KJCKorea
Journal Central

As art is already separated and independent of religion, the temptation to rebind the art and the sacred seems to be an anachronism. However, we often found Christian iconography in contemporary works, such as the cross of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Heaven and Hell. The traces of these sacred in contemporary works, how do we interpret? Giving provocative and shocking expressions to these motives, some artists are at the center of the controversy for blasphemy. Observing three works of art, <Piss Christ> of Andres Serrano, <The Virgin Mary> of Chris Ofili, and <Untitled> of Robert Gober, we will point out if these works should be interpreted as blasphemy. According to Mircea Eliade, the world of the sacred and the world of the profane are separated but co-exist. The sacred and the profane are two aspects of experience which constitute the essence of human existence, and they are one but two. Though the modern man has a non-religious character and is not supposed to find the transcendence, but he can not deny there is the religious room in him, in confidence. This is the archetypal nature of human beings, to seek the sacred. To re-discover the sacred, we should pass a boundary. It is at that moment that we are arrived at ‘hierophany’(manifestation of the sacred). To get the place and the time sacred through hierophany, Eliade named it ‘center’. He suggests the art as an examples of center. Through arts, we discover and remember the sacred, and approach to our archetype. The return to archetype happens in museums. This experience is amplified when we appreciate the works of performance, video, or installation which show the time. For example, in a space which is surrounded by sounds and images by Bill Viola, the spectator experiences a trance, that is, a mysterious feeling by transferring himself from a secular space to a transcendent space. ‘Homo sacer’ said by Giorgio Agamben is the man who has nothing but the bare life. He does not belong to the divine order, nor the secular order. He is the liminal figure who belongs to both of orders solely by the exclusion. He dwells in the zone of indistinction: inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. Agamben used the example of ‘Muselmann’ as prisoners in Nazi’s concentration camp for Homo sacer, and said that the ‘camps’ in modern sense exist today. In order to overcome the device to control the individual, it should do ‘profanation’ of what belongs to God. The strategy of ‘profanation’ relates to use irrelevantly or reuse the sacred, that is ‘the play’. We can explain it by the images of camps. Return to the sacred as an artistic motif among contemporary artists, suggest that human beings cannot exist as ‘beings profane’ without ‘the sacred’. According to Eliade, a modern man retrains the traces of human religion and it is revealed through the works of art. According to Agamben, as the potential of modern Homo sacer, we are repositioning the sacred for the common use.

the sacred, the profane, Eliade, hierophany, center, initiation, Agamben, Homo sacer, profanation, camp