Ordinary, Artistic, Theological. Exploration of the Revelatory Potential of Art Through the Examination of its Boundaries
Autor/ka: Mgr. Filip Taufer
Department of Church History and Systematic Theology, Protestant Theological Faculty, Charles Unviersity, Prague
Abstrakt
In 1935, František Bílek designed a unique host for the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, an object that can be interpreted in three distinct ways. First, it functions as a piece of bread, an ordinary item of daily life. Second, it is a work of art crafted by Bílek, reproduced in each baking of the host. Third, it represents a religious artifact, mediating Christ’s presence. Each of these perspectives assigns the object a different meaning, shaped by the context in which it is encountered. This host exemplifies the semantic shifts that arise from changing contexts or perspectives, such as the artistic appropriation of religious objects and images or religious appropriation of artworks; the integration of everyday items into religious rituals or their treatment as subjects in still lifes and landscapes, or their metamorphoses into the artworks by readymade and pop art (Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 1981). The study argues that these transitions do not simply turn one thing into another in some chiasmic encounter, but they reveal blurred boundaries between the sacred and the secular, and between art and the everyday. By dissolving the perceived absoluteness of these categories, the artwork can expose them as operating on the same level and, in doing so, points toward a deeper, vertical distinction: that between creator and creation, divine and human (for this differentiation, see Dalferth, Transcendence and the Secular World, 2018). The revelatory potential of art lies in its capacity to juxtapose and destabilize these semantic fields.
Klíčová slova: Art, religion, ordinary, transcendence, transfiguration
Reference
- Epstein, A. (2016). Attention equals life. Oxford University Press.
- Dalferth, I. U. (2018). Transcendence and the Secular World. Mohr Siebeck.
- Danto, A. C. (1981). The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Harvard University Press.
- Deming, R. (2018). Art of the Ordinary. Cornell University Press.
- Mersch, D. (2015). Epistemologies of Aesthetics. Diaphanes.
