Irreligia – negacja, pragnienie duchowości czy strategia artystyczna? Rozważania wokół twórczości Wojtka Ulricha

Abstrakt

Wojtek Ulrich’s artistic activity can be placed within the current of critical art, which, on the one hand, is characterised by a negative attitude towards traditionally un­derstood religious structures and the mystical practices connected with them, and, on the other, performs the function of a polemical dialogue, attempting to answer fundamental questions of a theological and philosophical nature. The art projects presented here ex­emplify a reflection on the role of religion and spirituality in contemporary secularized visual culture. The works have been subjected to an irreligious diagnosis based on the writings of sociologists N. Jay Demerath III and Colin Campbell, as well as the nine­teenth-century institutional critiques of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophical arguments were the symbolic beginning of irreligious thought. The aim of the publication is to attempt to answer the question of whether the irreligious practices in Ulrich’s work represent a search for a new form of secularizing spirituality, or whether they are merely an artistic strategy aimed at provocation, criticism and decon­struction of traditional forms of religiosity, motivated by financial gain.