ABSTRACT
In 2001, Peter Spencer, former pastor at Harvest Fellowship Church in San Antonio, Texas, collaborated with the contemporary German artist, Christian Jankowski, on a video that functioned both as a work of art, exhibited to great acclaim in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and as the basis for a television episode within Spencer’s series of weekly, televised church services. This chapter, which focuses on issues of authorship, audience, and context, analyzes the project’s unexpected conjunction of televangelism and contemporary art, while paying special attention to the polyvalent concept of medium, whose aesthetic and religious valences Jankowski teases out in The Holy Artwork, a piece that is at once a live performance, video, and television show.
