Page 46 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Aesthetics 29

Conclusion

To account for the appeal— and disgust—that images invoke for beholders
in our media-saturated, postsecular world, aesthetic theory needs to be
pushed beyond the divides between body and mind, high art and low
art, and art and religion. A broad understanding of aesthetics, as we have
argued, allows one to focus on the relationship between people and religious
images and other forms and to inquire how this relationship is shaped by
authorized modes of invoking divine presence and power and by sensorial
practices through which it is incorporated (see also Verrips 2008). From
the vantage point of the broad understanding of aesthetics proposed here,
believers’ distressed reactions vis-à-vis Piss Christ appear in a different light
from that of a conventional neo-Kantian approach, as mobilized by the
judge who regarded this image as a piece of high art with its own “beauty of
appearance.” Whatever our position with regard to charges of blasphemy, the
“aesthetic vertigo” (Young 2005: 20–45) it may generate, and the political
debates surrounding it may be, the approach of aesthetics advocated here
sensitizes us to the fact that people may be hurt—literally—by exactly those
images that violate their embodied religious sensibilities and accepted modes
of representation. Controversial imagery thus spotlights the point we have
sought to make throughout this chapter: Religion is not confined to the
sphere of ephemeral spirituality and mere abstract beliefs but entails solid
materials that form religious subjects through a process of embodiment.
In closing, we stress that our plea to turn to an embodied and embedded
aesthetics seeks to go further than privileging the body and the senses at the
expense of “the mind.” Owing to the dematerialization and disembodiment
of religion and aesthetics, it is certainly important to reclaim the body and
the senses. However, in so doing we need to avoid reinstating the mind–
body divide. In our understanding, as also pointed out by Merleau-Ponty,
the production of meaning and knowing (which is usually associated with
the domain of the mind) always involves bodily experiences and emotions as
well as reflections on it—a process that may well be characterized, following
Baumgarten, as “aestheticological” (see Schweizer 1973: 42–4). In other
words, to grasp the immediacy and power that religious sensational forms
wield over their beholders, we plead for an understanding of aesthetics that
incorporates body and mind as an undivided whole.

Notes
1 That watching taboo-breaking art can trigger visceral reactions in viewers is nicely
illustrated by the warning in the folder distributed by the Brooklyn Museum of
Modern Art in New York at the occasion of the “Sensation” exhibition in 1999.