Towards an Easter Aesthetic - What does the Garden have to do with the Gallery? (MHP Column, 4.06)


Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages;
let us walk through the door.


Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.


(John Updike, an excerpt from “Seven Stanzas at Easter”)


Athens, Jerusalem, and Christian Art


The question is often asked, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” It is a convenient way of referring to the age-old dilemma posed by intellectual history’s strangest bedfellows: philosophy and theology. Contemporary Christianity is faced with what may become an issue almost as problematic, especially as aesthetics becomes more successfully philosophical and theologians are thinking more and more like aestheticians. Just like the issues of Athens began to encroach on the home-field advantage of Jerusalem, so is Beauty beginning monopolize the sort of attention we used to put on the more clinical issues of Truth.


Which is fine with me, I don’t find it easier to think Christianly as an aesthetician than a theologian or biblical critic. But I do find it more profitable. All the inroads we are making as Christian thinkers into film criticism, literary theory, theatrical performance, and deeper appreciations of classic and contemporary art will lead us to richer conceptions of personhood, faith, doubt, and eternity. (If you are wondering where all these inroads are being made, please contact me, as I would love to introduce you to some before they start becoming clogged with traffic jams.) So on this Easter occasion, I want to ask: “What does the Garden have to do with the Gallery?”


By the “Garden” I refer to the event of Christ’s resurrection and the place in which it occurred, and by the “Gallery” I refer to the practice and exhibition of contemporary art. In essence, the question is: What does the Christian faith have to do with the craft and practice of Fine Art? The church has long held these two in odd tensions, some unconsciously keeping them in opposition, a few overtly fleeing one to do the other, and yet others collapsing the two as if they are one and the same thing. This stalemate will continue to exist unless we develop more provocative models of being artists in the church and more practical models of being a Church to our artists.


Perhaps we can best do this by starting with the right distinctions, and I simply suggest that the Garden and the Gallery really fit the bill. They are the “Jerusalem” and “Athens” of this conundrum. What we have in these two spatial figureheads are a number of important similarities, and at least one key difference, the significance of the latter precariously balancing the greater number of the former.


What the Garden and the Gallery Have in Common:


1. They are absolutely public. The resurrection of Christ was a public vindication of his ministry, and his initial appearance in the garden is the first of many public appearances of the victorious Savior. The Gospels intended to publicize it even further, making it the center of early Christian proclamation. Likewise, the artist places their artwork in the gallery so that it may be seen by others, so that the public can perceive its wisdom and expertise. There is something validating about having artwork excepted in reputable galleries, and we look at things differently on the walls of the MOMA or in the Louvre than we do things on the walls of bathroom stalls or our living room. Once things become part of public discourse, they take on a different significance than events and objects we consider private.


2. They are a public space. The Garden becomes an important place in John’s Gospel that has ever since been associated with the shocked wonder first of Mary Magdalene and then Peter and the Beloved Disciple. It is the place of man’s first encounter with the risen Lord. We go to the Gallery sometimes as Mary Magdalene went early that morning to the Garden, with fear, doubt, and questions. We leave earth-shaken and reality-checked. At other times we come with much different concerns, but either way we are going to an actual place that frames our expectations.


3. They are creative activities. The resurrection is a profoundly creative act, a re-creative act that charted a course for the proclamation of grace. If the Word becoming flesh was a startling wrinkle in the history of creation, then how much more the resurrection? It was an utter reversal in the scheme of things, the first-fruits of a new age. Art can be this same sort of creative activity, not on the same scale of course, but it can represent powerful reversals of the way things seem to be. It can produce images that alter the tenor and course of culture or experiences that critique our deceptive comfort zones.


4. They are unique. It goes without saying that the Garden is host to something unique; the point of the resurrection lies directly in its unexpected nature. Likewise the Gallery can be a place of newness, a place of discovery and innovation. The resurrection required the writers of the New Testament to develop an entirely new vocabulary for their encounters with the risen Lord. In the Gallery we learn to speak different languages about common concerns, and are given new tools to deal with what were considered to be unsolvable riddles.


But as attractive as they may seem, these analogies between the Garden and the Gallery are a bit naïve. All four of these points set the Garden next to an ideal Gallery that exists only as long as one can imagine it. And I think I think I know why. Even though all these functional analogies work so well, the fact remains that the Garden and the Gallery produce far different things. The Gallery is not consistent in its availability as a public space that provides creatively unique opportunities for revelation and change, and some of its more famous residents have worked very effectively to make the Gallery something else.


What the Garden and the Gallery Don’t Have In Common:


1. There is only one difference here, a key difference. This is that the resurrection is precisely about creation, redemption, and hope, and art quite often isn’t. Actually, most of the time it isn’t, and this may be the reason that we have become so sensitive to the difference between Church and Art in our age. Much of the art we encounter has no sense of redemption or hope and this causes problems for the Christian artist seeking to participate in the professional art world. What sort of work does one do when redemptive themes are so readily shelved as clichéd and passé by both the market and the critics?


But there is an even more fundamental problem as the resurrection is a profoundly and artistically creative act in every sense of the terms, and much contemporary art really isn’t creative at all. So much art these days is derivative, referential to a dizzying degree, and we celebrate this artless regurgitation. The sort of art that is inspired by the Garden cuts through the thoughtless delusion that Pop art is art, or that Tarantino’s films are works of art, or that art school isn’t about mastering the basics, or that Beauty is simply a matter of taste.


In his essay “Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?,” Anthony Burgess says: “Art begins with
craft, and there is no art until the craft has been mastered. You can't create unless you're willing to subordinate creative impulse to the construction of form. But the learning of craft takes a long time, and we all think we're entitled to shortcuts.... Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.” It may seem odd to bring words like “craft,” “construction,” and “form” into this discussion, but this is precisely what the Garden inspires. Enduring, thoughtful, expert works of creative intelligence that provoke more than insipid, self-serving reflections. It requires a renewed affection for form, a celebration of material and color, all things that are linked to an esteem of Creation.


“Let Us Walk Through the Door”


The John Updike poem isn’t up there just because I cautiously enjoy it. It struck me while reading it once that everything he says there about the resurrection could also be said about Christian art. Updike beckons us not to water it down, not to try to manage its sharper corners, or to season it so that our neighbors may swallow it more palatably. We need to embrace the entire package and let it leak into our journey in life. This may be the best advice we can offer to both Christian and non-Christian artists: Don’t be “embarrassed by the miracle.” To the former it is a plea to let their artwork be borne out of the struggle of faith and shaped by redemption. To the latter it is a plea to not be interested just with art, but with the miracle and process of creativity itself. To both it is a gesture that perhaps the Garden and the Gallery are not so far apart. Their failure to converse is the fault of the church, but may it not be for lack of trying.