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”.

One of the biggest questions surrounding Exit Through the Gift Shop is whether the movie is fact or fiction. Did Banksy stage the whole affair to make a statement about the commercialization of street art, or is the monster born out of Thierry Guetta real? It makes sense to let the movie have its cake and eat it too, because whether it is real or not, both sides of the argument make for compelling discussion. The fact that Thierry never truly understood the meaning behind what street artists (or any artists for that matter) are doing speaks volumes for either side of the coin.

When looking at street art, or even Thierry’s art, it seems as if the making of the art is more important than the art itself. After all, the function of street art looks to be self-promotion. By posting something repeatedly (whether it be the street artist’s style or repeating their logo), the street artist is able to make a name for themselves. An artist wants to be recognized, but in the case of street art, we can ask if posting something repeatedly is a form of artistic expression. To take this even further, is it still art if you destroy property to get yourself out there? Once you begin to vandalize buildings, art begins to lose its rules. Of course, the argument can be made about whether or not graffiti can even be considered an art form, especially since the law is broken to bring it to life.

Bansky makes a defense for street art by saying that spending money does not make good art. This is shown by the simplicity of the materials needed to create street art compared with the money and resources sunk into putting together Thierry’s pieces. While Bansky wants to send an individual message each time he marks up a wall, Thierry (or Mr. Brainwash, which is the name he gives himself as an artist), only cares about the money. Each artist wants to make an impression, but the intention behind it is completely different.

Mr. Brainwash is really trying to do just that by turning himself into some sort of a cultural icon, which opens up the question about whether or not these sorts of icons (which includes their creations) can be labeled as art. A perfect example is the golden arches. They were obviously designed by an artist, but when you look at the message, it’s all about triggering a particular response. When we see those arches, the first thing that should come to mind is a hamburger, meaning that the intention behind this icon is business, not artistic. If this is the case, we can begin to question whether or not it is fair to call marketing a form of art, especially considering the purpose is to coax people into buying things they don’t need. Sure, the artist had to be creative to come up with the marketing design, but that does not necessarily mean it is art. The simplest question we can ask after pondering on this is, what is the true role of an artist? Is it, as marketing would suggest, about having power over others?

A genuine piece of art will provide excellence and be relevant as time progresses. In the case of Exit Through the Gift Shop, we have to wonder if street art is still going to be worth discussing in 200 years. Yes, it may still be on the wall, but will anyone care? The answer lies in that art always fits into tradition. There’s no concrete way of knowing how long a piece of art must exist before it becomes tradition, so the best approach for the artist to take is to create art they hope will last forever. In other words, it needs to be able to go across generational lines. In regards to this last statement, how long the art lasts might not necessarily do with time, but the audience.

Before you can fairly create a piece of art (and call yourself an artist) or even judge a piece of art, it is essential that you study the history of art. It is the responsibility of the critic (at least a worthy critic) to lead others to study and discover art. Even if you disagree with the critic, it will help you explore a variety of different critics until you find one who fits your taste. That way, you will attain the proper guidance and knowledge of art. The kind of critic best searched for is the one who teaches as opposed to “critiquing.” Anyone can be a critic and try to understand what art is, but they need experience to really identify art and point others in the right direction. Is it safe to say Banksy is a critic of Mr. Brainwash? Could we say that with Exit Through the Gift Shop, Banksy has made the artist the subject (and criticism) of the art?

Once we begin to gain an understanding of art, we can begin to connect to it and it has the ability to unite us with others. That is part of the beauty of it…art is Universal. As we discuss and share art, we can then go deeper and ask ourselves about the nature of Truth. What is it, and can we know it, inside and out? Anyone is welcome to be a patron of the arts, but a decision we must make is what kind of art we will choose to patronize. If we begin to collect, do we do so because of popularity or because of appreciation? Look at Mr. Brainwash’s art show as a good overview in trying to distinguish the difference between the two. Why are all these people interested in what he has to offer? If you scan the paintings on display at his show, you can ask if he is an artist, or simply a creative organizer. And when you spot the similarities in what he is doing to famous art of the past, it begs us to ask if on some level, all art is derivative. It may not be true in the case of Mr. Brainwash, but it can be said that even if you did not create a particular genre, you are still able to try and perfect it. This goes back to the tradition of art, which includes repeating those traditions instead of creating something new.

In moving from street art (Banksy) to paintings (Mr. Brainwash), the question arises as to how long you can discuss one as opposed to the other. Can the same kind of discussion be had about a piece of street art? Can we find the same depth that we can in a painting? This question leads us to think about what drives a street artist to create in the first place. For that matter, what makes any artist feel the need to create? Whose glory is it for? Even if we as the patron are not able to answer these questions, art is able to challenge us to not only ask these questions, but also to discuss them. Even if we can’t find the truth, we can expand our understanding of art trying to get there. Exit Through the Gift Shop is a movie that is able to interestingly and entertainingly coax us to think about the nature and purpose of art. When put this way, we can say that the movie itself is a piece of art, as it follows what we know about the tradition of art. Like any good art, it can be studied for generations to come, as more and more people attempt, just as we have, to understand and appreciate what art (in all its beauty and diversity) truly is.

The above article was written in response to a discussion of the film Exit Through the Gift Shop, which can be listened to in its entirety here: A Discussion following “Exit Through the Gift Shop”. Exit Through the Gift Shop and the discussion are part of the Continuum Cinema Series. Lee Chase is a friend of The Continuum and a film critic. He has reviewed hundreds of films for various websites and audiences. His film analysis can be found at http://hellandbeyond-lee.blogspot.com/

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.

Dropbox Poetry came from a real desire to shepherd artists in order to prepare them for an audience whether that audience is at the local Open Mic night, as part of liturgical worship or in the preparation of manuscripts for national publications, books and competitions.

There is a lot gained from peer critique especially from those who share the same passion and are actively immersed in the same tradition. In some sense it hearkens back to apprenticeship where the tradition is passed on through relationship and community. This is where artistry thrives and why the myth of the solitary artist needs to be discarded. Rather, the idea of athlete is better suited here where a running partner results in harder, more demanding work-outs which push the individual beyond all preconceived physical limitations. The jazz composer and band leader, Charles Mingus, was a master at this, pushing his musicians to heights of musical excellence that surprised even the musicians, already world class, but unaware of their own fully formed capabilities.

That is the goal of Dropbox Poetry. Fully formed artists that excel beyond themselves. The hope is that truly excellent artists will arise from this effort, but even so every poet will swell with the excitement of growing beyond themselves, or into themselves–it is Augustine who wrote that Christ came that man might become more fully human. We wish then that artists might express this full humanity in excellent craft and works of creative genius that hearken to something so beautiful that it feels equally familiar and otherworldly.

To request an invitation to join Dropbox Poetry, please send an email to jimallman at continuumarts dot com or reply in the comments below.

5) Desiring the Kingdom – James K. A. Smith

Smith is on a mission to sabotage and supplant the prevalent modern, Enlightenment mentality which reduces man to simply “a mind on a stick.” Rather, he argues with St. Augustine that people are “desiring agents” who are shaped and aimed not so much by logic and dialectic but by liturgy, which engages the entire sensing being through bodily practice—one can read here art (amongst other things). One of the most interesting portions of the book, though, is his analysis of malls, stadiums and universities as liturgical structures for which the modern Christian Church fails to adequately understand; therefore, it ceases to remain counter-cultural and offers no competing, greater liturgy, instead a hollow message that abandons desire to the more sophisticated liturgical experiences of the world. Like other books in this post, it’s emphasis on embodiment asserts the great value of the artist to both Church and culture at large.

What James K. A. Smith is Reading: http://jameskasmith.blogspot.com/

James K. A. Smith’s Blog: http://forsclavigera.blogspot.com/

4) For the Beauty of the Church – Various Contributors; Edited by David O. Taylor

For the Beauty of the Church is a collection of essays with notable contributors Eugene Peterson and Andy Crouch. Some may decry the lack of hegemony, but the essayists each thoughtfully extend a dialogue which began in 2008 in Taylor’s home town of Austin, Texas. The first essay, “The Gospel” (Andy Crouch), is medicinal like oil and wine to a wounded artist’s spirit—asserting the primordial call to artmaking as a work of grace. Additional topics include art and worship, the value and necessity of art “indulgence” as patron, the artist and the artist shepherd, pitfalls to be avoided, ending with vision casting.

David’s Blog: http://artspastor.blogspot.com/

3) Refractions – Makoto Fujimura

Makoto is a painter first, rather than a writer, which is exactly what makes his essays both so insightful and invigorating. In each of the 20 or so that comprise this book, Makoto paints each as though his stylus were dancing across a canvas before settling on some denouement that when contemplated in its entirety is discernible only as an irreducible whole—each line and form contributing to the thesis like a hanging work of art. One can almost imagine him applying sheets of gold leaf on washi, painting over it with cinnabar pigment and applying a heavy wash—layering—rather than writing his ideas down. Refractions is a book of intimate meditations on art, culture and humanness—one in which the reader is invited to join—written (like an Icon is written) by a consummate artist and faithful brother-ascetic.

Makoto’s website: http://www.makotofujimura.com/

2) God in the Gallery – Daniel A. Siedell

Up until Siedell’s book, my only experience with Christian thinkers who turned their attention toward art was with Francis Schaeffer, who though often quite authoritative discounts all modern and postmodern (read here abstract) art as subversive and calls for a distinctly Christian, realist, art. Siedell, an art historian and curator, provides an alternative perspective with a call to consider all art as Icon in the vein of Nicea II. That is art as incarnational—suggesting that the Incarnation is critical to all understanding and often points to and engages non-rational knowledge (knowledge that cannot be said only pointed to and communed with, as Christ on earth is the embodied but Infinite God—knowable yet beyond understanding). Siedell suggests that the framework of the Icon is useful in understanding ALL art, including the works of notorious modern artists like Marcel Duchamp, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Paul Klee. The book itself is 6 essays on various topics which include: a brief survey of modern art, belief and spirituality within the context of art, the art of art criticism and the relationship of art and liturgy within the walls of the Church. It is a book to challenge, raise questions and engage in meaningful dialogue.

Daniel’s blog: http://www.dansiedell.typepad.com/

1) Beauty and the Infinite – David Bentley Hart

This is a DENSE book; it is high philosophy meets unorthodox (read here eastern; so, therefore very Orthodox, only alien to my western brain) theology, but worth every grueling, laborious, ponderous moment. It is work, but truly rewarding work. Hart develops not a theology of aesthetics, but a theology that requires an underlying, Trinitarian aesthetic where every image, difference and particularity are revelatory of God as Logos—pronouncing His infinite fullness to and through the uniqueness of each logoi. In this text he develops a counter to the errors of modernity and postmodernity, gives validity to beauty and form, confirms the vocation of the artist as theologian, and enriches the soul with an endless wonder in a God that can both be intimately encountered yet, thankfully, never fully plumbed.

The following video is the first part of 6 in a BBC special hosted by philosopher Roger Scruton on Beauty, the contemporary world’s apparent rejection of it, and the imminent need for its return. Personally, I am not completely convinced of all his points, but the general arc is salient and thought provoking. I certainly believe capital “B” Beauty is necessary, but Scruton’s Kantian and Neo-Platonism are limiting; these under gird a beauty that exists only in its idealism. To my understanding, the idealistic in beauty (though surely not to be excluded only eschewed as the only end) resulted in the 20th Century’s rejection of that capital “B” Beauty which he vehemently shuns. We often forget that capital “B” Beauty can be found in “ashes and dust, blood and bodies” as well as broken bread and a creation that includes its brokenness. After all, as believers, are we not to find the ultimate Beauty as Christ’s most ghastly sacrifice: macabre, despairing, and gruesome (not in spite of it but because of it)? Still, the essay will stir us to think and there exists plenty in it that speaks to truth and is worth fighting for.

Immanuel Kant speaks about the nature of play in art; how true it is, as long as we do not consider it the exclusive aim. What drew me to Milton was his playful combining of Greek and Christian mythologies; to T. S. Eliot his playful, modern often shocking metaphors of life, love and nature; to Gerard Manley Hopkins the playfulness of his near dancing rhythms. Kay Ryan plays, too; consider this verse:

Bestiary

A bestiary catalogs
bests. The mediocres
both higher and lower
are suppressed in favor
of the singularly savage
or clever, the spectacularly
pincered, the archest
of the arch deceivers
who press their advantage
without quarter even after
they’ve won as of course they would.
Best is not to be confused with good—
a different creature altogether,
and treated of in the goodiary—
a text alas lost now for centuries.[1]

It isn’t until the second to last line that one realizes they might have mispronounced the title. What else was missed? And it begs a second reading. Of course, as one reads it again, maybe the distinction between best and good becomes a bit more apparent. Plainly, Ryan suggests that the good are not frequently categorized or chosen as the best. I think of the naturalist with his species and genus; I consider the phrase, “only the strongest survive”, and I wonder as to its veracity. I ask do I want to be good or a beast (may be the title wasn’t mispronounced after all)? The playfulness of the poem belies a weighty set of questions.

Throughout the book, Ryan looks at the very ordinary and guides us through its enchanted landscapes to find both elations and revelations.

A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float on Pure Water

Who hasn’t seen
a plain ordinary
steel needle float serene
on water as if lying on a pillow?
The water cuddles up like Jell-O.
It’s a treat to see water
so rubbery, a needle
so peaceful, the point encased
in the tenderest dimple.
It seems so simple
when things or people
have modified each other’s qualities
somewhat
we almost forget the oddity
of that.[2]

The fun of her rhymes (Jell-O and pillow), off-beat word choices (cuddle sounds so much like puddle), and misplaced adjectives (rubbery water and peaceful, tenderest needles) all contribute to a sense of play and the pure charm found in this witnessed oddity. She sees like a child something of wonder that must be passed on, and even if that sense of surprise at seeing the unexpected is all that the reader derives, is it not a worthwhile poem? But everything in this poem is precise including the delivery of its fine point; the language changes here, becomes more terse—more plain—and resonates cleanly at the pricking end of the needle.

Not every poem in the book is a treasure, but they are all at least fun (read them aloud, the sounds are great). This is part of the work, though—sifting to find the genuine nuggets. Of the 60 or so poems, I marked 22 of them as “something special”. Honestly, this is a good number of poems in a single volume for me to enjoy; when I closed the end board of the book I found my self quite pleased and fully inspired. I encourage you all to pick it up and have fun, but don’t always expect to “get it” the very first time.

[1] Ryan, Kay. Elephant Rocks. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1995, 18.

[2] Ibid, 73.

Homes of My Past is part of the Homesick exhibit at the Art Gallery inside LifeLink Church (1015 S Cooper St, Memphis, TN 38104); it is on display through November 4^th 2009.

The first thing noticeable about Rachel Lockridge’s paintings is the extreme vertical orientation of the pieces. They are in the most elementary critique simple, architectural paintings, and as such a horizontal direction seems far more a propos—assuming that the buildings are the subjects. These are not skyscrapers piercing the clouds; they are residential buildings gathered close to the ground, towered over by the local flora, and dwarfed by the vertical: the endless blue sky, the billowy clouds and the infinite regress beyond.

The philosopher, Paul Crowther, tells us that “a work of art enables the self to move beyond and outside itself toward another object”—providing a reconciled relationship with the world; “it is the space between Self and Other, the metaxu, the rich between.”[1] It is this space—this between—where we discover Lockridge’s true subject; it is the space, itself. For in it she finds reconciliation in all its forms; most notably though with her own, small world.

The space can dwarf us; it can make us feel so insignificant—so trivial. Or worse, it can prompt us to consider the emptiness, devoid of signs. We might walk away considering nihilism or a hopelessness rooted in our own smallness: our quaint dwellings swallowed up or unconsidered by the grandness of the infinite. This is the tension in her paintings—irrelevance, but looking closer it isn’t the sky that imposes this message rather it is the earth-brown homes firmly grounded and lost in the soils that they rest upon which forces us to consider the Biblical message “from dust to dust”. The giant mouthed sky 2/3 of each painting is not the threat, it is earth-boundedness which paws at each of us to make us its own.

The sky on the other hand, is richly textured with washes of paint: sometimes with clouds rising like steeples other times like panels of stained glass interacting with the delicateness of light. There exists a serenity in them that smacks not of emptiness but presence. If it is not seen at first it is because the presence itself seems allusive at times, but allusive because of its pervasiveness—the way something that is always around seems to disappear or at least becomes unnoticed simply due to its ubiquity. Alexander Schmemann writes:

All that exist is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God. It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation.[2]

The largeness of the sky and its ubiquity do threaten but not the human element in the image; rather it threatens the earth-boundedness. Meaning trumps irrelevance in her paintings

And this is what Lockridge is hinting at: the home as sanctuary; a place where God is felt, communed with and made known; significance and meaning; a scene simple, straight-forward, and everyday that points back to God—providing value. It is always there but often our views need re-orientation. All the cosmos is a sanctuary from the most grand to the most banal if the lens is turned just so. Lockridge turns the lens to redeem her little insignificant patches of soil—what she calls “nostalgia…leaky windows and dirty sidewalks, the loud neighbors and pungent curry simmering next door.” A lens turned horizontal makes these just nostalgia with no greater purpose, but Lockridge sees God in everything and wants us to re-orient our lenses to move “beyond and outside” with her to see “His presence and wisdom, love and revelation” in nothing but the leaky windows and pungent curry sauce of the everyday: the divine food in the unexceptional.

[1]Daniel Siedell, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Grand Rapids Michigan: Baker Academic Press, 2008), 27.

[2]Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 14.