PressPausePlay from House of Radon on Vimeo.

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

Just read a great article on artistic discipline over at Comment Magazine written by Carey Wallace. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Let me be clear. Too many artists already raise artificial barriers to creation: they can’t write, or think, or paint, they claim, unless they’re seated at a pristine desk, with southern light, perfect silence, and a dozen sharpened pencils all pointed west. These are not aids to creation, or marks of real discipline: they are a group of excuses not to create if the conditions are not met. I am not saying, “Don’t bother to create unless your whole life is in perfect order.” I am saying, “Creation will require your whole life.”

…

I no longer draw a distinction between my spiritual and creative disciplines. I don’t claim this as a fresh practice, but confess it as a novice only now beginning to grasp a fundamental truth that I’ve long practiced without knowing its name. In some ways, this insight changes nothing. Both spiritual and creative disciplines still require strength and courage, and a high tolerance for loneliness, boredom and pain. But in one fundamental way, removing the distinction between creative and spiritual disciplines changes everything. I no longer flatter myself that I work alone, or that my strength is my own. I lean instead on God, who has been there all along. And that releases me from the very real fear that I will someday come to the end of myself: either my own limited ideas, or my own limited strength. Instead I have a bottomless well to draw on and an endless universe to spin through, renewing itself so fast that my limited mind can only ever capture it in glimpses and fragments.

The last few sentences of that last paragraph reminded me of a David Bentley Hart quote, “Not a formless sublime exceeding and annihilating the beautiful, but an endless display of beauty, surpassing the beautiful as the ever more beautiful.”

Also I find myself considering the word  “ascetic”. Yes, the monastic term. Hmm, Daniel Siedell comes to mind, then. He speaks a lot about the process of Icon writing which requires an act of spiritual preparation as part of the process of making. Siedell doesn’t stop there but delves into the creative lives of contemporary artists like Jackson Pollock demonstrating a similar quality, albeit secularized variety.

Very interesting! Lots to think about. Read the whole article by following the link below.

On Artistic Discipline

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.

The Temptation of St. Anthony - Salvador Dali

I just finished reading an article by the Arts Pastor, David Taylor, about the necessity of friendship as a part of the artful life. Of course, he begins with the ever glorified proposition of the monastic-like artist distinctive and hidden away in the friary of his studio and bohemian as a hermit, then debunks it. But even he, struggled with this idea in his twenties; he said, “I suffered the embarrassingly pathological need to find elite, Inkling-like friendships.” Taylor begins by recounting an encounter with artists as “the plaintive bleating of lonely, wounded sheep.” This is the contemporary myth of the isolated artist, the seer or desert ascetic; indeed it is a romantic myth, but it is a myth that as Taylor notes is the legacy of exemplars like Nietzsche and Rousseau and in need of dispelling.

This simple concept of community and friendship opposed to the wounded wimperings of isolation is gaining traction in the Christian art world. And before all the lofty goals for which the Continuum has as an agenda, the foundation of community is the most prior, immediate and important. Tolstoy claims in What is Art that art functions to bring isolated individuals together. This communing is  not just in the consumption of it, but can be found even in the midst of its creation; as an artist I have found I am most fulfilled, creative and generative when together with other kindred spirits. Personally, I prefer Tolstoy to Nietzsche. I know my creativity increases rather than decreases when amongst like-minded friends.

Here is an excerpt from the article which can be found in “Comment Magazine”. The article can be found here:

As Herdt explains (and here I am adopting her general observations on human behaviour to the lives of artists), an artist’s calling will find its proper orientation “in the presence of others and in response to others.” In the company of good friends, an artist discovers the resources both to want to cultivate virtue—to be humble, generous, diligent or courageous, for example—as well as to persist in the practices which sustain these virtues. Good friends help us to resist the hydra of vices—sloth and jealousy and so on—that betray us against our best intentions.

The Continuum wishes to understand this and offer a place to achieve each artist’s proper calling.

“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.

An early-15th century icon attributed to Theophanes the Greek

I’ve been promised a brochure, soon, regarding an arts conference at Union University, April 8th & 9th, 2011, but thought I might publish what I’ve been given to date. The tentative cost is $80 for the two day event. As I get more, I’ll post it here.

Friday April 8th

• 1:00 – Welcome/ Introduction to the Conference:  Artists and Union University Art Professors Haelim Allen & Melinda Eckley
• 1:15 – Introductory Addresses:    Dr. David Dockery, Union University President and author or editor of more than thirty books; &   Dr. Steve Halla, Artist, Writer and Union University Assistant Professor of Art
• 2:00 – Worship through the arts: Michael Card, Contemporary Christian Musician
• 2:30 – First Plenary Speaker:   Nigel Goodwin, Executive Director of Genesis Arts Trust- London, UK
• 3:15 – Worship through the arts:   Ballet Rejoice Dance Troupe
• 4:00 – Dinner Break (on your own)
• 6:00 – Second Plenary Speaker:   Dr. Dan Siedell, Art Historian, Curator, Writer, Speaker, and Assistant Professor of Art History – University of Nebraska
• 7:20 – Worship through the arts: Union University Music Department presentation
• 8:00 – Art Event & Gallery Opening:  Wayne Adams, Artist

Saturday April 9th

• 8:50 – Opening Comments: Dr. Carla Sanderson, Union Provost
• 9:00 – Morning Devotion: Michael Card
• 9:30 – 15 Minute Vignettes:
  • Dr. David Taylor, Arts Pastor, Hope Chapel Artistic Advisor, and Resident Fellow Hill Country Institute for Contemporary Christianity, Austin, TX
  • Dr. Paul Shockley, Associate Professor of Bible and Theology at the College of Biblical Studies-Houston
  • Michael Winter, Gallery Director, The 930 Art Center Gallery, Louisville, KY
  • Dr. Taylor Worley, Union University Assistant Professor of Christian Thought & Tradition
• 10:40 – Worship through Art: Union University Theater Department
• 11:00 – Panel Discussion (all speakers) with Q & A
• 11:30 – Third Plenary Speaker: Mary McCleary, Artist & Regent’s Professor of Art Emeritus – Stephen F. Austin State University
• 12:30 – Lunch (we provide)
• 1:30 – Worship Service
• 2:00 – Closing Comments: Dr Gene Fant, Union University VP for Academic Services and Author of “God as Author: Toward a Christian Approach to Narrative”