Lucerna Extincta: Spiritual Promiscuities in Performance and Installation Art, 1970s-80s

Abstract

This dissertation examines how artists in Bogotá, Port of Spain, London, and Los Angeles during the 1970s and 1980s engaged in what I term spiritual promiscuities—the purposeful synthesis of Indigenous, Afro-Diasporic, Asian, and European belief systems—as creative platforms to challenge modernist, colonial hierarchies and forge subaltern social coalitions. By analyzing key yet understudied performance and installation works, I argue that these artists navigated sacred and profane expressions of the otherworldly, complicating and resisting aesthetic distinctions, state repression, racialized exclusion, and, to varying degrees, the commodification of spiritual traditions. Drawing on archival research, oral histories, comparative religious studies, and art historical analysis—as well as feminist, queer, and performance theory—this study situates these artistic interventions within the broader sociopolitical transformations of the countercultural, post-Civil Rights, and postcolonial era. The selected case studies reveal how these artists transformed ritualistic practices, community engagement, and site-specific installations into strategies of artistic and social resistance that blurred the boundaries between public and private devotion, as well as trained and self-taught artistic traditions. By foregrounding the intersections of spirituality, corporeality, and performative agency, this dissertation contributes to discourses on decolonial aesthetics while critically engaging spirituality within modern and contemporary art historiography. In doing so, it illuminates how alternative and hegemonic epistemologies coalesce in spiritual, artistic, and sociopolitical conversations across the Americas and the Caribbean in the second half of the twentieth century