Art and the postsecular

Abstract

This article introduces the notion of ‘postsecular’ as a way of negotiating the work of contemporary and twentieth-century artists whose work has a spiritual content or context. The rejection of spiritual language in art criticism, and the history of its subjugation in the twentieth century, is traced to modernist imperatives that bracketed out its vital influence on key artists. By bringing together a fragmented but growing recent scholarship on art and the spiritual, and suggesting that this forms part of a postsecular sensibility, a new and pluralist language of the spirit can be articulated for the arts. Several modalities of the spirit are presented as particularly useful for approaching contemporary fine art practice, including the shamanic, the esoteric and the transcendent. By avoiding the monolithic framework of understanding in old religion, and exploring the broader implications of the ‘postsecular’, a fine-grained spiritual criticism of art can be constructed adequate for contemporary fine art practice.

Keywords:

• spiritual
• postsecular
• shamanism
• transcendence
• Anish Kapoor
• Bill Viola