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\"The spiritual in contemporary art is everywhere evident, yet rarely examined in scholarly research. Encountering the Spiritual in Contemporary Art addresses the subject in depth for the first time since Maurice Tuchman's seminal 1986 The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985. It significantly broadens the scope of previous scholarship to include new media and non-Western and Indigenous art in addition to that of the West. Encountering the Spiritual presents art from diverse cultures with equal status, promotes its cultural specificity, and moves beyond previous notions of \"center and periphery,\" celebrating the plurality and global nature of contemporary art today. This unprecedented book--a valuable reference for years to come--integrates different ways of exploring the spiritual in art. Essays based on cultural affinities are rhythmically interspersed with thematic categories. These themes demonstrate greater diversity and hybridity of artists' sources of inspiration and their emphasis on art-making as spiritual process. Finally, selected artists' statements further expand the knowledge of an academic and general audience\"-- Provided by publisher.

This dissertation examines the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, investigating how the body is represented and how philosophical understandings of the body are embedded in the art. A new emphasis on the role and meaning of the body is evident in the subject matter, style, aesthetic values, and techniques of these artists. The oeuvre of each artist is analyzed to determine how it embodies a distinctive set of concerns related to the body. As manifested in Abstract Expressionism, the body is present in numerous and diverse ways ranging from a slightly more representational form to an abstracted bodily presence. Whether overt, covert, veiled, or dispersed, the body is a continual theme in Abstract Expressionism, suggesting that it was being given new status on many levels as a viable and meaningful aspect of human experience. In this project, the body is a term indicating diverse and expanded philosophical meanings. The body in Abstract Expressionism is analyzed in the following ways: (1) as a figural form, (2) the presence of the artist's body invested in the canvas as traces of movement and dispersed bodily force which often substitute for the figure, (3) the role of the artist's body during the painting process, and (4) the intense focus on viewer participation as an active aesthetic experience emphasizing the role of the spectator's body in relation to the canvas. At the core of the spontaneous gesture and the enveloping field of color is a new attitude expressing the inherent wisdom of the body as a carrier of knowledge--not associated with knowledge as reason but with feeling, emotion, and subjectivity. This interpretation of Abstract Expressionism is informed by the philosophical revisions of the body in the theories of Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Schilder, Merleau-Ponty, and others, which facilitated and paralleled the Abstract Expressionist endeavor. Current theory, particularly the work of psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, provides an invaluable hermeneutic aid in understanding Abstract Expressionism as an art of and closer to the lived, experiential body of being.