Contemporary Art and Religion - Review of a Lecture by James Elkins

“I have tried to show why committed engaged ambitious, informed art does not mix with dedicated, serious, thoughtful, heartfelt religion. Whenever the two meet one wrecks the other.”
   - James Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (Routledge 2004), 115.



“We’re not here for conflict,” John Franklin announced placidly from the podium as he peered over his spectacles at the audience, “but for conversation.” Respect, curiosity, and excitement were in the air as the evening’s conversation commenced.

Last night Imago hosted a guest lecture by James Elkins, art historian, critic and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on his work related to the striking absence of religion in the contemporary art world. The problem is three-fold, according to Elkins: (1) religion is absent from contemporary art except when the object of criticism, (2) religion is absent from recent art historical and critical literature, and (3) religion is absent from the pedagogy of studio art. If an you want to make it as a contemporary artist in the art world, Elkins wryly recommended, only make art that is ambiguously critical of Western religion (the more ambiguous the better), if you decide to allude to religion at all. Religious artists (particularly those who subscribe to well-known world religions like Christianity, Islam, and Judaism), as a result, either are unable to express their religious convictions in their art or are marginalized in the art world as sell-outs.

The contemporary art world has become so closed off to Western religion, said Elkins, and any art that “comes out” as being motivated by religious belief or as containing religious content easily gets dismissed by the art world or sidelined. While some artists experience some success within the Christian community, they are not recognized as authentic artists by the larger contemporary art world. The bottom line is that artists who want to use religious symbols, liturgy, or ideas in their art without being overtly critical of them or artists who openly profess their religious beliefs are just not often welcome in the contemporary art scene.

Elkins suggested that contemporary art can be enriched by a change in attitude toward religion, and vice versa. If only “religionists” (religious believers) could be invited to the secular conferences, maybe there could be enrichment on both sides. The only way to deal with this impasse, says Elkins, is for secular institutions to act first: “But for any of these things to happen, secular institutions have to lose some of their phobia of religion.” Unfortunately, it’s a difficult task. How do we get art and religion into conversation and still avoid the possibility that they might damage each other?

In response to Elkins’ lecture, John Franklin, executive director of Imago, explored questions of what makes art religious and what it means to be a Christian artist who is committed to making authentic and innovative works. According to Franklin, religious art is understood to be religious because of either the artist’s intention, the content of the work, the setting in which it is displayed, or the viewer’s response to it. Using this vocabulary, it's helpful to explore which of these criteria might be problematic for artists trying to be innovative and authentic and which (if any) might be points of contact between religion and the art world. Franklin’s response uncovered some of the tensions at play for Christian artists and ended on a hopeful note. “Is there a sea change happening? Are we on the threshold of a new time?”

Last night’s conversation opened up a whole range of important questions that need asking on both sides. Among these is the question of accessibility and authenticity: how does an artist make art that is authentic but still accessible to a specific religious community? One of the problems with religious art, for the contemporary art world, is that it’s too accessible; it’s so tailored to a certain community that an artist isn’t given the proper creative freedom. Elkins pointed to recent examples of art commissioned for religious use, showing that they lagged behind in the art world because of the limitations placed on them by accessibility and the pressure to avoid being offensive.

Is it possible for an artist to make art that is accessible enough to a religious community for public or liturgical appreciation without selling the artist’s authentic creativity short? To what extent and for what purpose should Christian communities use art in their community liturgical practices? These questions are live ones in our religious communities, affecting the way we think about our places of worship, our music, and the symbols around which we form our communities.

I’d like to thank James Elkins, John Franklin and Imago for hosting this important event and for contributing to the opening up of a much needed conversation between contemporary art and religion.

For more on Imago, check out imago-arts.org. Further information about James Elkins and his research can be found on his website at www.jameselkins.com.

Matthew E. Johnson is currently a junior member at the Institute for Christian Studies, serving as the research assistant for the Centre for Philosophy, Religion, and Social Ethics.

The Hermeneutics of Ancient Astronaut Theory

“Only when I have first understood the motivating meaning of the question can I even begin to look for an answer. It is not artificial in the least to reflect upon the presuppositions implicit in our questions. On the contrary, it is artificial not to reflect upon these presuppositions. It is quite artificial to imagine that statements fall down from heaven and that they can be subjected to analytic labor without once bringing into consideration why they were stated and in what way they are responses to something. That is the first, basic, and infinitely far-reaching demand called for in any hermeneutic undertaking.”

    - Hans-Georg Gadamer. “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy.” In The Transformation of Philosophy: Hermeneutics, Rhetoric, Narrative: 333-334.

I recently came across an episode of Ancient Aliens on the History Channel that spent an enigmatic hour describing the ruins of Puma Punku in the highlands of Bolivia. The precise angles with which the giant granite boulders at Puma Punku were sliced into slabs is nothing short of incredible. Any way you look at it, Puma Punku is a great feat of engineering. How could an ancient primitive civilization have accomplished this?

In spite of myself, this episode had me fascinated. I think what was most captivating about it was one part their profound creativity speculating about the evidence and one part the passion that so obviously drove these “ancient astronaut theorists.” These guys were just loving this stuff. They were in their element; this is what they live for.

My first reaction was, of course, to laugh at how ridiculous these guys were with their implausible beliefs (and with their wild hair). But the more I reflected on it afterward, the more sympathetic I became, not because they’ve won me over to ancient astronaut theory but because of the daring way they’ve chosen their beliefs. These self-proclaimed “ancient astronaut theorists” seem to choose their particular hermeneutic approach based on its explanatory scope and on an aesthetic taste-based evaluation of the results of its application. In other words, they interpret the evidence as saying that aliens interfered with ancient human history because (1) it so easily explains much that we don’t understand about ancient history, and (2) it’s just really awesome. And strangely enough, I think I have now developed a soft spot in my heart for ancient alien theorists, and in a weird way I envy the strength of their convictions.

While this seems like an extreme case, I’m not sure it really is. I think that everyone forms their beliefs roughly in this way, religious or otherwise. It’s hard to deny that our beliefs serve a practical purpose in our emotional and social lives, giving us hope or explanation or passion or meaning. What makes the “ancient astronaut theorists” so absurd? I think it is simply that they choose their beliefs more explicitly and more directly in opposition to popular opinion than most of us do. To speculate, maybe their beliefs about aliens serves a purpose in the way their lives are infused with meaning. In that way, I’m not too different, except for maybe in the specifics.

I think that when we talk of presuppositional beliefs, religious or otherwise, it is important to explore why we hold our beliefs, or as Gadamer says, to uncover the “motivating meanings.” Sometimes it’s just superficial to talk about the actual content that we can articulate and ignore our motivations that drive our attachment to it.

If we’re interested in doing honest hermeneutics with fellow hermeneuts, we need to turn the microscope on ourselves. Hermeneutics, the task of interpreting of the world in which we find ourselves already entrenched, is always one of self-discovery. Why do I believe what I believe? What motivates me to hold these beliefs? It’s a bottomless project, Gadamer reminds us, but a fruitful one (“Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy,” 334).

What I think is so remarkable about these particular ancient astronaut theorists is that, against all opposition, they have decided to interpret the world in this way. And I suspect they are able to articulate and defend exactly what most of us wish we could uncover about ourselves. They’ve played their cards and put down their chips, while the rest of us sit and wonder what mysteries our hands hold.

But at our core, I think we’re all ancient astronaut theorists with our implausible beliefs (and sometimes even wild hair), and I think that’s really okay. Our interactions with our friends and with strangers on the street often make us play cards we didn’t know we held. Our beliefs are secured in place by support structures that we can’t see, sustained by reasons we can’t articulate. So hermeneutics is archaeology. The more we interpret, the more we reinterpret and discover ourselves. And who knows; maybe in the ruins of Puma Punku, we’ll find a granite monolith inscribed with our deepest reasons.

When we’re doing formal philosophy or having a casual conversation, there is so easily a tendency to talk past each other. Our ideas are, it seems to me, often built on intuitive hunches, and we are sometimes convinced of them long before we are able to articulate why. If Gadamer is right, and self-discovery is an endless task, is it possible actually to meet someone in conversation, or will we always pass them by in one way or another? Does a common language or vocabulary secure a shared medium between two conversation partners, or is it just impossible to come to complete grammatical agreement about meanings and reasons? How do we and how should we encounter others in the task of hermeneutics?

Matthew E. Johnson is a current junior member at the Institute for Christian Studies, serving as the research assistant for the Centre for Philosophy, Religion, and Social Ethics.

Forty Days Later on a Thursday

Ascension Day blew past this year, and I didn’t take notice. But I felt something lock into place last week, as if spring finally got its act together. The gardens on my street exploded in color, and the trees tentatively began to leaf all around the city. It had been a long winter, but by Thursday of last week, spring had finally taken off.

Forty days after Easter on a Thursday, the Anglican Church commemorates the day Jesus sprung into the heavens, leaving his earthbound followers dumbfounded and grounded, full of unanswered questions and half-formed hopes.

“Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” the disciples asked Jesus (Acts 1:6). But the question hung suspended, burning in the air, as Jesus responded, “It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.” Wait and see. The kingdom will come when it comes; the seasons will change when they change.

I’ve heard Christians talk again and again about how the first century Israelites blew it, and how the priests and teachers of the law were malicious bad guys. The Son of God was right under their nose, but all they did was sneeze him out of Jerusalem like spring pollen.

But I think it’s more complicated than that. The Hebrew scriptures gave them legitimate reasons to expect that the Messiah to come would literally usher back in the golden age monarchy of the Davidic kingdom, ending Israel’s exile from their homeland and from their God forever. Israel would finally escape the bonds placed upon them by the foreigners holding them in political captivity and be their own people. So let’s give first century Judaism a break. If Israel’s God is who he says he is, Israel was right to expect a grand return from exile and a re-gathering of its scattered people.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Jesus jumped ship right when Israel needed a strong political revolutionary most, leaving his followers scratching their heads, wondering what to do next. So what about the great deliverance? What about Israel’s return from exile? What about the reestablishment of the kingdom? What about the promises of Israel’s God?

I can imagine the disciples, and us with them on Thursday forty days after Easter, staring slack-jawed on Ascension Day as the one upon whom they placed all their hopes and dreams floated away like a helium balloon, leaving them with nothing but a tremendous sense of loss and the feeling of being stranded in a place that was just beginning to feel like home.

Throughout the history of Western culture and philosophy, we seem to have never fully recovered from the loss of our balloon. Keeping company with Plato, philosophy has looked up and beyond, trying to peel back the superficial layers of reality and peer inside to find its true shape. When the disciples stood stuck staring up, philosophy followed their gaze, searching for the realm where the true forms of reality reside. Both look upward, wishing they weren’t so earthbound, and ache for a world that is more than just a dirty mirror like this one.

The past century or two is filled with thinkers from all over the world struggling to push past this intellectual inheritance that points to the hidden reality beyond, just out of reach, and they urge us to forget about our helium balloon and take a look around. Maybe, just maybe, we can say meaningful things about our world here and now without appealing to the great beyond, what’s really out there, the truth hidden inside reality. The philosophers catch us lost in longing for a ghostly plane that most properly exists and for a language to speak that captures the truest truth, and they ask the same that the men robed white asked Jesus’ followers: “Why do you stand looking up?”

This, it seems to me, the default tendency for many of us Christians, as it was for the disciples and for the philosophers of the past. We have this idea that the ascension of Jesus somehow translated everything that matters into spiritual, intangible reality, always occluded from view. The best world is the next one; the most valuable things are the ones we can’t see, hear, taste, or touch.

But each time I read the Ascension Day speech of Jesus according to Matthew, I hear spring, rebirth, the revitalization of what is now. I hear echoes of the words of King Cyrus, the Persian king who called Israel back from their exile in Babylon, under the God of Israel’s authority inviting the people into restoration (Ezra 1:2-4). Likewise, Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18). Now go and gather the exiles, the lost and confused, brokenhearted and hurting, throughout all the world.

So here’s the punch line. I think it’s a mistake to read the New Testament as something “new,” something more spiritual than what came before, something that points us upward and pulls us out of this world. On the contrary, it pushes us deeper into the world, calling us to discover the strangers and invite them in; we are in the business, as Jesus was, of gathering the exiles to form a unity centered around the Messiah who ascends, not into the ghostly ether where we should wish we could be, but to the center of what is here and now. As Martin Heidegger might say, we are not just floating ghosts who happen to be located in a body and a world; we are always already in the world, constituted by it, and inescapably connected to it.

My hope for faith and for philosophy is that each can fasten its gaze firmly to what matters most. If we can tear our eyes away from the tragedy of our faded helium balloon and take a look at what is right under our noses and before our eyes, we might just be struck slack-jawed again by what we find in the stranger, the neighbor, the friend. In the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: “for Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / to the Father through the features of men’s faces” (from “As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame”).

Ascension Day blows by, and when we finally slow to catch our breath and take notice, we find that life in all its richness has sprung up and taken off, breathing freshness into the most regular things at the most ordinary times. Maybe the ascended Christ hasn’t abandoned us after all.

Matthew E. Johnson is a current junior member at the Institute for Christian Studies, serving as the research assistant for the Centre for Philosophy, Religion, and Social Ethics.

Earth and all stars: reflections after this year's Earth Day

Allyson Carr is the Associate Director of the Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics at the Institute for Christian Studies


"Earth and all Stars, loud rushing planets, sing to the Lord a new song!" That was the first line of a hymn I remember singing quite early on in my childhood. It stuck out because it spoke of the earth in a way I had not encountered before: put simply, I found the idea of the earth or stars or other planets (and later on in the song "flowers and trees/loud rustling dry leaves") singing to the Lord both novel and amazing. It filled me with wonder to hear this hymn and imagine the earth or dry leaves or trees or stars singing a song of praise. I remember trying to listen, to see if I could catch them at it--what would a tree sing about, if it wanted to sing a hymn?

Such were some of the questions that occupied my six-year-old mind. And with Earth Day only just past again, I am reminded that they still occupy my mind nearly 30 years later, though in a different way.  Whereas at six my knowledge about the earth and all in it was largely limited to digging in sandboxes, snow banks, or autumn leaf piles, now (in addition) I read papers on climate change, on deforestation, on oil spills and emissions, on Arctic melt and economic impact on the environment. I find studies on the connections between ecology and economy, and think through the implications for questions regarding how I vote, what policies I should advocate for, the ethical impact of all that I purchase. And perhaps because I am a philosopher it struck me as I was thinking through writing this post... I wonder whether I would still be excited to hear songs the earth or trees or dry leaves are singing, as I thought when I was a child, or if what they sing would break my heart? Would it be songs of praise, or lament, or cries for help? Perhaps a bit of each, and more.

It is hard to know what to do to address the environmental questions that face us today. The more we look into them, the more we realize how complex they are, even while realizing afresh how deeply we are mired in the very problems to which many of us are trying to find a solution. We see too that the effects of harming the soil, water, and air, or of drastically impacting our climate, don't just rest on the earth itself but also on its people. Shifts in climate or a sudden dearth in a once-plentiful resource can trigger massive social, economic and even political problems. And those problems in turn can spell new ecological troubles as governments, corporations and groups struggle to find ways to survive in the new situation.

We frequently hear about a globalized economy, and it's an important topic, but if I am reading the research right, we also seem to be going through a process of understanding that there is a similar global enmeshment when it comes to the environment. Water, for example, flows all over the earth, whether in rivers, oceans or even in the air, falling as rain. The trees that are just budding now as Spring unfolds--where has the water that falls on them been, and what does it carry? If it had a tune that the trees were picking up and magnifying, what would the tone of that tune be?

If, as many people are trying to do, we begin to sing a "new song" with regard to the way that we interact with our environment, how do we do it? The papers, articles, blogs, and studies I have read in order to try to understand right action in this earth, all sing of the need for change. As philosophers and theologians, how can we sing along, while remembering the kernel of truth I think the hymn I started with pointed out-- that there is a sense in which there is a call to sing a new song to God? It strikes me that any such new song sung in response should be multi-layered, one that tries to harmonize better with all that is around us, with which God has called us into relationship.

Algorithms, Excuses, and Outrage: Demanding Social Responsibility from Companies

Allyson Carr is the Associate Director of the Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics.

Today, March 8, is International Women's Day, and as I was thinking about what to write for it, someone sent me a link to an article that was calling out Amazon for selling offensive T-shirts: specifically, T-shirts advocating violence against women from a company called Solid Gold Bomb. The shirts included spoofs of the phrase "Keep Calm and Carry On" (derived from an old propaganda poster coming out of Word War II Britain) with such slogans as "Keep Calm and Knife Her" or "Keep Calm and Rape A Lot" or "Keep Calm and Hit Her." Amazon has since de-listed the shirts (though it took them a while), and the original company has apologized, claiming that the phrases were "randomly generated" from a computer algorithm they had written which took words out of a dictionary, and that the company did not know about the offensive phrases before it put them on Amazon. Unsurprisingly, few people are buying that excuse. Now, I am not actually saying the company is lying (though it may very well be); instead I am calling it an excuse. Even if the company did use an algorithm to generate a bunch of T-shirt phrases and these ones advocating violence against women just happened to come up, certain words could and should have been excluded from the algorithm, thus avoiding this situation altogether. And, if they were being responsible, any of the phrases that were generated would have been vetted by a company employee before they were posted for possible sale.

At first I wavered over whether to post on this T-shirt fiasco, because the use of such offensive, over-the-top phrases on T-shirts seems like an obvious attempt to seek attention. My usual policy in such cases is to refuse to grant such a gesture the attention it wants and thrives on. The uproar generated by the T-shirts is itself worth commenting on, however, since, in all the reading I've done on it thus far, the condemnation appears to be near-universal. I believe this is a step forward. But the process by which these slogan-ed shirts came to appear for sale on a website is also worth examining. It tells us something about our global commodity culture, as well as our attitudes about the consequences of what we do and what we sell, particularly in the context of a day of reflection such as International Women's Day. It's worth asking why would a company think that it is perfectly fine for this supposedly unfiltered algorithm to produce images and display them as commodities meant for human consumption with no human oversight of the production process? The company can say "it was just an algorithm..." all it wants, but to think that such an explanation in any way excuses them is to fail to understand their basic responsibility as an economically-oriented entity: to be aware of and responsible for the products they are selling. They just didn't care, because they appear to have believed that there was no need for them to take "ownership" of or be responsible for what they were selling, so long as they got the money from its sale.

As I started to research this story for the purpose of writing this post about International Women's Day, I realized that there was a lot more to this story than the fact of some upstart little company selling a product with an offensive slogan advocating violence against women (or Amazon taking their time in taking it down). And while misogyny was likely a contributing factor, (there seem to be no shirts from the company that include the pronoun "him" in the "keep calm and..." category, thus excluding from the get-go the possibility of any "randomly generated" slogans advocating violence against men), misogyny probably wasn't the root cause in this particular instance of a misogynistic message. The more I looked into the story, the more I came to believe that the root cause was something closer to social apathy, rampant consumerism, and the attitude that it doesn't matter what sells so long as it does sell—a sort of "cast your net wide and you'll be sure to catch a few fish, even if you drown a few dolphins" mentality. In fact it apparently mattered so little to this company, that they couldn't even be bothered to go through the creative process of coming up with their own ideas for slogans to sell on their novelty T-shirts, the production of which they presumably outsource; why do that all that creative work when you can have a computer do it for you, and why bother to check what is produced when your bottom line is how much quick money you can make?

(Just as a point of interest, there is an interesting blog post that gets at the technology behind such algorithms. After reading it, I had more insight into some of the processes driving consumerist culture, and how things like this are allowed—emphasis on allowed—to happen.)

So what do we take from a situation like this? I think the first thing we should notice is that, ultimately, the consuming public did not tolerate the sale of T-shirts containing such messages. I actually went and tried to find responses of people saying "this is just a joke, get over it" and I could not find any. That doesn't mean such comments don't exist in some dark corner of anonymous commentary on the 'net, but  the very fact that the overwhelming majority of the response was "are your kidding me?! This is unacceptable!" looks to me like we are finally making some real headway towards making violence against women unacceptable. There are other signs of such progress. Yesterday, in the United States, President Obama signed VAWA (Violence Against Women Act); meanwhile, organizations like Harassmap in Egypt are working to confront harassment and violence against women in an organized way, while giving a space for those who have been abused to speak up, and organizations here in Canada such as Act to End Violence Against Women, Women Against Violence Against Women, and the Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women are also trying to address the problem through different kinds of programming, crisis response, and community education projects. There is a lot to celebrate, but there is still a lot more to be done both here in Canada, and across the world.

But I think the second thing we learn from this whole T-shirt fiasco is the need to address the economic conditions that under-gird "marketplace" interactions. Work on issues like violence against women needs to proceed on several fronts at once. Organizations like those mentioned in the previous paragraph do the necessary on-the-ground work of changing hearts and minds. But there also needs to be responsibility taken in the economic realm, on the part of companies, for what kind of message they are sending, and what they are advocating. It is not enough to just release a product into the economic ether without thinking about what effects it will have, or without even bothering to look into what that product is. In demanding that Solid Gold Bomb take ownership of a product it tried to plead was "randomly generated," and by refusing to accept that answer as legitimately excusing the message that came out of their product, we can signal our refusal of a certain kind of market mentality. In demanding social responsibility, even for something as small as simply vetting your own product before it hits the sales sites, we communicate to the manufacturers that we will not tolerate social apathy on certain issues. To claim that this fiasco was simply the result of "computer error," or to deflect blame by saying "an algorithm produced this" does not exculpate the manufacturers of this product, but rather displays their irresponsible dereliction of social duty. We "know" as a society/societies, that individuals are responsible for their actions. We are now beginning to argue and understand that these actions include the manufacture of our products, our programs, and even our computations.