Time Continuum

Space-Time Configuration

What does the worker gain from his toil?  I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to the end.  Ecclesiastes 3:9-11

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.  T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Investing time in the studio always yields benefits. The work focuses or branches out into new forms. Pleasurable discoveries shifts the expenditure of our time, expenses, energies as we grasp towards that elusive something. The pursuit is future-oriented, but to obtain it we must be fully vested in the present, all the while sustained by positive past experiences of accumulated processes of art making.  

Yet sometimes the need to create is mere burden. No explanations needed for He has also set eternity in the hearts of men. We experience something good when we make art. And just as our studio practices hones the work, it is a pattern parallel to God’s perfecting of the cosmos through time, space, the particular, through Christ. We cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

What does this mean for artists? First off, eternity is continuous with our present world. Time present and time past are contained in time future. And time future double backs into time present: our time. God is with us through his promised Spirit, the hallmark of a new age. This means we don’t have to get it right the first time. Just as the whole of creation is groaning waiting for God to perfect it, our art is practice. One day the grunts and groans will eventually give way to true worship of the Triune God. Christ has already set the Spirit life in motion--we have the firstfruits of the Spirit awaiting the future redemption of our bodies. He has made everything beautiful in its time.

Secondly, since forever belongs to us, time is not a burden. One of the characteristics of our culture is the weight of time. We never have enough of it so we weary ourselves with too much work, too much play. The more we invent time saving devices to increase leisure, Colin Gunton notes the less capable we are of being able to dwell “in the body and on the good earth.” (Gunton, The One, The Three, And the Many, p.77). In God’s timelessness, he sets patterns of living: birth, death, plant, pick, kill, heal, extirpate, build up. Life does not happen all at once for we are to dwell in each zone discovering its merits and faults.

Isn’t this what we also learn in the studio? Idea, concept, action, introspection, more action, wait for the paint to dry, curse, smile, scrape off the paint, start again with the marks of the old refined by the new. What does the worker gain from his toil? John Dewey remarks how “Every work of art follows the plan of, and pattern of, a complete experience, rendering it more intensely and concentratedly felt.” (Dewey, Art As Experience, p.54) Artists, think of your art making practice as a sensitizing or priming agent for the ultimate experience of eternity.

Let the future break into the present; make art.

--Maria

Sensible Resurrection

The resurrection of Jesus puts into effect the possibility of eternal life. But what does this incredible event have to do with the arts? CFW’s next Gospel & Culture lecture will feature Dr. Jeremy Begbie who will speak regarding A World Made New: The Art of the Resurrection and the Resurrection of Art.

We'll prime Dr. Begbie’s lecture by reflecting, here on this post, the topic of resurrection. To begin with we must acknowledge how for various reasons our modern world suffers a faith crisis surrounding the sensory. We mistrust the senses; hence we can’t seem to make much sense of art, never mind the idea of someone coming back from the dead. Perhaps John Dewey is correct when he surmised we fear what life may bring, especially since we tend to see opposition between mind-body, spirit-flesh (Dewey, Art As Experience, 22-23). So instead of allowing the resurrection to breathe life into our work as artists, it lives comfortably tucked away in our doctrines and confessions—apart and separate.

Fortunately the narrative of John 20 takes great pains to make sure we understand the disciples encountered not an idea but a risen physical body—nail holes, split side. As John Updike describes in his poem, Seven Stanzas at Easter, “molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle.”

In fact, the chapter highlights Thomas’ discomfort with hearsay regarding the resurrection; he needed to see the risen Jesus. A radical confrontation with the concrete cannot question or doubt that God is involved with the stuff of this world. And just as Thomas was accustomed to witnessing Jesus incarnate the wonders of the kingdom, he also desired to look upon the manifestation of eternity in the shape of the risen Christ.

John Dewey remarks how our society utilizes the senses to arouse passion but does not move beyond “to fulfill the interest of insight” (Dewey, Art As Experience, 19). Good art making is dependent on both the senses and good sense. And, in a similar fashion Thomas needed to fulfill this new Godly insight through all of his being—including experience. He needed to touch the ridges of torn skin to thereby and passionately proclaim Jesus as “Lord and God.”

Likewise, some of us are not content with only a theoretical assertion that Jesus is currently living in a marred physical body. We want to make sense of this information in some weighty way. This passion should stir us to mediate this astounding God-action through our actions whether it be through dance, poetry, or just living a full life practicing for the one that is to come.

Thomas’ need allows us to ground Jesus in the fragility of materiality—“regathered out of enduring might,” as Updike reminds us. Seven Stanzas at Easter also calls us to remember:

It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled

eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His flesh; ours.

Please join us on Saturday evening, March 10, as Dr. Begbie help us discover A world made new by Christ's bodily resurrection.

--Maria

Art as Relational

God desires for us to know him. So, when the Word became flesh, the Triune God actively established himself in our world through a relationship. Even now when we read the four apostles' distinctive gospel accounts of their time with Jesus our emotions are drawn upon because of specificity of time, place, people, and things—their experience and our experience become essential. The artistic value of the narrative is its ability to feed the imagination by employing what is familiar: emotion, experience, the things we bump against day in and day out. Unlike the scientific that views things as object, Jesus, Incarnate, make all things subjects. In the same way, art employs things—ideas, emotions, people, and places--and begs for the participant to “see” them. At a recent lecture the sculptor Anish Kapoor reminded the audience that “art is good at saying ‘come here and take a look at me.’” * Art, therefore, can assist in detecting Jesus, who John relates “was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.”

Roberto Goizueta also reminds us how the aesthetic “allows us to live life itself as an end in itself rather than as some-thing to be understood.” Goizueta observes when we treat subject like object--analyzing emotions and things as information, we continually set apart the emotional and spiritual dimension of our humanity (Goizueta, Caminemos Con Jesus, p.94). Likewise, John Dewey notes how in our society "prestige" goes to those who use their minds “without participation of the body.” Dewey continues that a further mind-body separation occurs when we depend and take control of the “bodies and labors of others” to accomplish our ideas and wants (Dewey, Art as Experience, p.21). As artists we frequently experience this disconnect when we are asked to create something overnight with no consideration for creativity's lengthy and costly process. The prophet Isaiah laments how we are people who hear, but never understand; we see, but never perceive. It takes relationship between the heart, mind, and body to hear with our ears, and understand with our hearts, in order to be healed.

Art allows both emotion and experience to formulate connections and weave patterns until the next experience causes us to establish anew our way of seeing, feeling, knowing. Art enables our transformation, the taking in of the new. And, indeed, it became the gospel writers’ mission to explore the new world Christ initiated. Furthermore, according to theater director Peter Sellars, our experience with art “holds us together.” * The sharing of art deepens our relationships with one another and with the art itself. Think of how much more we understand a work of art through the action of describing it to another. Art enlarges us. We, reciprocally add to its profundity. Through Christ, we no longer look at the world as object, to be owned, exploited, ignored. The king, who calls us his subjects, asks us to be in relationship with the world. Art is one way of embodying this commitment.

--Maria

* Quotes from Anish Kapoor and Peter Sellars are from the New York Public Library Lecture Series event of November 13th. Their conversation also included Brian Eno.