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.

Missing the Mark

Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang up and I died. Romans 7:9

I like to say I got into acting on a fluke, but I believe God wanted me to be an actor so that I would become more like Him and that through my work others would see what Christ has done. In my pursuit of each character I discover that God is changing me, whispering to me about my own heart. The work of the actor has been called incarnational. We embody characters and enter the world of their story in order to pursue their ultimate good no matter who the character might be. All good actors discover their character through compassion, identifying with them and seeking their highest end.

I once prepared a scene for a TV episode in which my character was being questioned by the police at his little brother’s funeral. At first I believed my character was angry at his brother for having lived such a careless life and ending up a statistic. Just beneath the surface of his anger was latent sorrow and grief. Simple right? But the moment of breakthrough in the audition room came when I realized that my character was actually angry at himself and desperately trying to avoid the shame and guilt he felt for being unable to save his brother, a task that was never within his ability to accomplish. It turns out there’s something more universal than grief…pride.

A funny thing happens in our hearts whenever we hear about the thing which we must become… or else. Somehow we construct a perimeter by which we can measure or express our negligible resources to pull it off. And when the dust settles we’ll tax the world and everyone in it before we can admit our own failure to measure up to the standard. It’s a very fancy version of the blame game. The bible refers to this high standard as the law. But why is it that a perfect description of our intended purpose in the world, our teleos, awakens in us a sense of dread or even self hatred rather than inspired moral character?

In the Garden of Eden (Genesis chapters 1-2) Adam and Eve had no concept of their smallness in the great scheme of things, and they were never meant to. An infant is small but is never made to feel small in the world of the family. In fact it’s just the opposite. We’ve all seen how the nuclear center of the family shifts to accommodate a new born. But let the infant get the idea that it will enact it’s sovereignty on the local government to produce abundance and society on its own, then it must either have a moment of devastation or else it must find a vision more within its reach.

The gospel shows us that Jesus Christ the King, who does all things well, made himself lowly and condemned on the cross so that we could be held in great esteem by our Heavenly Father. He became insignificant so that we could become God’s treasured possession. Most of all, he fully claimed the condemnation that cries from every corner of every human heart “You’ve missed the mark!”

As you continue to reflect on the intersection of Christ's work on the cross and your own work in the world, consider how these gospel-conversant questions for the actor might also apply to your daily reception of God’s favor and love, which he stands ready to lavish on you in every moment of life, especially now.

Kenyon

Suggested Questions for the Actor in Loving Pursuit of a Character:

(Also may be helpful to ask questions in first person or “in character” using "I" and "my")

■ What does my character like most about herself/himself?

■ What is she/he most proud of in the story of their life?

■What would she/he likely change about herself/himself or their story if they could?

■ What mark or measure would she/he feel they have failed to attain in life?

■ What does she/he most regret in their life?

■ With whom does she/he need to be reconciled?

■ How will they she/he know they have been restored in that relationship?

■ How will she/he know when everything is finally ok in their story?

■ How would they describe “the good life”?

The Art of Suffering

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

T.S. Eliot, Second Quartet, East Coker, III

Suffering loosens the belief we are in control. When all we undertake falls apart and God seems to have gone on vacation, distress discerns an action that can be accomplish; that of waiting. What accompanies an artist’s wait? We create in hope. It is this aspect of art that reflects Christ’s redeeming work in the world allowing us to render every act of creativity as a sign of hope. Art reaches for the eternal despite our society’s refusal of such categories. As Christians we understand this hope as the beauty of redemption through the salvific works of Christ.

Edward Farley in Faith and Beauty maintains beauty is a manifestation of Christ’s redemptive work. Redemption allows us to uphold what is deemed valueless. Here, the darkness becomes light, the cast off is repurposed. Artists have the ability to take what is broken then reconstitute and employ it towards art. For Farley it is this transformative action that constitutes beauty. “Redemption reaches and reshapes into new freedoms all the ways in which the human being is infected by sin” (Faith and Beauty, 93).

John Dillenberger goes further and suggests difficult art needs to exist. He relates how the “literary and the visual are… affirmations in their negations; indeed, they negate in order to affirm” (A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities, 224). Artist make plain what needs to be—what should be, what can be. Ultimately, it is hope that drives the impulse of art making for it seeks to grasp Jesus’ work of redemption and transformation. Whether we are believers or not we all long for renovation. The nature of transformation, therefore, must fall under the Christian artist’s purview. In our own work we accept the waiting and the mysterious chaos of our lives then proceed to shape, arrange, and re-form it. Jeremy Begbie encouragingly reminds us, “In Christ, all that is ugly and subversive in the cosmos has been purified, beautified and fulfilled. Therein lies the promise for the transformation of all things” (Voicing Creation’s Praise, 175).

Redemption does not negate or ignore the ravages of sin but restores all things. Jesus’ transformative power goes further to redirect and transforms our inordinate desires. It is in the waiting where our love, hope, and faith finally reaches out for the Triune God. Barbara Brown Taylor speaks about this in terms of disillusionment. “Disillusionment,” she writes, “is the loss of illusion—about ourselves, about the world, about God—and while it is almost always painful, it is not a bad thing to lose the lies we have mistaken for the truth” (The Preaching Life, 8). It is in darkness we begin to see, feel, know. While waiting for God we offer him the pain, suffering and the waiting, which in turn, makes our work his.

Wait—for the darkness shall be light,

Maria

The Physicality of Grace

…You have given me relief when I was in distress. --Psalm 4:1

He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me. --Psalm 18:19

You have not handed me over to the enemy but have set my feet in a spacious place. --Psalm 31:8

If we put ourselves at the center of our lives, the world becomes a very small place. We become like an infant in a crib, pent up and cut off from the physical reality of the world in which we live. But grace offers us a different experience of ourselves and the world. Through grace we receive the physical world and our own bodies again.

When the Psalmist exclaims, “You have brought me into a spacious place…” he imagines a realm over which he does not have complete control. For in the world of his control he finds himself hunted by cruel enemies and tortured by guilt. In this world of his own making he is murderer, thief and adulterer. Yet when “in the day of his disaster” he is met by the Lord, he is led into a spacious place. This large room is an incredibly visceral description of grace as is David’s own physical sense of relief. He no longer feels trapped by his own deficiencies, instead he is lifted up and out. Relief came to him in the body because grace is a physical-realm response to a physical-realm problem. As a man thinketh so is he. But let us not limit this to the rational mind only. As a man thinketh also includes our imagination and our perceived existence in the physical realm.

Holiness connects us to deeper reality and we enter holiness by relinquishing control of our physical life to Jesus Christ. We enter holiness only through the realm of grace and we enter grace through yet another embodied experience. That is, the life that we would otherwise have lived in our bodies now must die in order for us to truly live.

Reflection

When at last we give up trying to protect ourselves against the flood of destruction that is due to us because of sin, and when at last we allow that flood to come crashing down as it has upon our Lord. When at last we put our imaginations to their highest use and remember him who gave himself for us and yet was without sin. When we see him, blazing and bleeding, seated at the right hand of God with our world under his feet and our destinies in the twinkle of his eye…When we see that he became inglorious for us, as shameful as a rapist, as guilty as Macbeth so that we could be wrapped up and held in the safest arms in the universe…Then we will enter the spacious place, that broad room of David, and the great, ancient sigh of relief which only the gospel of grace can induce in a human soul.

Kenyon

The Artists Role As Connector

Last April’s InterArts Fellowship, entitled “The Artist as Cultivator,” sought to investigate the connections between art and prayer. Without too much explanation we hoped the art--in the form of dance, song, music, and poetry, would lead some to prayerful ruminations. But, we also longed to portray the beauty of prayer.

One of the outcomes of April’s IAF were two separate Reflect nights initiated and facilitated by Nathan Troester at his church in Williamsburg. Nathan commenced the evening with prayer and a short theological presentation, later asking the handful of invited artists to reflect and response through their respective artistic mediums.

Graphic designer, printmaker, and creative director of Live From Bklyn, Dailey Crafton, shares his account from the first Reflect night in Live From Bklyn’s blog. I link the post here, but allow me to excerpt some of the content for this reflection:

as i meditated on the concepts of the transcendance/eminence of God, my thoughts were drawn toward the name that God gives himself, “I AM.” this name speak of self-existence, completely independent upon anything else for survival. transcendence defined (and named). i also thought about the Christian doctrine of God-incarnate in the person of Jesus. about how he had a body, hair: a beard. eminence. from these thoughts i also moved into thinking about the material/immaterial dichotomy. immaterial God, material man. I AM material, as it were. i’mmaterial. and that was the concept.

within the swirls of the piece, you can see the word i’mmaterial. and the line is a continuous, unbreaking line, symbolic of the infinite. i also wanted to capture the idea of humanity, so i used a pattern that to me is evocative of hair, a beard to be more specific.

What Dailey’s description from the Reflect event provides is an example of how artists can integrate prayer and art while also portraying their role in connecting abstract ideas with concrete matter. Yet more is being bridged, we also see the reconciliation of spirit and body, work and faith, product and process. Dailey demonstrates how art belongs in the realm of theology, and theology certainly can shape our art. Witnesses to such interactions come away with a deepened understanding of God, while also refreshed by possibilities. It is firmly set in my mind how artists are called to be bridge builders in our ever increasing disconnected world.

Pray artfully,

--Maria

Thank you, Dailey, for allowing us to reference your blog post. Dailey’s i’mmaterial linocut print is available through his online shop.

When Life Doesn't Stop; Making Time For Your Dreams

“In creating, the only hard thing’s to begin; a grass-blade’s no easier to make than an oak.”

James Russell Lowel

I have lived with an idea for a book for over eight years. Of course the inspiration hit me just as I became pregnant for our first son – right at the dawn of a new age of monumental time consumption. But over the years of considering and thinking about this idea, I realized that never does a spark of inspiration hit just as you are about to go to a divine lake retreat for three weeks of uninterrupted creative time. Never. Last spring, I realized that I had three main obstacles that were looming over me and making me more than procrastinate, they were causing a paralysis: time, task, and comparison.

I have been part of International Arts Movement for over 10 years. IAM is an arts organization not just for artists, but for anyone who has a desire to rehumanize their sphere of influence; to creatively make it more good, true and beautiful. I have always come away from their conferences feeling inspired and motivated to be a better person in every area of my life. But the last two conferences were especially significant to me as they helped put legs to something my heart had desired for many years – to write.

Makoto Fujimura, painter and founder of IAM, says that when he paints, it creates time in his schedule because it feeds his soul. It made me think about time to create in a whole new dimension. I had thought about time linearly: time out equals time gone. There is not enough time to get the things done merely to survive, let alone the seemingly luxurious time to write. But what it – what if– time to create didn’t take away, but added? I had also toyed with the idea of waiting until a more perfect time arrived. I know – it’s laughable. I knew there was no such thing as a perfect time, yet I still deliberated over it.

And who hasn’t thought of writing a book? Millions of us have. It’s on many of our bucket lists: get a book published. Whether that is from a desire of status, accomplishment, or because we have something we must say… I’m not sure. But for me, whatever the motivation, the task itself seemed gargantuan. It was like looking up at the Cliffs of Dover: straight up, impossible to climb, and fearsome to complete.

Then as I looked at the idea of my novel, a 1930′s historical fiction mystery set in New York City, I made a deadly choice: I compared how others write, to how I should write. Most of the mystery authors I love to read create an outline from beginning to end before they begin. So I tried that – and failed miserably. I had characters, I had a general sweep of where I wanted to go… but an outline was a virtual impossibility.

Finally, after a lot of frustration, I found some inspiration. I went to a book signing by one my favorite authors, perhaps one of the most creative people I’ve ever met: Jasper Fforde. He said that he often “just wrote” because he liked to see where his writing would take him. And he frequently used what he termed as “off-ramps.” Events or actions thrown in here and there – completely unrelated to the current storyline – that he may or may not choose to use at some other time in one book or another. I loved that. I loved the idea of letting characters and situations develop as I crafted them, seeing where possibilities could take me. Click to read further.

-L.A. Chandlar

Laurie is a longtime member of IAM, wife, mother of two, and lay ministry leader. And she still finds time to write! Please visit Laurie's website for more of her musings.

The Artist as Theologian

Remember the days when a conversation at Starbuck’s about the deeper matters of life and longing would inevitably end with one party resolutely declaring, “Well, that’s true for you but it’s not true for me”? It seems like only yesterday that relativism reigned as the catch-all response to issues of ultimate concern from philosophy and religion to sociology and even law.

In his recent talk at InterArts Fellowship, Steven Garber sought to orient our community of artists to the times in which we live and encouraged us towards meaningful actions and conversations within our hearts, communities and world. As he does in his book, The Fabric of Faithfulness, Steve reminded us of how the Age of Enlightenment and the rationalism of the modern era have left many in contemporary society with a dulled awareness of human destiny and purpose. Yet, Garber notes, even relativism is coming under strong suspicion amid the devastating scenarios of our war-torn and disaster-prone world, not to mention the accompanying nihilism which offers a bleak and gangly vision of human flourishing.[1] Unfortunately, this dilemma has left many in our society confused, depressed and floundering for a sense of meaningful purpose for their lives. [2]

It seems that in order for the church to navigate this scenario, artists must become engaged in developing our shared understanding of both our times and our God. Cue: the artist as theologian. Clearly, God's world is not black and white. There are grey areas that cannot be packaged or easily reconciled without the use of abstract thinking and imagination.These times may require the presence and participation of artists within the church in order to know God and make him known within a culture that has lost its anchor in rationality and reason yet has grown increasingly suspicious of relativism as an easy fix to the inconsistencies between our knowledge and our experiences. As artists we tend to live in the tension between the what is and the what ought to be as we work. Our gifts and our way of seeing allow us to accept and explore mystery.

What might it look like for your work to become a context in which the mysteries of God are explored and embodied? Have you ever experienced a way of living and working in the arts that integrates and enlivens your engagement with the gospel? Will you as an artist identify with the community and calling of the people of God?

Kenyon

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[1] The Fabric of Faithfulness, Garber. After Virtue, Macintyre. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, Bernstein.

[2] Generation Me, Twenge.