Summaries
Philippe Abadie - The shape of the crucified with Marc Chagall
At a first look it seems astonishing to meet the omnipresent face of the Crucified One with a Jewish artist like Marc Chagall. In fact it would be wrong to see the Christ of the Christians when it concerns the martyr of the Jewish people in history. Thus the Crucified One becomes a tragic leitmotiv with Chagall as long as the German third Reich lasts, from the “white crucifixion” contemporary to the dark night of crystal to the “Lilac Apocalypse” which illustrates the horror of the Nazi extermination camps’. The figure becomes appeased during the ultimate chagallian period, without however losing this tragic aspect which goes along with the destiny of Israel throughout the 20th century.
Simone Korff-Sausse - The spiritual body in private hospitals and modern art
In contemporary and modern art, bodies are subjected to metamorphosis. These mutant bodies are not so far away from sick, damaged, suffering bodies that are to be met in private hospitals of extreme cases. This kind of dehumanization of the body appears to be a paradoxical and subversive way to hunt for what the human has as an irreducible character and thus to reintroduce the dimension of spirituality. But the mutant body in question is first that of the artist. Thus the interest of the public, galleries, collectors for the very subjective expression of raw art would correspond to the need for spirituality in a disembodied world without subjectivity.
Marc Chauveau - The body in 20th and 21st century art. Markers for a chronology
In the 20th and 21st century when representing bodies, works of art illustrate the time they occurred, albeit not without a critical distance. Maimed bodies of war times, happy bodies of the consumer society, and obliterated bodies of a world in crisis where exclusion increases, vulnerable bodies of an epoch worried about its future. The paper proposes a few marks for this chronology. The Hostages by Jean Fautrier, a shattering series of martyred bodies. Andy Warhol or Martial Raysse, with whom the body appears as an element which is reproducible in mass and comparable to objects of the consumer society. Jean-Marc Cerino who calls up a body which is slowly obliterated and thus attempts to put forward the exclusion of human beings who can no longer be seen in our western societies. Ron Mueck, who despite progress, shows up human vulnerability through bodies without artifice.
Michel Durand - The body and the sacred in present art. When contemporary artists are leading me to feel the sacred part in the world
In the present world in order for the contemporary man, (in majority outside the Church), to feel invited, the glorious spiritual resuscitated body can only hammer our sensitivity through beams of light directly flashing from Jesus’ heart. In order for the contemporary body to enter into the field of the sacred it must not impose itself dogmatically, but on the contrary it must keep in touch with the humiliations suffered in and through humanity.