ABSTRACT
‘Eruptions From France’ as a title for a book on mystical theology immediately implies a double entendre riven with implications of mystical jouissance, and thereby raises the question: from where do our mental images of such jouissance arise? Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s reflection on the ineffable spiritual raptures, as they have been described by the women mystics, is expressed in a provocative and profoundly engaging art installation: Extases. 1 This chapter endeavours to explore this contemporary work of art as a multi-layered commentary on the relationship between the female mystics and the Roman Catholic Church, most especially the Society of Jesus and their role in the Catholic Baroque in France. I suggest that the influence of contemporary French thinkers such as Bataille, Irigaray, Lacan and Beauvoir may be detected in the installation Extases. An installation as an art form seeks to engage the viewer in a direct way; to create an experiential dimension to the artwork; to allow the audience be more fully immersed in the work. If we are to consider this installation in context, in the light of the artist’s deliberate siting of the artwork in a Jesuit chapel of the late Baroque period, in Avignon, France, we need to look first at these particular aspects, however briefly. How is the Baroque, as the period in art history most acutely associated with visual representations of female rapture, quoted in the contemporary piece? What are the layers of meaning contained in the architecture? How do they offset the drawings of the women mystics caught in the raptures of ecstasy? What layers of history and memory are disrupted by their eruption into this space? What enduring struggles, interior or imposed, around female autonomy and authority in the realms of spirituality and sexuality rip searingly across these glistening white sheets, under the faded golden monstrance-sunburst?
