[IR 11.

2 (2008) 173–181] Implicit Religion (print) ISSN 1463-9955

doi:10.1558/imre.v11i2.173 Implicit Religion (online) ISSN 1743-1697

Review Article

Can contemporary art be religious?

On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art by James Elkins. New

York: Routledge, 2004. 116pp., paper, $27.95, ISBN 9780415969895.
This is a good short book on a huge and diverse subject. Its merit is that
its author (who is a professor of art history in two universities, one on each
side of the Atlantic) tackles, head on, an issue which many of his contem-
poraries ignore—the presence of religious themes, perceptions and inten-
tions in an aesthetic environment the opinion-formers of which reject all
expressions of religion in fine art, be they explicit or implicit. Or at least
they do so, apparently, in the United States. The “art world,” Elkins tells
us, has no place for religion: “there is almost no modern religious art in
museums or in books of art history” (ix). When religious art is discussed it
is in terms of techniques and materials rather than of the themes addressed
and the intentions of the artists. Indeed, Elkins is somewhat fearful that
“the very fact that I have written this book may be enough to cast me into
the dubious category of fallen and marginal historians who somehow don’t
get modernism and postmodernism” (xi). He “gets” both—but it seems that
the students whose work he goes on to “explain” in the body of his book
apparently do not. For example: one of these students is called Kim, a
Korean. She produces what Elkins describes as “conventional religious” art,
one of the tiny minority of students who do so in the art schools in which
Elkins teaches. Kim has read the influential postmodern texts. She knows
the work of Barthes, Greenberg and Foucault. But she does not produce
postmodern art. Elkins describes Kim’s work as “sentimental” and “happy.”
It is work which is “really obviously religious,” but Elkins warns her that
her kind of art is unacceptable. If she is interested in making and exhibit-
ing contemporary art in the West then she cannot make religious art. Kim
asks why. In a few revealing sentences Elkins says:

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174 Michael Austin
From Kim’s point of view, ideas like complexity, ambiguity, difficulty, the
absence of religion, and lack of sentiment were just the ideas of Western art
criticism and it should be possible to make first-rate art that is both religious
and optimistic. I could not find the words to tell her that complexity and the
rest are postmodern, that they are contemporary art. “Modernism is just like
that.” It was all I could manage. (31)
Kim does not produce postmodern art, and therefore her art will not
be accepted as fine art by those who currently determine what fine art is.
Her work may be original, and she may be very gifted, but the definition
of “original” and the criteria of giftedness are pre-determined by the art
establishment, and she does not meet these benchmarks. That sums up
both the problem that Elkins identifies, and, above all, the difficulty in
which he finds himself. Religion clearly has no “place” in the contempo-
rary “art world” because the cognoscenti, the opinion-formers, the leaders of
the art world have no place for religion in their postmodern hermeneutic.
For them, “first-rate” contemporary art cannot be religious, because their
totalitarian aesthetic does not allow it to be so, by definition. It is of the
nature of what it is to be “first-rate” that it is not religious. Yet religion is
to be found in this alien environment. In a neat analogy Elkins describes
the presence of religion in the art world of the cognoscenti as “like living in
a house infested with mice and not noticing that something is wrong” (xi).
This is the major issue which arises from this book. Elkins recognizes it.
Its existence is the reason for his book. But he does not confront it at its
source, in the prevailing, self-limiting, supposedly postmodern aesthetic
hermeneutic.
The modernist/postmodernist interpretative schema in art, in excluding
religion, shares a problem with all totalitarian ideologies. Ideologies can-
not cope with evidence that denies the fundamental criteria upon which
they are built. Just as the Church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries could not accept empirical evidence which denied that the earth and
therefore man, its supreme creature, created by the God to whom the
Church alone granted access, was the centre of the known universe, so
the American “art world” cannot allow religion to have any place in the
universe of meaning which it controls. Of course this raises the question of
what that slippery word “postmodern” signifies. In Michael Dibdin’s mys-
tery thriller Back to Bologna (2005), one of the “seminal chestnuts” of the
eventually-to-be-murdered professor of semiotics, Edgardo Ugo, was that
“in our post-meaning culture, to move from the sublime to the ridiculous
and vice versa no longer required even a single step, merely an alternative

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Review Article: Can contemporary art be religious? 175
selection from an infinite interpretational menu.” That is what many sup-
pose that postmodernism is—though Dibdin’s Ugo calls our culture post-
post-moderna—but Elkins takes as read a much more restrictive meaning.
However, both “modernism” and “postmodernism” go undefined in this
book, and at times seem interchangeable.
In positing the difference between organized religion and the art world
Elkins admits that he is flying in the face of the fact that the art world, or at
least that part of it which is the art market, “is in fact wholly saturated with
religion.” But that is not the world of contemporary art where the scholarly
journals are sold and in which the teachers in the art schools live. Yet even
there religion does have its “strange place,” its mouse-hole. So, Elkins says,
let us recognize its existence and ask if there is a way in which the worlds of
art and religion can address each other. To put it as Elkins does: “I want to
see if it is possible to address both the secular theorists and [the] religion-
ists who would normally consider themselves outside the art world” (xi).
This is Elkins’s primary purpose in this book. A second and related purpose
is “to consider how best to talk about contemporary art that is reluctantly
or even inadvertently religious.” This is an issue “that has to do with how art
is taught and judged” in art departments and art schools where “straight-
forward talk about religion is rare,” such that “sincere, exploratory religious
and spiritual work goes unremarked,” on its own terms (xi, xii).
Elkins sets about his tasks with three introductory chapters in which
he defines, for his purposes, “religion” and “art;” takes his readers on a very
brief history of religion and art, and sets out how some scholars deal with
the question of the relationship of art and religion. I will take each of these
in turn.
In his first chapter, “The Words Religion and Art”  Elkins defines both in
institutional terms. Religion is “a major system of belief ” against which he
sets spirituality as a foil. Religion is overt religion. It is not implicit reli-
gion. “Spirituality,” for the purposes of this book, is any private, subjective,
largely or wholly incommunicable, perhaps even unrecognized, system of
belief. Art, similarly, is institutional art. It is the art which is installed in
galleries and arranged by curators. It is the art that is written about in the
art journals. It is the art of the modernist/postmodernist art world. It is
what is regarded by that world as “fine art.” It is certainly not popular art
or tourist art or children’s art or commercial art or graphic design or, of
course, religious art (4).
In his second chapter Elkins takes his readers through “A Brief History
of Religion and Art” (though the contents page has it as “. . . Religion in

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176 Michael Austin
Art.” There is a very considerable difference!). In fifteen illustrated pag-
es, during which he departs (as he does elsewhere in his book) from his
restrictive definitions of art and religion, Elkins covers some eight thousand
years of the relationship of art and religion, in all the major religions. This
is a worthwhile and informative chapter, though inevitably very selective.
Elkins concludes this chapter where he both began his Preface and ended
the first chapter. “Religious images” he tells us, “are unlikely to be found in
college curricula because they are not considered part of the world of art.”
He concludes: “Most religious art—I’m saying this bluntly here because it
needs to be said—is just bad art.” It is “poor and out of touch.” Why? Not
only because it is produced by artists who are far less talented (in Elkins’s
view) than, say, Jasper John or Andy Warhol, but—and here again is the
clinching argument—“it is because art that sets out to convey spiritual
values goes against the grain of the history of modernism” (20). If art goes
against this grain it is, ipso facto it seems, poor art.
In his third chapter Elkins summarizes “How Some Scholars Deal with
the Question” of the relationship of art and religion. It is inevitably a limit-
ed selection of academic opinion. E.H. Gombrich is omitted for example,
though Thierry De Duve is discussed at some length. This is an informative
chapter, although Elkins’s selection seems to be conditioned by his central
assertion, which he repeats again: “Religious artists aside, to suddenly put
modern art back with religion and spirituality is to give up the history
and purposes of a certain understanding of modernism” (22). “Serious art,”
he again tells us, “has grown estranged from religion.” But this repeated
assertion only serves to emphasize the incongruity of the “strange place”
that religion occupies in contemporary art, for, “there is something reli-
gious and spiritual in much of modern art.” Elkins cites John Updike who
calls modern art “a religion assembled from the fragments of our daily life”
(22). Here, and throughout the book, Elkins gives the impression of some-
one tapping on the glass ceiling that separates the world of contemporary
fine art, which excludes religion from its index, from the everyday world
which finds a place (because it must) for both art and religion.
At the end of this third chapter Elkins comes to an important con-
clusion. Commenting on Édouard Manet’s Dead Christ and the Angels
(1864), he makes the revealing comment that what matters is, not what
Manet was trying to achieve in conflating a number of episodes in the life
of Christ in this picture, but “to notice that the painting does not behave
itself in [a] proper religious or art-historical manner; that is enough to
signal that something else is going on, that Manet was trying to do some-

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Review Article: Can contemporary art be religious? 177
thing in painting, and not in doctrines” (25). Yes of course! Great artists,
in defying existing conventions, eventually force the critics to look at the
world in their way, thereby inadvertently creating the conventions that the
next generation of the art-world cognoscenti follow! What is (eventually
regarded as) a “proper art-historical manner” follows great art, it does not
create it. So it is (or should be) with religion too. The experience of what
we “know,” what we call “God,” is always prior to the formation of dogma.
Consequently “God” can never be forced into the frame of “proper” reli-
gion. It follows that contemporary artists who “do something” in painting
that ignores the canons of postmodern art criticism may be creating an
art which, when paid attention to sympathetically, and when one allows
oneself to be moved by it, may prompt what Elkins, following Thierry De
Duve, calls “an act of faith that answers what the painting proposes” (25).
If this is true of Manet’s great painting, then why can it not be true also
of much lesser works by far less talented artists? If it can be acknowledged
that the “truth” in a painting is in what De Duve calls “the beholder’s
gaze”—a beholder whose gaze is not directed through the lens of either
religious or critical dogma—then, as Elkins acknowledges, “the seculariza-
tion theory of modernity might be losing its grip” (23). Incidentally, the
idea of  “the beholder’s gaze”  is evocative of that of “listening” to a paint-
ing, one of the many interconnected themes in Jacques Derrida’s remark-
able treatment, in The Truth in Painting (ET 1987), of the ways in which
van Gogh’s Old Shoes with Laces has been interpreted.
Elkins then comes to the body of his book, in which he describes and
“explains” (his word) the work of five of his students. This is to illustrate
five approaches to “the problem of making religious art.” He tells of a
visit to the studio of each student. Kim paints “conventional religious art:”
hands upstretched from earth to a glowing sphere with an enormous hand
reaching down to earth. Rehema’s art “sets out to create a new faith” in
New Age fashion. She mixes Russian Orthodoxy with feminist prehistory.
Brian produces art that seems to be overtly critical of religion. He plac-
es Elvis on the cross, and portrays a model as both the singer Madonna
and the original Madonna. Ria’s sculpture is of a church in which she has
placed, and then wrenched out, conventional religious images. She thereby
“burns away what is false in religion.” Joel’s art “creates a new faith, but
unconsciously.” He produces many images of heart-shaped objects,
because, Joel says, “I love drawing this shape. I think about it a lot,
but I don’t really like to talk about it.” Before he analyses this artwork
Elkins prepares for his conclusion: the work of each of these students “goes

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178 Michael Austin
to prove my pessimistic point that it is nearly impossible to mix art and
religion” (37).
In five chapters, to which it is not possible to do justice here, Elkins
explains the artwork of each student by placing it in the history of the
development of Western art. These chapters are both provocative and well
informed. Elkins is a very knowledgeable art historian who wears his con-
siderable learning lightly, but one has the impression that the students
whose work he describes were chosen to represent five aspects of a thesis
upon which he had already decided—that is, that art and religion do not
mix—rather than that his insights derived directly from their work. So it
is that Kim’s work is explained in a chapter on “The End of Religious Art,”
and is used to support the statement that “the excision of piety and faith
from art has deep roots and is entangled with the very ideas of modernism
and postmodernism” (48). Rehema’s story, explained in a chapter entitled
“The Creation of New Faiths,” illustrates that it is easy for new religious
perceptions to find an outlet in contemporary art, yet, as with the art of
Alex Gray and Ann McCoy, the main reason why this artwork “is not
accepted as fine art is [the artists’] sincerity and openly declared beliefs”
(58). Brian’s story, explained in a chapter on “Art that is Critical of Reli-
gion” shows that “art that trumpets its discontent with religion can seem
too strident, too superficial. The many shades of grey, the conflicted second
thoughts, are where art begins to happen” (70)—a strongly postmodern
sentiment. Ria’s art, explained in “How Artists Try to Burn Away Reli-
gion” in a sensitively nuanced chapter, illustrating “the feeling that religion
is closed up tight inside its churchly armature. It has to be broken into,
scraped off, burnt away” (84) to reveal “a meaningful portion of older reli-
gion trapped inside the dogma. . . the essential spirit of religion” (89). Joel’s
art is explained in a (for me, unconvincing) chapter called “Unconscious
Religion,” in terms of the search for “sublime,” the “transcendent,” and
those other concepts “that used to be studied only by theologians” (96),
just as Surrealism explored the territory “at the end of the line,” beyond
rational analysis.
Joel’s art raised questions which Elkins seeks to answer in his last main
chapter, “Some Words to Describe Spiritual Art.” He asks whether reli-
gious ideas can be discussed without “straying into theology” (106). He
wants to find a way to talk about religion without using the language of
religion. He investigates the use of the words numinous and mysticism but
finds that they are each “tainted by their association with the major West-
ern religions” (106). Atheism and agnosticism he rejects as “inappropriate”

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Review Article: Can contemporary art be religious? 179
labels to attach to artworks. Elkins lands, unsurprisingly, on apophatic or
negative theology as providing “the best answer I know” to his problem.
But, in coming to this conclusion, he draws on a very significant theme in
early Christian thought, going back to Clement of Alexandria and Origen,
Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, representing a theological tradition
that he wants to avoid being “tainted” with—though he freely acknowl-
edges the significance of Pseudo-Dionysius. He concludes, very helpfully,
that “the dissolution of the art object in conceptual art and the progressive
narrowing and literalization of the object in minimalism have more than
a passing resemblance to the long Western history of restrictive negative
judgments” (109), though he is quick to add that “apophatic theology is
not a model for explaining minimalism or negative art.” Thus it is that
Elkins finds something in theology, some “resemblances,” something that
is “relevant,” to “finding words to link fields as large, and as deeply rooted
in history, as ‘art’ and ‘religion’  ” 109). Religion, after all, “is so much part
of life, so intimately entangled with everything we think and do, that it
seems absurd [that] it does not have a place in talk about contemporary
art” (115).
In the end, and rather unwillingly, Elkins finds himself talking about
God. He ends his book with this somewhat confused and confusing state-
ment: “. . . the name God does not belong to the language of art in which
the name intervenes, but, at the same time, and in a manner that is dif-
ficult to determine, the name God is still a part of the language of art even
though the name has been set aside. That is the stubbornness and chal-
lenge of contemporary art” (116). What this suggests is that Elkins can
offer no lasting solution to the problem of the “strange place” of religion
in contemporary art. Trapped by his critical criteria he struggles to make
sense of the presence of this mouse within the well-maintained circle of
his hermeneutic. For Elkins, “it is impossible to talk sensibly about religion
and at the same time address art in an informed and intelligent manner,”
even though “it is irresponsible not to keep trying” (116). The “impossibil-
ity” derives directly from the self-limiting nature of the critical aesthetic
that influences him so profoundly. The responsibility to keep trying finds
its origin in a very different, ethical, environment.
Professor Elkins writes this very worthwhile book from a position out-
side that of personal religious conviction (“I have no hidden agenda,
unless it is hidden from me. My own beliefs are not part of this book”).
Had he delved deeper into the Christian theological tradition he would
have understood that once the Red Sea “Rubicon” of abandonment in faith

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180 Michael Austin
has been crossed, belief in the incarnation of God has an inexorable logic.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out:
Either I determine the place in which I will find God, or I allow God to
determine the place where he will be found. If it is I who say where God
will be, I will always find there a God who in some way corresponds to me,
is agreeable to me, fits in with my nature. But if it is God who says where
He will be, then that will likely be a place which … at first does not fit so
well with me. That place is the cross of Christ.
(2000, 36)
It may be that God has, among a myriad of other “strange places,” chosen
the “strange place” of contemporary art to reveal his extravagant grace!
There is much else to be said on this topic. For example, it is intriguing
that in a supposedly religious United States, the current cotemporary art
world finds no place for religion, whereas in the United Kingdom, where
organised religion has been in serious decline for many years, the contem-
porary art scene is more welcoming of religious themes. As I was reading
this book the Independent ran four articles each of which spoke directly to
Elkins’s problem. On 27 April 2007, Tom Lubbock wrote a piece about
Wyndham Lewis’s One of the Stations of the Dead (painted in 1933 and
now in Aberdeen Art Gallery). In this “modernist” painting Lewis links
the seen and the unseen worlds. The title suggests a link to the Stations
of the Cross. But the unseen world in the painting might be a station on
the London underground. Lubbock says: The coloured line of souls are a
queue of passengers standing among posters. As in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land, “it is only a step from the ‘unreal’ modern city to the drifting shores
of hell.” A few days later, on 1 May, the Independent ran an obituary for
the fine Welsh painter Tony Goble. His work, the Independent said, “might,
contentiously, be regarded as ‘postmodernist’ in the sense that it conscious-
ly, playfully and eclectically referenced imagery from the mediaeval period
to the present.” It is also deeply and confessedly religious. For Goble,
painting was a spiritual activity: “I see my paintings as poems, as prayers
if you like.” In the edition for 3 May 2007 there was a review of a major
exhibition of contemporary art in Winchester Cathedral. The exhibition
is entitled Light, and “juxtaposes contemporary sculptures with ancient
religious monuments.” Marc Quinn, whose troubling Angel is exhibited,
says that placing these artworks in a space normally reserved for worship
“would lead viewers to reflect on ‘big questions’ .” And then, on 9 May, the
short list for the 2007 Turner Prize was announced. The chairman of the
jury is Christoph Grunenberg, director of  Tate Liverpool, where the prize

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Review Article: Can contemporary art be religious? 181
will be presented. He told the Independent that “only after the jury had
met and discussed the works did we realize there was a strong concentra-
tion of political work and work about religious beliefs and spirituality.”
He continued: “It’s an obvious truth, but works of art are actually political
acts and artists act as mediators.” He could have added, perhaps echoing a
despairing Cezanne, that artists are also a priesthood struggling, at much
cost to themselves, to mediate deep truths about the world in which they,
and we, live and work.

References

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich
2000 [1986] Meditating on the Word. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publi-
cations.

Revd Canon Michael Austin
7 Dudley Doy Road
Southwell
Nottinghamshire
NG25 0NJ
austin2@doy7.orangehome.co.uk

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