Trevor, I've just come across this Votive exhibition at Image and Text, which is an online contemporary art galley in New Zealand.

The exhibition is concerned with sacred and ecstatic bodies, the associations and slippages between the sacred and profane and eroticism in religious tradition.

Very Bataillian themes are they not?

Reading an article called Incisions and Excesses by Kyla McFarlane I notice that the exhibition is located within a critiques of the church, acts of religious devotion, and the emptying out of traditional sacred iconography. An example of the latter is Andre Serrano's Piss Christ,
This work, if you remember, created such a huge furore in Melbourne when it was shown at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997. It was deemed to be blasphemous.

This critique of Christian religion establishes a shift from sacred to the profane and from the spiritual to the bodily, which in turn foregrounds the eroticism in religious tradition.

Philosophically this aesthetic critique works within the tradition of Nietzche and Bataille.

Where to next?

In the essay titled Unreasonable Passion by Mark Jackson we make a turn to Bataille. He picks up on the loss and reinscription of the sacred in modern forms of sovereignty can be derived from the writings of both de Sade and Georges Bataille. Jackson says that:

'If Sadean and Bataillean sovereignty pose a challenge to the foundation of law, singularity is the name given to the challenge they pose to modernity's absolute and autonomous individual epitomised in a liberal democratic notion of integral selfhood. Singular being is the locus for the ecstatic, pivotal to Bataille's notion of the sacred. For Bataille, this sacred was an unleashing of passions, and eroticism was a vehicle that made visibile this sacred and ecstatic singularity of being. It is for this reason that Bataille's erotic tales (as with Story of the Eye, Blue of Noon) need to be read in conjunction with his "philosophical" tracts (as with Inner Experience, Eroticism). Indeed, the opening sentence to Bataille's discussion of D.A.F. de Sade in Eroticism brings the entire series of concerns into relief: "There is nothing in our world to parallel the capricious excitement of a crowd obeying impulses of violence with acute sensitivity and unamenable to reason." If sovereignty marks a new relation to law that invokes the sacred as a violent overturning of reason by passion, this relation is enacted by a being whose relations to others is constituted by bodily excess that defies reason in its pursuit of intense pleasure.'