College of Creative Studies

Current Course Offerings
Spring 2006

This course seeks to understand the relationships between religion and contemporary art. This is not an easy task in that many of the great contemporary artists do not see themselves or their work as religious, and there is comparatively little interest in and understanding of religion in the official institutions of contemporary art, museums and galleries, critics, curators and collectors.

We seek to explore this problem and area with a simple question: Is the sacred relevant to our understanding and appreciation of contemporary art? In order to pursue this question we will use a series of categories, including time, space, word, body, ritual and memory, to interpret the work of artists such as Bill Viola, Robert Gober, Wolfgang Laib, Christian Boltanski, Doris Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread, Ana Mendieta, Anselm Kiefer, James Turrell, Anne Hamilton, Marina Abramovic, Agnes Denes and many others. The course includes a fieldtrip to Los Angeles.

Students will have the option of creating either a paper or an artwork, which explores the problems of the course.