Open Studios this Weekend

The Art Department Faculty at Wheaton College is holding an Open Studios event this Friday from 3-5pm and Saturday from 10am-2pm at the Old Scripture Press building. If interested, you can download the brochure here.

NEW BLOG

That’s right gang. I’m using wordpress to set up a site to keep up with studio happenings.  My plan is for it to be the hub from which all my other web projects: etsy store, portfolio, tumblelog…etc. will be accessable. This site will remain as a kind of “satellite” site for my ramblings. I have a lot of rambling ideas, but no time to post them…sigh.

Check out the new site here.

It seems to all boil down to this…

I am far from being fully versed on all things art and theology, but I have done a fair amount of reading on the subject for the past three years, and it seems to me that all of the discussion, at least what I have read, revolves around the same basic principle. It is this:

The pursuit of art is a material pursuit. It is right and natural for us, as beings made in God’s image, to engage in this pursuit because the Triune God endorses material pursuits (not just spiritual pursuits) through his own actions and engagement with the world:

God the Father created the world, and proclaimed it “good,”

God the Son became incarnate–a physical and material being–to redeem the world, and

Gd the Holy Spirit actively sustains the world.

That’s it. And that’s more than enough.

All the rest of the words are pretty much just talking about how these concepts apply to specific situations; either specific disciplines (painting, sculpture…etc, or writing, theater, music…etc), or specific period styles (contemporary, modernism, post-modernism…etc.), or specific roles in the arts (artist, critic, patron).

So, you can save yourself a lot of eye strain by meditating on the nature of the Triune God. Heck, if you get a reasonably fully realized vision, you can write your own book on the subject.

…I’ll probably read it.

Matter Matters, a nice article from Christianity Today

Matter Matters | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction.

I love how this article points to one of the great paradoxes of Christianity, that we are both physical and spritual. Too many times in my life I have heard the “spiritual” aspect overemphasized:

This is no news flash: We live in a body-obsessed culture. Materialism—the conviction that only matter can be proven to exist and that belief in transcendence is at best a fond hope, and at worst a dangerous delusion—is the spirit of our age. Ironically, it leaves us with no spirit at all, just our bodies and their appetites, unbridled and insatiable. No wonder we approach the fridge—and each other—with a predatory eye. We’re just trying to survive.

I believe that the only cure is to embrace nonmaterial reality as an integral part of the universe and ourselves. The conviction that we cannot be reduced to bodies is foundational to my worldview.

with little mention of the importance of the physical:

I suspect that my longstanding protest against materialism has made me susceptible to another time-honored heresy: Gnosticism, the belief that matter is inherently evil. Gnostics wondered how a perfect God could be defiled in imperfect human form. Gnosticism had to be struck down repeatedly in order to reach an orthodox understanding of the Incarnation: Jesus was fully God and fully human. The Word became flesh (John 1:14).

The Incarnation shows us that matter is not all there is. But it also shows us that matter matters. Jesus came a long way to take on our molecular structure. He pointed to other kinds of existence, telling his disciples, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about” (John 4:32). But he also fully inhabited our bodily reality, so much so that many of his miracles involved food, drink, physical healing, and even resurrection. One of his final earthly acts was to cook fish on the beach for his friends.

It’s not easy to reconcile these two, but I think it is vital. There are real serious implications here for the visual/plastic arts, and how the artist could be seen as an integral part of the Christian community. Our physical reality effects our spiritual well being, and art/design/architecture are fields in which study that relationship. I think the Protestant community (I know, huge sweeping generalization) is willing to affirm this fact in some instances–we are happy to call on the architect to design our worship spaces–but not in others–we tend to be less enthusiastic about how the artist/ designer can affect our daily lives (i.e. we are not serious about having art in our homes), or how the artist/designer might be valuable in missions. It’s interesting to me how we seem to talk about missions as either material (need for clothing, food…etc) or spiritual (need to spread the gospel) but we rarely consider visual art, a discipline which attempts to bridge the material and physical, as important.

Truth about Truth

I was driving around town yesterday when I passed a church with one of those signs where you can change the letters and create little messages for everyone driving by– you know the type. Anyway, the sign read something like “Truth has the merit (benefit?) of being simple.” You’d think I could remember the exact quote, as short as it is, but I can’t. (I’m prety sure I was thinking about donuts.)

Anyway, I was struck at how completely inaccurate I thought this idea was. The Truth, especially “Truth” with a capitol “T,”  is vastly complex. I would go so far as to argue that the Truth from a Christian point of view–the whole Truth– is far too complex for us to really understand at all. It is a Truth that is both infinite and full of paradox–and both of those concepts are really beyond our understanding.

Perhaps it might be accurate to say Truth can be expressed simply, but that’s not at all the same thing. It is also true that part of the power of the Gospel is that it can be understood by people all over the world with all different backgrounds and levels of education (perhaps because it is a Truth of the heart, not the head, or perhaps because understanding this Truth is caused by the intervention of the Holy Spirit, or both). But again, that doesn’t make it simple.

Size Matters at Packer Schopf

I have a piece in a group show at Packer-Schopf gallery in Chicago. Pictures of the show are available at Packer-Schopf’s web site here. Here’s a detail of the full piece, Tumblestack V. You may have noticed this looks familiar. The idea behind the “tumblestack” piece is that it grows and morphs every time it shows, as it has to adjust to the space and I also add more parts. An earlier version, incorrectly labelled (it should read Tumblestack III) is in an earlier post here.

I also got a little mention in a review by ArtLetters. Check it out here. You have to scroll down a bit. Although I’m not mentioned by name, there’s a pic of my piece, and I think I might be one of the “mid-career artists here who continue to make the best work of their lives, often while guiding, teaching or mentoring.” Which is nice and all, but I think I’d rather be “new talent.”

A Few Books I’ve Been Reading Lately…and where they are leading me

My summer reading has been quite interesting this year.

It started with the requisite Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. It must say something about the way teaching effects my psyche that every year when I listen to this (I have the audiobook) I find it convicting and refreshing.

As usual, the list  has contained several mysteries. I’ve been catching up on Smith’s Ladies  No. 1 Detective Agency series, which I now find is on HBO, and I’m a little apprehensive about that. I’ve seen a few clips via HBO’s website, and they look pretty good (which doesn’t surprise me), but the books have such a wonderful slow pacing, and so little drama, I’m afraid HBO is going to lose that, and it seems that they might have judging by the clips (even the theme music is a bit hip-hoppy).

In addition I am reading several books on art + art and theology. I am doing this part because David McNutt and I are proposing a team taught art and theology class for next year, which will include both lecture and studio time. I’m really excited about this venture because, as far as I know, it is unique: there are several art and theology classes/ seminars out there, but I have not seen one that includes studio practice. Most of the participants are theologians looking in and commenting on art, but not actually getting their hands dirty. (To be fair, the artists are not usually engaging in the high level of theology presented at such a conference, myself included.) At art and theology conferences, there is always this gap. Artist and theologians get together and shake hands, maybe even pat each other on the back, but they don’t actually work together- there’s no true dialogue. I doubt David and I are capable of turning that around by ourselves, but I hope we can plant a seed.

Sorry, I digress. The point is that I have reading the following:

Siedell. God in the Gallery

Wolterstorff Art in Action

Elkins. Why Art Cannot Be Taught

At the same time, and not quite related, I read Miller’s Blue Like Jazz.

Quite the selection. I have to say Blue Like Jazz has been the most rewarding, and has helped me figure out certain things about myself, many of the questions I posed at the beginning of the summer, and helped frame many of the art and theology questions I have, as well as those posed by the other books. I highly recommend it. More on this in a later post.

Elkins makes a point in Why Art Cannot Be Taught that I find interesting. He tells art students (for whom the book is meant) that art is made for a selective art market, and not for the general public. His point is that if you are going to survive and be relevant as an artist you better figure out what the current dialogue is about and make art about that. Themes which are current, and I think he refers to most, if not all of these, are feminism, ethnicity and race relations, and existential phenomenology (I’m not sure he calls this by name, but I seemed to have this general sense. Sorry, I don’t have the book with me at the moment).

I find this statement both a bit cynical and a bit true.

It is true that artists make art for a select art market—mostly.  Students who have to sit through my art history class are really frustrated by this, but, honestly, how could it be otherwise? Name an academic discipline where the dialogue centers around the general public. Read any good science journals lately? High end literary criticism (as in, not to be found in the Sunday paper)? Have a subscription to “Psychology Today?” Me either. If you do read this stuff it is likely it is because you studied it in college and/or beyond. Why should art be burdened with being different? How could the conversation in art grow/change if it was so burdened?

The other tricky thing here is to try to difine the “general public.” Who is that, exactly?

At the same time I think most artists are looking to be relevant beyond the boundaries of the “art world.” I know Rothko was very adamant that he didn’t make art for the  artistic elite. For most of us, the highest achievement woud be to have our work collected and shown in major museums all over the world, and the patronage for those museums, although skewed towards art lovers, includes, in very large part, what one might consider the “general public.”  I think of Doris Salcedo’s recent installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern. I’m pretty sure she wanted that work to be for everyone (even though it still fits into the dialogue one might subscribe to the contemporary art world).

Elkins also makes the point, almost as an aside, that artists have given up on the idea of transcendence.

I find this statement both a bit cynical and mostly false.

Well, maybe I should qualify that. I think most contemprary artist, would say they have given up transcendence. They have been taught to give up transcendence. They just don’t practice art is a way that is consistant with this view.

Ok, I think I have to qualify that, too. What I mean is that I think the definition I have of transcendence includes what I see happening in most contemporary art. And I think the way most people in the art world (and out) use the word “transcendence” is much to limited. I’m still working this out, but I’m interested in the fact that the root of the word “Transcend” means “to climb across,” which to me translates as something like “to bridge.” If I apply that I get something slightly different than “to rise above.” I also think it is possible to see “up” by looking “down,” if that makes any sense.

Plus, as a mentioned in an earlier post, I think a lot of contemprary artists are directly interested in the idea of beauty, which is by definition transcendent.

Anyway, this is already much longer than I intended. Let me know your your thoughts. And book recommendations.

A Few Thoughts on a Standard Posture

I saw this article in The City Journal:

Roger Scruton

Beauty and Desecration

We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness.

Click the link above to see the article. I included the subtitle because it gives you a sense of where Mr Scruton is headed. It is an argument one comes across regularly in our culture, and in Christian circles it is a kind of rallying cry- let’s all get together and rescue “beauty” in the name of God..there is a cultural war going on…we must oppose those that would shove ugliness in our face for the sake of art. The usual suspects are usually rounded up, and Scruton does not disappoint:

It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction. Hence the many works of contemporary art that rely on shocks administered to our failing faith in human nature—such as the crucifix pickled in urine by Andres Serrano. Hence the scenes of cannibalism, dismemberment, and meaningless pain with which contemporary cinema abounds, with directors like Quentin Tarantino having little else in their emotional repertories. Hence the invasion of pop music by rap, whose words and rhythms speak of unremitting violence, and which rejects melody, harmony, and every other device that might make a bridge to the old world of song. And hence the music video, which has become an art form in itself and is often devoted to concentrating into the time span of a pop song some startling new account of moral chaos.

Of course, these forces of evil are always set aside standards of good, and never ones from our contemporary culture. Scruton again…

Of course, there were great artists who tried to rescue beauty from the perceived disruption of modern society—as T. S. Eliot tried to recompose, in Four Quartets, the fragments he had grieved over in The Waste Land. And there were others, particularly in America, who refused to see the sordid and the transgressive as the truth of the modern world. For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, and Wallace Stevens, ostentatious transgression was mere sentimentality, a cheap way to stimulate an audience, and a betrayal of the sacred task of art, which is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty—as Stevens reveals the beauty of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 1915. But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront of modern culture.

Or a little later in the article…

Look at any picture by one of the great landscape painters—Poussin, Guardi, Turner, Corot, Cézanne—and you will see that idea of beauty celebrated and fixed in images. The art of landscape painting, as it arose in the seventeenth century and endured into our time, is devoted to moralizing nature and showing the place of human freedom in the scheme of things.

I have to say Cezanne is an interesting choice. I would agree that his works are beautiful, but I seriously doubt he would approve of having his work characterized as “moralizing nature and showing the place of human freedom in the scheme of things.”

The basic problems I have with this kind of argument are twofold. First, I question the definition and understanding of the word beauty, and second, I question the idea that it is not to be found in contemporary art, and subsequently that it needs to be “saved.”

For the first question, I think the understanding of beauty, or what we see as an attempt to create beauty in the past, is quite suspect, and not at all what we mean now. Art aesthetics, schools and academies from the Renaissance on have really seen beauty as an ideal that cannot be found in this world, and therefore has to be invented, or perhaps the better word is projected, onto our natural world. One did not, for example, try to draw the model, or the landscape as it was, but how it would be if it were ideal. The is an artist who does this now. His name is Thomas Kincaide.

Do you really want to argue that Kincaide’s work what contemporary art should be?

That’s to talk about beauty in landscape works. In terms of the human figure we also have the contemporary version of the kind of beauty the academies aspired to. It’s the world of fashion models, where far too skinny young women are squeezed into tiny bikinis and photographed, only to have that picture airbrushed to make them impossibly curvy. In Renaissance terms that would be something like Titian’s Venus of Urbino- or in Baroque terms Boucher’s “Diana Leaving the Bath” (well, most anything by Boucher makes the cut). Again, I have to say, when you are talking about beauty and the ideal, at least historically, you have to think about these types of works, which are quite problematic in many ways (sexually, for one obvious way). When we talk about beauty, we do not always mean it in these same terms. We usually talk about it in the terms Scruton himself uses: that is to say something transcendent (sacred), but also something ordinary, or everyday.

This is not at all the way beauty manifests itself in the canon of Western art history (at least not until, say Realism, at the turn of the last century). Not to say it is not there at all, but it is not there in the ubiquitous way modern thinkers typically suggest. It is worth noting that those that have approached beauty in the ordinary are people like Caravaggio and Courbet, both of which were considered scandalous and shocking in their time because their work was course and ugly–the exact same complaint voiced of critics like Scruton (to be fair I do not know what Scruton would say about either of these artists, although I would like to think he would affirm Caravaggio if not Courbet). It is not that far of a stretch to say that most artist derided as wallowing in ugliness and shock today would align themselves with artists like Caravaggio and Courbet- artists who were suspicious of beauty because, rather than see it as an ideal, they saw it as an obstruction to another ideal (say, “truth,” or “justice,” for lack of  better words).

When confronted with the ugliness, or the shock, of a contemporary artwork, I think it is helpful to start with the question “Why, to what end?” Am I saying that all work of contemporary art is life affirming? No. But I am saying a work of art is not inherently bad because it is either shocking or “ugly,” and that these same shocking/ugly works often have an underlying message that is life affirming. Furthermore they may be appropriately shocking/ugly.

As for the second point, I would have to say that Scruton takes the common tactic of pointing to the most extreme examples and holding them up as the norm. I certainly find lots of work in the contemporary art world, work that is highly regarded, which is very beautiful. I am not familiar with Bieito’s production of Die Entführung, and I have to agree that–at least by Scruton’s description–it is hard to see it as having any kind of life affirming qualities, except perhaps in a very base and distorted sense. And I am not an opera goer by nature, so I cannot really comment on what is happening in the opera world. But I can offer antidotes to the other “hell-in-a-handbasket” works Scruton uses as examples. You can too, I bet. For every Tarantino film out there that is about gratuitous violence, there are several films that I think are “beautiful” and life affirming. Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, and Pieces of April come to mind immediately. All of these are movies, by the way, that are both beautiful and ugly, shocking and life affirming.  For every Serrano’s Piss Christ (a work, by the way, that is visually quite hauntingly beautiful, by any standard–and one that I think is worthy of deeper consideration than I can give here), there are beautiful works by Janine Antoni, Vija Celmins, Mel Chin, Do Ho Suh, Pepon Osorio, Martin Puryear and James Turrell, just to name a few (I deliberately picked artists you can easily find at the PBS website for their series Art 21 so you can judge for yourselves). These artist may challenge our perceptions of beauty, but they reveal to us something fully ordinary, profound, life-affirming, and perhaps even sacred.

–which is exactly the kind of thing it seems Scruton–and others who wail and gnash their teeth at the state of the arts–is looking for.

Tumblestack V to be installed at Packer-Schopf Gallery

Detail of Tumblestack III, Installed at the Carillon in Charlotte, NC

Location:     942 W Lake St, Chicago, IL

http://www.packergallery.com/

Artists’ Reception:          Friday, July 10  5 – 8 PM
Exhibition dates:         July 10 – August 15
Gallery Hours:             Tuesday – Saturday 11:00AM – 5:30PM

If you are going to be in the greater Chicago area this summer, please come on into the West Loop and see the show Size Matters at Packer-Schopf gallery. This group show features all large scale work. Artist include Mark Crisanti , Laurel Roth/Andy Diaz Hope (collaboration), Victoria Fuller, Jenn Wilson, Michael T. Rea, Jud Bergeron, Renee McGinnis, Don Cameron, Catherine Jacobi, Doug Smithenry, and yours truly.

If you saw my last show “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Smoke,” you saw Tumblestack IV, the last evolution of this piece. Every installation is redesigned for the space the piece inhabits and new pieces are added/ taken away. I don’t want to give it all away, but new pieces this time include an observatory and where Snidely Whiplash isn’t.

It’s been great to have Aron Packer from Packer-Schopf include me in this group show. The gallery is in a great space on Lake street, part of the West loop gallery district (go to chicagogallerynews.com for more info).  Sadly, we will be out of town during the opening, but drop by if you can and shamelessly plug my work!

Flaws in the Ointment

Alas, two days since I wrote to you, my blog, and posed questions to myself, and already I see some significant–perhaps unsurmountable–problems.

1) I still have little time to write, and when I do have the time I do not feel myself wanting to devote it to writing.

2) I am stuck by the difference in theory and practice. And I am reluctant to attempt to develop theories at the moment. I have the feeling that most of the answers (or non-answers) I am searching for must be searched for through work, not through contemplation. Or rather, through the contemplation afforded by working. I think if I stop in the middle of working to reflect on what I am doing it will short circuit the process.

Here are some thoughts I have had in the last couple of days that are relevant (I think).

The leap of faith required to believe in a Christian world view is really beyond any human being. It is certainly not rational. The obvious answer to what separates people of faith from those without faith is the intervention of God himself through the Holy Spirit. From the outside this must look like nonsense. In a way it is; or rather it is beyond-sense, or beyond or ability to understand through our limited senses. It is no wonder those friends of mine who do not believe think of religion in general and Christianity in specific as a kind of ancient superstition they have outgrown. How could they think otherwise? It is the same sense I have to admit I have at times of doubt. It is what happens we only live within our own experience. It is, ultimately, the great temptation, and the original sin (but that’s another post altogether). When I run into this kind of thinking (even within myself) I find myself a little angry and really, really sad. I think of David Foster Wallace, a great writer who recently committed suicide, largely because he could not escape the weight of his (or, as he project from his experience, anyone’s) isolation.
There is so much pain, and so much of it is self-inflicted.
All the attempt I make to understand the connections between art an faith take me to the same dead end: that is, you can’t really know where you are going until you get there. The artist has to approach the creative process to discover things, not to communicate them. Really, seriously, I believe this to be true, even though it goes against so much contemporary art thought. Sure, art is a formm of communication, but the communication happens because the artist asked questions, explored questions through the material,  and that communication is not usually an answer to the artists original question (the creative process is not like entering data into a super computer), but a series of questions posed to the viewer. The goal is not to come up with better answers, but to ask better questions!
Form and content are inextricably connected.