-
Studying Spirituality: Two Reactions
Reactions When I Mention Spirituality At Parties So, I’m busy with a PhD focused on spirituality. Once I mention my topic in polite party conversations, I get reactions which fall somewhere between two extremes. The first extreme is fascination. What is spirituality? How does one study it? Can such an endeavour be useful? Can you […]
-
Modern Art and Spirituality: Hockney
Hockney’s art takes us beyond the perspectivist reduction which insists our perception is static. What does this mean for Spiritualities?
-
No Title Adventures
A quick take on T.D. Suzuki, Thomas Merton, and Titles.
-
Modern Art and Spirituality: On Kawara
“Death, if nothing else, is a form of transcendence—particularly from a life spent accounting.” – Holt’s review of On Kawara’s 2015 retrospective at the Guggenheim. The artist died just before the show’s opening. Today April 27, 2018—today. Imagine for a moment you got up each day with two crucial tasks. First, paint the date on canvas […]
-
Modern Art and Spirituality: Turrell
Lights On Arrival We return, in this post, to one of Taylor’s[2] preferred artists. With Turrell, we enter even more dangerous territory than Warhol, for he is not only very much alive but also vogue. The 2016 blockbuster Arrival, for example, draws on Turrell’s Shallow Spaces for the meeting place between the aliens and humans. Under […]
-
Modern Art and Spirituality: Warhol
Introduction: Reading Notes Crack Open the Velvet and Coke While reading this post, I recommend listening to The Velvet Underground, eating your can of Campbell Soup, and cracking open a Coke. Yes, today we will consider the one, the only, Andy Warhol, or whatever copy of him you prefer. Now, a word of initial warning – […]
-
Modern Art and Spirituality: Beuys
Artists: Spirituals or Portfolio Managers Mark C. Taylor’s [1] Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy starts by juxtaposing the four artists mentioned in the title subsection with Hirst, Murakami, and Koons. Art has come under the sway of market forces which inflates its value. At the same time, chasing dollar value deflates art’s critique of […]
-
Modern Art And Spirituality: Brâncuși
1. Constantin Brâncuși: The Folksy Artist More than any artists we have met thus far, Constantin Brâncuși grew up poor, his parents peasants. The Romanian would, also, live a life of simplicity, continuing with the habits, cuisine, and religious practices of his forbears. Although versed in philosophy and friends with many names we have already covered, he remained […]
-
Modern Art and Spirituality: Kandinsky
The Russian-born Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky came late to art. In 1896, at age 30, he gave up a legal career to take up painting inspired by Monet’s Haystacks. His first works such as Der Blaue Reiter shows Monet’s influence on Kandinsky. Similar to the artists we considered earlier, Kandinsky’s work increased in abstraction as he matured. […]
-
Modern Art and Spirituality: Picabia
1. Who was Francis Picabia? 1.1. From Sisley to Dada… This week we turn to another of Duchamp’s friends, Francis Picabia. Picabia’s juvenalia resembled Alfred Sisley, who preferred quiet nature scenes. Soon, however, he found such romanticist natural scenes trifling and turned to cubism in search of a more honest sentiment. Picabia unique sensibility, however, […]
-
Modern Art and Spirituality: Duchamp
This week considers a third artist often grouped with Picasso and Matisse—the polymath Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp is the crossover figure of the triad. Paris’ early 20th-century art salons, for example, already found it difficult to classifying his Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2. He was too Cubist for the Futurist and too Futurist for the […]
-
Modern Art and Spirituality: Matisse
The next stop on our tour through modern art is Henri Matisse. Compared to Picasso, Matisse was a temperate man with a bourgeoisie work-ethic, yet not humble. Indeed, he imagined himself the high-priest of art. Van Gogh influenced both Matisse and Picasso. John Peter Russel exposed Matisse to van Gogh in 1896 and by 1899 Matisse […]
-
Modern Art and Spirituality: Picasso
In my ever scattered state many vague inklings float around in my head. One idea I’ve tinkered with and have not found the time to explore is creating spaces between spirituality and modern art. By modern art, I mean the art of the 20th and 21st Century. Now, please don’t expect long, profound essays on […]