Category: art

In the Reformed world, transformationalism is the most prevalent view of Church-culture relations. This view espouses that because Jesus rules over all things, even culture is a part of Jesus’ kingdom. A general tagline for transformationalism is, “Christ transforms culture”. Practically, this view means that when a person becomes a believer in Jesus Christ, their habits, their work life, their customs, are all altered as the individual seeks to be obedient to Jesus. Now, even the Spirituality of the Church view agrees with this concept. But transformationalism implies, next, that as an individual alters their customs, the culture itself is altered. As the culture is altered, it is being reclaimed by Jesus Christ. This is one way in which Christ’s rule spreads visibly and tangibly in the world. Now, this sounds like a triumphant and optimistic view of Christ’s kingdom, and indeed, it is, however I question the biblical-ity of it. Despite that question, my main point in this short post isn’t to critique transformationalism. It is, instead, to offer a viable demonstration of how the Spirituality of the Church view is carried out in relation to culture, particularly the arts.

Two Views

Imagine that you are an artist, and you become a Christian. How should you then make art? This is the subject of numerous books, all of which have varying advice and approaches. Some suggest that you must make symbolic representations of biblical themes and ideas. Others say that you must merely make art very beautifully. In short, I’d argue that there are two prevalent views today: 1. Symbolic Christian Art (Symbolists) 2. Aesthetic Christian Art (Aestheticians). Now, any adherent to the second view would hate the fact that I attached “Christian” to the

term art. They say that you can no more make Christian Art than you can have a Christian Toilet. Obviously, they are correct, however I simply use the term to mean “art made by Christians”. So, calm yourselves. Many people in the first group are very strongly anti-modernist. They believe that Modern art has destroyed a culture, and cannot be used honorably. Others within the group disagree, and employ modernist techniques and practices while they also use symbolism. The second group generally believes that Modern art is, as a whole, useful to the Christian, and uses aspects of the philosophy and aesthetic of modern art. The Symbolists employ a more worldview-based, common-sense-realist epistemology while the Aestheticians have what is often called a “sacramental” view of reality, or a more post-modern epistemology. Despite all of these differences, both groups agree that Christians have, as a common task as artists, to create works of art that compel hope in the gospel. The problem is this: to what extent does your artwork carry out that task, and to what extent do you as an individual carry out that task?

An Altered Approach

This is where the Spirituality of the Church is exceedingly helpful. It says that you should reconsider your purpose in making art. It is not the task of art to share the gospel. It is the task of individuals to verbally share the message about Jesus’ saving work. Spirituality of the Church argues that as members of God’s Kingdom, you also ought to live in a way that persuasively demonstrates the verbal message that you believe Jesus. But that ethical life doesn’t somehow prepare an unbeliever to believe. This means that whatever job a Christian has, it is not the burden of the job to convince others about Jesus. If you are a farmer, your production of soy is not going to convince the world that Jesus is risen from the dead. Rather, it is the burden of the person, the Christian, to share the message, and to support the message with a godly life. But what about art? Art is distinct in that it is a communicative thing. Soy is farmed for consumption, but art for contemplation (supposedly). So, doesn’t that make art distinctly responsibly for the communication of Christianity? Well, while visual art employs a kind of visual language, yet it is not sufficient to share the gospel. Yes, it may communicate certain themes. Yes, it may depict truths. But the medium is the message, and the medium is not fit for the proclamation that we are responsible to make as people. This will undoubtedly anger some people, but I argue it nevertheless. The gospel itself is expounded through auditory or literary means, “faith comes through hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” What Paul has in mind is not a play, demonstrating Jesus’ work. He is not considering a movie, depicting Jesus’ work. He does not consider a novel, somehow relating to Christian themes. No, Paul has in mind the explicit, clear, and precise verbal or written presentation of the good news about Jesus.

Preparation?

In the sacramentalist mindset, artists often argue that beautiful aesthetics prepare a person to believe in Jesus Christ. In the symbolist mindset, artists argue that complex literary or visual symbols help persuade a person to believe in Jesus. Personally, I believe this is a unfounded idea, and akin to a kind of preparationism. While God uses varying means to ultimately convert a person, the burden of the artist is not to make their art for the evangelistic purpose. So Spirituality of the Church then compels an artist to say, “I can’t make art that compels a person to believe. I can’t make art that is persuasive. But I, as an individual, must do this with my ethic and my speech.”

A Concession

The arts are unnecessarily burden by an evangelistic ethos–both in the symbolist and aesthetician schema. Yes. I say all of this, but then I must add something: we talk about what we love. Art is indeed communicative. As Christians, we will talk about our love for Jesus. But the problem I’ve been responding to is with our expectations. We should not expect our art to be converting instruments, though obviously God may use them in that manner. But, while the subjectivity of the visual language of art makes it unfitting for evangelism, at the same time art is quite fitting for a “discussion” of certain themes or ideas that the artist finds important. So, as a Christian, your art is about truths you find valuable. Beauties you love. Concepts that are fascinating. Typically, these ideas will be related to Jesus, yes, but not always specifically. There are Christians who make art about geography, theology, aesthetic quality, time, space, etc. You are free to make it about whatever subject is God-honoring. In the end, the Spirituality of the Church entails that you, as a believer, have the task of making your craft in a God-honoring way, and beyond that, in sharing the gospel personally, and living it out with godly character.

I’ve been working on assembling a “definitive” biography of Franciscus Junius in order to aid my Phd work.  This is a small example of what I’m hoping to accomplish!  All this chart shows you is the frequency of Junius’ departures from and entries into various cities.  Obviously, he probably left and entered more cities, but this is the amount that I have deduced from his own biography as well as others’ biographies of Junius.

The last article that I wrote covered the artists and movements that have influenced my thought as an artist.  Now, I’m going to attempt to explain why I think my chosen medium/style is acceptable for a Christian and a pastor.  In short, my artwork is non-representational.  Its meaning is complicated or ambiguous. This post then seeks to answer two questions: Is art that has ambiguous or complicated content acceptable for the Christian to make or view? If it is acceptable, then why should a Christian make or view art that has ambiguous or complicated content?

Question 1: Is art that has ambiguous or complicated content acceptable for the Christian to make or view?

First, I’ll begin by considering the alternative to non-representational art.  Why is representation an acceptable way for a Christian to paint? Of all the possible ways to make art, representation initially seems like the most problematic for the Christian.  The Decalogue expressly states, “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” The bluntness of the phraseology is perhaps what caused hesitation towards, nay, even rejection of, the creation of representational images on the part of intertestamental Jews.  While images of non-animal objects, such as shrubbery, are clearly permitted (having been used in the Solomonic temple), the representation of humans, animals, and heavenly bodies was viewed with suspicion or scorn.  Of course, this suspicion and scorn of all human/animal/celestial representation is due to scribal tendency to “fence” the law.  If the meaning of a command was difficult to understand, they assumed that the safest bet was to add laws around it to prevent any possible way of violating it.  So, though it is rather clear that this prohibition of images was meant specifically in regards to idol-making (note the phrase, “for yourself”–as in, “don’t pay someone to make an idol for you to worship in your home”), an abiding fear of violation lurks around this particular commandment.

Second, though it’s entirely acceptable for a Christian to make representational images, what do we make of the Western history of representation?  I immediately think of two particularly disturbing aspects of representation: images of God and pornography.  If anything, the command not to make idols directly prohibits the making of an image “of Yahweh”.  The Lord was specifically forbidding the making of images to be used to worship HIM.  While most venerators-of-icons would never say they worship the image itself, neither did Israel worship the golden calf itself.  When the people cried out, “these are your gods who lead you out of Egypt,” they bowed to a singular image.  Idols served as totems of the invisible deities to whom the nations bowed.  Israel bowed to a singular image, but sought to reverence a plurality of deities.  Sure, the Lord could have said, “don’t make images to worship false deities through them,” but He didn’t.  He didn’t want images attached to His own reverence or worship.  There are all sorts of reasons why God made a command like this, but one basic argument is that image-making necessarily multiplies deities.  Just ask a Christologically orthodox professor to draw a symbol of the Trinity, and you’ll hear an audible grunt of angst.  Any image will play into a form of heresy–modalism, partialism, or tri-theism.  Remember Patrick’s bad analogies.  Last, in addition to images of the Lord, the history of Western representation has been riddled with pornography.  This isn’t something that I wish to go into in detail, but let’s just say that non-representational art doesn’t carry this issue along with it.

Third, while I think representational art can be used in a God-glorifying way, I just wanted to show that the burden doesn’t really rest upon me to prove the validity of non-representational art.  It was Kandinsky, a theosophist, who once pointedly argued that music is not representational, and yet we value it.  Similarly, writing is non-representational.  Does someone really need to argue that writing is an acceptable endeavor for a Christian to pursue? The meaning of a novel is complicated, and while it may be summarized, a good novel’s meaning “grows” or is “unearthed” over time.

Fourth, I don’t need to defend “non-represenationalism,” or whatever you want to call it,  but I need to defend an aspect of it.  To what extent is this type artwork communicative of an idea?  If it doesn’t communicate anything, then what is the use of it for a Christian?  If it communicates an idea, but a complex or ambiguous idea, then is it worth making or viewing?  This is where, I believe, contemporary Christian artists split ways.  If I had to create categories, I’d say that there are heirs of aestheticists on one side, and heirs of the symbolists on another side.  The former group are also influenced by postmodern reader-response theories, poststructuralism, and perhaps what I’d call a revival of romanticism.  The latter group are influenced by structuralism and occasionally by revivals in Platonic theories of aesthetics.  Of course, I’m making a dichotomy to distinguish the two thoughts from one another, but more realistically this is a spectrum that Christians traverse.  Basically, along poststructuralist lines, many non-representational artists would argue that knowledge doesn’t work as cleanly or plainly as a symbolist would like to imagine.  Brute facts don’t exist, and symbols are complex.  Color, texture, and form can all be their own “language” which a mind can “read” at an intuitive level by thinking about what it sees, much like it “reads” musical compositions by meditating on what it hears.  This is all very well, but what is actually “communicated” in a way more than just feeling? Is it necessary to communicate something more than an impression or feeling? Many Christians believe that it is sufficient to make something beautiful that communicates feeling.  Other Christians believe that the role of visual art in general is meant to communicate more than feeling.  They might argue that non-representational art ought to be made to communicate through a kind of symbol-system.  They would reject the idea of merely intuitive meaning, and argue that though complex, meaning is notional/conceptual and rises above bare intuition.   Both of these thoughts, though, can only be reasoned on a cultural level.  That is, there is no biblical warrant to suggest that a Christian ought only paint aesthetically pleasing things, or that a Christian ought only paint symbolic things.  This being the case, the manner of painting then comes down to Christian liberty.

Last, my own artwork contains elements of both the symbolic as well as the aesthetic.  I’ve never been comfortable with attempting to evoke sheer feeling from a viewer.  While I perhaps sacrifice specificity of meaning by not using representation, I think that I gain complexity as well as aesthetic.  Is art that has ambiguous or complicated content acceptable for the Christian to make or view?  I hope you see that the answer is, “Yes.”  The next question, though, is, “But is it worth making it or looking at it?”

Question 2: Why should a Christian make or view art that has ambiguous or complicated meaning?

I answer this by an analogous statement:  A Christian should read a novel with complicated meaning.  If that statement is true, then I would argue, “Therefore a Christian should look at a work of art with complicated meaning.”  To me it is almost absurd to suggest that a Christian (or any person) shouldn’t read a novel with complicated meaning, but I suppose it is worth addressing this statement in our day-and-age.  In my last post I argued that meaning is complicated.  It isn’t necessary to say “where” it resides: in the viewer/reader, the artist/author, or the painting/book.  It probably exists somewhere “in dialogue” between these things, but who am I to know the answer to this question? The fact is that meaning exists, and must be found in the thing itself that you seek to understand.  But why pursue this meaning?  I have several reasons why we ought to seek to understand complicated or seemingly ambiguous works:  1. For the enjoyment of a quest. 2. For the sake of personal knowledge/growth.  3. For the purification and edification of imagination.  4. For love/charity (growth in sympathy) of others and ourselves.  5. For enlargement of personal experiences.  There’s a strange association of sympathetic people with the amount of quality fiction that a person reads.  I’d assume that the same is true of people who imbibe a good amount of quality fine art.  This might say more about the person (they want to read/look at these things), or it might say more about the art (it changes you), or both perhaps.  The point is that seeking to understand artwork can refresh the mind, and provide other benefits that accompany this.  Just as an example–this morning I was reading through some of Wendell Berry’s poems on “rest”, and found that the verses refreshed or freshened my understanding of a subject that I’ve already studied.  They provided a breath of fresh air in a stale area of the mind.  In the end, there are dozens of reasons to invest your time in thinking about complicated art.  Most importantly, though, good artwork provides a challenge to its viewers, urging them to stop and consider the relation of its parts with the goal of providing a new “angle” on reality.  Investigating artwork is worth the endeavor.

As a Christian, and a pastor, I’ve received many looks of concern when I explain that my artwork is “non-representational”, or to put it incorrectly but more recognizably, “abstract”.  One seminary student laughed, and flippantly disregarded me, when I mentioned the work of an abstract expressionist.  One pastor has said that a Christian artist cannot or should not paint in the vein of abstract expressionism because of its historic un-Christian underpinnings.  More recently I have simply received blank looks when the subject is mentioned, because people in Mississippi are too polite to say what they think to your face (unless you mess with a family tradition).  Because of this, I’d like to present an explanation for what my “genre” or “style” of artwork is, as well as why I work in my particular “genre” or “style”.  This article in particular will cover the philosophy of art and works of art that have influenced me over the years.  The next article will cover why I think a Christian can work in contemporary styles or develop his own.

First, we need to clarify some terms.  Representation or representational art is the type of art that attempts to imitate or approximate objects, people, or places from the perspective of a human. Representational art encompasses a variety of styles so vast that it is impossible to detail it all here. Different civilizations have possessed different standards at different periods for how to best or most  acceptably carry out representational art.  For example, I’ve been studying the life of Franciscus Junius, and have learned that his son, Franciscus Junius Jr., was a philologist and artist.  During Franciscus Jr.’s lifetime, the favorable style of representation transitioned from Mannerism to Baroque art.  Simply put, each culture develops its own styles of representation as a variety of factors influence it.

Abstract art is the type of art that intentionally seeks to abstract representational objects, people, or places.  The term itself isn’t entirely helpful because, in a sense, all representational art is an abstraction.  In general, theorists use the term abstract to explain a work that has intentionally altered the visual appearance of a thing.  Take, for example, Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase.” While vestiges of a figure remain, the majority of the painting is splintered into forms.  In this work it is clear that Duchamp was interested in the work of the Cubists and Futurists, who also employed abstraction.

Non-representational art is the type of art that does not represent objects, people, or places.  Frankly, the term only tells you what a work of art isn’t, rather than what it is.  Consider the work, “Canyon” by Robert Rauschenberg.  While the piece contains a few elements of representation, such as a photograph of a child, a painted-over picture of a statue, a photograph of an automobile, and what looks like clippings from a magazine, the overarching artwork isn’t seeking to represent a person, object, or place.  Or perhaps more clearly, take a look at Barnett Newman’s “Onement I”.  While you can suggest that the line on this work looks like something, you can only do so by strict analogy.  The line is not an attempt to represent or abstract a person, place, or object.

Having defined these terms, we can move on to what exactly my artwork isn’t.  My work is not abstract, nor is it representational.  That said, it is much harder to define what it is.  Within contemporary art movements I clearly don’t fit into a representational school scene like that of Yale, nor with a movement of conceptual artists like that of the Young British Artists.  Further, I don’t consider myself an expressionist, and I don’t think my work fits into the expressionist schema.  My work isn’t an attempt to resurrect fauvism, expressionism, primitivism of any kind, or minimalism or its contemporary offshoots.  It might have connections with contemporary expressions of pop-art (since I’m immersed in popular films, tv shows, and music), but it lacks the mass-production, the stylization, and the fact that the artist actually made it.  It is much easier, however, to explain the influences behind my works of art.

All-in-all, I think that there are five main influences behind my work: 1st, Dada [and from Dada: installation art, minimalism, and conceptual art].  2nd, outsider art. 3rd, Japanese zen paintings. 4th, Abstract Expressionism/Color Field. 5th, Symbolists, Imagists, and Aestheticists in poetry.  First, I say that Dada is a main influence behind my work because it is probably is true.  I was first exposed to Dada artwork in high school, and though I reject the atheistic philosophy behind it, I value some of its quirky aesthetics.  I also enjoy some of its thought-experiments.  For instance, to ask whether a painting of a pipe is or is not a pipe, and where the “pipeness” resides, is fascinating.  Although Dada artwork seems to get giddy over the supposed fact of the absurdity of “where meaning or value resides”, I think the question itself is interesting. Personally, I don’t approach that question with the same skepticism as the Dadaists, and I’m not concerned about it.  Meaning is complicated, and we don’t need to say that it solely resides in an object, the artist, or the perceiver.  I’m much more interested in the Dada aesthetic.  Most of their works are simple and fairly banal, and created this way for the pointed purpose of questioning whether fine-art is a real, objective thing, or merely an invention imposed by viewers.  “Remove the frills that make people imagine the piece is ‘fine art’,” they say,  “and perhaps it doesn’t really exist!”  Just as an aside, the YBA, Damien Hirst, has clearly been influenced by Dada as well.  I recall the story of the time a janitor at a gallery threw away one of Hirst’s pieces, believing it to be trash.  Hirst just laughed, and said that this way basically the point of his work.  Hirst, like Dada, wants to challenge the notion of “fine art” as a thing that objectively exists (though all of them are certainly willing to exploit the idea of “fine art” to make a living!).  Though I disagree with this thought, I do believe it is important to recognize the continuity of fine art with “real life”.  It isn’t some detached, sterile realm where things can be coldly analyzed, and the meaning distilled into a few lines on a page.  Art is part of the culture of a people.  It can’t be severed from the motives or life of the artist.  At the same time, I reject Dada’s overarching assumption that “fine art” does not or cannot exist.  Despite this, I still enjoy the manner in which the Dadaists arranged their art.  It is simple and plain, and whatever meaning is derived from it must be derived from the relation of its basic parts.

Second, outsider art is clearly an influence.  I’m particularly impressed by the architecture of Howard Finster, the pottery of George Ohr, and the sketchbooks of Walter Anderson.  These three men are clearly more provincial than the Dadaists, confined to their particular southern towns (though Anderson is an exception), and none of them seemed to care for the contemporary standards of aesthetics.  If I’m correct, Ohr wasn’t well-recognized in his day, though he advertised himself heavily as the “Mad-Potter of Biloxi”.  Finster, on the other hand, became popularized, but only by being “discovered.” He was a Baptist pastor, and painted religious scenes and messages in whatever style he thought would work.  Walter Anderson was different than both Ohr and Finster in his art education.  He willingly chose to adopt an outsider-art style and lifestyle.  All of them seemed to view their work as a process rather than a finished product, though they definitely desired to sell their work.  I appreciate different elements of each of these “outsider artists”.  I’m not an outsider, having been trained at an institution for art, however the basic direction I was given in undergrad was “find your voice”.  The only style or philosophy of art I’ve been pressured to have is one of my own making.  This reminds me of the aesthetic of the outsider-artist.  Either with a firm belief in the worth of their own style/method of art-making, or without a need for income (and therefore without a need to conform to popular styles), these outsider artists developed their own methods for art-making to suit their personal goals.  They rejected the popular style of the day, not categorically, but simply in regards to their own methodology. I feel similarly.  I don’t categorically reject contemporary op-art, minimalism, conceptual art, abstract expressionism, or tribalism, but I simply don’t find these categories useful.  Sure, I like various elements of each of these movements, but I wouldn’t consider myself a member of any of them.  Further, my teachers heavily emphasized the idea of process over product.  Like outsider artists, I highly value the process of creating art, viewing it as a part of daily life, and not as an esoteric or transcendent time where I escape from reality.  Many of the things I create are not of high enough quality to be deemed “fine art”, and they end up either as trash or hanging in my studio.  But this is part of the process.  Out of the process, jewels emerge–but not everything is a jewel.

Third, I’m definitely influenced by the artwork of Japanese Zen artists.  Some of this artwork has come to me via the work of Makoto Fujimura, an artist living and working in New Jersey.  He is particularly influenced by American abstract expressionism as well as certain schools of Japanese Nihonga artwork.  His work impresses me for a lot of reasons, which I won’t detail here, but I was mainly interested in the form of his work.  In the “West” (I hate to make the whole East-West false dichotomy) we really do seem to find a work “balanced” when there is visual weight on the left hand side of a painting.  Meanwhile, the converse is true in the “East”.  Mako’s work seems to flip-flop between having weighty visual sections on the left or on the right.  This made me delve into Japanese (and some Chinese) artwork, where I found an interesting combination of poetry with visual accompaniment.  As a poet, I am fascinated by the cultural acceptance of this combination.  For Americans, it is only post-modern artists, interested in reader-response theory, who tinker with the interaction of text and image.  Unlike most of these Japanese paintings, however, I did not want to combine representation with text.  But then I came across some Japanese artists who combined text without representation! Some of the Zen painters in Japan used a form called ensō, which is a minimalistic brush-stroke, meant to be part of a daily process of achieving enlightenment, and symbolizing a number of conceptual ideas.  Again, while disagreeing with the philosophy behind this, I enjoy the fact that such a beautiful basic form could be produced from a daily process, and with a rich conceptual background.  I want to produce work like this as well–work with significant conceptual notes, and yet with minimal objects or forms to evoke ideas.

Fourth, I’ve perhaps spent the most time studying the works of impressionists, abstract expressionists, and color field painters.  I’ve also been trained in plein air painting, which, though distinct from these movements, is slightly related.  Historically, abstract expressionists and color field painters had, overall, a similar agenda, but differed as to how to accomplish their goal.  Abstract expressionists adopted the agenda of the expressionists, but believed that abstraction better accomplished the goal of expressing subjective emotional response.  Color field painters, on the other hand, followed Clive Bell’s argument that,“significant form is the only quality common and peculiar to all the works of visual art that move me” (italics mine).  He goes on to argue that while some paintings use form to communicate something else–as in a ‘normal’ painting of an object, person, or situation–form itself is what truly evokes aesthetic emotion.  He concludes, “The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.”  While Bell himself painted representationally, his thoughts were adopted to argue that mere form ought to be juxtaposed to evoke the greatest amount of “aesthetic emotion”, thus leading viewers to “the world of aesthetic ecstasy.”  Some might attempt to correlate minimalism with color field, but the two really are quite different in their goals.  Personally, I’m not interested in the goal of expressing or evoking the greatest amount of aesthetic emotion.  I think that aesthetic experience is a vital part of fine art, indeed of all of life (as Dewey once argued), but I don’t make it my goal to find a formula to produce this experience.  I’m influenced, rather, by the formal aspects of abstract expressionism and color field paintings.  I consider many of the works of Rothko, Newman, Diebenkorn, and Hofmann to be exceptionally beautiful.

Fifth, and last, I am influenced by the symbolist, aestheticist, and imagist poets of the early 20th century.  While I’m not a huge fan of symbolist paintings, it is the poetry that has affected my view of artwork.  Though many of the symbolists seem to have bought into the aesthetic theories of Schopenhauer, I am unwilling (pardon the pun) to accept his mindset.  I agree that aesthetic experience is important, but reject the idea that one can, or ought to seek to, escape suffering via aesthetic contemplation.  I enjoy the movement primarily for the concept of what a later imagist, William Carlos Williams, says, “-Say it, no ideas but in things-“.  Overall, I think I am attempting to develop the idea that aesthetic experience is a vital part of viewing fine art, and that things-themselves possess the “ideas” that we need to discover within them.  This process of viewing artwork isn’t to be done to escape from reality, but rather to learn about reality and grow mature.  Because ideas and meaning are complicated, it is best to explain that meaning is something that exists in relation between the artist, the artwork, and the viewer, and it is something that must be discovered.  The meaning of a thing grows with it as it takes on historical significance (or insignificance), and ends up transcending the immediate intent of the artist, or the immediate perceptions of the viewer.  This means that, again and again, we must look for meaning in the thing itself. Ad fontes.

In summary, this overview really doesn’t explain why I make things the way that I make them in a programatic way.  I have shown my influences, and the various things that I appreciate or dislike about them.  I’ve tried to be honest in showing the strands of art history that have made a significant impact on me.  Next, though, I’ll need to provide an explanation for why a Christian, and a pastor, feels that he can work in the style/medium that I currently use.

The Bible:

Beeswax: