Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience

Description

While place-based pilgrimage is an embodied practice, can it be experienced in its fullness through built environments, assemblages of souvenirs, and music? Imaging Pilgrimage explores contemporary art that is created after a pilgrimage and intended to act as a catalyst for the embodied experience of others. Each chapter focuses on a contemporary artwork that links one landscape to another-from the Spanish Camino to a backyard in the Pacific Northwest, from Lourdes to South Africa, from Jerusalem to England, and from Ecuador to California. The close attention to context and experience allows for popular practices like the making of third-class or "contact" relics to augment conversations about the authenticity or perceived power of a replica or copy; it also challenges the tendency to think of the "original" in hierarchical terms. The book brings various fields into conversation by offering a number of lenses and theoretical approaches (materialist, kinesthetic, haptic, synesthetic) that engage objects as radical sites of encounter, activated through religious and ritual praxis, and negotiated with not just the eyes, but a multiplicity of senses. The first full-length study to engage contemporary art that has emerged out of the embodied experience of pilgrimage, Imaging Pilgrimage is an important and timely addition to the field of material and visual culture of religion. It is essential reading for anyone interested in pilgrimage studies, material culture, and the place of religion within contemporary art.

Kathryn R. Barush is Thomas E. Bertelsen Jr. Chair and Associate Professor of Art History and Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA, USA and the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, USA.

Kathryn Barush takes us on a fascinating journey that explores the rich connectivity between people, places, images and song. A major contribution to our understanding of pilgrimage past and present. * John Eade, Professor of Sociology & Anthropology, University of Roehampton, UK * This is a seductive book, deeply engaging to read and to think with. Kathryn Barush crosses landscapes, temporalities, and disciplines to extend our understandings of both pilgrimage and experiences of art. Her scope is wide, but her scholarship is profound. * Simon Coleman, Chancellor Jackman Professor, Department of Religion, University of Toronto, Canada * Bringing together arts of the built environment, portable shadowboxes, songs and sounds, and site-specific installations, Imaging Pilgrimage puts contemporary art that enacts and translates pilgrimage in dialogue with the deep, embodied histories of pilgrimage. Barush emphasizes the sensorial work of pilgrimage and the work of objects to build communitas-through-culture across space, time, and difference and her work is an important contribution to critical reception studies. Barush's analysis of localized pilgrimage practices and objects connecting pilgrims to faraway places on ecocritical grounds takes on even deeper resonance amidst the Covid-19 pandemic in which Imaging Pilgrimage emerges and points the reader towards the entanglement of these global ecological and epidemological crises. In addition to its scholarly exploration of pilgrimage and contemporary art, perhaps Imaging Pilgrimage also offers itself to readers as an object of communitas-through-culture, one that moves us towards being, feeling, and knowing together. * Jennifer Stager, Assistant Professor of History of Art, Johns Hopkins University, USA * Imaging Pilgrimage is a vivid and vital evocation of the visual cultures of contemporary pilgrimage - the place of pilgrim frame of mind in current art production and the ways contemporary art itself enables and develops the pilgrimage process in the modern world. Deeply embedded in a rich historical understanding of Christian pilgrimage across the centuries, Kathryn Barush's book throws light on the ways the arts across a vast geographic span in today's world have built models of spiritual identity. * Jas Elsner, Senior Research Fellow, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, UK * This brilliant book brings the ancient "kinetic ritual" of pilgrimage out of the pages of history and into the context of the contemporary continuity of this ancient sacred art form. The art of pilgrimage has been embodied in the decorative badges, souvenirs, relics, pilgrim ampullae, the well-worn rosaries that accompanied pilgrims, and visible in the influence pilgrimage had on architecture, statuary, and fine art. In Barush's fine retelling of the past and present of this global praxis, we are taken on a journey through the Pacific Northwest, to Ecuador and are able to perceive, through the pilgrims' eyes, Santiago de Compostela, Jerusalem, and Rome. Beyond the physical journey is the imagined journey that the "manuscripts, maps, and labyrinths as sites of mental, or stationary pilgrimage" the pilgrim's experience is literally brought home for others to experience. This fine work is groundbreaking in its interdisciplinarity scope and will be important not only to Pilgrimage Studies, but also to Art History, Ritual Studies, Visual & Material Culture Studies, Comparative Religion, and Contemplative Studies. * Rita D. Sherma, Director & Associate Professor, GTU Center for Dharma Studies and Co-Chair, Sustainability 360, Graduate Theological Union, USA *