catapult magazine

[i’m putting this in “visual art” but there’s not really a clear spot in our categories for this discussion…]

i ran across “”http://communionofthearts.blogspot.com/“>the communion of the arts” the other day and wanted to get reactions to the “”http://communionofthearts.blogspot.com/2005/03/theology-of-art.html">theology of art" that was posted.

here’s a grab from the beginning of it (click the link above for more):

I distilled all I had learned into a three point theology of art (sorry not a story). Here it goes:

1. Art is a glimpse of the ineffable beauty of God

2. Art is a glimpse of the true soul of humanity

3. The artist is a servant motivated by love for his audience, who through a difficult process of training and apprenticeship acquires the heart and skill to be able to produce either singular works of power or works of craft or multiple replicatable designs in order to give his audience number 1 and/or 2 above, and this is good.

…

One of my main goals is to understand why all art is suffering in our day. I believe that ?secular? artists are being debilitated by false views of art just as much as Christians are debilitated by false views of art.

I’m the spikey-haired one in the middle. And in rock years, I am OLD. I don’t mean rock like granite, quartz or boulder. Rock’n’roll. Just to be clear.

I guess the point I was trying to make by delineating music (and perhaps we could add film too) from the more static arts is that … hold on, I’m not sure what I’m responding to. Let’s get this straight, first: What do you mean when you say aesthetic? You’re talking about the science of aesthetics as a discipline, right? Or are you also including a person’s or community’s sense of taste? Because I think I’m talking more about teaching people a sense of taste without depending on language.

Because I think I’m talking more about teaching people a sense of taste without depending on language.

OK, now you’ve got me! How do you propose to teach a sense of taste without language? At some point there has to be a discourse, doesn’t there? Even some analytical pursuits?

Aesthetic? I mean many things. The patrons and purveyors of art, music, film et. al. , for example, need to understand the difference between kitsch and good aesthetic art. So that is taste, I guess. Otherwise they will be patrons of kitsch and for me that isn’t good christian aesthetics!

The aesthetics of aesthetics or the science of aesthetics? Creative types (like ourselves!) need to be taught the tools of their trade, a language as I’ve called it, to differentiate between a thoroughgoing ‘christian’ aesthetic and some postmodern, deconstructionist fable that tells them that bird s**t at the bottom of a cage, can provide the viewer with an authentic aesthetic, even spiritual experience. (The example is arbitrary!)

From what some of the members of my Group in Bristol are taught – at the local postmod fest college – there seems to be what I’d call, maybe wrongly, a Socialist anti-art critique, that is still stamping on the canvases of bourgeois art. They continue in the Francis Bacon mould and play ‘the game’, to while away the hours of a ‘meaningless’ life and so it seems to be that the installations I see all around me are cheap, tacky – maybe even PM kitsch – excuses for the aesthetic work. Y’know stuff that trivialises, rather than posts serious questions. Some it seems revel in the nihilistic construal of life!

What I mean by aesthetic is alluding to Seerveld and also Dooyeweerd’s aesthetic aspect. Now I’m not saying that only art is aesthetic (or music for that matter!), but that artists are primarily involved with stuff where the term of reference is the aesthetic, not a plumbers manual or legal documents, nor a credal statement of faith. Just because we can paint, write music or stories, doesn’t mean to say that we are born with the aesthetic ability to produce something that can elucidate a christian worldview. Now some have said to me that there is no such thing, but when I tell them that the aesthetic principles they have utilised in a work or are taught at college, reveals a philosophy or worldview which is quite contrary to their faith, sometimes I see a flicker of light. It seems to me that if everyone else, be they humanists, marxists or buddhists, can produce profound statements about their commitments and presuppostions, then why can’t we?

Language again – Does music have a language? I think it does, but I can understand what you are thinking when you say that it doesn’t! When it is performed, how does it communicate? Now you’ve mentioned something about the spirit and emotion and as a listener I can understand that, but as a composer isn’t there a way of writing music, certain conventions, tools that you have to use to make the music communicate, joy, or passion or remorse? I’d call that language, but I’m biased towards linguistics! You’re a musician, so what do you call it? Or does anyone know of someone who has expounded this kind of theoretical stuff?

So, I hope that makes sense and answers a few of your questions, whilst I’ve posed a few of my own!

Peace,

Geoff

Yes, language does help, but words are only cues to point the listener or viewer to a certain kind of experience. The actual “learning” of an aesthetic happens as you listen to something over and over again or view a painting for an hour without interruption.

Here’s an example of learning an aesthetic without words…from my own life: I never really liked (understood) Blues music. Even as I was listening and appreciating all kinds of music in college (I liked snake-charming music from India before I liked the Blues), I could not get into the Blues. Until I went to Memphis, TN and took the Sun Studios tour. It’s a one-room tour and they played music that was recorded there on analog tape, pointing to the chair where Johnny Cash played “I Walk the Line” and showing us the microphone that Howlin’ Wolf used on his first couple of albums. The tour guide didn’t explain the aesthetics of the blues. He just played old analog tapes of recording sessions, but when I stepped out of that little room, I understood the blues for the first time in my life! Another example from someone else’s life: Joel, my musical partner in crime, understood the greatness of the Red Hot Chili Peppers one evening when a guy in the studio turned up their music and started playing air guitar to it. That’s all it took, just seeing the RHCP embodied in an air guitar performance, and he understood something new about a music he had been listening to and reading about for years.

So what I’m saying is that if we expect the Christian community to develop a good philosophy of aesthetics, we’re going to have to develop a good aesthetic as aesthetic, which is taught by experiencing it in the right context. In order to discern Christian from non-Christian music, it may be necessary to see bands in a certain live context with a certain amount or type of people (spirits). To understand a painting, one may have to see it among or surrounded by certain other works of art. This new seeing and hearing is the learning of an aesthetic and of how to speak of aesthetics as a whole. Another example from my life: A few years ago, I went to a scotch tasting. As they explained the process of making scotch, how the liquid absorbs the air of its environment through the barrels, breathing in the wild flowers and sea-scented air surrounding it, I started to understand my own artistic practice as a very natural process of taking in the elements around me. I didn’t come to this conclusion through their language, but by tasting the whiskey and experiencing that indeed sixteen years of breathing the air of Scotland, season by season, was all captured in that one sip, I understood how the six years of life that went into our album affected the result. Oh taste and see! See?

So I’m not denying that language is helpful, but the problem with the Christian community is not in the language department. We definitely have the gift of gab. The problem is that Christians are not listening to enough good music, watching enough good films and drinking enough Scotch!

As far as our own process, there is an interview with ourselves on *cino right now about the process of making a rock album. I think it is adequately descriptive. It’s called “Favorite Mistakes”. I call music a form of communication, not a language. Maybe there’s a better term than form, but it seems to work, since music does have an order to it. But it communicates as a form, not as a language, and the tools we have discovered for making music can be described in words, but they are primarily experiential skills that cannot be taught with words, but by doing.

I did want to add one more great example on speechless aesthetic-teaching. I might be getting the performers mixed up, but I think it was John Lennon who was sitting in the studio while David Bowie was mixing his album (maybe it was vice versa or none of the above), and Bowie gave Lennon a mixing credit on the album even though Lennon never said a word about the mix. Bowie understood that the way you hear a mix changes when a certain someone, a certain kind of spirit, is in the room with you. Just the presence of the right person can alter one’s aesthetic or make one see or hear what they never saw or heard before. The Christian community has to get together in a room or two if it expects to find the right language for Christian art. In the meantime, yes it helps to have good cues to help eachother hear what we’re hearing and see what we’re seeing, but there’s no substitute for experience.

Grant, I understand much better now what you meant in another post on the challenges of teaching Christian art. I defended the importance of instruction, saying much (perhaps most) recent instruction in art is all about experience and getting into the “spirit” of art.

Some of your concrete examples were useful. To add a few: I think it is Martin Scorsese who said he likes to watch Lawrence of Arabia before starting film projects, just get him into the spirit of film making. it’s not the film’s pictures and sounds (though they’re spectacular); it’s the film’s spirit he seems interested in getting into. The members of U2 said they remembered why they like rock so much when they went to a Radiohead concert. For my part, when I can’t write, or when my writing is coming off flat (ouch!), I’ll try reading good literature or other good writing. It gets me in the spirit of writing well. Before coming to seminary Nelson Kloosterman gave me advice on preparation: don’t read Calvin’s Institutes but good stories like The Lord of the RIngs trilogy. We can teach you theology; other things can’t be taught.

What’s that some people say, What can’t be taught must be caught (?). Perhaps there’s something to it.

Ah, a kind of synaesthesia!

So Grant/Anton, if I ever get to teach this stuff I should say, don’t read Lyotard, but Kundera? Don’t read Seerveld, but go see a van Gogh or Rembrandt exhibition? Don’t read Baudrillard, see The Matrix etc. Then when they get to the University they’ll be aware spiritually/sensually of what the philosophy of aesthetics is about? And even may discern christian from non-christian dynamics/worldviews?

There is something to be said for this. I think the two can go hand in hand, language and sensitivity. It’s I suppose what Polanyi is talking about when he cites the need for connoisseurs and connoiseurial education?

Will give more thought to this boys (I’m sure you are both way younger than me!), but I’m off to a good old english pub now. I shall raise a glass to you both!

Peace and Love,

Geoff

Before I write articles for *cino, I often read Seerveld and Hendrik Hart to get in the spirit of what I’m about to do. When I do vocals, I listen to various vocalists to get the right attitude for my own performance. I think theology as a discipline has a certain spirit, a certain feeling and that’s what I’m questioning, whether aesthetics should be studied in the spirit of objective science or if its possible to teach aesthetics with a spirit closer to art itself. And then of course there’s getting into the spirit of an English pub, which requires the drinking of many good spirits. What is the spirit of choice for you, geoff3?

Hi Grant!
My current spirit of choice is Jack Daniels! Any other time and its vodka, polish and finnish being my favourite, followed closely behind by swedish.

Personally I don’t think teaching aesthetics in this way is possible, that is, should be the only way. Artists of the past like Gauguin, Seurat, Vermeer and Rembrandt knew the theory, but didn’t sit there with a book open with one eye on it and the other eye on a girl with a pearl earring! ‘Now according to my theory I should paint her this way!’

Maybe music is a different form, but still musicians such as Arvo Part incorporate some musical theory in their heads, but because it has been assimilated into their consciousness, it spills forth quite naturally. Synaesthesia is fine, but for me it only takes you so far. Look at all the sound alike bands that raise their heads from time to time; they’ve heard a great song and the next thing you know they are producing ‘new’ songs that sound [i:2eb4102871]strangely[/i:2eb4102871] familiar!

How far would that approach have got Adam and Eve, would Adam have ever got round to naming the animals, or would we just have sound alike names? Lion, Brian, snake, shake?? Beware of the Brian!

I think it would be a great thing to incorporate the two processes. If you discuss what you have learned you need a language to do this, another naming process if you like.

Geoff

Right. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t use language. I’m wondering if the language of science (which is based on an objective distancing god-substituting view) can get us there. The artists you mentioned no doubt communicated what they are doing in an artistic way. I hate it when artists say they can’t speak about their process because it’s a complete mystery or beyond words. That’s bullshitaka. But when someone like Bjork says something like “Art should be a grey-green cloud scraping against the pavement on a crystal-creme day” (not a direct quote), that might be closer to the thing-in-itself than “art is the symbolical objectification characterized by allusivity”(also not a direct quote). Which is not to say that speaking of things in scientific terminology is evil. It just seems that our understanding of art as art has suffered because of these scientific-like theories (your post-mod artists are a case in point). Many artists today are serving abstract ideologies and philosophies of art instead of the actual materials and substance of creational artistic expression. If we are to teach such artists how to feel or be attuned to God’s creation in a way that’s consistent with His norms for art, more ideologies and philosophies might not be the best way to do that. So, I guess what I might be saying— however impractical or possibly impossible this might be—is that we should pursue a science of art (aesthetics) but we should try to do that science not in the spirit of science but in the spirit of art.

Other examples from my life:

A few weeks ago, a guy named Tom Willet presented at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Music. He said he was no theologian or academic person at all, but he wanted to give a sort of theology of music. Then he proceeded to play great pieces of music from different genres and styles, injecting poetic musings about what music does in between. After his meditative words (and they were very few), the meaning of the music jumped out at us. The creaturehood of the music as God’s music was displayed.

I sometimes think that Seerveld’s great contribution is the spirit of urgency that is conveyed by his writing and speaking, not the words themselves (this is probably something he learned from Vollenhoven or Runner because several of their students have this quality). In high school and college, I tried to apply this feeling I felt from Seerveld to music, to listening and playing, and to my Bible reading, and my tastes were changed. I understood art better, was closer to the events of Scripture, was a better musician even!

From these experiences, I am led to believe that the most effective way to teach aesthetics is to get a bunch of people in a room together and talk about what’s going on in the works of art and what is the spirit conveyed in those pieces. That’s what Seerveld did for me as I tried to look and listen the way he learned to look and listen from neo-Kuyperians and ultimately from the Word of God. What I’m trying to respond to, I think, is Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which says that if you’re looking at something with Reason, that which is rational will reveal itself to you. I take that to be true and indeed very biblically oriented. When we look at the world through the eyes of Christ, however, through the Word of God, guided by the Holy Spirit, His Kingdom will be revealed to us. We will see things that we could not see through the spirit of rationalism. So, as Christians who think in the Spirit of Christ and not in the spirit of rationalism, we will find His Spirit and will be able to feel the emptiness of the other spirits in the world. That’s what a Christian aesthetics ought to do. A Christian science of art must be careful not to try to bring art under the lordship of science, but under the lordship of Christ, which allows art to be spoken about in a way that’s true, ie. consistent with the norms God has set for it (Dooeyweerd et al.), not science. My question, I guess, is how can we speak about art in an academic context using scientific methodology without imprisoning it in scientific language (language that is used to “know” all sides of a thing, that is a desire to gain human control of our environment, that reveals what is most universal and abstract, that tries to grasp its objects)? Such language is not the language of art (language that opens up possibilities of meaning beyond our control, that expresses human inability to know all sides of a thing, that seeks to express the “subjective” uniqueness of human experience, that resists being grasped)!