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This essay collection exploring the relationship between spirituality and art is the result of a conference that took place in December 2010 at Liverpool Cathedral. During this two-day event, artists, clergy and academics from different disciplines - including theology and art history - came together to discuss the relationship between spirituality and art. One of the objectives of both the conference and this collection was to clarify what is meant by spiritual art or, indeed, what it means to describe an artwork as being spiritual. The essays expand on this issue by addressing the following questions: what is the relationship between spirituality and art in the context of the art gallery, religious institutions and the academy and at personal and social levels? How and why does art convey spirituality and, conversely, why and how is spirituality made manifest in works of art? Many of the contributors examine the spiritual aspects of particular artworks, artists or artistic traditions, and ask what we mean by the spiritual in art. The volume articulates the interdisciplinary nature of the subject and explores pressing concerns of the contemporary age.
List of contents
Contents: Rina Arya: Introduction - Matthew Rowe: The Spiritual and the Aesthetic - Franco Cirulli: Friedrich Schlegel: On Painting and Transcendence - Nicholas Buxton: Creating the Sacred: Artist as Priest, Priest as Artist - Peter M. Doll: Immanence, Transcendence and Liturgical Space in a Changing Church - Michael Evans: Out of Nothing: Painting and Spirituality - David Parker: Outsider Art and Alchemy - Dino Alfier: Necessarily Selfless Action: An Enactment of Simone Weil's Notion of Attention as a Practice of Detachment through Observational Drawing - Ayla Lepine: Installation as Encounter: Ernesto Neto, Do-Ho Suh and Kathleen Herbert - Judith Legrove: Fragile Visions: Reading and Re-Reading the Work of Geoffrey Clarke - Maxine Walker: Painting the Question: Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross - Rina Arya: Painting in a Godless World: Contemplating the Spiritual in Francis Bacon - Harry Lesser: Spirituality and Modernism - David Jasper: The Spiritual in Contemporary Art.
About the author
Rina Arya is Reader in Visual Communication at the University of Wolverhampton. Her primary area of research is art theory. She has published articles on Francis Bacon, Georges Bataille, and art and theology. She is the author of
Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World (2012) and
Chila Kumari Burman: Shakti, Sexuality and Bindi Girls (2012) and the editor of
Francis Bacon: Critical and Theoretical Perspectives (2012). She is currently working on a monograph titled
Abjection and Representation, which is forthcoming in 2014.
Report
«As this work demonstrates, the conversation about the spiritual in art is far from over, and this collection of essays will help invigorate that debate in fresh and timely ways.» (Taylor Worley, Theological Book Review 26.1, 2014)
