Film - Think

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 as 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. Though the precedent is slim, I don’t find it less profitable to think Christianly as an aesthetician than a theologian or biblical critic. 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, and wisdom. But how does this pan out with practitioners? What role does the artist play in these border crossings between culture and theology? 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 along with 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 Christian thought have to do with the craft and practice of fine art? The church has long held these two in odd tensions, some unconsciously holding them in opposition, a few overtly fleeing one to inhabit the other, and yet others collapsing the two as if they are one and the same thing. This gridlock 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. It will also persist unless more holistic and definitive ways of thinking Christianly about art are produced, thought patterns flexible enough to appreciate the entire spectrum of fine art media and traditions. 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. 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 Do Have in Common:

1. They are public events. The resurrection of Christ was a public vindication of his ministry, and his initial appearance in the garden is the first of many subsequent public appearances. The Gospels intended to publicize it even further, making this event 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 share in its intentions. There is something validating about having artwork accepted in reputable galleries, as we look at things differently on the in the MOMA or in the Louvre than we look at the things on our living room walls. Conversely, hang a toilet seat in a gallery, and you have one of Dada’s most famous works. Public spaces are the spaces in which culture is performed, critiqued, and transformed - thinking of the resurrection as a cultural event, occurring in the same space that all other cultural events do, enables the Garden and the Gallery to refer to each other. While they may often differ in intention, they are similar in effect.

2. They are public spaces. 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 alternately frames and subverts 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-fruit of a different creative order. We see shadows of this same sort of creative activity in the Gallery. This is not on the same scale of course, but we often see in the Gallery 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. The shock of art is not always from the ideas jogged loose by a particular piece, but the unexpected form in which they come, the very materials that enact these revelations. So the risen Christ: bewildering, nondescript, glorious, cooking fish on a beach. The resurrection as a creative process is rich and thoughtfully indeterminate.

4. They are innovative. 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 unsolvable riddles.

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

1. There is only one difference here, a key difference: 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 seems to have no relation to key Christian ideas and this causes problems for the Christian artist seeking to participate in the professional art world. This isn’t to say that art needs to be about the things that the resurrection is about. Or that the Christian artist needs to catch up ideologically with what everyone else is producing. But the artist needs ways to think about themselves in relation to both Garden and Gallery, which begins by reveling in the similarity between both spaces. The problem of subject matter will begin to find resolution in the work of artists who understand the creative event-ness of the resurrection negotiating their way towards the public on their own aesthetic terms, with their own materials.

Related to subject matter, there are also differences in how they understand form. The sort of art that is inspired by the Garden cuts through the thoughtless delusion that Pop art is art, or that things as derivative as Tarantino’s films are works of art, or that art school isn’t about mastering the basics, or that beauty is always just 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 self-referring reflections. It requires a renewed affection for form, a celebration of material and color, all things that are linked to an esteem of creation as exemplified in the resurrection. As an artist bookbinder, I am certainly predisposed to craft and material. But there is a point at which all art is the manipulation or performance of material, and thus capable of leading to a Christian perception of materiality. This perception is moored in all those ideas about creation that are reaffirmed by the resurrection.

“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.