Abstract
In 2018, Nick Cave launched The Red Hand Files website, where fans ask personal questions and the artist responds. This ongoing dialogue presents a unique iteration of religious visibility at the nexus of religion and the arts. Here, Cave articulates his personal religiosity in the wake of his son’s death, detailing the role of creative practice, performance and communication. Cave’s personal spirituality engages processes of aestheticisation that awaken experiences of inspiration and mystery. The epistemological orientation of alternative spirituality that values encounters with the ineffable and seeks to be free from static beliefs had previously found its antithesis in organised religion, but more recently, the fervent dogmatism of political correctness has applied its own pressure. As an example of religious aestheticisation within the tradition of alternative spirituality, The Red Hand Files exhibits the continued salience of this worldview despite the countervailing influence of politically correct culture.
Highlights
In 2018, Nick Cave launched The Red Hand Files website, where fans ask personal questions and the artist responds
Aestheticisation is a common feature of subjective religiosity and modern identity construction, discussed here as an integral part of alternative spirituality, yet changes in the media environment over the past decade have altered the ways in which people engage with the symbolic resources available to them
The rise of political correctness has had wide-ranging impacts on the practice of aestheticisation, interceding in processes where the universe and everything within it were previously available as resources of self-creation
Summary
Graham Ward and Michael Hoelzl’s 2008 edited volume The New Visibility of Religion: Studies in Religion and Cultural Hermeneutics presents a multidisciplinary exploration of religion’s visibility, revisiting theories of secularisation and reenchantment, religious violence and metaphysics. Religious resources are central to Cave’s creative practice, and while the Christian stories hold special significance, Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology of cross-cultural religious poetry, Technicians of the Sacred, has been cited as profoundly influential (Cave 2018, RHF 5, 25) These symbolic resources form a part of imaginative processes that bear religious qualities in and of themselves, yet this does not mean that the original religious meaning of these stories is left unchanged. In the case of alternative spirituality, one is looking for a particular epistemological orientation marked by a desire for unmediated experiences of religious truth, and a subsequent retreat from metaphysical claims as experiences are psychologised and made personal Bearing this in mind, the reenchantment thesis can be understood as a psychological state rather than a historical fact. The ostensible authority of the individual is exercised both in the movements of disenchantment and reenchantment as a choice to reject or reinvest in a known illusion, where one adopts “the will to believe” on one’s own terms (James 1956)
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