ABSTRACT
Since the inception of modern art and the writings of Wassily Kandinsky, artists responding to the contemporary world and its distinct realities and tensions such as Joseph Beuys and Wolfgang Laib have described the work that they do as akin to that of a priest, healer, or erstwhile holy man. This chapter examines the ways contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst, Teresa Margolles, Doris Salcedo, and Laib employ physical actions, methods of making, or material agents that imbue their work with transcendent implications and transformative potential ex opere operato (“from the work performed,” to use the words of Catholic doctrine) independent of the individual agents’ belief or disposition, where the artist functions in the manner of a priest or intercessor between the human and some higher power. It is not surprising that the language that most powerfully captures the state of the contemporary world – where prosperity and want, hope and despair, the predator and those preyed upon so commonly collide – draws on religion, marked by strains of ritual practice, sacramental reverence, and the compulsion to bear witness to higher truths or moral obligations that require acknowledgment or response.
