The Visual Culture of American Religions.

David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)

While devotional objects recovered from past civilizations often retain a powerful and exotic presence, it is difficult to imagine what future generations would think of today's religious imagery. The Visual Culture of American Religions treats a wide selection of visual languages that have been utilized to communicate American religious experience, including sculpture, painting, photography and installation. Though not a comprehensive overview, the editors, David Morgan and Sally Promey, succeed In collecting abroad range of essays that together portray North America's diverse religious and cultural landscape. Although some of the research would fit within traditional modes of religious inquiry, the editors and publishers seek to inaugurate a rigorous, academic discussion of religion within the inclusive and contemporary field of Visual Culture. The work represented in the book stems from a three-year collaborative program of consultation, research and publication, funded principally by the Henry Luce Founda tion and Lilly Endowment. If it sounds heavy, don't be fooled, for the book highlights both the levity and the gravity of religious experience.

The book seeks, in part, to expose two extremes that have hindered the study of the visual culture of American religions: American art historians belief that religion cultivates an inferior aesthetic, and religious historians' view that art properly derives from textual subject matter. From the beginning there is a clear indication that the book's project extends not only out of an interest in American religious culture, but also out of a desire to engage the division separating art from craft and high from low culture. What results is an intriguing and abstract mixture of ethnography, postmodern cultural critique, biblical scholarship and art and religious history. In the introduction we are informed that the privatization of religion correlates historically with the separation of church and state. The areas of inquiry into which the book then delves often speak of the abiding tension between church and state, but also of the sacred terrain of self expression that, from pre-colonial times, has struggled to g enerate the imagery of everyday life.

Some of the themes explored are "Catholic Envy: The Visual Culture of Protestant Desire," in which writer John Davies explores the impact of Catholicism's visual exuberance upon American Protestantism; "'When Jesus Handed Me a Ticket'; Images of Railroad Travel and Spiritual Transformations among African Americans, 1865-1917"; "From' Presentation to Representation in Sioux Dance Painting"; and "Robert Gober's "Virgin" Installation: Issues of Spirituality in Contemporary American Art," which provides an introduction to Gober's installation work linking the corporeal and the divine. The text features a full-color plate for each of the 14 chapters and well-printed black and white reproductions throughout. What the editors and writers have attempted to do is, in a sense, to unify avant-garde and traditional artistic practice, and marginal as well as mainstream religious cultures, into a mutually revelatory and constructive dialogue. To this end the book, by remaining openly modest in scope, impressively performs its task.

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