Visual Spirituality : Art, Mediums, and Cognitive Dissociation

This book explores the topic through the lenses of media ecology, art history, and psychology. Media ecology is a theory that media shapes how messages are delivered.

The importance of spirituality in shaping contemporary visual culture has mostly been disregarded. Mentioning art and spirit in the same sentence was considered embarrassing. In contrast, most of the significant twentieth-century art movements developed in conjunction with spiritual inspiration. This book explores the topic through the lenses of media ecology, art history, and psychology. Media ecology is a theory that media shapes how messages are delivered. The non-commercial nature of spiritual concepts would prevent messages from being offered through commercial media. As a result, many respected artists whose works are familiar have escaped understanding because people haven''t yet pierced the spiritual history of modern art. Images once considered devoid of meaning are now being re-examined in terms of their spiritual underpinnings. Kandinsky thought that he could correct nineteenth-century materialism by replacing it with twentieth-century spirituality. However, it was not until the twenty-first century that modern art''s spiritual value started to be publicly recognized through scholarship and gallery exhibits. Abstraction provides the opportunity to explore design as a psychological self-revelation of the artist. Automatic drawing, once a tool for spirit messages, became a psychological method with the introduction of Surrealism. Psychology introduced the notion of creative dissociation to replace the idea of mediumship as a basis for art created in altered states. Art, as a personal and reflexive expression, can be used to steady our culture from one that denies spirituality to one that embraces it. We can all use artistic techniques to become more balanced people. Spiritual and psychological artistic techniques created the world of art we experience today. Understanding these influences can help us to better know the world in which we live.