Modern Religious Art

My reflections from the concluding post of my 'Airbrushed from Art History' series of posts have been published on the Modern Religious Art website as 'Modern Religious Art: airbrushed from art history?'
Modern Religious Art  displays and encourages the work of contemporary artists who are in some way motivated by or engaged with the religious. The motivation for the site was driven by artist Christopher Clack's interest in 'religious art' and exploring the possibility of a ‘Modern Religious Art’.

Clack writes:

"The possibility of a religious art in  the modern world will be for many people a complete impossibility, and I can understand why they may think this. One reason is the unpopularity (with some good reason) of formal religion and anything that may seem to support it, but also the development of art itself with its overall tendency to remove all meaning exterior to it,  all meta -narratives. The grand narratives of the old religions taken as ‘ the truth’ would be considered a straight jacket for any contemporary artist.
 
But there are broadly two reasons I do not rule out the possibility. One, I believe the religious impulse will not just go away, and that we need to improve our  understanding of this  impulse, and importantly not confuse it with formal religions.

Two, the nature of art and creativity itself. The way that contemporary art has developed, I would argue, has in fact brought it closer to the origins and nature of the religious impulse ...

In much contemporary art practice we are not given answers, we are given images and word games. Contemporary art attempts to move us away from the everyday, to break down our ideas and preconceptions.

Our artists  in someway expect us to be able to live with their inexplicable contents, to live with the inexplicable.

'What does it mean' is not the appropriate question in relation to contemporary art, but how does it alter my perceptions, does it open things up."
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Elbow - Jesus Is A Rochdale Girl.