Humans use art to capture ideas about worlds outside our own. Art can be a vehicle for myth, which uses narrative to convey truths about human nature. Art also expresses hard-to-articulate aspects of spiritual worlds, which are products of religious practices. Cultures use iconography to symbolize abstract ideas, such as dreams, love, power, and emotion, and societies call on the artist to create them. Art also plays a significant role in rituals and ceremonies. In this unit, we explore how artists materialize human thought, belief, and imagination through art.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 3 hours.
We derive myth from the Greek word mythos, which means story. Most cultures preserve collections of stories to preserve their most ancient historical backdrop. We sometimes call them folk tales or heroic epics. These stories help us define our cultural identity on a grand scale across space and time, such as by tying people to territories and relating current events to the old creation myths. We retell myths, legends, stories, and songs to highlight the more durable features of human character and general patterns of life that recur across the generations.
This article discusses art that represents mythic figures and mythological stories.
As you read this chapter, focus on the "Symbolism, Iconography, and Visual Literacy" and "Symbolism and Iconography in Mythology and Storytelling" sections to learn more about the role myths play in art. Why do you think artists who live in much later periods find the myths of antiquity so appealing?
The influence of dreams in art is significant. Dreams provide creative subject matter for visual artists and play an additional role in art through ceremony and ritual. For example, William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream continues to be a popular play from Elizabethan literature.
Dreams have always had a strong appeal in culture – we can interpret them as divine messages of a deeply spiritual kind or as material psychoanalysts scrutinize for clues about mental disorders. For example, surrealist artists draw on both kinds of ideas. They believe dreams are "the royal road to the unconscious" – they simultaneously invoke art's ancient origins and use more contemporary scientific approaches to explore dreamlike material in their visual works. Read this text for more explanation.
We often make general distinctions between the major, organized religions – Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – which we associate with global identities and hierarchical social institutions, and the myriad rituals and ceremonies which are unique to smaller, diverse tribes or groups which trace their beliefs and practices back for millennia. Whether they are religious or spiritual in character, artworks that express this facet of human existence invoke questions about human nature and the nature of the cosmos.
The art historical record is filled with works from many cultures that refer directly to spirituality.
Find an artwork from a culture other than your own that represents a form of spirituality. Explain why you chose the work you did and how it represents the spirit. You will need to understand the context in which the artwork was made and how it is used within the culture.
Click on Discussion Topic 11 to post your thoughts. After posting your response, you can leave a reply to the posts of your classmates as well.
Take this assessment to see how well you understood this unit.