Re-Enchantment (The Art Seminar)

332 Pages·2008·1.52 MB·English

by  James Elkins

Re-Enchantment
The near-absence of religion from contemporary discourse on art is one of the most
fundamental issues in postmodernism. Artists critical of religion can find voices in the
art world, but religion itself, including spirituality, is taken to be excluded by the very
project of modernism. The sublime, “re-enchantment” (as in Weber), and the aura
(as in Benjamin) have been used to smuggle religious concepts back into academic
writing, but there is still no direct communication between “religionists” and scholars.
Re-Enchantment, volume 7 in The Art Seminar series, will be the first book to bridge
that gap.
The volume includes an introduction and two final, synoptic essays, as well as
contributions from some of the most prominent thinkers on religion and art, includ-
ing Boris Groys, James Elkins, Thierry de Duve, David Morgan, Norman Girardot,
Sally Promey, S. Brent Plate, and Christopher Pinney.
James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory,
and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Head of History of
Art at the University College Cork, Ireland. He is the author of Pictures and Tears,
How to Use Your Eyes, What Painting Is, The Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary
Art and Master Narratives and Their Discontents, all published by Routledge; and Six
Stories from the End of Representation, published by Stanford University Press.
David Morgan is Professor of Religion at Duke University, and author of several
books, including Visual Piety, The Sacred Gaze, and The Lure of Images (Routledge).
He is co-founder and co-editor of the journal Material Religion.
The Art Seminar
Volume 1
Art History versus Aesthetics
Volume 2
Photography Theory
Volume 3
Is Art History Global?
Volume 4
The State of Art Criticism
Volume 5
Renaissance Theory
Volume 6
Landscape Theory
Volume 7
Re-Enchantment

Sponsored by the University College Cork, Ireland; the Burren College
of Art, Ballyvaughan, Ireland; and the School of the Art Institute,
Chicago.
Re-Enchantment
EDITED BY
JAMES ELKINS AND DAVID MORGAN
First published 2009
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
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trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Re-enchantment / edited by James Elkins and David Morgan. – 1st ed.
p. cm. – (The art seminar ; vol. 7)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Art and religion–Congresses. 2. Art criticism–Congresses. I. Elkins, James,
1955– II. Morgan, David, 1957–
N72.R4R44 2008
704.9’48–dc22
2008009226

ISBN 0-203-89166-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–96051–7 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–96052–5 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–89166–X (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0-415–96051–9 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0-415–96052–6 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–89166–7 (ebk)
Table of Contents
Series Preface vii
James Elkins
SECTION1 INTRODUCTION 1
Enchantment, Disenchantment,
Re-Enchantment 3
David Morgan
SECTION2 STARTING POINTS 23
Art and Religion in the Modern Age 25
David Morgan
From the Form of Spirit to the Spirit of Form 47
Randall K. Van Schepen
How Some Scholars Deal with the Question 69
James Elkins
Religion as Medium 79
Bor is Groys
Mary Warhol/Joseph Duchamp 87
Thierry de Duve
SECTION3 THE ART SEMINAR 107
Participants: Gregg Bordowitz, Thierry de
Duve, Wendy Doniger, James Elkins, Boris
Groys, Kajri Jain, Tomoko Masuzawa, David
Morgan, and Taylor Worley 109
SECTION4 ASSESSMENTS 185
Jeremy Biles 187
Ann Pellegrini 192
Chris Parr 195
v
vi Re-Enchantment
Norman Girardot 200
S. Brent Plate 209
Stephen Pattison 211
Lisa DeBoer 217
Kevin Hamilton 219
Sally M. Promey 222
James Panero 225
William Dyrness 228
Ena Giurescu Heller 229
Daniel A. Siedell 232
Robin M. Jensen 235
Diane Apostolos-Cappadona 237
Theodore Prescott 239
Amy Sillman 241
Graham Howes 243
Samantha Baskind 244
Jens Baumgarten 249
David Brown 255
Insoo Cho 258
Cordula Grewe 261
Deborah J. Haynes 266
Pepe Karmel 269
Anna Niedz´wiedz´ 270
Kristin Schwain 273
Jorgelina Orfila 275
Christopher Pinney 277
SECTION5 AFTERWORDS 285

Missing Religion, Overlooking the Body 287
Jojada Verrips
The Next Step? 297
Erika Doss
SECTION6 ENVOI TO THE ART
SEMINAR SERIES 303
Envoi 305
James Elkins
Notes on Contributors 311
Index 315
Series Preface
James Elkins
It has been said and said that there is too much theorizing in the
visual arts. Contemporary writing seems like a trackless thicket, tan-
gled with with unanswered questions. Yet it is not a wilderness; in
fi
fact it is well-posted with signs and directions. Want to nd Lacan?
ˇ
Read him through Macey, Silverman, Borch-Jakobsen, Zizˇek, Nancy,
Leclaire, Derrida, Laplanche, Lecercle, or even Klossowski, but not—
so it might be said—through Abraham, Miller, Pontalis, Rosaloto,
Safouan, Roudinesco, Schneiderman, or Mounin, and of course never
through Dalí.
People who wo uld rather avoid problems of interpretation, at
ffi
least in their more di cult forms, have sometimes hoped that
“theory” would prove to be a passing fad. A simple test shows that is
not the case. Figure 1, below, shows the number of art historical
essays that have terms like “psychoanalysis” as keywords, according to
the Bibliography of the History of Art. The increase is steep after 1980,
and in three cases—the gaze, psychoanalysis, and feminism—the rise
is exponential.
Another sampling (Figure 2) shows that citations of some of the
fl
more in uential art historians of the mid-twentieth century, writers
who came before the current proliferation of theories, are waning. In
this second graph there is a slight rise in the number of references to
fl
Warburg and Riegl, re ecting the interest they have had for the
vii
viii Re-Enchantment
Figure 1 Theory in art history, 1940–2000
current generation of art historians: but the graph’s surprise is the
precipitous decline in citations of Panofsky and Gombrich.
Most of art history is not driven by named theories or individual
historians, and these graphs are also limited by the terms that can be
meaningfully search ed in the Bibliography of the History of Art. Even
so, the graphs suggest that the landscape of interpretive strategies is
changing rapidly. Many subjects crucial to the interpretation of art
are too new, ill-theorized, or unfocused to be addressed in mono-
graphs or textbooks. The purpose of The Art Seminar is to address
some of the most challenging subjects in current writing on art: those
that are not unencompassably large (such as the state of painting), or
not yet adequately posed (such as the space between the aesthetic and
the anti-aesthetic), or so well known that they can be written up in
critical dictionaries (the theory of deconstruction). The subjects
chosen for The Art Seminar are poised, ready to be articulated and
argued.
Each volume in the series began as a roundtable conversation,
Series Preface ix
Figure 2 Rise and fall of an older art history, 1930–2000: Citations of
selected writers
held in front of an audience at one of the three sponsoring institu-
tions—the University College Cork, the Burren College of Art (both
in Ireland), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The
conversations were then transcribed, and edited by the participants.
The idea was to edit in such a way as to minimize the correctable
faults of grammar, repetitions, and lapses that mark any conversation,
while preserving the momentary disagreements, confusions, and
dead-ends that could be attributed to the articulation of the subject
itself.
In each volume of The Art Seminar, the conversation itself is
preceded by a general introduction to the subject and several “Start-
ing Points,” essays that were read by the participants before the
roundtable. Together the Introductions and “Starting Points” are
meant to provide the essential background for the conversation. A
number of scholars who did not attend the events were then asked to