Overview

During the 1990s the United States was embroiled in deeply divisive Culture Wars. In this redesigned, re-edited, illustrated new edition of the classic study Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art, cultural commentator Eleanor Heartney offers a radically original interpretation of the extraordinary cultural and political battles that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Postmodern Heretics reexamines this period from the perspective of religion revealing how the most controversial artists of that time came almost without exception from Catholic backgrounds. This book clarifies for the first time how the culture of Catholicism shaped the 1990s Culture Wars. Postmodern Heretics also challenges conventional wisdom about the relationship between contemporary art and religion. By examining the myriad ways that Catholicism has worked its way into the creations of a wide swath of contemporary visual artists; this book undermines Modernist assumptions about the inherent antagonism between creativity and religious faith. A newly researched introduction brings this cultural history up-to-date for our current deeply conflicted times. The Culture Wars have flared up again, pitting Red against Blue, urban against rural, white against non-white and agnostic against believer. By revealing the Catholic roots of some of today's most important contemporary artists, ""Postmodern Heretics"" suggests how a more nuanced understanding of religion provides new insight into art while helping us heal our cultural divisions.

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Reviews

In this brave and urgently needed study, Eleanor Heartney explains how the work of many of the most controversial artists of recent decades has frequently been due to the Incarnational consciousness rooted in their Catholic upbringing. The view that our identity as human beings derives from our bodily condition is inseparable from Catholic doctrine, but its implementation in works of art is often out of phase with the attitudes and beliefs of some members of the religious community, who react to the art as blasphemous and transgressive. Thus the history of postmodernist art has often been a story of bitter conflict. It may be too much to hope that Heartney's compassionate and deeply informed analysis will bring these conflicts to an end, but it has the power to raise the discourse to a new level of healing understanding if read in the spirit in which it is intended. For any reader, however, it is a valuable and indispensible contribution to the appreciation of contemporary art in some of its most extreme and difficult manifestations. Arthur Danto, art critic, The Nation The Catholic imagination is both robust and flexible enough according to Ms. Heartney to influence even those artists whose works many would consider transgressive. Perhaps, she suggests, Catholics could go beyond what they consider to be the bad taste and blasphemy of these works and attend to what they are saying. Father Andrew Greeley, author [Heartney] was the first to identify a Roman Catholic sensibility among diverse artists whose work has demonstrated, often inadvertently, a startling capacity to offend. . . The ultimate and inarguable value of Postmodern Heretics lies in demonstrating for those already appreciative of contemporary art the very earnest spiritual passions of the many individuals covered in the book. Sue Taylor, Art in America, February 2005 [Postmodern Heretics] is a brave, pioneering work that opens up whole areas of study for future art historians and meanwhile provides fresh insights for anyone interested in the whys and wherefores of recent art. Corinne Robins, American Book Review, Nov/Dec 2004 Eleanor Heartney's Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art is the first book I've read that attempts to bridge the gap (between faith and art) in a comprehensible fashion. She examines some of the most controversial artworks of the past two decades, noting that a majority were created by artists who are, or were brought up as, Catholics. In the process she deftly draws parallels between a kind of physicality that is peculiarly Catholic and these artists' propensity for expressing their ideas through corporeal means. Virginia Maksymowicz, Sojourners, July 2004 Heartney accomplishes many things with her concisely written, highly accessible study, not the least of which is to offer novel, nuanced readings of familiar works to an art world that, she notes, tends to view;art that invokes religion in any but a critical way as retrograde and reactionary'. Kate Hackman, Kansas City Star, May 16, 2004

"In this brave and urgently needed study, Eleanor Heartney explains how the work of many of the most controversial artists of recent decades has frequently been due to the ""Incarnational consciousness"" rooted in their Catholic upbringing. The view that our identity as human beings derives from our bodily condition is inseparable from Catholic doctrine, but its implementation in works of art is often out of phase with the attitudes and beliefs of some members of the religious community, who react to the art as blasphemous and transgressive. Thus the history of postmodernist art has often been a story of bitter conflict. It may be too much to hope that Heartney's compassionate and deeply informed analysis will bring these conflicts to an end, but it has the power to raise the discourse to a new level of healing understanding if read in the spirit in which it is intended. For any reader, however, it is a valuable and indispensible contribution to the appreciation of contemporary art in some of its most extreme and difficult manifestations. Arthur Danto, art critic, The Nation The Catholic imagination is both robust and flexible enough according to Ms. Heartney to influence even those artists whose works many would consider transgressive. Perhaps, she suggests, Catholics could go beyond what they consider to be the bad taste and blasphemy of these works and attend to what they are saying. Father Andrew Greeley, author [Heartney] was the first to identify a Roman Catholic sensibility among diverse artists whose work has demonstrated, often inadvertently, a startling capacity to offend. . . The ultimate and inarguable value of Postmodern Heretics lies in demonstrating for those already appreciative of contemporary art the very earnest spiritual passions of the many individuals covered in the book. Sue Taylor, Art in America, February 2005 [Postmodern Heretics] is a brave, pioneering work that opens up whole areas of study for future art historians and meanwhile provides fresh insights for anyone interested in the whys and wherefores of recent art. Corinne Robins, American Book Review, Nov/Dec 2004 Eleanor Heartney's Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art is the first book I've read that attempts to bridge the gap (between faith and art) in a comprehensible fashion. She examines some of the most controversial artworks of the past two decades, noting that a majority were created by artists who are, or were brought up as, Catholics. In the process she deftly draws parallels between a kind of physicality that is peculiarly Catholic and these artists' propensity for expressing their ideas through corporeal means. Virginia Maksymowicz, Sojourners, July 2004 Heartney accomplishes many things with her concisely written, highly accessible study, not the least of which is to offer novel, nuanced readings of familiar works to an art world that, she notes, tends to view;art that invokes religion in any but a critical way as retrograde and reactionary'. Kate Hackman, Kansas City Star, May 16, 2004"

In this brave and urgently needed study, Eleanor Heartney explains how the work of many of the most controversial artists of recent decades has frequently been due to the ""Incarnational consciousness"" rooted in their Catholic upbringing. The view that our identity as human beings derives from our bodily condition is inseparable from Catholic doctrine, but its implementation in works of art is often out of phase with the attitudes and beliefs of some members of the religious community, who react to the art as blasphemous and transgressive. Thus the history of postmodernist art has often been a story of bitter conflict. It may be too much to hope that Heartney's compassionate and deeply informed analysis will bring these conflicts to an end, but it has the power to raise the discourse to a new level of healing understanding if read in the spirit in which it is intended. For any reader, however, it is a valuable and indispensible contribution to the appreciation of contemporary art in some of its most extreme and difficult manifestations. Arthur Danto, art critic, The Nation The Catholic imagination is both robust and flexible enough according to Ms. Heartney to influence even those artists whose works many would consider transgressive. Perhaps, she suggests, Catholics could go beyond what they consider to be the bad taste and blasphemy of these works and attend to what they are saying. Father Andrew Greeley, author [Heartney] was the first to identify a Roman Catholic sensibility among diverse artists whose work has demonstrated, often inadvertently, a startling capacity to offend. . . The ultimate and inarguable value of Postmodern Heretics lies in demonstrating for those already appreciative of contemporary art the very earnest spiritual passions of the many individuals covered in the book. Sue Taylor, Art in America, February 2005 [Postmodern Heretics] is a brave, pioneering work that opens up whole areas of study for future art historians and meanwhile provides fresh insights for anyone interested in the whys and wherefores of recent art. Corinne Robins, American Book Review, Nov/Dec 2004 Eleanor Heartney's Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art is the first book I've read that attempts to bridge the gap (between faith and art) in a comprehensible fashion. She examines some of the most controversial artworks of the past two decades, noting that a majority were created by artists who are, or were brought up as, Catholics. In the process she deftly draws parallels between a kind of physicality that is peculiarly Catholic and these artists' propensity for expressing their ideas through corporeal means. Virginia Maksymowicz, Sojourners, July 2004 Heartney accomplishes many things with her concisely written, highly accessible study, not the least of which is to offer novel, nuanced readings of familiar works to an art world that, she notes, tends to view;art that invokes religion in any but a critical way as retrograde and reactionary'. Kate Hackman, Kansas City Star, May 16, 2004

Author Information

Eleanor Heartney is a New York based art writer and cultural critic who has been writing about art since 1981. She is Contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for such other magazines as Artnews, Art and Auction, The New Art Examiner, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Heartney was the 1992 recipient of the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism and has also received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Asian Cultural Council. A collection of Heartney's essays was published in 1997 by Cambridge University Press under the title ""Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads"". Other books include ""Postmodernism"" published by the Tate Gallery Publishers and Cambridge University Press in 2001; ""Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art"" published in 2004 by Midmarch Arts Press; ""Defending Complexity"", published by Hard Press Editions in 2005; and ""Art and Today"", a survey of contemporary art from the 1980s to the present published by Phaidon in 2008. She is a co-author of ""After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art"", 2007, which won the Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Anthology, multi-authored or edited book in Feminist Studies and the Outstanding Academic Title Award from the Association of College and Research Libraries. She is also author, with the same team, of ""The Reckoning: Women Artists in the New Millennium"" (2103). Heartney is past President of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association. In 2008 she was honored by the French government as a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

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