Category: Culture

That’s a question that’s worth asking.

I mean, it isn’t as if Christian art has always been lame. A visit to the Sistine Chapel or a read through Dante or a listen to Mozart will tell you that.

But for some reason, right in the here and now, an enormous amount of Christian art–whether visual, literary, or musical–is just really, really lame.

And it’s not driving the culture the way it used to.

Instead, it feels like a shallow copy of secular culture.

That’s something explored in a recent article at Salon.Com. Here’s the money quote:

For faith, the results can be dangerous. A young Christian can get the idea that her religion is a tinny, desperate thing that can’t compete with the secular culture. A Christian friend who’d grown up totally sheltered once wrote to me that the first time he heard a Top 40 station he was horrified, and not because of the racy lyrics: "Suddenly, my lifelong suspicions became crystal clear," he wrote. "Christian subculture was nothing but a commercialized rip-off of the mainstream, done with wretched quality and an apocryphal [sic] insistence on the sanitization of reality."

SOURCE [WARNING: There are a few just plain gross references in the article.]

The article largely focuses on culture schlock in Evangelical circles, but we all know the same thing is true in Catholic circles, as the insipid folk-esque musical spoutings of Oregon Catholic Press or the chunky abstract patterns that pass for stained glass windows in many parishes reveal. Those are just cheesy ripoffs of secular music and secular art (and dated ripoffs at that.)

So why isn’t contemporary Christian art better than it is?

From Old World Swine, the long-ago promised
conclusion to my "But Is It Art?" series, Part One;

I titled this series "But, Is It Art?" because that was the question I
sought to answer regarding non-representational (purely abstract) art,
like the Robert Motherwell piece at left. My first instinct – my bias
early on – was to say that, no, it wasn’t really art. As I have
explained earlier, I have come to modify that position, and in the
process have come to a new appreciation of abstract art in its proper place.

I’m sure that in part my reaction against abstract art was due to
the particular kind of art education I slogged through as a young man.
The new broom of modernism had swept the academy clean, and it was made
plain again and again that only the dullest sort of hack artist would
bother to paint a straight, traditional portrait, still life or
landscape. The concept of seeking Beauty was actually derided, and one
poor grad student who let the term slip out during a critique was met
with snickers and the shaking of heads. She was done for.

In regard to non-representational art, we were trained not only to
see things that were not there, but to write papers about it… with
footnotes. We were all expected to take seriously the idea that a
canvas with a few lines and blobs of paint on it was as significant and
praiseworthy as Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St. Peter. Not surprisingly, I don’t recall any student in the MFA program I went through who wasn’t simply adrift
as an artist. There was no sense of connection with history or
tradition beyond the last 100 years, or so, and indeed little sense of
connection even with one another. There was very little in the way of
technical help or instruction, and even less in terms of personal
artistic development, no cohesive approach or philosophy – no rules,
except "There are no rules". We were all making it up as we went along,
with more or less success.

It took quite a while for me to begin to see past this, to gain some
perspective. When I at last reached a point where I decided it was just
a matter of plain sanity to prefer beauty to ugliness or meaning to
emptiness, I was no longer painting at all, but was doing design and
illustration. It was no doubt due to my embrace of historical, orthodox
Christianity and the influence of writers like Tolkien, Chesterton and
C.S. Lewis that I came to think about the mystery of beauty at all. In
my new enthusiasm for tradition, meaning and beauty, I turned smartly
on my heels and completely dismissed non-objective art as a fraud and
the last refuge of talentless duffers.

But I digress.

In my next post I will give what I consider to be the strengths of
modern abstraction and talk about in what contexts and in what ways I
believe it does function well. In this post, though, I will
focus on why I believe non-objective art can not be placed in the same
category as the truly great works of art history.

Art is one of those magical, mysterious things – like writing and
music – that only humans do. It sets us apart from the animal world by
a gulf that is incomprehensibly wide.

There are two things – two fundamentally mysterious and magical
things – that traditional representational art does that
non-representational art does not do. The first is the most obvious;
representational art, well, represents something. It calls to
mind something that is not there, or that never existed except in the
imagination of the artist. It communicates symbolically in a way
analogous to writing. Writing is just ink on a page, figures of varied
kinds that we string together to make words, and then sentences and
presently we are drawn into a world, with its own people and events…
we are with Frodo and Sam on the slopes of Mount Doom, or tied to the
mast with Odysseus.  One undeniable mystery of visual art is this power
to symbolically represent things that are not really there. It’s
something we may not often think about (because we are too busy doing
it), but the fact that I can draw a few lines and make you think of a
goat or a sailing ship is just indescribably awesome. It’s something
only we humans do… even cavemen knew that.

The second mysterious thing that traditional representational art often does can be related to the first, but they are not the
same; this is the breaking of the "picture plane", or the property of
taking the viewer past the surface of the painting and into an illusory
space. One can represent an object in a very flat and abstract way
(again, think of cave painting or modern road signs), but the ability
of the artist to create a believable space, with its own sense of
light, atmosphere and perspective adds a dimension to the experience
that is, again, powerful and mysterious. It gives the viewer the
sensation that they could reach past the frame and into the painting.
Most often they see past  the surface of the picture without thinking about it. That’s magic. Alice through the looking glass.

These two properties are so fundamental and potent that they could very nearly be the definition of what fine visual art really is.
Without them, what is left are the merely formal aspects of visual
art… composition, color harmony, texture, etc… all important
things, but by themselves inadequate to move the viewer in anything like the way representational art can.

Now, there is a line of thought that holds that symbolic
representation and the illusion of form and space are irrelevant to the
appreciation of visual art, or even that such things get in the way,
which to me is exactly like saying "That could have been a great novel,
if not for all those characters, locations and plot developments
getting in the way", as if the true essence of a novel were in formal
concepts like "paragraphs" or "grammar".

The formal aspects of art are very significant, and can be
appreciated and admired for their own strengths, but there’s one
problem with that way of thinking; every great novel and every great
work of art possesses these formal strengths and uses them to great
effect anyway… and in addition also provides the kind
of narrative and symbolic communication that gives meaning to the
whole. In other words, with any great work of visual art, you get the
symbolic communication, the illusion and the brilliant use of the formal aspects (like composition, color, texture, etc…) thrown in, so the experience of traditional, representational art is much more comprehensive, making use of all the strengths of abstract art, but in service to the substantive mysteries of symbolism and illusion. The great thing about, say, a Sargent portrait is how a dash of paint
can function so completely, powerfully and simultaneously as both a vital and evocative bit of brushwork and
as a totally believable reflection on the bridge of a nose or the curve
of a shoulder. We see it as one, then the other, then both at once. The
passage resonates with the energy of this meaningful dichotomy.

The point being that if you’re going to toss out
representation and illusion to begin with, you had better have
something pretty damned powerful up your sleeve to give meaning to the
formal properties of the piece… that is if you’re after fine art.

There is another way of thinking that says that visual art shouldn’t
be compared to the concrete symbolism of writing, but rather to the
abstract patterns of music. Being wholly ignorant of the subject, I
will not even try to write in any meaningful way about how music works,
how it engages the emotions, but I will say that art, music, writing,
dance, etc… all enter the mind and move the human consciousness in
very different ways. Art is not meant to affect us just as music does,
or one of them would be redundant. In a similar way, it would be a
mistake to push the analogy of art to writing too far. Fine art can be a great deal more like visual poetry than straight visual story telling.
There certainly can be a very musical sense of rhythm, texture and mood
to a piece of visual art, but the mystery and power of visual fine art
flows from its own spring and can’t be understood simply and solely as
visual music.

There is a kind of art that functions something like visual music,
though… decorative art, which figures large in the next (and final)
post.

Another from Old World Swine;

I remember the first time I sat in a figure drawing class and worked
from a real, live, nekkid model. I was a little nervous before, as were
probably a lot of us wet-eared art undergrads. I don’t know how
everyone else responded when the young lady dropped her bathrobe, but I
expect their experience wasn’t too different from my own; there were a
few moments of awkward ogling, a few moments of stern and studied
pretense at ignoring the obvious, and then – something else. I began to
think about how I could wring a good drawing out of the pose. As I
started to draw, my brain began to break the model down into her
component elements… line and form, light and shadow, muscle and bone.
Within a minute, and for the remainder of the class, she registered no
more on my libido-meter than a clay pot or a fern. And I was not nearly
such a paragon of virtue and restraint as I am now.

Not everyone has had the benefit of such a class, of course, but it
did demonstrate to me in unmistakable terms the very real difference
between appreciating the beauty of the human form and what might be
called the Look of Lust. I had the great privilege of having my view of
the female form somewhat redeemed and baptized long before I knew
anything of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. In this work, he makes
brilliantly clear that the mere repression of lustful thoughts is not
enough, and may even be unhealthy in the long run. We must learn –
through the help of the Holy Spirit, the teaching of the Church, the
sacraments and prayer – to change the way we perceive the human body.
We must have our thoughts redeemed. We should work toward being able to
thank God for the breathtaking beauty of the human body, and through
giving thanks and praise to the Creator, disarm and disable Lust.

The idea is not to cage our lust, but to drag it out into the light where it can be transformed by the Holy Spirit.

Not that nudity is something to be treated lightly. We are fallen,
after all. There is nudity – even under the pretext of art – that is
wholly inappropriate. If it is intended to excite lust, or if it in
fact does so, then it is unhealthy.

How do we tell the difference? Obviously, this is a matter of
judgment. For one aware of his own weakness, one sincerely committed to
trying to please God in everything, one familiar with Original Sin, one
who has been trained to respect the dictates of conscience… a
certain  amount of confidence in personal judgment is possible, and can
be developed. In the words of St. Augustine, "Love God and do as you
please".

For one lacking these things, it may be impossible, though I believe
that even based only on natural law one can tell the difference between
a painting that is basically an act of praise and homage, and one in
which the body is displayed like a piece of meat in a butcher shop
window. In the first case, the viewer’s response is "Yes, that is
beautiful – God does great work". In the latter case, the viewer’s
response is "I want that".

In short, if you are truly concerned about lust in regard to viewing
nude figures in art, then the battle is half won already. Trust your
judgment, and be watchful of your own thoughts. Where truly great,
classical, historically significant art is involved, I don’t think even
children need be  cocooned and shielded as much as one might think.
Most children likely have a much saner and simpler response to these
things than we give them credit for. If you have concerns for kids,
look things over for yourself first, but don’t get too wound up over
them seeing this or that body part, in the right context.

(Note; I use the word "abstract" in this post as a synonym for
"non-representational" art, that is, art that doesn’t depict or
represent any object. In truth, all visual art involves abstraction,
but I use the word here as a less cumbersome way of saying
"non-representational" – T.J.)

The topic of this post (at my blog Old World Swine) brought me back to a series I authored
here at JA.O , on how I understand modern abstraction in
terms of where it fits in the broad movement of art history.

In retrospect, I see that project was too great a stretch for a
layman and average schlub like myself. I have absolutely zero credentials as either a philosopher or art
historian. I am a working artist (Masters Degree, thanks) not that widely read
or traveled. What I can do is talk very honestly about art from my own
non-expert perspective and hope that this becomes a useful bit of grist
for the mill. I’ll begin with a little background that might help explain
why it has taken me so long to finish this series of posts.

A commercial art client with whom I worked for years had a very large abstract painting hanging in his office. It was dreadful
– the kind of thing one would buy at a discount furniture store – a mass
produced vomitous mess of cream and "earth tones". It was bad in every
way that a painting can
be bad. The abstract equivalent of a black velvet Elvis.. I saw this
painting off and on for years, and one day the undeniable bad-ness of
it got me thinking; I
had seen a lot of other abstract paintings that were much better than
this one. If they really were better, I thought, what made
them better? If we can talk at all about "bad" and "good" abstract art,
that almost proves there must be something worthwhile in the good abstract art, doesn’t it?

Where I had been all set to consign abstract art to the dustbin, I
decided to hold off and rethink my position. I mulled things over for
quite a while, and ended up reaffirming my first intuitive response to
abstraction (that it is a subset of decorative art), while at the same
time developing a genuine appreciation of abstract art in its proper place.
I can now say that there
are a number of pieces of abstract art that I think are successful,
interesting, even engaging… just not what I consider to be great art,
for reasons I’ll get to in the next post. One of the things great art does is move
the viewer, and I have never once been moved by a piece of abstract art. I don’t see how that works.

There is, of course, the real possibility that I may just be missing
something, that I am a thick-skulled, irrecoverable rube – what C.S.
Lewis called a "trousered ape" – who simply lacks the imagination, the
emotional depth and psychological complexity to plumb the mysteries of
abstract art. That’s fine. I’ll admit the possibility… but it’s not
for lack of honest effort.

I have looked at and thought hard about abstract art for years. In
some circles – circles I occasionally run in – verbalizing a lack of
sufficient enthusiasm or appreciation for abstract art is a social
blunder on the level of making fun of the handicapped – much worse, in
fact (in the latter case, one could always pull a Mel Gibson and claim
it was the booze talking). This is just not something a sophisticated
and civilized person is ever supposed to say… particularly an artist. It will
change what people think of you. It will cost you work and connections
and references. I once knew an art history professor who was denied
tenure partly because (he seemed certain) he had spoken well of Norman
Rockwell.

I’m convinced that many people, especially in the art world, never
say what they really think about abstract art because they are keenly
aware of the social stigma attached to such opinions. They are
frightened to death of being shut out and denied opportunities, of
being thought of as ignorant hicks. But it is only by moving beyond
this stigma and speaking plainly that we can begin to have a real
conversation and honestly evaluate the benefits and detriments of the
modernist movement in art, which began over one hundred years ago. We
are in a unique position in history (the information age) that allows
us to calmly and rationally toss out the bad and retain the good when
it comes to the visual arts. We need desperately to get about this
work.  We need especially to develop an aesthetic of beauty that
resonates with the modern world. That is our job as artists.

Next – my thoughts on the good and bad of modern abstract art.