Conversion and the aura of visual art: a Polynesian case study

Abstract

The biblical first commandment, “You shall have no other gods,” exemplifies the Christian insistence that material objects are not to be regarded as physical embodiments of spiritual divinity. Situations of conversion to Christianity offer an opportunity for scrutiny into shifting interpretations of material objects from venerated gods to discarded idols. This paper analyzes the role of religious conversion in stripping visual artworks of their religious aura, paving the grounds for both accidental and intentional cultural transformations ranging from the neglected decay of objects no longer venerated to systematic programs of iconoclasm. As a specific case study, this paper examines the impact of Christian missionaries on material culture in Polynesia in the early eighteenth century, when Polynesians reviled the gods they formerly revered, widespread iconoclasm erupted at the instigation of powerful Polynesian converts to Christianity, and Polynesian Christian megachurches emerged. The materiality of text played a role in subduing the aura, as literacy and the introduction of the printing press emerged simultaneously with mass conversions to Christianity in Polynesia. At the fulcrum of the fields of visual art and literary studies, this paper situates the activity of Polynesian conversion within a theoretical framework of the “aura” identified in Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). This paper considers the potential impact of separating art from artworks, arguing that a conceptual process of intellectual discipline narrated, scripted, and endorsed through literary means can re-encode divinity, overriding the experience of sacredness inherent in visual objects.