Problems integrating Contemporary Art into Ritual Spaces

David Rastas

Ritual architecture presents a series of problems for the artist and curator that may not be encountered in the museum or other types of historical space. Ritual spaces are anchored in political, cultural and social traditions that integrate multiple narratives of place, self and history. The encounter of contemporary art in ritual space brings together a self-reflexive aesthetic experience with an enraptured contemplation aimed at spiritual transcendence. All objects encountered in ritual space are transformed by a ritual significance which compel attentiveness and demand a response. By virtue of an artwork’s presence within the context of ritual, it becomes vested with symbolic meaning connected with past experiences, memories and religious narratives. This paper examines the mechanics of site-specificity and site-responsive art in historical spaces infused with cultural meaning and activated by ritual, through a series of installations in monumental church buildings. These installations have attempted to address the formal, conceptual, and contextual implications of encountering art in an ideologically-loaded, historical space. Each of the installations discussed have sought to enter into a meaningful dialogue with the historical, social and ritual significance of the space.

The conditions which have allowed interventions of contemporary art in historic churches result from the radical changes to ritual function during the twentieth century, particularly the stripping of ritual significance from subsidiary altars and chapels. Since 1970, there have been hundreds of installations of contemporary art in churches, synagogues, mosques, temples and other forms of ritual space. Curatorial approaches to installing contemporary art in historic ritual spaces have developed from site-specific and site-responsive practice, ahistorical methods of display in museums, and institutional critique. In 1986, Friedhelm Mennekes began a twenty-five year program of installations of contemporary art in the seventeenth century church of St Peter in Cologne. The Sankt-Peter Kunst-Station set the benchmark for interventions in churches and Mennekes’ strategy for incorporating non-religious contemporary art into active ritual space has had a major influence on similar projects across Europe. There are several organisations based in the UK that work with art in churches including CGP Dilston Grove, Art in Sacred Spaces, Florence Trust and Art Angel. Historic churches that have a long program of installing contemporary art include Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpetrière in Paris, San Fedele in Milan, Sankt Andrä Kunstkirche in Graz, San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, and L'art dans les chapelles based in France. The series of exhibitions by KUNSTGLAUBE in Vienna sought to position each artwork within a conceptual organisation around determined themes to support discursive dialogue between specific spaces and works.

The reorientation of recent art practice toward site-specificity has its origins in a rejection of the assertion that an artwork is self-sufficient and self-contained. The progressive relinquishment of the principle of aesthetic autonomy and its sustained interrogation underpin developments in site-specific practice. An emphasis on the autonomy of art limited the expression of empirical subjectivity and promoted universality as a core element, aided by the setting apart of art from the world of consumable things and the breaking down of interrelationships between the artwork and its social context. In early discussions on site-specific art, Miwon Kwon defined the ‘site’ according to phenomenological, institutional, and discursive paradigms.¹ The first paradigm defined the site as an actual physical location, the second as informed by the dynamics, politics and power structures of the institution, while the third paradigm was characterised by a ‘discourse’ or field of knowledge.² Each of these paradigms can be applied to an analysis of site-specificity in ritual space. The phenomenological paradigm already relates to the installation of contemporary art in a variety of sites outside the museum, including ritual spaces. Extending the institutional paradigm beyond the museum and gallery to also refer to the religious institution, implicates the politics and power structures in ritual space. The dematerialised site defined by the discursive paradigm, involving theoretical concepts and the social realm, could refer to the liturgical, theological and social issues associated with ritual space. In addition to the three paradigms, I propose an additional paradigm to describe the mysterious enactment of sacramental rites and transcendental character of ritual space. This fourth paradigm defines the site as an ‘affective’ space which evokes sensations of pleasure, awe, fascination, terror, disgust, consolation, transcendence and surprise. It could be referred to as either the ‘affective’ or ‘sacramental’ paradigm. In ritual space, the unique function of aesthetic objects is established through the contemplative mode adopted in private devotional practice. Artworks are absorbed into the realm of visual piety as vehicles for transcendent experience and the focus of meditative reflection. The distinct types of response to an artwork in ritual space were traditionally either liturgically structured or shaped by devotional practice. An overlapping of the phenomenological, institutional, discursive and sacramental paradigms featured in the site-oriented installation of Clemens Wilhelm’s ‘JE CROIS QUE JE SUIS MALADE (I Believe I Am Sick)’ in a confessional in the Votive Church in Vienna. The video artwork was included in the Leiblichkeit und Sexualität (Corporeality and Sexuality) exhibition in the neo-Gothic church in 2014. The work consisted of a vertical screen standing in the position where the priest normally sits during the administration of the sacrament of penance (hearing confessions). Wilhelm’s silent video was filmed in the former residence of French playwright Jean-Baptist Poquelin (Molière), where he died in 1673. In producing the work, the artist invited people into a small room in Molière‘s home, where they were asked to take a seat and recite the sentence “I believe I am sick” into the camera. Even before the work entered the church, its content was attached to the physical reality of the playwright’s apartment as its initial phenomenological site. The confessional is an enclosed wooden box divided by two screens. Low benches give the penitent the opportunity to kneel and make their verbal confession to the priest through the screen. Wilhelm’s installation provided seats directly opposite the confessional for the viewer to sit in imitation of the speakers in the video. The words “I believe I am sick” in French, German and English scrolled across an LED display placed below the video screen. Because the film was silent, viewing the work prompted a focus on body language and facial expressions. The phenomenological paradigm relates to the physical structure of the confessional, drawing attention to the ritual act accommodated by the space. Through taking a seat in front of the video installation and reading the words, the visitor participated in an extension of the confessional ritual. The act of speaking the words “I believe I am sick” could then be considered in relation to the words spoken in the penitential rite, “I have sinned.” The phenomenological experience of the site prompted visitors to engage in ritual. The institutional paradigm bought into focus the potential for the intervention to critique the power structures of the religious institution. Considering the video screen occupied the space for the priest, some visitors felt that the work suggested that the priest is sick. This particular interpretation was reinforced by having encountered previous works in the exhibition that had addressed the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. The intervention also made the confessional space inaccessible for administering the penitential rite, which also contributed to a form of institutional critique. In Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, he outlined the central role of confession in the order of civil and religious powers as an “institutional incitement to speak.”³ The positioning of Wilhelm’s work denied this institutional incitement through its appropriation of the space. The words featured in the video were taken from Molière’s last performance of the Imaginary Invalid which included themes of hypochondria, health mania, belief in doctors, and the public display of illness and ego. The discursive paradigm related the “theological” encounter of participation in an extension of the ritual of confession. The discursive site was framed by the abstract theological implications of reconciliation. The codified physical actions prescribed by ritual are corporal in their means and abstract in their agency.⁴ The sacramental paradigm relates to the potential for Wilhelm’s intervention to facilitate transcendent experience. Individuals resistant to affording ritual space with any ‘intrinsic supernatural ontological status’ might be inclined to consider the work of art and the ritual space as mutually exclusive.⁵ According to Lindsay Jones, a suspension of disbelief is not only requisite to transacting meaning from ritual space but a precondition for the sacramental encounter.⁶  The individual need not adhere to the codified prescriptions for specific gestures and responses to ritual space nor have an explicit understanding of subtleties in their structure. The potential for the site of Wilhelm’s video installation to arouse an emotional response in the viewer is dependent on their will to engage, not necessarily on their familiarity with the ritual of penance.

One precedent for the installation of contemporary art in historic ritual spaces was the practice of arranging ahistorical juxtapositions of contemporary art within the permanent collection of a museum. The shift in museological practice toward revisiting the cabinet of curiosities, reframing artworks and ahistorical juxtapositions began with the institutional critique of the 1960s and 1970s, which drew attention to the politics of collections and museums. Dialogue between medieval religious objects and contemporary art in the Kolumba Museum in Cologne transform the museum space into a genuine Gesamtkunstwerk. The museum’s annual repositioning of contemporary art with works from different ages demonstrates the “infinite possibilities of aesthetic perception that the same object offers when presented under different circumstances.”⁷ Another example of the recent approach to ahistorical juxtaposition is in the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania. The staging of juxtapositions of older objects with contemporary art at MONA is influenced by recent developments in the critique of a museum’s historicist assumptions and institutional authority. The ahistorical juxtaposition of Takashi Murakami’s ‘Figure Miss Ko2’ with a nineteenth century copy of Herkules Farnese in the Votive Church, set a dynamic tension between old and new that was echoed by the pair of sculptures’ relationship to historic ritual space. Murakami’s sculpture is representative of his broader practice, exploring the formal connections between old and new in terms of stylisation, pictorial flatness and all-over composition. His sexualised representation of a female manga character stood in stark contrast to the classical marble sculpture of Herkules. The collisions that occur at the intersection between the old and new forge a hybrid space which becomes the focus of the viewer’s visual attention. Meaning is then located in this hybrid space between the two works.

Some of the precursors for recent ahistorical methods of display include Harald Szeeman’s 1988 exhibition ‘A-Historische Klanken = a-historical soundings’ at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Rudi Fuch’s documenta 7 in 1982 and the 1984 “Primitivism” exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art. In the MOMA exhibition, objects were removed from their original cultural contexts in order to emphasise their formal aspects. Tribal objects were positioned next to canonical European works in a manner that seemed to promote a modernist ideology of universal formal beauty. In most installations of contemporary art in churches, synagogues, mosques and temples since 1970, the emphasis has been on prioritising form in the relationship between the physical attributes of the artwork and site. This has been particularly evident in a series of installations in disused chapels across Brittany, organised by L'art dans les chapelles. An example of a work which emphasises a formal relationship with the spatial volume of the site is Élodie Boutry’s 2014 installation in the Chapelle Saint-Tugdual in Quistinic, France. Her abstract geometric sculpture dominated the space, unwrapping in the chapel like folded origami. Chapels and churches which are still in use could not allow such an invasion into their ritual space. In active churches, the artwork can interfere with the liturgy in very distracting ways. For example, the installation of Bill Viola’s Tristan’s Fire in All Saints Church in Melbourne, prevented liturgies from being celebrated altogether, as the projection screen for the video artwork blocked the entire sanctuary. Such an intrusion into the space would not be a problem if the work were installed in a decommissioned church like the Former Clare College Mission Church (Dilston Grove) in London, or any of the churches annexed for national pavilions during the Venice Biennale. In fact, the possibilities for interventions are virtually unlimited in a space which only contains the remnants of ritual. The complete transformation of Dilston Grove with Michael Cross’ ‘Bridge’ installation involving a large tank of water that visitors could walk across would not be possible to realise in an active ritual space. Likewise, Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey’s 2003 grass installation ‘Growth’ in the same space, took full advantage of the absence of ritual. Ackroyd and Harvey applied clay and grass seed to the concrete walls of the derelict church which transformed the space into a “green chamber of living grass.” Ahistorical juxtapositions of contemporary art in derelict spaces have the potential to reactivate the church’s ritual character.

Ritual focus increasingly tightened around the sanctuary over the second millennium to prioritise community-oriented ritual. Changes to ritual space following the second Vatican council consolidated this development and almost completely stripped the ritual significance away from subsidiary spaces outside the sanctuary and main body of the church. In efforts to be more inclusive and involve the community, the religious institution sanctioned the reordering of ritual space to involve more active participation in the primary ritual. The fostering of participation as a design priority has influenced the construction of new ritual architecture and had a significant impact on the function of historical spaces. One of the most fundamental changes to ritual space over the course of the twentieth century, was the abandoning of spaces for private contemplation in favour of community oriented ritual.⁸ Though a sense of sacrality was largely derived from an association with public ritual, an experience of the sacred could be independent of the liturgy. Devotional zones within the church, had previously served to unite the personal experience of religion with the architecture of ritual. These niches, chapels and side altars were both enabled and supported by an aesthetic of silence and contemplation. As these private zones of contemplation lost their function, remaining empty and under-utilised, they set the conditions for interventions of contemporary art. Evidence of the diminishing importance of devotional spaces preceding Vatican II could be seen in the empty ambulatory chapels of the Votive Church in Vienna. The nineteenth century historicist architecture of the Votive Church represents a fusion of diverse historical influences, though its spatial structure was modelled on the architecture of twelfth century Gothic Cathedrals in France.

Completed in 1879, the seven radiating chapels surrounding the main sanctuary were never opened to the public. Remaining empty except for a Marian altar in the central chapel, the spaces were eventually used for storage. Regular concerts were held in the Church which prompted the conversion of two chapels into dressing rooms with toilet and wash basin in the 1980s. When preparing the proposal for the Leiblichkeit und Sexualität exhibition, a plan was outlined for cleaning up the ambulatory chapels for the installation of contemporary artworks. One chapel was left as it was found, containing ladders, candles, light fittings, chairs, mattresses and a bronze head of Christ that had been stolen from the church, then returned in a gym bag. A site-responsive intervention of Hermann Glettler’s ‘Cleaning You’ was placed on a shelf among the found objects. The video on a small vintage television screen featured the artist approaching a gothic carving of Christ’s crucified body as it lay on the floor of a French church. He knelt down and proceeded to clean the entire sculpture with his tongue - licking away the dust of several hundred years.

The subdivision of spaces within historic churches articulated the boundaries between private devotion and corporate ritual participation. Side altars, chapels and niches housed relics, tombs and devotional images which supported introspective contemplation, petition and the performance of private ritual. The presence of more than one altar dates back to the sixth century and the Lateran Basilica in Rome with its seven subsidiary altars, provides an early example of their presence in antiquity. In around 590, Bishop Palladius of Saintes erected twelve altars each dedicated to one of the apostles, in addition to the high altar. These altars were primarily used as depositories for offerings until the eighth century when they became predominantly repositories for relics. The rise of devotion to saints began in the ninth century and contributed to the widespread distribution of relics consisting mainly of dismembered parts of a saint’s corpse.⁹ The practice of trade guilds and devotional confraternities offering endowments for the construction of chantry chapels emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.¹⁰ These endowments coincided with an institutional reinforcement of a burgeoning devotionalism to individual saints and the Virgin.¹¹ The funding of chapels by confraternities and families was often a religious expression of social status.¹² In large monasteries, side altars along the nave of longitudinal ritual-architecture would be used simultaneously by individual monks for the Eucharistic ritual.¹³ These altars could also be used for smaller congregations. In the thirteenth century, where there were multiple priests in a monastery or Cathedral, numerous altars were required for each individual priest to independently perform the liturgical ritual.¹⁴ In 2006, Claudia Terstappen’s video work ‘Fire, Water, Sky & Earth’ was installed on the decommissioned St Brigid altar in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne. This particular work along with a number of others in the Crisis, Catharsis and Contemplation exhibition were seen as an offense to religious sensibilities. The very premise of introducing contemporary art into ritual space can arouse hostility from individuals for whom the historical building represents an idealised past. The problem with Terstappen’s work was mainly due to the medium of a moving image and the unexpected encounter of a television on an altar.