On the other side of our inquiry, the term religion has its own serious difficulties, staking claims over simultaneously too much and too little. On the one hand, the term is too encompassing, grouping many widely variant forms of belief, practice, and social arrangement under a single universalizing term (historically, by adapting Christian norms to describe other traditions). For this reason, it is generally preferable, where possible, to refer to particular religious traditions rather than to the general “religion.” On the other hand, the term is often too narrow, tending to function principally as an anthropological category, designating (only) the social, institutional, and ritual structures that support and regulate some particular kind of beliefs, values, and experiences. As many scholars have demonstrated, this is a distinctly modern Western notion, specifically developed to manage intense political stresses arising in modernity. In the first instance, “religion” provided a means to understand, classify, and cope with profound cultural differences encountered as colonial powers circumnavigated the globe. In the second instance, and at a more national or regional scale, the category of “religion” provided a means to create and regulate a “secular” public square, whereby the secular would preside over everything common and verifiable, while delimiting and preserving the religious as a domain of essentially private phenomena and voluntary commitments (a dichotomy on view throughout the material surveyed in part 1). As cultural anthropologist Talal Asad argues, “This construction of religion ensures that it is part of what is inessential to our common politics, economy, science, and morality.” In all these ways, the term religion thus tends to function in ways that are, in theologian Sarah Coakley’s words, both “falsely unifying and inadvertently ghettoizing.”
Over the long run, this has also had the effect of superficially detaching religion not only from “secular” public territories but also from spirituality and theology, both of which are now often differentiated from, and juxtaposed to, religion’s social institutions, forms, and rituals. In the first instance, it has become commonplace for people who leave the faith of their childhood describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” often signaling a search for (and preservation of) something essential within their religious inheritance—the sacred, the transcendent, the holy, the numinous, etc., but without consensus about how these terms are used in relation to each other. In the second instance, the most withering critiques of “religion” over the past two centuries have come more from theologians than from secularists. Karl Barth, for example, famously argued that religion is the most insidious form of unbelief.
When the study of “contemporary art” and the study of “religion” are brought together, several internal tensions emerge. For scholars of art, it is common, for reasons explored in part 1, to see contemporary art (at least anything coherently avant-garde) as definitionally inimical to religion. For scholars of religion, it has become common practice to contest the problematic—though evidently not simply dispensable—categories by which “Art” is differentiated from devotional images, liturgical objects, design, kitsch, etc. Indeed, some argue that the modern conflict between art and religion is primarily an ideological function of distinctly modern, essentialist definitions of art. While much has been done to complicate these differentiations (between fine art and “devotional” images, for example), the fact remains that they do generally correspond to different discourses, practices, and institutions. And thus essentialist definitions are generally displaced by some form of institutional definition, whereby contemporary art gets defined in terms of the key institutions and rituals of the art world, in much the same way that religions do.
There are ways to mitigate these various problems that accompany these generic categories. For example, it is preferable to refer, wherever possible, to particular religious traditions rather than to the general “religion” and to particular artists and artworks rather than to general artistic -isms. Nevertheless, even as we recognize these problems and proceed with appropriate cautions, both these terms, contemporary art and religion, remain indispensable, designating (in both popular and academic usage) two broad constellations of social activity that remain vital to contemporary cultural formations and to the central questions that concern us here. Because the aim of this second part of the book is to understand the ways that discourses about “religion” are circulating in the domains of “contemporary art,” I will retain these commonly used terms and proceed with fairly flexible institutional definitions of each, allowing for a range of usages to emerge through specific examples. The general shape and gravitational pull of these terms will gain clarity as we proceed, and periodically we will return to questions of terminology.
Beyond questions of definition, the more difficult and pressing questions pertain to how the study of art and religion might operate as a coherent field of inquiry, given its dispersion across (often disconnected) bodies of knowledge and the relative lack of established critical discourse. Writing in 2004, art historian and scholar of religion David Morgan helpfully framed the issue:
“Art and Religion” certainly is a “field” if by that one means no more than to signal the general concentration of one’s study, in a manner comparable to “art and psychology” or “art and sociology” or “art and gender.” Designations like these indicate a broad intersection where one studies, but they say little or nothing about how one studies the subject or what intellectual formation may be requisite for such study. Compare them, for instance, with rubrics like “Marxist art history” or “psychoanalytic analysis of art,” both of which imply the sort of questions scholars will bring to the examination of works of art as well as the kinds of literature in which they will be conversant. . . . [I]f an organized, self-critical discourse is the principal measure of a field of inquiry, one cannot say that art and religion is such a field.
Here, Morgan challenges scholars of “art and religion” with three questions meant to spur this field-that-is-not-quite-a-field toward more organized and self-critical discourse: how do scholars focus studies within this general concentration? what intellectual formation and disciplinary framework(s) are needed for such study? and which sorts of questions and hermeneutic values propel this kind of study? Under the pressure of these questions, Morgan begins working “toward a modern historiography of art and religion” (as his essay is titled) by sketching a taxonomy of the ways scholars have, at least implicitly, addressed these questions. He outlines five programmatic approaches to the field—evolutionary, cognitive, visual cultural, art historical, and phenomenological—which can be “distinguished from one another by the problems their practitioners wish to solve.” He expands this by identifying five theoretical approaches, which seek “overarching generalizations about human nature and its creative activities” by refracting them through “disciplinary dispositions” shaped by philosophy, religious studies, art history, theology, and cultural history. Finally, he argues that all such studies, both programmatic and theoretical, get concentrated or “centered” on one of three focal points of analysis: object-centered studies, practice-centered studies, or religious aesthetics.
(excerpted from chapter 3)
