Tasteful Play: Christian Artists, Ambiguity and the Theo-politics of Taste

Abstract

Émile Durkheim (1912) argues that art is an essential part of religious life—it ‘refreshes a spirit worn down by all that is overburdening in day-to-day labor’ (385). For Durkheim, making art in religious contexts is akin to sacred play. We explore how contemporary Christian artists use play, frivolity and experimentation to intentionally, and more often unintentionally, challenge, or at least, reveal various social and theo-political dynamics within their religious communities. We will explore some of the pressures artists face to ‘fit in’ to church environments, their encounters with various arbiters of ‘taste’, and the threat that artists pose to power structures in churches that have been traditionally derived through the interpretation of text. This work is part of a multi-sited ethnography that investigated the relationship between visual art and religious innovation in Canadian Christian communities, including 4 years of ethnographic observation and interviews in Alberta, Southern Ontario, and Grand Rapids, Michigan.