The recreated image. The experience of the sacred in contemporary art followed by an interview with James Elkins

Abstract

The essay tries to analyze the relationship between the sacred and contemporary art in the light of recent studies of the American professor James Elkins. According to the author of On the Strange Place of Religion in contemporary art, art and religion, in the past, in their mutual dependence revealed the essential and original dimension of man; they revealed the ritual, cultish, individual and collective condition that responds to the primary sacredness of life. This kind of osmosis has been replaced by individual entities that no longer overlap in the secularized era. In an epoch dominated by rationality of technology, for most contemporary art the religious theme seems to be inherent and intertwined with the creative work. To avoid the risk of making art as "propaganda" for religion, according to Elkins, the figure of the artist, meditative and uncertain both on art and religion, must appear: ambiguity, irony and self-criticism must penetrate the work of art in order to demonstrate its belonging to the statute of membership of the fine arts. Religion, like mythical thought, symbolic thought and reason are part of man, they are innate in religious and a-religious man; similarly psychology, like religion in the past, has dealt with “healing” the soul, discovering the hidden sphere of individuality. The destruction or rather the separation of these languages ??has led to a weakening of the ego, a move away from the center, a disorientation expressed visually by the artist. The loss of orientation results in a lightness of existence, made ??up of multiple directions, and infinite Weltanschauungen, in which meet languages??, cultures, religions, ideals and values ??that generate empowering different and plural paths.

The exclusivity and intimacy of the relationship between the viewer and the work that generates astonishment, wonder, fascination (or the contrary), allowing you to put yourself in a position of sensing the spirituality, the sacredness of the religious feeling, of perceiving spirituality as a sensation without necessarily needing to recognize it within the style, forms or symbols of the tradition.

The sacred refers to an idea of the extraordinary, it evokes awe, veneration, something inviolable because it is absolutely confidential; sacred space means a limited space separated from the ordinary one, and the time is a time outside the normal order, suspended.