PREFACE
Barbara Baert & Hilde Van Gelder

The relationship between the human body, religion and the visual arts is characterized
by fear and delight. Are we able (and allowed) to think of the divine in a corporeal way? Isn’t artistic expression, which originated from both the human mind and body, intrinsically a bodily matter? From which perspectives will the corporeality of art reflect on the sacred world? And, what role does the identity of Christianity play in these questions? From the very center of the ‘body-religionart’ triangle, a force is pulsating between taboo and embrace, between Dionysus and Apollo. The traumatic, iconoclastic periods in the history of Christianity and recent conflicts, such as the destruction of Buddha statues by the Taliban, reflect the emotional impact of corporeal representations on mankind.

The artistic domain of the last few decades has been characterized by a convincing reevaluation of the bodily aspect of art. This process of reevaluation began with a trend that transferred the body, or more frequently the artists own body, into a medium as such. Performance art, video art, photography, and mixed media force a repositioning of the human body in art and society. Visual studies integrates theoretical insights, which have not only been generated in art history but also in the fields of literary history and cultural studies. With this integration, visual studies allows interpretation of artifacts in the light of socio-cultural and anthropological mechanisms, from medieval illumination to photography, from the art of painting to digital technology. The influence of gender studies provokes scholars to question the deeply rooted patrilineal approach to the triangle of body, religion and the visual arts.

This book–Fluid Flesh–is the result of a symposium that was guest curated by Barbara Baert, with the assistance of Mieke Bleyen, for the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography. An international panel of eminent speakers was gathered, all of whom are specialists in their respective fields of research. This wellattended conference was organized in order to form a discursive part to a large-scale exhibition held in the city of Leuven under the distinguished curatorial auspices of Philippe Van Cauteren, director at the SMAK Museum for Contemporary Art in Ghent, and co-curator Rolf Quaghebeur from Sint-Lucas Visual Arts (Ghent). Several topics of this fascinating and well-received project, Mankind: Story of a Wound, were explored further and debated in an academic context. It was evident that the participating scholars were selected to generate dialogue from an interdisciplinary point of view involving art history, theology and visual studies, gender studies, anthropology and science. Moreover, it was our intention to present epoch-transcending case studies in order to put medievalists, Renaissance
specialists, and contemporary art scholars around the same table.

We focused on the following subthemes, presented here as the four chapters of this
publication: the visual as a spiritual medium today; iconophilia/iconoclasm: probody/
anti-body; the human body, religion and contemporary lifestyles; premodern and postmodern perspectives on anatomy and the visual arts. These themes represent an ambition to explore concepts of wide diachronic scope.

The four chapters contain either extensive essays or shorter response statements, depending on the author’s personal input. Together these elements form an architecture that unlocks the spaces of religion, the human body and the visual arts via four main portals. James Elkins kindly accepted our invitation to guide the reader through this quaternity. His introduction is a wonderful symphony of personal interests and emotions reflective of his impressive life-work. On the one hand, Elkins is dedicated to understanding and sensing the image. On the other, he accepts the global academic challenge to think of image and body from iconoclastic, iconophobic, iconophilic, and idolatrous perspectives, while simultaneously mapping the consequences of all these approaches. James Elkins: ‘I suppose I am an iconophile: I love images with a moderate love–I would not kill or die for images, like the people who first engaged in iconoclasm and idolatry. An interest in iconoclasm is an interest in a passion stronger than one that we ourselves possess, and that may cause us to mistake it for a fundamental category of imaging (Elkins,‘Introduction’, xiv).’

Fluid Flesh is the title of this book because every picture is the blood and the sweat
of another; because its space is the wound and the body; because Christian art flows through the figure of the wound; because its image is ambivalently rooted in the liquids of the body; because, in it, the anatomical frozen meets the contemporary liquid pixel; and finally because the void, the lacuna, the absence, ends in the missing body part. Let us try to understand this fluidity, this flesh.

But before we get to this point, there is one person we especially want to mention. Marc Vervenne, Chancellor of the KULeuven, generously initiated the symposium on which this book is based and supported this project from its onset, while allowing us total freedom of operation. We offer our wholehearted thanks for the confidence he has put in us.