The interviews which James Romaine carried out for Objects of Grace provide an interesting survey of artists expressing their faith in and through contemporary art and those that they view as peers or influences.
Dan Callis is a visual artist/educator whose work includes painting, drawing, and installation. Currently, his work explores issues of visual hybridization, arising from the interaction between artifice and ecology, spontaneity and the mediation.
When he spoke to Romaine, Callis explored connections between his work and that of Anselm Keifer:
"There is a strange sense of longing and mourning, also a sense of reckoning. The layering of imagery and material makes the work operate somewhere between memory and vision ... The work is so grounded in the history of painting and at the same time it transcends the issues that have hamstrung painters in the last two decades. This what I hope for my work. To acknowledge my traditions and use those traditions as a vehicle (or at least the fuel) to break free of the current orbital confines ...
Memory is made in place. Place is the ecosystem for memory. memory is story, individual and/or collective, and that occurs in place. This is history. That idea has been the common connection of all my work, the idea of memory, location (place) and community ...
I understand part of my role as an artist is to be a storyteller and I understand this role to be a redemptive act. I think that is one of the things that our works share: this belief in the redemptive quality of the art. The redemption comes, in part, from remembering. I would hope to evoke something forgotten, something important yet forgotten. I see that in Keifer's work. I also see in his work the role of the artist as a mediator or facilitator between memory and place ...
As a culture we are creating images at such a rapid pace and the bulk of these images are purely for consumption. Our memories are so meshed in the audio and visual drown of our commodity economy that we desperately need places to slow down, to reflect, to remember. And in this remembering there can be mourning, there can be celebration, and there can be reconciliation. I hope in some way my work locates or fixes the viewer in the space they are occupying and at the same time transcends that space. Keifer's work does that for me."
Callis thinks it is very exciting and dynamic time in the contemporary art world which is ripe with opportunity:
"With artists like Keifer, Robert Gober, or Kiki Smith, there are serious, spiritual questions being asked. It appears that we continue to be in a major period of flux and that means everything is up for question. As an artist of faith I believe it is paramount that we maintain a relevant place in the conversation. I think of the Southern California artist Tim Hawkinson, who showed in the 1999 Venice Biennial and ... Whitney Biennial. He and his wife, Patty Witkin (an accomplished painter and professor at UCLA) both are committed artists of faith and very active in the contemporary scene. I also think of Canadian artist, Betty Spackman, and her Austrian collaborator, Anja Westerfrölke. Both women are strong and committed believers and very active in the European art scene (including exhibiting their work at Documenta)."
Albert Pedulla is a sculptor who makes mixed media installations and who has shown his work at museums and alternative spaces including the Museum of Fine Arts - Houston, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, City Without Walls, and many college campuses across the North East of America.
Pedulla views his work as questioning some of the Enlightenment foundations of Modernism and its self-satisfaction at the same time that Modernism is still the vocabulary he has to use in order to be engaged woth or relevant to this time. One of his disenchantments with Modernism is:
"The idea that could be created in an autonomous sphere that has nothing to do with the rest of life ... The artist, like anyone else, has to consider the consequences of their work. I think that, to a certain extent, the Modernist artist has done a disservice to culture and the public by not giving back to culture something that is of use ...
a holdover from the Enlightenment and Modernism ... holds that the real truth is in analytic proof that can be factually verified. This reduces Truth to fact ... Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence for which is still unseen ...
What is seen is the subject; the content is hidden except to those who are willing to discern it. In Wall Object #4 (With Fire and Light), the fire which is unseen to the viewer creates the marks which are seen. The illumination is created by a light source which is unseen. The idea, the faith ... also relates to the act of art making in general. It suggests the prayerful attitude that an artist can bring to her work. The artist's work can be a visual manifestation of an invisible prayer. By faith, the artist's prayers may be seen."
As a younger artist, Pedulla was very interested in the work of Sol LeWitt:
"He does many of his works directly on the wall, and my work is also directly on the wall. I find his work to be optically very beautiful but LeWitt's work is less critical of Modernism. I think my work is arguing with him at the same time it is engaging Modernism."
One artist he is very interested in is Robert Gober:
"Even though his work looks very different than mine, he seems to have a similar ambivalence about Modernism and is engaged in the question of true spirituality as contrasted with the clinical, closed, spirituality of Modernism. So I feel a certain kindred spirit with his work. Yet, on the surface, I don't think people would categorize us together."
Tim Rollins says:
"What is funny is that artists like Serrano and Gober, and even Mapplethorpe, were maybe trying to transcend the limitations and boundaries of denominational organized religion by creating these critiques, in which they engaged and challenged church traditions and doctrines. Many people mistake critique for sacrilege. I often wonder what Christ would have thought of Piss Christ? I think he would have agreed with the ethos of it, to be frank. I mean, most people think Piss Christ is a glorious image, glowing, and they're just ready to shout and get down on their knees and pray until they do find out that it is urine. It is a critique. You have a cheap plastic crucifix that represents how Christ was sold and how Christ really had to suffer rejection and hung out with literally the scum of the earth. But the light that comes out of it, and how you can make something that beautiful. When I see particular works, like Piss Christ, I moved by the pathos of them. They're not just vandalizing, or attacking people's faith. It's an honest engagement of what these individuals have been though, often negative encounters with the church ...
Is there something they could say to the artist to persuade them that perhaps this isn't the most beautiful, or this isn't the way to engage with religion or with God? ... That's why it is very important for us to make things that are beautiful, that are glorious, but that can be critical and vital and political simultaneously. Only beauty - love made visible - can change things. I think that is the ethos of Jesus as well. People come to church and they want some of this. I see it in their faces when the choir starts singing and this glory radiates. I see their longing like, "There is something going on here that I have never felt before and I want to feel." We as human beings are biologically wired for spiritual ecstasy. And we try to get it in every form but a one to one connection with the Almighty. I think art is a way to summon that connection. The glory of God - this is what we seek to demonstrate in our art. This is what I feel in front of great works of art."
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The Blind Boys of Alabama ft Lou Reed - Jesus.
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