PressPausePlay from House of Radon on Vimeo.

A powerful movie asking important questions about the digitization and democratization of art.

“The artist’s central dogma was beauty, and beauty is protean.”

The painter Helen Frankenthaler died December 27, 2011, in Darien, Connecticut. Obituaries by The New York Times and The Washington Post construe Frankenthaler’s importance as the inventor of a “revolutionary” soak-stain technique in which poured paint unites with the canvas; a method which made possible the Color Field movement. That similar journalistic profiles would never focus the same attention on Rembrandt’s mystifying, heterogeneous technique, or da Vinci’s departure from buon fresco in The Last Supper, evinces the extent to which art in the 20th century has been defined in terms of ideas; even ideas fastened to events as miniature and ritual as the act of pouring paint from a coffee tin.

Helen Frankenthaler entered the art world at a tender age. In 1950, at 23, she was already going down on Friday nights to The Club on East Eighth Street, meeting with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner and the other members of the New York School’s Abstract Expressionist movement, and falling almost immediately into a five-year relationship with the movement’s venerable philosopher-in-residence, Clement Greenberg. But more than simply clever and precocious, Frankenthaler was well-educated, well-financed, and serious. At 20, she toured Europe’s major cities, and at twenty-one, after receiving an inheritance from her late father, a Supreme Court judge, established her own painting studio in New York City while pursuing graduate-level courses in art history at Columbia University. In the coming years, Frankenthaler would see the treasures of Europe again, this time with Greenberg, examining masterpieces in Venice, Madrid, Rome, and London.

Frankenthaler’s love of art for its own sake, and Greenberg’s insistence that art appeal to the senses, doubtless helped inflate Frankenthaler’s lucid, self-contained, style. The paintings seem to be motivated by an interest in the beauty of paint itself—particularly the blooming effects associated with “staining” the canvas—and paint’s organization on the canvas. Small’s Paradise (1964), a bilaterally symmetrical puzzle of red and green, retains the inherent, visceral, qualities of paint—its sinuous, organic, contours, its pure color—but disciplines these elements in a classical design. Continents of green, red, pink and blue organize in a top-to-bottom asymmetrical figure in which massive, four-sided shapes in the upper half of the painting fragment into more delicate forms below; the two opposing sides sustaining equilibrium through contrast, and the entire, bouncing complementary field of red and green constrained by a dark band of blue at the appropriate spatial interval. Throughout her career, Frankenthaler’s interest in painting was pure, not sustained or clouded by political or existential ambitions, and without trailing polemics. “With any picture, on paper or on canvas,” the artist said in a 2003 interview with the New York Times, “the main idea is: does it work? Is it beautiful?”

By the close of 1951, Frankenthaler had already held a one-woman exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and participated in “Ninth Street: Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture,” both in New York City. In 1959, Frankenthaler’s attention to pictorial organization began to gather its proper rewards. She received first prize in the Paris Premiere Biennale for Jacob’s Ladder, a painting, which, if lacking the chromatic interest of her later work, upheld Frankenthaler’s values of form. Just ten years later, the Whitney Museum of American Art would launch a retrospective of the 41 year-old artist. Subsequent retrospectives followed in 1986, at the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1998, at the Guggenheim Museum.

Frankenthaler, however, had been fortunate enough to enter the scene at an era congenial to the brighter and less philosophical products of the New York School. Her entrance coincided with a postwar spirit of optimism, the artist’s career riding the same channels as rock and roll. The work of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, contemporaries of Frankenthaler and the first and most famous actors of Abstraction Expressionism, had been nourished differently. All three had survived the spiritual and social assaults of two world wars, and both Newman and Rothko had, with their art, attempted to build an insulating system against them. Rothko claimed his solemn, economical canvases conveyed “tragedy, ecstasy” and “doom,” and that “the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” But the painters’ existential defenses were not incorruptible. By the time Frankenthaler met Pollock in the early Fifties, his classic drip technique had already begun to subside, and he had resumed his alcoholism. In 1970 Rothko’s career would end with his death by suicide just as Frankenthaler’s work was ascending to maturity.

What impact Frankenthaler’s work has had on American painting is often summarized in a single anecdote. In the spring of 1953, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, two painters from Washington D.C., took the train into Manhattan to visit Clement Greenberg. Coincidentally, Frankenthaler’s studio held the recently completed Mountains and Sea; a stain-painted, nine-feet-wide canvas inspired by watercolors she had made on the Canadian coast.

Pollock’s drip technique had already attained philosophical importance for theorist-critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg—Rosenberg construing Pollock’s trope as giving rise to “not a picture but an event” (Greenberg disagreed)—and technique had been raised to the proportions of an idea; technique no longer the handmaid to works of art, but works of theory. In this highly oxygenated universe, little 24 year-old Frankenthaler’s idea, her concept of paint poured onto unprimed canvas, exploded like a match. Frankenthaler, Morris Louis declared, “became a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”

In one sense, the lavish attention paid to this event is unfortunate. It is true that Frankenthaler’s “invention” indirectly launched the careers of Louis and Noland who adopted it, and became the foundation of the Color Field movement; a movement comprising paintings, which, like Frankenthaler’s, were mostly luminous and stained. But to the extent that Frankenthaler’s soak-staining technique is praised for itself—as an idea—Frankenthaler’s true legacy is obscured. It is doubtful the artist would have regarded the technique as important—except in the classical sense of enabling a particular variety of beauty. Frankenthaler was always mainly interested in the formal relationships which Rothko dismissed as being not “the point.” Frankenthaler’s paintings, although perhaps lacking the imagination of Rothko’s misty, sublime work, is not constrained by allegiance to a particular mood or theory, and therefore free to radically change form with each instantiation. Frankenthaler never embraced the “moral and metaphysical” justifications of her circle because, of course, she simply refused them. The artist’s central dogma was beauty, and beauty is protean.

Amanda Johnson studies painting and philosophy and teaches a course on “the art of looking at Art” in Memphis, Tennessee. Her work can be found elsewhere including the online arts journal “The Curator”.

…The incarnation is the Father’s supreme rhetorical gesture, in which all he says in creation is given its perfect emphasis. This is particularly evident in the Gospel accounts of Christ’s miracles: the healing of infirmities, the raising of the dead, the feeding of the hungry, even the transformation of water into wine. These are not acts that manipulate or negate the order of creation in order to achieve an astounding effect; in them the goodness of creation is reaffirmed, its peace is restored: they repeat God’s gift of creation by imparting joy in the good things of the world—food and wine, fellowship and rejoicing, life and vision and health—to those in whom joy is lacking. Christ’s miracles—as do all the aspects of his life and ministry—constitute a semeiosis (John’s Gospel, in fact, calls them to semeia) that restores the original semeiosis of the world, the language of divine glory, and that reorients all the signs of creation toward the everlasting sign of God who walks among them. As Augustine remarks, Christ’s miracles are not intended merely to provoke amazement; to the person able to read them as signs they are simply true, a discourse of God’s truth, a text adorned by the particularly lovely illuminations of the writer, but a text nonetheless. Mere marvels—mere tricks—could never be woven into the greater narrative, either of Christ’s nature as God’s express likeness or of creation in Christ, because such marvels always constitute an interruption, inducing not only awe but confusion; the semeia of Christ, however, are transparently acts of lordship and love and testify to Christ’s nature as the creative Word who can command and restore all the words of Creation.

Which means, conversely, that all the signs of created being may, without contradiction, speak of him: there is a limitless array of ways in which creation’s words may be employed in service to the Word who has spoken them all eternally within the infinity of his “ever greater.” Every declaration of Christ (such as the church’s confession of faith in him), consequent upon the declaration of divine love that he is, an attempt to express the glory that is visible as the “other side” of his way of abasement, the Taboric splendor that breaks from his form in an endless series of signs. No claim regarding Christ can be excessive; everything that the Christian tradition says or attempts to say about him can be, at most, a joyous but inadequate attempt to span the infinity of the sign that he is: an epektasis of words, in and toward the Word…

“Not a formless sublime exceeding and annihilating the beautiful, but an endless display of beauty, surpassing the beautiful as the ever more beautiful.”  – David Bentley Hart

Sola Scriptura permeates the portion of protestant faith I have grown up within. It is a term which tends toward an epistemology that raises the written word above everything else, after all John 1:1 tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is powerful, the word—both the spoken word that made everything that was made and the Word through whom life and light was given to “all mankind [as] the light [that] shines in the darkness” that cannot be overcome. But within that same tradition, the word is often eviscerated.

The artist Makoto Fujimura was recently commissioned to illuminate the four Gospels in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. It is the first time the Bible has been illumined in centuries with gold and silver leaf, verdigris, vermilion and azurite. Far different from the bibles I have owned—starkly black and white, pages diaphanous, perhaps the binding is leather but the gilt is suspect. Similarly, the early Reformers white washed church walls, eradicated icons and images and alter pieces and simplified architecture all to convincingly enunciate the great importance of sola scriptura—the word. They did this because there were abuses—great abuses and tragedies where the word was undervalued, beautiful as it was, but unknown. Maybe all they did was necessity. I do believe the Protestant Reformation has done much good for the Church; after all, it is much closer to the concept of the priesthood of all believers, now, then when under the exclusive domain of the papacy. But it was a reactionary movement, nonetheless, and like many reactions it conceivably went too far to value only, as Jerram Barrs says, that which exhibits “bare simplicity, barrenness, and even ugliness” as if these things were “somehow considered more pleasing to God”—more spiritual, even.

It did not help that along with the Protestant Reformation strutted the Enlightenment, both at times made bedfellows. One can almost hear the likes of Voltaire, Hegel, Kant, Hume and Rousseau singing along with Rabbit of Winnie the Pooh fame,

Never trust your tummies, tails, or toes
You can’t learn a thing from any of those
Here’s another fact I must disclose
From the mighty pen true wisdom flows.
(“If It Says So”, Winnie the Pooh)

In so much we have the proliferation of reason—that abstract portion which constructs texts on texts. In Christian circles we call these Systematic Theologies. I am no anti-intellectual, but know enough of philosophy from Plato to Descartes to Derrida to know where reason alone takes its travelers. I know enough to assert that an epistemology which assumes we are merely “minds on a stick” (James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom) as opposed to tummies, tails, toes, minds, ears, noses and eyes (amongst other things) is deficient. After all, we are called to know what surpasses even knowledge. (Ephesian 3) And the only way I know to accomplish this is incarnationally.

This is the evisceration: that the Word is not truly flesh, full of grace and truth (John 1:4) and “the [very] image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1:15) Rather that it is just a word flattened into 2-Dimensional space—made just an excerpt, an abstraction of text. When C. S. Lewis wrote of human nature, he called it amphibious; that is, we exist simultaneously as physical and spiritual beings like a salamander lives in water and on land. But somehow the spiritual is not just coexistent along with the physical; it is intertwined with it and accessed by means of it. Martin Luther wrote of God that He cannot be seen directly, but He can be seen through the “face or mask” of creation, (Martin Luther, Commentary on Galations) which is echoed when Ravi Zacharias mentions, “we make a cardinal mistake if we look only at the [external of a thing]. We cannot stop like secularists do by looking at something; we’ve got to look through it and beyond it.” We must consider the physical and spiritual, visible and invisible, material and immaterial, as a surface folding in on itself which creates a continuous, unseen interior that is not incomprehensible because of its concealment but knowable through its tactile surface exposed for all to perceive. It is much like the Orthodox Christian concept of Icon, which is defined by their tradition as a window into the unseen world “where the visible and invisible embrace each other from a fire that no longer destroys but rather lights up the divine face for humanity,” (Jean-Luc Marion) and the Incarnation creates this economy in which material reveals the immaterial and transcendent.

This is the very reason why Romans 1 can emphatically assert:

Since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. (Romans 1:19-20)

Nature itself bids testament to the unseen. Psalms, Job, the prophets all tell of God’s greatness, power, beauty, justice, goodness, truth and mercy, and creation is often the evidence for it. Imagine the power of the sea even when pacified, even at low tide—the pounding surf, the unremitting sound of waves, amplified in the tempest, and at times devastatingly destructive. Nevertheless, it is a place of peace and relaxation, of bounty and of infinite, creative diversity. There is a Buddhist saying which states that every stone has a sermon to disclose. Yes, every stone and grain of sand, every krill and whale, too, point back to God, themselves icons. Imagine a place of praise no longer contained within the four walls of a church building but extended into the world; this temple as large as the cosmos and all of its contents sacraments. It is equally full of wonder, this place, which is always fresh because of the creative pervasiveness redolent from dappled and variegated things like shells, bejeweled and spun in delicate Fibonaccis, to the expedition into that ever telescoping realm of atomic, subatomic, fermion, quark, lepton, Higgs boson.

This is the world the artist attempts to preserve and enlarge; he does so through his vocation regardless of his faith, but that is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say, the artist works at the nexus of the physical and spiritual creating and identifying icons whether to God, or to an unknown god resident in the Aeropagus, but always inescapably to the Transcendent. Artists work incarnationally; in so much it is a form of cognition often revealing what could not otherwise be known or qualified. The art historian, curator, author and Christian Daniel Siedell calls the practice and consumption of art a form of “non-rational knowledge”, but he just echoes Thomas Aquinas. It can make visible the invisible. It can teach us things that the rational scientia find difficult, or mysterious or down-right impossible, to affirm and believe. The scripture attests to this fact in its structure. There is but one didactic sermon  I am aware of in all of scripture, the great majority of which is song, poetry and story. And even so, the scripture emboldens us to look outside of it.

My favorite example is Psalm 34:8, “Taste and know that the Lord is good.” It is my favorite kind of sermon, one found in the delight of food. Far from being an extravagance (or more likely because of its extravagance), good food (the culinary arts) is a means to participate in the goodness of God. It is a goodness that cannot be known in any other way; it is a pervasive goodness, the kind to be enjoyed and remembered at every meal (for as often as you eat and drink). It is to be known in a satisfying cheese burger as well as foie gras micuit strait from a street vendor in Sarlat, in a glass of Spanish, spiced lemonade, or a cup of coffee or in a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti “La Tâche.” With each sip or bite, with every hmmm, we lift up our voices in praise acknowledging God’s goodness.

Never doubt it is a goodness expressed through artistry. I would never take a bite from an onion as if it were an apple, but sliced with a bit of garlic, salt, olive oil and carrots and the scent becomes splendid; add to it apple cider vinegar, jalapeños and a blend of spices and you’ll have escabeche (for fish, chicken or pork); one of my favorite meals. Much of beauty is latent, like this, in need of cultivation, exploration, experimentation and craftsmanship to fully render. And though I can praise at every level of artistry, I find that some burgers are more effusive with it, as they are more lavishly exemplary of God’s unmatched goodness.

There is so much more that can be said of food as icon. The corollary between it and Christ as bread and wine or, as the Gospel of John points out, living water and living bread, which quenches all thirst and satisfies all hunger. Good and satisfying food is anticipatory of our ultimate satisfaction at the wedding feast in heaven, but even its lack speaks, too. For hunger pangs are our regular reminder of our great need—our thirst for God.

The psalmist directs our attention also to the category of the sublime—that Romantic era word for greatness beyond all possibility of calculation or measurement, like the psalmist describes:

You answer us in righteousness, with awe-inspiring works, God of our salvation, the hope of all the ends of the earth and the distant seas; You establish the mountains by Your power, robed with strength; You silence the roar of the seas, the roar of their waves, and the tumult of the nations. Those who live far away are awed by Your signs; You make east and west shout for joy. (Psalm 65:5-8)

So it is, when I look at the photography of Ansel Adams or Richard Hoesel or Frans Lanting, I see sublimity. There is power in Ansel Adam’s images; consider “Canyon de Chelly”, “Monolith, The Face of Half Dome”, “Winter Sunrise, from Lone Pine” or “Tetons and the Snake River”. Each celebrates God’s awe-inspiring works, intentionally or not; they speak of majesty. Ansel describes Yosemite Valley as “always sunrise, glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.” The valley captured his imagination, and it needed to be shared. With his heavy large format, Korona View, camera and magazine of 8 x 10 glass slides he ascended mountain sides and often perched precariously between rock-face and abyss to capture these incredible images. But as anyone who has snapped a picture knows there is a knack to translating the three-dimensional onto photographic paper. It only begins with ISO, shutter speed and aperture. For Ansel it was knowledge of filters, light, lenses, papers and enlargers, dark room technique but most of all an imagination in order to visualize the final artifact. Half Dome had a story to tell that day in 1927, just as the psalmist says, “Day after day they pour out speech” (Psalm 19:2), and Ansel Adams listened, heard it and had the capacity to translate it for all to see. When I sit to listen to his or another’s retelling I wish to mingle with its splendor; I am raptured and left stirred with a deep longing “to find the place where all the beauty came from.” (C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces)

The response of the psalmist to such moving splendor is oftenest, praise in the shape of music: “Praise the Lord with the lyre; make music to Him with a ten stringed harp. Sing a new song to Him; play skillfully on the strings, with a joyful shout.” (Psalm 33:2-3) A new song, the anonymous author writes. Why must it be a new song? The theologian, David Bentley Hart postulates it is out of music’s innate ability to represent the polyphony of being, specifically the infinite music of the divine Being “whose beauty and variety can never be exhausted” (David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite). Take Bach’s Art of Fugue which is an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject. Each of the 14 fugues develops from a single, deceptively simple, musical theme.

A very good friend of mine, Roger Lowther, is a Julliard trained organist who is intimately familiar with the works of Bach. One evening he was explaining his love for this collection of music which ends mysteriously with the “unfinished fugue,” Contrapunctus XIV. Early musicologists surmised that Bach had died before its completion; modern scholarship has its own and different theories, but Roger told me he believed it to be intentionally left so. The idea behind the Art of Fugue is the richness of variety possible in a lone musical theme. By Contrapunctus XIV, it becomes evident that this theme’s contours cannot be exhausted; it could progress, infinitely building and extending itself. So the composer prematurely ends it as a statement of this disclosure. Unfinished it is arresting; for to perceive the infinite one must be yanked from time. If this feels like an unnatural terminus it is because the listener has left the familiar for the unfamiliar, or as Lewis tells us in The Last Battle, “The dream is ended: this is the morning”, and temporarily we have awakened to the morning whilst in the midst of a dream.

But regardless of where Bach chose to end the Art of Fugue, it would have been left unfinished even if musically resolved. For, there is an infinite reserve in the notes A, B, C, D, E, F, & G, even if further constrained by one simple theme. We see this in the Jazz scales, which open up endless provisions of improvisation such that each performance of Brubeck’s Take Five is marvelously unique. Then there is the joke that all Rock ’n Roll is achievable with just four Barre chords; humorous as it is, it smacks of the possibility contained even within the most modest of sets. After all, aren’t these just repetitions unbounded by imagination? Consider the possibilities of color variation from just three hues: red, yellow and blue. God’s imagination conceived of an eight-legged octopus, a bipedal man, a horned narwhale, and a creepy gulper eel all from 4 amino acids. What the musician achieves is an echo rumbling with the resonance of the infinite God, himself an ever renewing song. It is a modest set, yet the variety intrinsic to it reveals emphatically the truly boundlessness of a God whom, himself, has no limits.

To this point we have over looked the most ancient of the arts—poetry. Or have we forgotten that the word poet derives from the Greek, meaning “maker” or “creator.” Thus God in his act of creation penned poetry when he uttered “Let there be light.” Imagine figurative language doing more than just implying something else metaphorically but becoming the figure and form of the word, itself. Imagine it having life and breath. “For we are God’s workmanship” (Ephesians 2:10 a) made in the “image” and “likeness” of God. We are his poema the Greek says; we are God’s poems and as such we are tangible symbols of the Creator—we are body and spirit like he is, we are little creators, we are vested with authority. But consider also that God is known through every face and fingerprint, every personality and aptitude. He is both Achilles & Odysseus as he is also Paris; he is both the lion and the lamb, and no less one than the other.

Imagine God created everything in like manner. Imagine that instead of stumbling on “wine and vine” as apt figures of speech, God created them to allegorize himself even when he said in Genesis, “Let the land produce vegetation.” Imagine bread, likewise—lamps, doorways, lambs, lions all created to anticipate the person of God, to give us insight and understanding into his nature and being and not just in the “wow” of it all. And all we must do is look to see God all around us.

Enter the poet. The poet demonstrates the relationship of things. He takes what at first glance appears to be completely other and unifies it. Take for instance these lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains…

Only a poet could see the feline in fog, but once he reveals it, fog forever becomes animated as such. Perhaps this is just an exercise (I do not believe so), but if it is, it exercises the muscles of our own intuition that we might more easily perceive the analogic reality about us—that all things are little metaphors of God. I wish we could all see like Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins perceives the warm glow at sunrise as the very manifestation of the Holy Ghost. He sees God descending in the golden light of morning hovering as if over a nest of chicks. The 20th century Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain, reminds us that the “intellect sees by conceiving, and conceives only to see.” (Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism) If it is all Poetry, we do well to understand poetry; we do well to seek poetic knowledge that we might see what is just below the surface though at first it is obscured; for what is there is often the Holy Ghost.

But poetry plays another crucial role. It fuses the object back to the word—affirming sola scriptura. It reminds us that the Word is interstitial tissue knitting objects together, binding them to spirit and memory alike, otherwise they are just objects, or things. According to Maritain, art is connatural as a person is connatural, bridging body and soul. Maritain’s use of connatural is akin to Lewis’ use of amphibious, except even broader extending to all of reality. A poet’s poem becomes for him a special communication and means of knowing the spirit through the formative—ergo all form; such that “the soul is known in the experience of the world and the world is known in the experience of the soul.” (Maritain, Creative Intuition) Maritain posits, in an ontological argument beyond the scope of this article, that participation with beauty engages the whole human being in the “two substances [soul and body] that function as co-principles of the one existent reality.” (Maritain, The Person) The whole being, including its senses, memory, reason, intellect, heart and will, become engaged whether in the production of art or in the aesthetic experience of it. And not just these portions within us, body and soul, but also, as Tolstoy tells us, the greater community of bodies & souls who have and will yet participate along with us in mutual love of the form wherein splendor is revealed

to become conscious of union and mutual brotherly love. Each glad that another feels what he feels; glad of the communion established not only between him and all present (not only between him and the artist or him and God), but also with all now living who will yet share the same impression; and more than that he feels the mysterious gladness of a communion which reaching beyond the grave, unites us with all men of the past who have been moved by the same feelings and with all men of the future who will yet be touched by them. (Tolstoy, What is Art?)

We know, now, that all love, all relationships (between God & man, man & man and man & World), are mediated through Jesus Christ. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship). Poetry is formed and formative—shaping our very desires through the mediation of love; “poetry unwittingly gives us a foretaste, a hidden desire for supernatural life.” (Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge)

Not just poetry but all art accomplishes this feat, but poetry does so via the spoken word (for poetry is a collection of chosen sounds). Aloud, poetry preserves the word as it reinvigorates language by rejuvenating disappearing, unspoken speech—words as well as metaphors—conceives of new ones, and even realizes genuine poetic utterances in everyday vernacular: at the coffee shop and water-cooler (just as a musician hears notes in train whistles and birdsong). As the word first transformed the spiritual into flesh when it was spoken into the void, poetry transcends the “thingness” of flesh that it might return to the spirit world where once there was only void.

Consider this short poem by Emily Dickinson:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

This simple verse reminds us that even in the absence of things there is no void. Notice how the words “bee” and “revery” are connected through their sounds. First we find the sound “ee” in the final syllable of revery in an imperfect rhyme, but there is also the reverberation of the buzz of the bee in the first stressed syllable—“rev”—and again repeated in the next line as if emulating the Doppler of wing-beats. The bee exists even if it does not exist because it finds itself in revery—in a word; in like manner, “bee” and “prairie” are imperfectly rhymed, also, becoming signs for one another. If the bee can be found in revery, there is a whole prairie there, as well. But the poem goes on to reveal a love for nature one which is known even when it is absent. There is a deep longing to return to bees, foxglove and hyssop; a longing, after reading it, I too share. But it is a desire for more than just bee and prairie. It is a desire for rest; spiritualized, it is a desire for escape into the idyllic. It is a spiritual emotion by which the author, as an embodied soul, and the reader, likewise, come to know each other.

But we have just barely scratched the surface, here. The ancients identified nine muses governing the arts; we have mentioned only a few. We have not yet to comment on painting, sculpture, film, fiction, drama, or comedy, which are each expressive as icons in their own right. There is too much here to flesh out, but needless to say each art form has its own language possessing its own vocabulary and richly communicative—appealing to and speaking through the different senses. Each form expresses a knowledge inaccessible by other means, or at least dulled in its translation. Marshall Mcluhan gave us the phrase “the medium is the message;” it is a wisdom the artist has long known even if left unarticulated. So much is gained from engaging them which would otherwise be left silenced.

But God has seen fit to reveal himself in the infinite variety of his Creation along with all of its perpetuating creations—along with all of its opulent but transitory moments (consider the bee in the prairie or the endlessly changing face of Half Dome) which all exist for “an instant and will disappear forever, and only in the memory of angels [and artists’ souls] will [they] be preserved, above time.” (Maritain, Creative Intuition) God rewards those ardent-hearted who understand that “to love God is to invest the world with significance, a significance which deepens the mysterious presence of things” (Graham Ward) and results in an ever watchful eye and ever transforming hand that helps us all remember that beauty is the radiance of all the transcendentals united.

What is written above is by no means exhaustive. Rather consider it a groundwork on which to build. For the God of the Bible is an inexhaustible sea of splendor, and each singular piece of art possess the capacity for something unique and never to be stated again. This is the nature of the infinite. The Word is much more glorious then ever surmised by reason alone; it is a much brighter light then we first believed, and we must be about the business of chasing after its abundant expanse as it overcomes the darkness with truth, goodness and delight—stirring up our passion to know the God of Beauty. Let us consider ourselves, now, without excuse.

This morning I ran across confirmation: a short documentary about mannequins, 34X25X36. One of the interviewees says in it:

[Mannequins are a type of] religious art. What the churches did was make figures out of wood or paper maiche, and they were trying to replicate for the people what they envisioned these saints were supposed to look like, like we replicate what the perfect girl is…Because if you really start to look at it, it is a continuation of the same thing. I can see where it could be believing in something or worshiping something because it is something that you aim for.

The whole thing is sobering. It reminds me that there is little innocent, though there is much which asks of me to think it so. Watch the whole thing below. Then be on guard.

I can’t help but think wow when watching this slide-show. I wonder as to what it is that, not only, makes me yearn to hold one and display one (or several), but what makes the locksmith yearn to embellish a tool of such simplicity. Walk through your hardware store and see only functionality; I just bought a padlock. Manuel Guerra sees a chance to extend the Garden of Genesis to metallurgy and locks. What if Creation were nothing but an embellishment? After all what need of Creation did God have? Was He incomplete—or so over-full and Creation His excess?

Some may argue that Guerra participates in a craft and not an art form. The distinction is a brewing debate; it is a bewildering mess. But why must we denude his embellishments and categorize it as a lesser form? Because it possesses utility? Are not both high art and craft an overflow of our own excesses and subsequently participatory in the very act of God’s creative excess? Let us keep these things in mind both as we take sides in the art/craft debate and as we create, ennoble or embellish even the most humble of things. Let us consider not just the engineering, but the spirituality of imbuing immeasurably beyond it.

“Just as Christ’s redemptive work ennobles, artists can pick up this God rhythm, take up the ordinary and celebrate it. Through Jesus’ actions in the world we can praise the small, the quiet, and the humble things of this world. The triune God also bids our work to be collaborative, communal, a celebration of the infinite variety of relationships we hold in our lives.”

—Maria, Redeemer Arts

The American Folk Art Museum dramatically transformed the Park Avenue Armory’s historic 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall with the installation of 650 red and white American quilts, all of which were on loan from the collection of Joanna S. Rose. It was the largest exhibition of quilts ever held in the city.

Roughly fifteen artists and friends gathered to watch and discuss the movie Exit Through the Gift Shop. We asked and considered several questions including What is Art, which we believe we solved (you can thank us later). O.K., so if not solved, at least considered along with tradition, branding, money, critics, power, patronship, creativity and making all as they relate to art (all questions raised by the film). The discussion hopefully will get you considering what your place in these things might be both as an artist and consumer of arts. The discussion is lead by Continuum Fellow, Kent Smith.

“I would suggest that we take all of these perspectives on art and consider how they apply to our own Christian life…No work of art is more important than the Christian’s own life, and every Christian is cared upon to be an artist in this sense. He may have no gift of writing, no gift of composing or singing, but each man has the gift of creativity in terms of the way he lives his life. In this sense, the Christian’s life is to be an art work. The Christian’s life is to be a thing of truth and also a thing of beauty in the midst of a lost and despairing world.”
—Art and the Bible, Francis A. Scaeffer

“God names himself the Alpha and Omega of things, their beginning and ending: not the truth that simply lies fixedly beyond the vagrant syllables of being, the silence that surrounds or prescinds from the discourse of finitude, but himself the first and last word, the fullness of speech. God is, so to speak, infinite discourse, full of the perfect utterance of his Word and the limitless variety of the Spirit’s “reply”. Here, in the most elementary terms, is Christian metaphysics: God speaks God, and creation occurs with that speaking, as a rhetorical embellishment, a needless ornament…one in which every created thing [is] a living word, communicating God’s energies to all the senses…and that there is no species of intelligibility that wholly escapes the logic of poetic analogy, metaphor, and deferral; that all is utterance; and that, to borrow a phrase, il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”
—The Beauty of the Infinite, David Bentley Hart

“But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the instituters of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and true.”
—A Defense of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelly

There have been more than two thousand years of great thinkers tasked with the question, what is art. Two thousand years and we are as perplexed as ever yet intent on resolving it, as if the profound having escaped the grasp of Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Schiller, Tolstoy and many other minds of acumen, will settle itself with finality in a discussion amongst friends—not in Critique of Judgment, On the Sublime or Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, but on the pages of some weekly like Christianity Today or the Saturday Evening Post and as easily discardable on the authority of weekly fashions. There are so many wagers and each wager in some sense is a bet against all the others. Mostly, I presume, to justify personal preference. As an artist myself, I want to know that I am creating good art. As a consumer of art, I want to know that what I like is pertinent possessing a value which by association increases my own personal worth. If I were a collector, it would help me to know what possessed latent value before I invested as well a prediction of my art trove’s worth over time. I want to know for selfish reasons that my art is good while yours is rather, at its best, a noble craft undeserving of the label—that I am cool and deserving while you are unsophisticated.

Considering the opening quotes, an altogether different question must be considered. For what is art assumes that creation itself—all of creation, everything that we know and breathe—isn’t an artistic embellishment, that life lived isn’t an art form, and that creativity of any kind—even the creativity of a lawyer practicing law—isn’t pure poetry. It presumes that a large portion of these things are conspicuously dissimilar from what can be hung on a wall, put on a pedestal or enjoyed eyes closed in a concert hall. And if these can be categorized as art and not art, then the assertion can be put to one poem over another. As has been noted, one can spin their facile brain wheels for thousands of years over the question: is John Donne superior to B. H. Fairchild; after all, one is formal and the other is free verse?

Instead what if everything we knew to be true, even the rules of existence were imbued with a primordial art such that the culture of “civil society” and the physics of the universe colluded in an always artful reality—that every dust mite and ant were poetic and that every act, moral or immoral, were resigned acts of creative embellishment? The question what is art is solved, then, by the answer, you and you standing on it. It brings into unity those reams of warring discourses which proclaim it to be order vs. self expression and says, “Yes,” to both. It says it is both high and low, observable and unobservable, profane and secular all at the same time.  The question what is art becomes a useless one.

A better question then is what kind of art is best for me to engage with and in. This question shouldn’t be confused with rugged individualism or subjectivity though it does acknowledge the importance of uniqueness like a single note in a symphony is both unique and necessary in the larger composition. It doesn’t stand in judgment of the notes before or after it; it stands firmly on the staff and sings when asked to. It is a question that judges my own capacity, gifting, interests, and aesthetic always from the framework of “fearfully and wonderfully made”. It seeks to improve my place, and as God wills, not me, the place of others. My definition of art presumes I know better what others need. It is an act of judgmentalism, superiority and legalism.  On the other hand, what art is best for me, acknowledges that all could be profitable either as steps in someone’s growth or in ways that even discordance in music can be profitable in creating tension that draws attention to the genius of the Composer who is capable of resolving all discordance.

It is not rugged individualism because this question begs for the answer: tradition. In other words, what is the artistic tradition in which I wish to participate? And as discussed, in some sense all art falls under the primal tradition of God as Composer and Director—in this sense all art is, therefore, good art. For the first call outlined in the Biblical account of creation puts Adam and Eve to the task of expanding the Garden over the whole earth. Gardening, an act of creativity, is a vocation that continues the tradition and story of God’s hand in creation. It is an overcoming of the Chaos with nurturing care. From the first, God demonstrates to us that artistic practice requires participation in a story. Our first parents rejected that story establishing a second—also one to which we are somewhat beholden. And both stories have established for us all tradition (notice that even rejection of tradition is itself already a tradition). But the greater story is that all chaos and disorder can be redeemed. God promises to enter the new tradition of man after the fall in order to interweave the two stories back together. God does not reject the story; he mends it and embraces it.

So, in like manner what art is best for me does not reject Banksy, Duchamp, Koons or Pollock. It does not reject hubcap art as childlike craft. Instead, it acknowledges that each does participate in the great story of art. Not just artfully, mind you but creating, naming and continuing the infinite discourse of God. It says, too, that the traditions of painter or lawyer are not meant to be part my story-thread as much as it might also say that Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ isn’t either. All no less creative, or artistic, in their own right—nor less a part in the story—just because I do not approve or participate in their respective traditions—not if all creation is art (let me give up on that distinction!). Instead, it makes it a personal decision (no less pertinent because so) about calling. The question becomes how might my life and art become a thing of beauty? What have I been placed here to do? What teachers do I want and wish for in order to accomplish it? What can I learn even from reluctant teachers like Serrano whom I wouldn’t otherwise care to sit under except to understand the greater score of God above? Am I called to enter into a tradition to redeem it, or am I to continue a tradition that has already experienced that redemption? Both are valid. Both are necessary. Both God above has fully staffed.

The 19th c. critic, Walter Pater, writes in Studies in the History of the Renaissance that definitions of beauty are unprofitable; instead, a temperament that can be moved by the presence of beauty is most important. He asks “How is my nature modified by [beauty’s] presence and under its influence?” This is the underlying ethic of the question what art is best for me. It is the reality that art affects my spiritual person; if art is all things and everywhere, I should walk with open eyes both to see its splendor and to walk without naiveté. How easily though, the question what is art can morph into an equally nefarious one what is the moral good in art. But it is not the art itself that is good or bad; it is the temperament of the consumer which transforms it, thusly. More precisely it isn’t even me (Bonhoeffer writes in Ethics that man cannot be an agent of the moral good) it is Christ in me that creates this temperament.  Longinus remarks that “sublimity is the echo of a great soul.” Such a soul can see the ever transforming, redemptive hand of God where others see only its discord. This great soul can be an agent of God entering into stories in order to exact redemption; not by imposing a rule completely foreign to them but within the very flesh and trope of their existence.

As an artist or consumer of art, let us each think less didactically. What art is best for me is more fully realized in which story do I belong. What tradition is my tradition? Which tradition or story do I want to be a part of and a contributor to? These are much more profound questions. They are more thoughtful and more appropriate. They will produce the beautiful life that recognizes the creative and artistic hand of God everywhere and in all things—that can embrace the good and is attuned to the good in everything. Let us nurture our souls with this kind of good and not the selfish demarcations we are so quick to universalize; for the universal is as Schaeffer, Hart and Shelley have witnessed: that the world and all that is in it is already a grand work of art in which I am called to contribute, as best I can.

David Bentley Hart is quickly becoming my favorite theologian. Read what he says about Bruckner’s 9th symphony to understand why:

There are some pieces of music that, by their nature, should remain unfinished. No fourth movement that Bruckner could have composed this side of death would have fulfilled the deeper design that unfolded throughout all his work. That last adagio is already so otherworldly, and so overflowing with a sweet hunger for God, and so deep a longing for the timeless within time, that only eternity could bring it to its proper completion. And there are some artists who, by all rights, should write themselves into eternity. Bach is obviously the most perfect example, leaving that final great fugue on B-A-C-H in Die Kunst der Fuge abruptly unfinished; one senses that it had to be taken beyond time in order to be made perfect. But Bruckner too was an artist who required more of his art than time could supply.

I should like to take this, I think, as a metaphor for all our lives, each of which is in some measure always unfinished within the limits of time. At least, if faith provides any wisdom that can simultaneously humble and console us, it is this knowledge: each of our lives is an opus imperfectum, which within its own immanent terms must in some sense end largely thwarted and unrealized; but we may truly hope that, sub specie aeternitatis, all the scattered and incomplete truths time contains will be gathered up into a final truth, and everything lost that is worth finding and everything broken that is worth mending will be restored, and all of it will finally be brought to a consummation that fulfills—but also immeasurably surpasses—the work we have always only begun.

The whole article can be found at First Things, here.