Re-Enchantment isn't a book in the usual sense. It's part of a series Elkin edits, called The Art Seminar, and models a generous and quite involved kind of community and conversation. The first part of the book offers five essays as "Starting Points." Next comes the transcript of the Seminar, a day-long conversation between nine art historians, theorists, artists, and scholars of religion - all of whom read the "Starting Points" essays before beginning. The discussion ranges widely, but that's part of Elkin's purpose - to show that one can, however disjointedly, talk about issues he thinks the art community refuses or fears to engage. The discussion is indeed disjointed, although the participants go through the motions of engaging and agreeing with each other.
But the real point is not to show that an impossible conversa- tion is indeed possible, but that the impossible conversa- tion, even or because it's impossible, is interesting, generate provocative insights, and is alive to issues of importance. The last part of the book (which I haven't got to yet) is over thirty short essays, responses to the transcript by people who weren't at the Seminar.Interesting format. I'll know better what I think about it all once I've read some other readers' responses. But for now I'm struck by the different levels of discussion - some speak only philosophical aesthetics, some the language of psychoanalysis or ethics, some are caught in the folds of ideologies of modernism, one traces everything back to the iconoclasm controversy, and one is all electric prophecy. The arty participants seem more comfortable talking about grand ahistorical things like faith, transcendence, incarnation, disenchantment. The three representatives of religious studies (David Morgan, Wendy Doniger and Tomoko Masuzawa) are the least dogmatic, but for that very reason probably seem flat-footed to their interlocutors.
And yet I couldn't but cheer when Morgan said: Jim [Elkins], sometimes when you talk it sounds like you're saying religion and contemporary art cannot be linked, axiomatically, whereas [T. J.] Clark seems to be saying even if they could, they shouldn't. It's a kind of prescriptive distinction. From my point of view, doing ethnography, the study of lived religion, and visual piety, all that seems silly. I'm not working on fine art, mostly. If I want to know what people do with their images, I just go ask them, and I watch them. I see what they do, in their homes, churches, or synagogues, or in the streets, and then I compile descriptions of their practices. (141)
And elsewhere, where Morgan describe his field of visual studies as concerned not only with the object but with: the visual field in which the object participates, but is not the only actor. The object, in this sense, is engaged by viewers, by values, by histories, and that makes it possible to produce a taxonomy of different ways of seeing ... This may not be of interest to scholars of contemporary art, but the value of an approach that is less object-centered than practice-centered is that it lets us understand the worlds, the life-worlds, in [/] which images function: the ways they gather meaning and participate in different social occasions. For the subject of religion, and perhaps also the production of art, that can be very important: the sacred is created as a social process, an effect of engagement. ... It's not that I want to promote religion in art: I want to understand it. It marks life-worlds that are not mine, and they can be fascinating. (144-45)
Interesting. The artists seek or refuse enchantment, transcendence, while the religionists are actually interested in other people, too.
