Seeking the Shalom of the City (MHP Column, 1.06)

As I live and breathe the culture of New York, as I am called to live to ‘seek the shalom and prosperity of the city,’ I must work incarnationally, and get my hands dirty. I want my hands and intuitions to seek the shalom of the splintered and degraded aesthetic language of the day, to play a role, hopefully, to redeem the language of art, so that we can all, Christians and non-Christians alike, use the language to communicate. - Makoto Fujimura


For the past eight years World Magazine has granted the Daniel Award to someone who does something worthy of it. This year’s winner is none other than Makoto Fujimura, whose relative obscurity in mainstream Christian awareness is one of the reasons the Daniel Award probably exists. According to the magazine’s piece on Fujimura, his presence as a successful artist in lower Manhattan “restores art’s good name among Christians and gives Christians a good name in the arts.” And with a recent exhibition in the Sara Tecchia Roma Gallery, the founding of the International Arts Movement, an appointment to the National Council on the Arts, and a brilliant body of work one wonders if this might even be understating the case.


Much of his past work makes use of a traditional Japanese craft included under the umbrella term “Nihonga,” which involves the placement of rock and mineral pigments on hand made papers. This results in richly layered surfaces that play spatially with light and color, verging on color field abstractions that materially produce a slick hypnotizing depths of field and rhythm. Often some of the materials he uses often change over time, producing works of art that literally progress with their audience into a much richer dimension of response. Fielding a question about a 1997 exhibition, he speaks of the process this way: “It is neither the Renaissance system of creating pictorial depth through perspective nor is it the Modernist emphasis on the surface space. It is much more similar to the stained-glass window. This approach creates the effect of space rising and falling through these veils of pigment. In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil states that there are only two operating forces in the world, one is gravity and the other is grace. That is precisely what I am trying to do with these pigments.”


And you might as well get used to hearing Fujimura speak for himself, as a plethora of essays exist in parallel to his body of work. Sometimes these essays explain his work, and sometimes his work re-describes the denser areas of his writing. The former occurs in an article “Beauty in Brokenness” on his website in which he explains the temporal aspect of Nihonga, “Beauty is in the brokenness, not in what we can conceive as the perfections, not in the "finished" images but in the incomplete gestures. Now, I await for my paintings to reveal themselves. Perhaps I will find myself rising through the ashes, through the beauty of such broken limitations.” The latter happens in an email sent out to friends in a brilliant response to the 9/11 attacks: "Create we must, and respond to this dark hour. The world needs artists who dedicate themselves to communicate the images of Shalom.”


Sometimes Makoto dons this prophetic mantel as if it were a natural fit. His most recent work deals with the aftermath of 9/11, which he witnessed first hand while caught for hours in the wreckage of the subway near Ground Zero. He says in the Daniel Award piece that this work is an attempt to take us “back to the fallen Jerusalem that Jeremiah witnessed.” Spike Lee uses post 9/11 New York much in the same way in his 2004 film 25th Hour, but without the clarity of Fujimura’s biblical undertones. It has become a space of violated securities, fractured illusions, and before restoration work began on that giant empty space in lower Manhattan a city that embodied the sense of loss forced on its inhabitants. As Lee identified in his film, there in the center still lurk moral riddles waiting to be answered, or at least transcribed by willing artists. In the midst of this Makoto poses the provocative question, “Is New York City like Babylon or Jerusalem? How do I remain faithful here, even among the rubble?” More on that in a moment, it is far too good a thought to pass up.


For now, permit me a digression. The author of the World Magazine article eventually says that Fujimura is currently working in an art world “where bedrock concepts of truth and beauty—much less biblical concepts of redemption and healing—are usually rejected, and where ironic distance has been stretched to such a limit that most non-artists regard the arts as stubbornly detached from reality and rotating in a narcissistic, varicolored universe.” I am hesitant to agree with this generalization. I can imagine that this is true in Chelsea, and it is even more broadly true in individual cases (like the Turner Prize), but is it fair to think of the work of even established figures like Giacometti or Richter as distant from truth and beauty? It does no service to working Christian artists to abandon the notion that their unbelieving colleagues have little to offer. And what is more narcissistic than the characteristic self-referentiality of what passes for most “Christian art” these days, as if the church is only comfortable producing things that accord with its own image?


In one article Fujimura creates a starting point for helping Christians get over some of their more cherished myths about the art world. While musing on Abstraction and the Christian Faith he points out, “In the works of many abstract expressionists I see not only abstract paintings but a yearning and groping for the heavenly language. They were convinced that earth and history did not contain the language to capture the fear and power of the age.” And even better, he goes on to speak of such language as “sacramental” which, “must address reality and confront what we see, but must transcend it to grasp what we can't see yet.” Would only that theology catch up with its artists. Would only that it at least begin to become an audience!


A few points in conclusion. There is something profoundly Christian about the emphasis on craft in Fujimura’s work. As a once full time book artist/binder by trade, I often went back to more material driven artists like Lee Bontecou, Joseph Cornell, or Joan Miro for encouragement to stay the road and keep training on the details. The lengthy, banal process of hand-sewing the pages of a book together for example can become an exercise in the physicality of creation, and a celebration of the details of this world’s materials. He has spoken of the joy of watching his paint dry at times, no doubt cognizant of the fleeting divinity of the creative process. There is also something revealing about how readily he thinks such things out in print in so many essays and interviews. One can visit his blog (accessible through the links on his website) for a continual peek behind the curtain. The only thing better than a successful artist is a speaking one.


And finally, it is provocative to think of the artist as a prophet, reconstituting the present in thoughtful visions, dragging what ails us out into the light of a gallery, and unpacking the future in the tones of today. Fujimura has leapt on the chance to stand in an odd gap in lower Manhattan. His work about 9/11 evokes private questions about public space, layering the potentialities of hope over the textures of defeat, loss, and fear that have invaded the American cultural landscape. And he does so with the utmost abstraction, with the reordering of existing materials, all the while cultivating a language that enables us to participate in his work. He has developed a truly Christian sense of abstraction, an aesthetic performance of “thinking God’s thoughts after Him” in such a way that his audience can follow these mental mechanics by the mere suggestion of color, rhythm, and texture. All I can say is that I hope Makoto Fujimura is not the last Christian artist I get to rave about in this column in the years to come, and it has been a privilege to learn of him through the Daniel Award.


N.B. In other news, the aging performance artist nabbed for urinating in Duchamp’s renown found art sculpture The Fountain in 1993 has again been jailed for attacking the same sculpture with a hammer. His defense was simply that is actions were in tune with the spirit of Dadaism. And it most certainly was. But I also appreciate this old man as an analogy for good cultural criticism. The best sort of criticism occurs in interaction with a piece by reason of use. Even if one desires to take a hammer to it, he is willing to go back to the actual piece to do so.