Repetitive Reverie

This chapter offers some interesting insights to religious and spiritual art, and I paid close attention to the assessment of popular reaction to art as religious experience. While I believe art can instigate a transcendental state, Robertson and McDaniel write that many are "skeptical about the ability of art to provide an experience of transcendence." (286)

With works such as Shirazeh Houshiary's Turning Around the Center, this is a valid point. While elegant and full of religious significance, her piece does not exactly awaken the sensory overload we connect with most religious experience. However, Fred Tomaselli's painting, Untitled (Expulsion), is a perfect example of how art might induce a feeling akin to religious fervor.

In the piece, a stark background is contrasted with bright objects, making a pattern of light and dark, objects are repeated at regular intervals, and everything spouts from a single font in rigid line formation: pattern is everything in this piece. Even the bodies of the rejected Adam and Eve join into the pattern-making process--the veins that snake throughout their body create alternaitng bands of light and dark red, mimicking the light and dark of the overactive wellspring that created them, the one they are now forced to leave. It is here in patterning that we find a religious experience: according to Robertson and McDaniel, "these patterns have the effect of slowing down looking, overwhelming the senses, and opening the door to a dreamlike consciousness." (285) Common sense would dictate this connection as well. In order to achieve trance, in both western and eastern religions, many people use rhythmic chants, low lighting, and slow breathing techniques. Even repeated the rosary over and over can be used to meet the same end. Pattern and repetition are an important aspect of unlocking religious experience, and I feel Tomaselli's painting is an accurate recreation of what is necessary to induce reverie.

Robertson, Jean, and Craig McDaniel. Themes of Contemporary Art. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 273-297.