The Continuum and its artists have participated in several community initiatives including “Help-Portrait” and “The Young Artists gifts”, to name a few. We believe that art is generative—that it is a gift that creates out of its effusiveness. We believe that artists have a significant role in the redemption of culture one-by-one through the individuals they encounter and by means of their art. How fortunate, then, to be given the opportunity to partner with Advance Memphis.
Engaging Culture with Culture Through Acts of Creative Excellence
On the Purpose of Art
Regularly has the question been put to me in some form either open ended or directly, “What is the purpose of art?” Since the Reformation, art has been looked at as a means to an end: to tell stories to the illiterate or illustrate a truth better said then seen. There are those who believe it to be merely propaganda: a means to proselytize or spread the gospel message. And then there’s the “secular” world who considers art sometimes as a means of provocation, sometimes as escape, and always a vehicle for self-expression.
But consider the purpose of food and drink. They certainly exist as fuel for the body—sustenance necessary to maintain our bodily routine and perpetuate our daily labors, but is this the sum total even the greater portion? The psalmist tells us “Taste and know that the Lord is good.” The implication is that the smorgasbord of flavor in food has a role in reminding us of God’s goodness and His superabundant blessing and bounty. Then there is the Eucharist where bread and wine together tell us about the being and promise of Christ: also implied is the superabundant blessing and His life sustaining quality. One could go further to the agricultural portion of food; the rain that falls on everyone’s crops is what some might call “common grace”; the tilling of the earth, the sowing and harvesting is reminiscent of man’s first call to stretch out the Garden of God across the whole world; and what of the many parables which Christ analogically connects to food and the agrarian life? To regard, then, only the caloric portion of food and drink is to flatten out its rich potential.
Imagine if in describing something as commonplace as food how severe the risk of fixing its purpose; what risk then exists when demanding “purposiveness” of something as grand as beauty and art? The word is reductionistic, and this is to be avoided. One should not deny that art has purpose, nor be surprised that it can serve many purposes at once, but should not demand that all art fit or embrace a single intent. To do so limits the possibilities of how God (not man) tends to work by repurposing things, yet the common fear is that it will be misappropriated. Where does their distrust lie? Not then in the artist.
Young Artist Gifts – 2009
This year for Christmas, the Continuum and its artists gave gift boxes to young artists, twelve to eighteen years old that demonstrate a passion and persistence in art of some kind. This year’s recipients, Cassie Cole (painter), Alex Porter (painter) and Hannah Tyson (illustrator and story teller) each received gift boxes in order to encourage them to continue and inspire them beyond what they’ve already accomplished.
The contents of each gift box included not supplies, but books, movies and music to inspire their future and broaden their perspective of what is possible in artistic media. I for one drew incessantly growing up, worked in pastels and charcoal and painted only to later find that poetry was my forte. Exposure is the key word in describing these gifts—exposure to good, creative and broadly categorized arts so that each might understand that imagination is what truly defines the artist; this so that they might not lose interest but engage the artistic endeavor as a lifelong pursuit.
Memphis 2009 Help-Portrait
Many people believe portraits are an extravagance, and that the needs of the poor are so great that a portrait isn’t worth giving; why not give them something practical? These same people though might call it a tragedy when someone loses all their family photos in a fire or flood. It is a tragedy to be bereft of memories, to never have an image that captures the transience of childhood and when finally as all families must at some point be pulled asunder lack those precious memories caught together.
A Working Thesis
The irrelevance of art in the contemporary ethos happened perchance by accident, alas it is so. Reason, science and religion cannot find a place for it except as superfluous, and by them it has been classified into the genera obsolescence. Yet the concept of beauty (a very classical pursuit of art) has been forever linked with truth and goodness throughout the philosophical heritage of every civilization; it is, itself, a transcendental that as humans we are eager to define, quantify and grasp at, but in our modern age, we know it less well then the ancients we have supposedly surpassed in every human faculty. Where as once, it was known as universal, it is now considered subjective; where as once it was considered both inspired and imbued with power to, itself, inspire, it is now a plaything, a fancy, a leisure—ignored. Art once depicting the most powerful symbols of a culture is now produced irreverently hiding behind its every sparse line an increasingly sparse and vapid message. It has fallen from its lofty place beside the other transcendentals; like others, though, who scale towering heights, they (each tied together) succeed or fall as one. So it is that these three (Truth, Goodness and Beauty) have all become whimsical fancies, and have lost the potency to carry any lasting messages; by Fact they are slain, sterile though it is, humane perhaps, they headless bow to the every compounding, shifting, competing fact. Fallen. First beauty, then truth and goodness. All fallen; the loss of beauty a mortal wound that cannot be borne.