Quarternity

Anselm Kiefer’s painting Quaternity depicts a bare wooden interior. The room is the artist’s studio containing three small, seemingly contained fires and a serpent. The three flames are labeled Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; the serpent is branded, Satan. I will not presume to read into Kiefer’s symbolism, but for the sake of this entry I will utilize Quarternity to make a statement regarding Christianity and the arts. As I see it they both sit in an upper story, an emptied attic, displaced by the preference for the technological, scientific, rationalistic and pragmatic. Despite the fact our society regards the church in this way, Protestant Christianity has created a similar attic to place art.

Yet Kiefer’s studio holds a key towards the integration of faith and reason, symbol and statistics, spirit and materiality. He depicts the Trinity as flames ready to ignite the embodied soul with real light in order to illuminate our fragmented world. At the same time we must be alert to the serpent in the room undermining the Trinity’s work by fracturing what should be united. Quarternity, four, not three, speaks of a God who acknowledges sin and moves beyond himself to address it.

Therefore, we too, must move beyond the ground floor status of rationality and integrate with the upper story. Our one God, Father, Son, and Spirit is the source of all creation. We must worship him not just with mind, will, and intellect, but with our whole embodied being. This means putting into our Spiritual practices things like drawing and data entry. God as one and three, restores matter and revelation and re-cast the idea of living inter-relationally with a dependence on both fact and fiction, faith and finance, relationships and retreats, art and religion.

The incarnate Christ has prepared a place for us in the Father’s house. To be sure it has many rooms, so with the Spirit’s help--the one who creates porous boundaries between disparate properties--let’s practice living life in the whole house, not just the attic.

--Maria

Regarding this entry listen to Jamie K.A. Smith's Gospel and Culture Lecture, Culture As Liturgy.

The Deep Places: Accessibility and Responsibility

ac-cess /'ak,ses/ , n. a means of approach or entering a place.

ac-ces'si-ble, adj. easy to reach or influence.

As artists we have access to a key environment in the structure of a human being. Nigel Goodwin calls it "your belly". Martha Graham calls it "your center". Aretha Franklin calls it "my soul" and King David called it "my innermost being". This deep place exists between dreaming and waking where we are most ourselves, in which no pretense could ever possibly materialize, where the passions and fears that drive our lives are cultivated. But we would be kidding ourselves to think that artists have some kind of original authority or credential at the gateway to the deep places of the human heart. No, it is only in collaborating with the most mysterious Artist of all that we ever even come close to accessing the deepest realms of human longing. It is in this place, the deep place, that we need God to meet us most of all.

So, much of our work as artists is a kind of active or skilled waiting, as we delve into this mysterious place where the Holy Spirit is quite impressively on the move like a merchant sailing a trade route in hostile waters. Much of our work, indeed, is looking, listening and waiting to respond or simply be awed by what the Holy Spirit is doing in us, through us and around us. Unlike us, He is not limited by time, place or resources. He has infinite power to access the deep places in every human heart.

Might we consider that the spiritual responsibility of the artist could be a matter of stewarding the access we’ve been granted to this most potent environment? How are we doing as artists with stewarding the access we have to human hearts? How are we doing as a community of artists within churches...within families...within society? As individuals? Have we learned the discipline of listening, looking and waiting? Are we aware of how He might be moving in our own deep places? Understanding accessibility and responsibility might help us discover an important aspect of our spiritual calling as artists, particularly within the church. But certainly, the first environment we must explore is our own.

Have you been met in the deep places by the Spirit of the living God? Certainly we are being met by many other presences, personas and influences in the deep realms of our hearts from which our longings stir us to daily actions and ways of being; or to use James K. Smith's helpful description, our cultural liturgies. Has the risen Christ stepped into your "inner most being" lately and impacted your "center"? Would you notice if He did? Does He sometimes seem to take flesh in your dreams, or perhaps he's used the melody of a song or a childhood memory to take apart your facade until you crumble at His feet? Has He undone you with His skillful, compassionate artistry? Has he melted your heart with warm fear and penetrating hope?

If artists do not learn to articulate and understand the nature of the spirit’s work through the various mediums of the arts then we may ourselves begin to conceive of a lesser value for the power and access we’ve been given by the grace of God. In this world, we need merciful merchants on the waters of that deep river. Artists do not control the heart, but we can know Him who is the Desire of nations.

It is because of Grace that artist’s can operate in the deep places. Grace was bought with a price. Let us give the Lamb of God the reward of His sufferings. What He seems to desperately want in all of this is to create hearts that are awed by Him and Him alone. As He says, to remove our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Isn't it ironic that all of the other things that move us deeply and control our lives only make us harder, colder, less alive, less human? But He works with all the maniacal devotion of a research scientist who's discovered a cure, using his own body and blood as the test subject.

Let's look and listen and wait for the Holy Spirit to invade the deep places of our hearts; and as He gives us grace to move others, let's move them to awe at the One who paid such a price to have full access to our hearts.

Kenyon

Art and Suffering: Some Thoughts On Referencing Without Resting

A recent trip to with friends to the United Nations NY Headquarters, and a subsequent perusal of its main gallery's current photographic exhibition, DeterMined, prompted me to revisit some thoughts on art and suffering. With the biblical prompting to "look after" those who suffer (James 1:27), I am particularly provoked by works that deal with the subject.

DeterMined showcases the work of international photographers Kike Arnal and Arne Hodalic. A series of large-scale color and black and white photographs display portrait-like images of survivors of cluster munitions explosions in Lebanon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The photos are well done, but painful to gaze at for long. In one, a preteen floats in a suffocating circular pool whose radius extends just beyond the boy’s outstretched arms and two unequally-stubbed thighs. A veiled woman clutches a mechanical contraption with her truncated fingers, boldly and ironically grasping the culprit with its own affect.

Collectively the works imbue a tired tenacity, humanity's perpetual flailing to remain afloat in life’s harrowing waters. Reminiscent of the work of Dorothea Lange - whose depression-era Migrant Mother Series at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles always moves me - they are aesthetically pleasing but weighty.

Quickly crossing 2^nd Avenue to return to Midtown away from the UN gallery with its nagging heaviness, I paused in front of the construction site of a new consulate building as my friends, a block behind me, sought to catch up. The shredded blue tarp surrounding the high metal meshing of fence and rough plywood waveringly discouraged viewers from witnessing the rubble of the site’s previous occupant. Through an eye-level opening in the plastic, I gazed at the jumble of broken concrete and metal rods, the splints that would soon welcome new growth and infrastructure. I thought about how art on a gallery wall, like the hole someone had created in the plastic tarp, perhaps likewise acts as a pealing away of something we’d like to cover.

But why did the exhibit bother me so much? The ending lines of a research paper I once wrote about Picasso’s Guernica perhaps provide a subtle answer: “As long as pain and struggle accompany the politics of our public and private lives, surely [the work] will maintain its impact.” There is a universality to suffering that instills in us desire to witness it. It is the artist's task to discover how to reference such depravity without resting there.

--J.A.D.

J.A.D. has helped lead the Art Leaders and Vocation group.

Thomas Martin

This week we welcome and enjoy Thomas Martin's latest work.

Q139 Pencil, Colored Pencil, Copic Markers, Graphite, Acrylic on Paper

Q138 Pencil, Colored Pencil, Gouache, Copic Markers on Paper

Q137 Pencil, Colored Pencil, Copic Markers, Graphite, Acrylic on Paper

Q125 Pencil, Colored Pencil, Gouache on Paper

Q108 Pencil, Copic Markers, Gouache, Ink, Colored Pencil on Paper

For me, drawing is a way to integrate my whole person, the unconscious, the felt and the rational, the desire to organize and the impulse to improvise. It functions as an intermediary moment between the idea and the reality, between the emotion and the response (T.S.Eliot, The Hollow Man). In this sense, drawing is a membrane through which outside(what is other) flows in and inside (what is personal) flows out. My drawings, therefore, embody fluctuating and contradictory states of understanding, feeling, and/or being.

--Thomas Martin

www.thomasmartinstudio.com