Smells and Bells

  Of Paint, and Pottery, and Perception;  Looking at the Effects of Religious Arts I may be biased towards the power of art. I work in the gallery four hours a week, I set up exhibitions, I love to draw, and I long to spend my hours immersed in an art museum. However, I think many would agree that art has a lot of power culturally. In this instance, I will be looking specifically at the power of art in a religious aspect since so many religions tend to use art. If we look at one of the most famous examples, the Renaissance, we see an emergence of not just art but extremely emotional depictions of religion from The Last Supper to The Birth of Adam. Art tends to be a very popular way of creating connections between religion and the “masses” because humans are such visual creatures. The Sistine Chapel is a great specific example of this because it is not only filled with art but is also a public space that (theoretically) anybody can visit, meaning that the art is open to anyone ...

Whenever I see a piece of art, I often immediately think about how I interpret it and then how someone else can. The main reason being that something obviously had to have been the basis for the piece. In a way, interpretting art and religion are very similar. Hindu temples contain varying statues and with one statue,"One can see the silver mask of the goddess Durga, or the stone shaft of the Sive linga , or the four-armed form of the god Visnu" (Eck 36). A person's interpretation varies based on their own religious background and their environments. Whatever someone interprets they are doing so because of how the art affects them as well how others affect the art simply by viewing it.

The term is an oxymoron. Sacrality implies (at least in the salvation religions dominant in Western and Near Eastern history), a meaning rooted in a cosmic frame that transcends any immediate sensed from. The sacred cannot, therefore, be “performed.” Any reduction of meaning to form deprives that form of meaning. To perform the “sacred” necessarily is to profane it. Yet the sacred becomes real only as embodied in form. (1990, 208) This quote from Peacock in chapter three, page 119, of Rasmussen's book really intrigued me. It's sort of a different take than what I recently read in Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach  by Rebecca Alpert and Jacob Staub. There's an entire chapter on Mordechai Kaplan's transnaturalist perspective that I was reminded of in this section. Kaplan's view was more so that God is found in the process, "God works through  us rather than upon us" ( Exploring Judaism , 20). I can't exactly remember if the phrase 'God...

I love religious art. I think that there's a quality to it which cannot be explained. It doesn't stir feelings of faith in me, but I feel the weight which people's faith and devotion lend the piece. I've been struck by the beauty of Hindu devotional art and architecture for a few years now. I love looking at the richly decorated Shiva Linga , the revered statues of gods and goddesses, the rainbow-adorned temples, and the massive Ratha chariots (which I had always thought were called Juggernauts). However, my appreciation for devotional Hindu art had been only surface-deep. Until I read Darsan  by Diana Eck, I never knew the significance of these things, especially the statues. It was easier for me to associate the "aniconic" manifestations of the gods, like the Linga , than it was for me to imagine a deity in a statue, and I'm still unsure why. Shiva Linga (center left, near crack) being worshiped by Gandharvas c. 100 BCE Crucif...