Medium and Message

Both religion and the arts provide access to desires and needs that are a part of being human. Will Willimon states how “God continually, graciously, gives himself to us and makes himself available to us through touched, tasted, experienced, visible means.” (Willimon, Worship as Pastoral Care, p. 151) By God’s grace knowledge arrives in many forms. This is precisely why the artist’s creative action also strengthens faith. Multifaceted art experiences helps establish concrete connections to theology. Art helps “flesh out” facts, data, concepts and makes them dynamic.

Art comes by exploration of ordinary human abilities. We notice, remember, speak sounds, listen, understand and recognize. Then, we take our findings, order them, create patterns, adjust and manipulate our resources. Matthew Crawford finds “moral significance” to this type “of work that grapples with material things.” For working with our hands, discovering the properties of materials, takes us “outside the self.” (Crawford, Shop Class As Soulcraft p.16) Perhaps this is why art is sometimes termed as transcendent, and consequently, why it can play a vital role in our spiritual formation. Art is not necessarily a distraction, but instead exercises our attentiveness. I remember defending my teenager’s doodling in a parent-teacher conference explaining how the drawing gave access to the listening.

Through the busy work of creating we also collect information that shapes the way we perceive the world and make sense of it. Juhani Pallasmaa states how “Artistic expression is engaged with pre-verbal meanings of the world, meanings that are incorporated and lived rather than simply intellectually understood.” (Pallasmaa, The Eyes of Skin, p.24) Art is a different way of discovering God and the world he set us in. Art can also be the medium that allows us to care for His creation. If John Patton’s statement that “The message of God’s care is inseparable from the messenger,” think of what our art work could deliver. (Patton, Pastoral Care and Counseling, p.95)

If the word became incarnate, God’s message of love and forgiveness found in the medium of Jesus’ body, we don't have an excuse to put the paint brushes down, forgo the dance class, tell ourselves art making takes too much time. Marilynne Robinson reminds us of “when people still had sensibilities, and encouraged them in one another.” According to Robinson folks “assumed the value and even the utility of many kinds of learning for which now we can find no use whatever.” (Robinson, The Death of Adam, p. 9) We learn from encounter with the world. Literacy is not just the ability to read information, but connects our embodied knowledge and histories with the words being offered.

You are the medium, and you have a message.


--Maria

Wiggle Room

Indeed, there are times when artists lament how job pressures keep them from true creativity. We don’t always possess the luxury of pursuing interests, concerns, or longings. Instead we are given assignments, commissions, and roles to embody. We must pay bills, make deadlines. Therefore, reality spurs motivating factors besides predilection to rouse artistic action. But does this really make the work any less creative?

In Shop Class As Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford disputes the romantic concept that freedom or “the unleashing of the self” engenders creativeness. Crawford maintains that creativity is actually a by-product of being present. It takes discipline, “the mastery… cultivated through long practice,” to shape good work. In other words, it’s really submission to given materials that allow artists to be inventive, effective, and authentic. For Crawford one must “dwell” in given tasks to gain any credence in it.

Along this line of thought my writer friend, Garnette, introduced a creative concept he employs which he calls wiggle room. We witness wiggle room every time an actor sparkles despite vacuous B-movie material. Wiggle room utilizes inventiveness and imagination within our specified perimeters and shortcomings. Artists are called to access what Crawford calls “patterns of experience;” the knowledge gained from “confrontation with real things.” Our embodied experiences, no matter how low or mundane, become foundational for good work. We must rely on experience to make our projects ring true. Here is where Crawford connects work with philosophy. While philosophy seeks the good—a way to live life; it is our work that become the context to employ the good. For Crawford we must make use of philosophy, “the desire to know” and examine, in order to embrace and propagate good work.

Perhaps, then, our real problem with creativity is submission. Do we really want to surrender our time and energy on a seemingly unworthy project? Jesus seems to think so when he took on the disastrous human project. Surprisingly, because of the taint, few are interested in investing in his mission to redeem humanity. In The Death of Adam, Marilynne Robinson, bewails how we lost our ability to take pleasure in human presence. She writes “we ceased to enjoy human act and gesture, which civilization has always before found to be beautiful even when it as also grievous or terrible.” Despite the circumstances of sin, Christian artists need to employ wiggle room. We need to be hands on with the work given no matter how inconsequential it seems. Christ came to redeem humanity by becoming present, therefore, calls us to also be substantial, to confront real things, in real time.

Artists, let’s make wiggle room a redemptive part of our work.

--Maria