Equal(ly) Rites: Performance Art and Contemplative Ritual as Theological Processes
Copyright: © 2024 by the authors. Submitted for possible open access publication under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Abstract: This article examines the intersection of performance art and ritual practices through an analysis of selected works by performance artist [Author 1]. We analyze [Author 1]'s performances, which adapt contemplative rituals into performance works, as examples of how performance art’s similarities to ritual make it useful as a theological process. Performance art as a theological method can explore contemplation as an embodied experience within space and time, as demonstrated in the three key pieces from [Author 1]'s oeuvre surveyed here.
Keywords: Performance art, ritual, contemplation, Julian of Norwich
1. Introduction
An image flickers across a sheet pinned to the gallery wall. In the video footage, a woman silently irons this same top sheet, meticulously steaming and pressing the hand-embroidered linen. As she works, a slice of sunlight traces a path along the greenish-gray wall of the room. The light hovers over an industrial sink in the background as it catches her silhouette smoothing the cloth. The woman reaches for another sheet, carefully irons it, folds it. She continues this repetitive task for eight hours.
What would it mean to claim that this eight-hour chore, documented as a piece of performance art, is also a devotional practice? That is the question that we—[Author 1], a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and [Author 2], a graduate student studying American religious history through art and material culture—analyze in this collaborative article. Our intuitive understanding was that [Author 1]’s performance art uses embodied practices to communicate a theological perspective. What we wanted to better understand through discussion and writing was how artmaking functions as a contemplative practice that can prompt and articulate theological insights. We were not interested in art as a container for communicating theological concepts, but in artmaking as a theological process itself. Specifically, we were most excited by the ways in which the medium of performance art can be an apt method for commentary on embodied contemplation: how performance enables reflection on and expression of experiences with these devotional practices that so thoroughly resist being reduced to logical explanations.
Our dialogue circled around three key examples from [Author 1]’s body of work that adapt a contemplative ritual into the medium of performance art—“adapt” in the same sense that a book can be adapted for the screen. Laundry/Ecstasy, an eight-hour performance where she ironed sheets in a monastery’s former laundry room, recontextualized this domestic task as a contemplative ritual. Her most recent project, Anchorhold and its companion performance Consumed, reframe devotions practiced among medieval women by creating a “cover version” of the anchoritic lifestyle that the 14th century visionary Julian of Norwich vowed herself to after experiencing a “bodily vision” of Jesus Christ’s suffering on the cross. Read together with Laundry/Ecstasy, these pieces reframe the rituals they invoke as equally lived-in practices and encourage viewers to consider how other practices historically written off as “women’s work” could be performed as contemplative exercises that orient the body’s connections to other human beings and to God.
[Author 1]’s performance art expresses a discontent that the majority of female spiritual experiences throughout history have not been documented and cannot be used to inform our own contemplative practices. By re-presenting her own imagined renditions of the relatively few experiences that were recorded, making them legible as religious rituals, and documenting the resulting experiences, [Author 1] provides a second chance to interpret and evaluate how women throughout Christian history accessed God in their everyday lives. The theological project of resourcesment carried out in these performance pieces is facilitated by positioning them as “art.” The category of art gives [Author 1] and her audiences a positionality from which to reflect on how these rituals exist in a broader social context—a perspective that would have been swallowed up in pure contemplation if these rituals were only being deployed with an eye towards their function as spiritual practices. Leveraging the shifting boundaries and intentional distortions of space and time that both performance art and ritual derive their power from, these performances showcase shared aspects of both forms of practice.
2. Performance Art and Contemplative Ritual
Performance art and contemplative rituals both operate by adjusting liminal boundaries through embodied actions. The art historian Catherine Wood suggests that the category of “performance art” developed as “a way of enlarging the frame around what was previously considered to be the work of art, as a material object, to include also the active presence of its maker and viewers” (Wood, 8). As this categorization cohered throughout the mid-twentieth century, artists upset the typical relations that shaped how art was interpreted. Wood’s analysis sees this “redistribution of relations” between “artist, viewer, and artwork” as the defining contribution of performance art’s peak era during the 1960s and 1970s (Wood 8). Artists used performance to subvert the economic functions of art objects (it is far easier to buy and sell a painting than a one-time performance) and to reduce “the element of alienation between performer and viewer…since both audience and performer experienced the work simultaneously” (Goldberg 152). Performance art replaced the exhibition of finished art objects with an exhibition of the artistic process. Boundaries between the artist and their audience were transgressed—in the most sensational pieces, outright violated.
Ritual operates through a similar manipulation of boundaries. In her influential survey of ritual studies, Catherine Bell defines ritualization as “a way of acting that specifically establishes a privileged contrast” which differentiates ritual actions as “more important or powerful” than other practices (Bell, 90). The Christian Eucharist, for example, is differentiated from the everyday meal it otherwise resembles by its formality, smaller portions, and consistent menu. Ritual practices centered around contemplation differentiate themselves as rituals by asking participants to create a contrast with their ordinary levels of perspective and self-awareness. In the Christian contemplative practices that have developed as a ressourcement of earlier Christian mysticism from the 1960s on, the goal is usually to reframe a practitioner’s self-identification away from the differentiated self towards an appreciation of their unitive existence within God. Contemplation fosters an intentionally different way of knowing: in and through one’s body. “Contemplation,” the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr writes “is a way to hear with the Spirit and not just with the head. Contemplation is the search for a wide-open space, a space broad enough for the head, the heart, the feelings, the gut, the subconscious, our memories, our intuitions, our whole body” (Rohr 2022).
Other similarities are apparent in how rituals and performance art play with normative boundaries through their use of bodies, space, and time. Both practices are used as methods for embodying concepts. Ritual is commonly assumed to be an expression of beliefs in the material world, even if scholars of ritual have helpfully problematized this causal chain by stressing the mutual interdependence of ritual and belief. The art historian RoseLee Goldberg sees performance art as an extension of conceptual art and thus “a way of bringing to life the many formal and conceptual ideas on which the making of art is based” (Goldberg 7). Both rituals and performance art make ideas more immediate to audiences by embodying those ideas in experiences instead of objects. “Conceptual art,” writes Goldberg, “implied the experience of time, space, and material rather than their representation in the form of objects” (Goldberg, 152-153). Instead of encouraging viewers to accept the sensory perception of the artist as definitive, performance and other conceptual artworks invite viewers to have actual sensory and visceral experiences of their own as part of the artwork.
Performance, Catherine Wood argues, asks viewers to encounter an artwork’s disruption of conventions “more directly, and often as a two-way conversation, or a situation that we are implicated in” (Wood, 24). Involving more senses in an artwork directs audiences to experience the piece in emotional registers beyond dispassionate, rational assessment of an object under review. Rituals are similarly designed to enable participation in the ideas being conveyed. Returning to the example of the Eucharist, partaking in a shared meal conveys the underlying concept of “communion” more directly than a sermon. Rituals animate passive adherents into active practitioners; “doers of the word and not hearers only,” in the biblical parlance (James 1:22, KJV).
3. Laundry/Ecstasy
When we started thinking of ways to describe [Author 1]’s performances we hit on a musical metaphor to describe their relationship to the devotional practices they are modeled after. These renditions of medieval Christian rituals and lifestyles are analogous to the relationship between a “cover version” and the original song. This analogy catches the line between fidelity and departure that these performances dance along. A good cover is not typically a one to one replication of the original performance, even while it remains recognizable as the same song in structure and lyrics. Indeed, the differences between the cover and the original are what give value to the exercise. A cover lets listeners directly perceive what the unique qualities of the songwriting are and what a different performer adds by interpreting the song in their own style. “Covering” a ritual or contemplative practice as performance art similarly brings resonances from the specificity of a particular performance into conversation with the template of the practice it is based around.
[Author 1]’s earliest performance artwork fits into this metaphor well. A Cloud of Unknowing (2018) adapted the 14th century contemplative guidebook into an embodied space. Installed in Virginia Theological Seminary’s Octagon Room, adjacent to Immanuel Chapel, this piece transformed the eight-sided communal worship space into a private mediation chamber. [Author 1] deployed lit candles, filtered sunlight, a repeating soundtrack, and the scent of rose petals around a single prayer bench in the center of the chapel. By reframing the space, the installation invited individuals to use sensations as an entry point into contemplative prayer. As her artist statement read, [Author 1] aimed for A Cloud of Unknowing “to create a visual language/container for spiritual experience.” She followed a “gut response” catalyzed by theologian L. Callid Keefe-Perry’s description of theopoetics as a method of religious reflection that “honors fleshy experience” by examining “the how as well as the content—how things are made, in what materials, in what context” (Keefe-Perry). The semi-opaque curtains in the windows and around the prayer bench served as physical prompts to facilitate the Cloud’s instructions to “become blind” and “cut yourself off” from the known world. In hindsight, however, this first attempt was not entirely successful: her reference points to The Cloud of Unknowing and contemplative prayer were not familiar enough or inviting to a broad audience. With only a brief excerpt to guide visitors through contemplation, potential connections between the medieval practices and the contemporary, embodied experience of the space fizzled out. These limitations made [Author 1] recognize that, in order to make her performances more immediate, she needed to move from such a specific religious reference towards more commonly understood framings for her ideas about contemplation and embodied rituals.
One solution was performing a rendition of an overlooked, everyday practice and highlighting its contemplative potential by framing it as a ritual. In her 2021 performance Laundry/Ecstasy, [Author 1] spent eight hours steaming, pressing, and folding stacks of handmade linens that had passed through the hands of five generations of women in her family. The textiles were the result of untold hours these women had spent sewing, washing, ironing, folding, and mending: a physical manifestation of care and attention. She kept silent as she worked to acknowledge how “women’s work” is often unrecorded apart from these material fragments. We lack insight into how individuals performing these chores throughout history experienced the rhythm of unfolding, pressing, folding. By recreating that sensation over the (only mildly) exaggerated duration of eight consecutive hours and recording the experience on video, [Author 1] simulated what a documentation of this devalued labor might look like. Projecting the full-length video recording onto one of the sheets in a gallery highlighted how this repeated ritual of care is transmitted through the sheet as a material object.
This aspect of Laundry/Ecstasy shows how performance art and ritual are technologies for collapsing time. The five-generation life of the sheets used in the piece is re-presented in the eight hour footage, moments snatched from the past and lived again as the immediate, present moment. The repetitive nature of ritual connects practitioners with everyone who has performed the same gestures in the past and will perform them in the future. The repetition recontextualizes the practice as part of a sequence, a sign whose full resonance is only understood when it is recognized as reverberation. Every repetition of a ritual carries the force and meaning of its other iterations with it through time. Rituals play upon this network of associations through time to let participants transcend their immediate context and see from another perspective. If the same practice can be meaningful at different times, that should change how we think about the meanings we instinctively assign to what we do. What performance art adds is the intention to frame a particular sequence of practices as an artwork. Without an object which leads to questions about when the performance actually begins.
By reenacting and documenting a practice that has historically been devalued as “temporal” and “feminine,” Laundry/Ecstasy provokes questions about who decides what practices get valued as “sacred.” These determinations are made by social structures that reinforce gender roles and normalize unpaid labor. In this context, Laundry/Ecstasy communicates a feminist theology arguing that God remains as accessible to women toiling in domestic work as God is for workers in any other ora et labora. Laundry/Ecstasy questions why borders have historically been drawn to differentiate the life-supporting work frequently assigned to women as unimportant and limited in value. It suggests that laundry’s negative connotation as drudgery results from the social contexts that oppress women, not the embodied practice of caring for clothes itself. When the chore is intended as an intentional practice of love and connection with the other hands that have run across this set of sheets, or as mindfulness towards the repetitive movements of your body that lets them fall back into contemplation, new potential sprouts inside a tired practice.
4. Anchorhold
Anchorhold (2023) is [Author 1]’s most recent adaptation of a medieval contemplative text and some elements of the project are still ongoing. The core idea of recreating and inhabiting an anchorhold—a cell alongside a church where anchorites withdrew from the outside world to live under vows of permanent enclosure —came to [Author 1] during the pandemic. The opportunity to perform this concept in a church came together serendipitously: 2023 was the 650th anniversary of the 14th century anchorite Julian of Norwich’s mystical visions and the English Gothic architecture of the National Cathedral in Washington DC featured a crypt chapel in a style that would have looked familiar to Julian. During the month this anchorhold was open to the public [Author 1] created additional adaptations of Julian’s text: an artist’s book of sensory drawings in a copy of Revelations of Divine Love, a communal audio recording of Julian’s Short Text, and a live performance, Consumed, based around the medieval European Christian practice of eating holy texts.
Ironically, a project about isolation in a cell became [Author 1]’s most collaborative work to date: friends helped construct the installation, a librarian wrote the bibliography, and volunteers read aloud for the audio book. Visitors showed up to write or weep in the cell, teach sacred dance, and discuss their religious memories in the communal space adjacent to the crypt. The way an “isolated space” became a place for gathering is in part a natural result of how viewers engage with an artwork. But it also challenges our assumptions about how anchorites like Julian fit into the social relations of the medieval church. The solid spatial barriers between anchorites and the outside world could be crossed by the openings in cells that let them take food, participate in the mass, and give spiritual counsel. Julian’s space was similarly extended by the words she wrote down, which could travel to others even as she remained in her cell. Julian was far from “dead to the world” and the blend of isolation and collaboration that [Author 1] experienced when staging Anchorhold suggests how that could have been the case.
5. Anchorhold
Consumed was staged in the Anchorhold installation but also stands as its own work. Sitting alone in the anchorhold, [Author 1] read from Revelations of Divine Love and copied lines of the text onto paper. Combining the action of manuscript-making with devotional gestures, she dusted the letters with gold powder and smoothed them with a bone folder. [Author 1] repeated different actions that expanded her interaction with the words she had copied to her other senses: smelling, licking, chewing, and swallowing words for spiritual nourishment, with the intention of cultivating attention and reverence.
Reading is often imagined as a purely intellectual activity. But it has specific physical dimensions: paper and ink, hands turning pages, eyes that take in light. By making the “consumption” of the text literal, embodied, and almost uncomfortably visceral, Consumed emphasizes these embodied aspects and their theological implication: that we read with both our minds and bodies because we are both matter and spirit.
Consumed exemplifies performance art’s capacity to dissolve boundaries. A contemplative text like Julian’s Revelations is typically understood as an external guide for its readers. Eating her words posits a different relationship to the text and a different relationship to Julian. Her words become part of us and we become part of her. Revelations of Divine Love is not a treatise in systematic theology. Instead, Julian recounts what she learned through her “bodily vision” of Christ’s suffering, a vision in which the barriers between Christ’s suffering and her own deathbed become porous. In her first revelation, she writes: “In all the time that He shewed this that I have told now in spiritual sight, I saw the bodily sight lasting of the plenteous bleeding of the Head. The great drops of blood fell down from under the Garland like pellots, seeming as it had come out of the veins.” (Julian, 15). Julian’s understanding of God’s intentions for human beings comes through her identification with Jesus—literally, her compassion, her mystical experience of suffering alongside him. So it is fitting that, in this performance, what brings Julian closer is not trying to better comprehend the anchoress’ words but physically interacting with them, identifying them as something that has crossed the boundary between our own body and the external world.
By framing consumption as an intentional performance, [Author 1] symbolically short circuited the relationships between producing and consuming an artwork. Her act of eating produces a commentary on the purpose of Julian’s text simultaneous to her engagement with it as a literal consumer. In order to be fully experienced in the reader’s life, a theological treatise needs to be chewed up and swallowed into the reader’s body. Without fuller sensory engagement, a text remains just words. This paired creation/destruction underlines the Revelations’ value: it is the embodied experience of God that Julian’s visions can fuel in her readers when they consume her and bring her insights into their own sensate experiences. In Consumed, Julian’s visions are eaten away to become raw matter for other sensory reckonings with God. The ‘Showings’ become a means towards further theological reflection, not an end in themselves. Julian herself would support this. “That which l say of me,” she wrote, “I say in the person of all mine even-Christians: for I am taught in the Spiritual Shewing of our Lord God that He meaneth so” (Julian, 111). In her Revelations, Julian already embodies her experience of revealed truths in the persons of all other Christians. Consumed literalizes this metaphor by taking her textual adaptation of this experience into the body itself. The result is a recursive model of communion: Christ eaten in the eucharist by Julian, who is eaten in words by [Author 1].
6. Conclusion
Performance artists occupy the unique position of being both outside and inside the work of art. Like painters and sculptors, they stand outside the artwork as an object as they conceptualize the piece’s structure and intent and reflect afterwards on what they communicated. At the same time, the performer embodies the piece, reacting to the unplanned possibilities that emerge in their visceral experience of the performance.
Theologians also follow this outside/inside paradox of positionality: they are at once systematizing the implications of different experiences of God (both their own and those transmitted by others) and participating in rituals, communities, and locations that immerse them in visceral experiences of God. Performance art offers both a medium for articulating theology and an analogy for theological practice. The similarities performance shares with ritual—its manipulations of time and space and foregrounding of the body’s participation in concerns that could be seen as merely conceptual—allow for theological reflections on the lived experience of rituals. That lived experience is interpreted through a simultaneous immersion in the experience of the practices themselves and the bracketing of this performance as a distinct artwork that can be interpreted as its own context. Performance art can act as a controlled setting for documenting the uncontrollable and unexpected experiences we have through spiritual and contemplative practices. It can function as a form of embodied theology, offering new insights into the nature of devotional practice and its representation. By blurring the boundaries between art, ritual, and daily life, [Author 1]’s performances invites a reconsideration of the sacred potential inherent in mundane activities, and challenges traditional dichotomies between secular and religious experiences. We hope this article contributes to ongoing discussions about the role of embodiment in religious practice and the potential of artmaking as a mode of theological inquiry.