Religion And Contemporary Art

Religion and Contemporary Art sets the theoretical frameworks and interpretive strategies for exploring the re-emergence of religion in the making, exhibiting, and discussion of contemporary art. Featuring essays from both established and emerging scholars, critics, and artists, the book reflects on what might be termed an "accord" between contemporary art and religion. It explores the common strategies contemporary artists employ in the interface between religion and contemporary art practice. It also includes case studies to provide more in-depth treatments of specific artists grappling with themes such as ritual, abstraction, mythology, the body, popular culture, science, liturgy, and social justice, among other themes. It is a must-read resource for working artists, critics, and scholars in this field, and an invitation to new voices "curious" about its promises and possibilities.

These essays explore the relationship between art and religion. The first part, 2001-2002, is essays about "The Ism," where 1994-9 Padgett united religious and spiritual perspectives by uniting the art-forms appropriate to them. The second part is essays from 2002-2005, when Padgett studied at Wimbledon School of Art, London, for an MA in Theory of Contemporary Art and Performance. Padgett looks at artists (Damien Hirst, Thomas Hirschhorn, Anton Artaud, Jake and Dinos Chapman Brothers, Guillermo Gomez-Pena etc) and develops the idea of "Postmodern Religious Art." His program of uniting the art-forms is progressed by uniting the specific material forms of religions in semi-irony with the profane - whilst keeping the sacred as of highest importance. The final part is the questionnaire that Padgett submitted to the Employment Tribunals, giving the main arguments behind his claim that the Tate Galleries were exercising religious discrimination in the way they selected artworks.

Can contemporary art say anything about spirituality? Answering this question and more, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art explores the curious disconnection between spirituality and current art.

Contemporary artists are engaging more deeply than ever with religious imagery, themes, practices, and audiences. With a bracing, jargon-free style, Aaron Rosen—a leading scholar, art critic, and curator—takes readers into studios, galleries, and worship spaces as he paints a compelling picture of art and religion today. Focusing on individual artists, from eminent names to emerging stars, Rosen’s essays and interviews tackle key questions, from how art might sustain communities to how it might offer new approaches to conflict resolution. Drawing on years spent developing relationships with artists around the globe—from Algeria to India to the United States—Rosen gets artists to talk, often for the first time, about how religion impacts their practice. Whether inspiring or unsettling, these brushes with faith challenge and invigorate the artists in question, and those who ponder the results. Replete with more than seventy color images of works ranging from video art to outdoor installations, this volume is indispensable reading for those looking to see contemporary art in a new light.

An art historian develops a theological, philosophical, and historical framework within which to experience and interpret modern and contemporary art that is in dialogue with the Christian faith.

In recent decades curators and artists have shown a distinct interest in religion, its different traditions, manifestations in public life, gestures and images. Breaking Resemblance explores the complex relationship between contemporary art and religion by focusing on the ways artists re-work religious motifs as a means to reflect critically on our desire to believe in images, on the history of seeing them, and on their double power-- iconic and political. It discusses a number of exhibitions that take religion as their central theme, and a selection of works by Bill Viola, Lawrence Malstaf, Victoria Reynolds, and Berlinde de Bruyckere--all of whom, in their respective ways and media, recycle religious motifs and iconography and whose works resonate with, or problematize the motif of, the true image.

Can contemporary art say anything about spirituality? Answering this question and more, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art explores the curious disconnection between spirituality and current art.

Series and the final part of a three-fold project organized by BAK under same title, in which the popular assumption of the return of religion to the field of artistic practice and its discourses, the public sphere, contemporary politics, and media in the West is interrogated as a constitutive "myth" of our current condition. Through a wide-ranging selection of texts, a group of artists, art historians and theorists, scholars of religion, and sociologists unpack the historical underpinnings of religion's so-called "return", art's long-standing relationship with iconoclasm and connection to religious representation, the manipulation of certain religious imagery in the mass media, and contemporary art's potential to complicate and problematize commonly-held beliefs about the role and potential of the image in today's world.