Fairy Tale, Myth and Fantasy: Approaches to Spirituality in Art

Henry Darger... Cat-Headed Blengin (1930s?, Watercolor and pencil on manila paper, Titled and inscribed, lower center). From the exhibition Fairy Tale, Myth and Fantasy: Approaches to Spirituality in Art, December 7, 2006 - February 3, 2007 at Galerie St. Etienne in New York, NY. "...Despite its modern-day secularization and commodification, art-making is still tantamount to a spiritual practice, a way of understanding and giving meaning to one’s existence. To do so, artists reach into the depths of their souls, tapping resources of which they are not always fully conscious. And to express what they find therein, artists develop a pictorial language that will, ideally, arouse kindred feelings in their audience. Now that the hegemony of abstraction and its allied critical discourse has diminished, the spiritual re-emerges—not as something new, but as something that has always been there. Today’s art world is awash in a multiplicity of expressive forms; no single dominant pictorial paradigm has replaced abstraction. And this is all to the good. For one must beware of dogmatic ideologies, whether they be aesthetic, political or religious. Art-making is a spiritual journey to an ambiguous and elusive destination; the magic is lost when the message becomes fixed and finite."