Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Weeping

There is nothing that I can add to what so many people have already said about Boston Marathon bombing. Like so many others, I am simultaneously outraged and saddened, unable to do anything but pray and weep. Unlike some artists, who go into the studio in order to work out their immediate feelings and thoughts, artmaking for me is an extremely slow, alchemical process in which experiences and emotions may not become visible until years, or even decades, later.

Other artists work differently. On September 11, Toni Franovic was visiting in New Jersey. As he made his way towards Manhattan to keep an appointment with a gallery that was interested in showing his work, he watched as smoke began to rise from across the river. As he began to understand what had happened, he turned back, and the next day, he came to Washington, where he could work in the basement studio of friends. One of the paintings he made in the next few, frantic days depicts the New York skyline as it is seen from the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge just after the horrific events of 9/11. A lurid, flame-filled sky is reflected in the water below, revealing an ugly, green monster lurking just beneath the surface.

Toni Franovic, Untitled, oil on canvas on board, 2001,
on of 7 works shown in  Kaddish for New York 
 at the Dadian Gallery in the fall of 2001

Raw and filled with pain, this picture now hangs on a wall in my living room. Often, I experience it merely as a flash of color, a familiar punctuation mark seen from the corner of my eye as I go about my daily business, evoking no more emotion than a table lamp or a footstool. This is a well-known phenomenon, in which we cease to notice things that are part of our everyday life. Just as I sleep soundly through the sirens and other noises that surely punctuate most nights in my busy, urban neighborhood, even great artworks can start to function like wallpaper when we see them every day.

Today, however, I almost cannot bear to look at Toni’s silent witness to our collective howl of anguish. Today, the wound is wide open once again. Today, the violent monster winks and leers, rejoicing at the death of innocent children, at once-exultant runners who now have no legs. Today, the pain and suffering and fear spreads insidiously among us, daring us to go out in crowds and cheer on some other glorious, sun-filled day, lest the monster strike again. Today, I wish that I could paint away my sorrow, but right now I can only weep.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Food for the Soul


Church of Il Gesu, Rome, Lazio, Italy. 
©© Photograph by Tango7174, available at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Lazio_Roma_Gesu1_tango7174.jpg
This semester, I have been teaching a course called Picturing the Church. It’s a gallop through two thousand years of Western art, looking at the ways that artists have responded to matters of faith and doctrine in paint, sculpture, architecture, and other media. Like any survey course, it’s an impossible task to boil down so many ideas and images into two hours a week spread over fourteen weeks, but I keep on trying.
The other day, I was trying to explain the tension between the intellectual, scientific ideals of the Age of Reason as exemplified in neo-classical art and architecture, and the focus on emotion, passion, and immediate engagement with the natural world so typical of Romantic poetry, music, and painting. Earlier, I had shown them the lush, evocative, Baroque interior of Il Jesu, the Roman Catholic response to the Reformation austerity as embodied in the whitewashed walls of John Calvin’s oratory in Geneva and the equally interior of church of St Bavo at Haarlem as depicted in Pieter Saenredam’s 1648 painting of that name. 

Pieter Janszoon Saenredam
Interior of the Church of St Bavo, 1648

Now, reflecting on that tension, I am reminded that the entire history of Christian art can be thought of as swinging continuously between the poles of austerity and embellishment. The argument goes all the way back to the disciples who argued with Jesus about the expensive ointment that Mary used to anoint his feet. As John tells the story, Judas exclaims “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.”[John 12:5 NIV] but Jesus admonishes him to leave her alone, saying that we will always have the poor with us.
In the fifth century, the hermit monk Nilus objected to the proliferation of images in churches, saying “it would be childish and infantile to distract the eyes of the faithful with the aforementioned [trivialities]. It would be, on the other hand, the mark of a firm and manly mind to represent a single cross in the sanctuary.”In the twelfth century, Abbott Suger defended the lavish decoration of the newly-rebuilt Abbey Church of St. Denis against the imprecations of his contemporary, Bernard of Clairvaux, like this:
If golden pouring vessels, golden vials, golden little mortars used to serve, by the word of God or the command of the Prophet, to collect the blood of goats or calves or the red heifer: how much more must golden vessels, precious stones, and whatever is most valued among all created things, be laid out, with continual reverence and full devotion, for the reception of the blood of Christ! . . . The detractors also object that a saintly mind, a pure heart, a faithful intention ought to suffice for this sacred function; and we, too explicitly and especially affirm that it is these that principally matter. [But] we profess that we must do homage also through the outward ornaments of sacred vessels. . . . with all inner purity and with all outward splendor. [Abbot Suger, “De Administratione,” 65-67]
Bernard, meanwhile, wrote disparagingly of the “enormous height, extravagant length and unnecessary width of the churches, of their costly polishings and curious paintings which catch the worshipper's eye and dry up his devotion.” He admitted that such things probably do no harm to the simple and devout, whatever problems it may pose for the vain and greedy. However, he pointed out, for poor, spiritual, cloistered monks such things are at best distractions and at worst invitations to sin. He went on,
But in cloisters, where the brothers are reading, what is the point of this ridiculous monstrosity, this shapely misshapenness, this misshapen shapeliness? What is the point of those unclean apes, fierce lions, monstrous centaurs, half-men, striped tigers, fighting soldiers and hunters blowing their horns?... In short, so many and so marvelous are the various shapes surrounding us that it is more pleasant to read the marble than the books, and to spend the whole day marveling over these things rather than meditating on the law of God. Good Lord! If we aren't embarrassed by the silliness of it all, shouldn't we at least be disgusted by the expense? [Bernard of Clairvaux, “Apology”]
And so today we have both the National Cathedral and plain, unadorned, cinderblock meeting houses, and we still wage budget battles in our churches and our secular legislative bodies that pit the arts against the never-ending needs of the poor.  But the scriptures suggest that maybe we should not be disgusted by the expense, in both time and money, of embellishing our lives. For instance, Psalm 19 praises God's handiwork. It reminds us that it is God's nature to make beautiful things, whether it is the sun or moon or sky, or the laws by which the created world, and we in it, must live. While neither the words "justice" nor "beauty" occur in this psalm, both are implicit in its themes and construction. Too often, justice and beauty are set up as opposing forces, as if it were true that to work for justice is to be oblivious to beauty. But the very existence of this poem of praise, and the many other references both to God's creation and to the human arts, is a reminder that physical food is not enough, that justice includes the beautiful things which are often referred to as "food for the soul."



Thursday, April 4, 2013

Drawing on the Edge of Faith

installation photo from the
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution website
“Portraiture Now: Drawing on the Edge,”
at http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/drawing/
Recently, I went to the National Portrait Gallery to see a show called Portraiture Now: Drawing on the Edge. Like many titles in the arts, this one is filled with intentional ambiguity. Each of the six artists whose works are featured—Mequitta Ahuja, Mary Borgman, Adam Chapman, Ben Durham, Till Freiwald, and Rob Matthew —push drawing into new territory, exploring the edges where drawing meets photography, painting, collage, writing, video, and digital imaging.

Some of the drawings are very large, expanding faces until they stretch nearly from ceiling to floor, filling the visual field even when the viewer stands on the other side of the smallish rooms in which these works are installed. Others are tiny, depicting their subjects within circles only a few inches in diameter. But whether large or small, all of the works in this show invite close inspection, revealing their most interesting moments at the edges where visual description meets the unmarked surface, where clothing folds against skin, where one color or tone fades into another.

Many of the drawings are edgy in other ways, as well. Ben Durham’s exquisitely rendered portraits, composed of words written by hand on thick, soft, handmade paper, begin as mug shots from the Lexington, KY police blotter. I found myself repeatedly moving in close, where I could study the edges where the lush, deeply textured surface of the paper gives way to the illusion of smooth, radiant skin, trying to understand just how the artist managed such an improbable balancing act. The nearly-photographic crispness of the image became even more improbable when I realized that every stroke of graphite contributed not only to the visual likeness, but also to letters, words, and sentences that together recount the artist’s memories of everything he can remember or has been told about the subject.

installation photo from the
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution website
“Portraiture Now: Drawing on the Edge,”
at http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/drawing/
Mary Borgman’s huge charcoal drawings on Mylar similarly drew me in, inviting me to see the traces of her hand and mind in the gradations of dark and light that, from a greater distance, resolved themselves into old, soft denim; intricately braided dreadlocks; or luminous, bare skin. The people in Borgman’s full-length portraits look calmly out at the viewer with so much physical presence that they seemed almost ready to engage me in conversation. Larger than life, these extraordinary portraits of rather ordinary-looking men transform their subjects as they emerge mysteriously from smudges, rubbings, and erasures that flow as if the charcoal had somehow become a liquid rather than a gritty powder in the artist’s hand.

For me, however, the most surprising edge was in portraits that were, in many ways, the most traditional. Rob Matthews presents at least twenty austere, highly detailed, depictions of his friends and family in simple graphite on paper, all carefully circumscribed to fit into identical, perfect circles. In one, the artist’s wife holds a crocheted skull; in another, his father holds a seashell; in a third, his sister-in-law holds a candle. The titles give each subject’s name and relationship to the artist, as well as some explanation of the object that serves as that person’s attribute, a marker of his or her self-understanding. In these the tour-de-force drawings, the sitter’s personality is captured in a sagging shoulder, a stray wisp of hair, or a barely-lifted eyebrow, all of which become, on closer inspection, no more than subtle gradations from deep black to an almost invisible gray built up in cross-hatching almost too small for the naked eye to perceive.

What was most edgy about Matthews’ work, however, was not the drawings themselves, but the quite casual, and completely unapologetic, references to sincere Christian faith. One portrait is identified on the title card as “my pastor”; another, describing the image of his friend and fellow artist, Mikel, says “Mikel holds a lily that traditionally symbolizes purity”; a third informs us that his sister-in-law “wanted to hold a candle for Matthew 5:15”. Others are more oblique or even entirely secular: his father holds that seashell “because the ocean is where he goes to block out the rest of the world and connect with God”; Amy holds a Mason Jar as “a symbol of multiple meanings”; Rebecca holds a cat whose “posture suggests how much she did NOT want to be drawn.” [to see photographs of these images, go to http://npg.si.edu/exhibit/drawing/matthews.html]

Not so very long ago, any artist who aspired to recognition in a serious, high art venue would have carefully disguised any shadow of conventional Christianity under a cover of historical or ethnic interest. As recently as 2004, noted art historian James Elkins upset a lot of committed, serious artists who also happened to be serious, committed Christians by telling a story about an art jury that refused a work they had previously accepted on learning that it had been painted by a nun. At that time, Elkins was simply describing a point of view that was widely shared among members of the visual art establishment when he observed,
Committed, engaged, ambitious, informed art does not mix with dedicated, serious, thoughtful, heartfelt religion. Whenever the two meet, one wrecks the other. Modern spirituality and contemporary art are rum companions: either the art is loose and unambitious, or the religion is one-dimensional and unpersuasive. [On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, p. 115]
Now, just a few years later, that once hard line between art and faith seems to have, if not dissolved, at least become less well-defined. It has become an edge, a place where one thing may imperceptibly shade into something else, changing our perceptions of both. The drawings of Rob Matthews are neither loose nor unambitious. Nor is the religion to which he alludes one-dimensional and unpersuasive. Rather, it is a simple fact of life for him and his family and friends, as solidly rooted in their daily life as the skulls, candles, and seashells that connect them to death and eternal life.