Resources (Part 4)

1) "Behind The Screen: Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film, and Culture,"
Edited by Spencer Lewerenz and Barbara Nicolosi

2) "Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment,"
By Brian Godawa

3) "Eyes Wide Open: Looking For God In Popular Culture,"
By William D. Romanowski

Why Look? Engaging Contemporary Art: Class 2 Slides & Notes

1. Review: Why look?
1. Because we live in visual culture
2. Because the Word became flesh
3. Because contemporary art tells part of the story, but we know how the story ends.
2. Recognizing certain themes in contemporary art helps us direct our looking. They can also function as a way to introduce important artists, working today, that you should know about.
1. Ecclesiastes is approached the same way as a contemporary art gallery: confusing. It is a beautiful book, but it can be hard to read and hard to draw meaning from.

   In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him. Ecc. 7:14

   
   
3. Theme: Time and Memory
1. Art that takes time to unfold for the viewer, or took time for the artist to make.
2. Art that is about the memories or personal histories of the artist. Retelling cultural memories from their families, for example.
3. Ecclesiastes 8:17. We need each other’s experiences to fill out our own sense of reality, of God’s creation. We are created to experience things in time and to encounter other people’s experiences in time.
4. The slides shown are meant to illustrate these themes, not meant to make you derive meaning from. What do you see, and how does it relate to the theme? We will address how to look at these types of art next week.
5. Ann Hamilton, Corpus. A 10-month installation, incorporating sound, movement, paper, machines, light, etc. A meditative work, referencing a grand cathedral. Not a timeless work, but inextricably based in a certain time. The viewer is unsure whether to go in or not. Fall leaves, raking, copy machines, making a game instead of frustrating. A physical experience.
6. Yamamoto, untitled slide. 280 nails into a line in the wall with tiny words on their heads. It took some time to make, but it takes a bit of time to look at as well, especially since the line compels you to follow the words all the way to the end. Chores, monotony, a life cycle. A negative view of life. Nails as a way to get rid of the repressiveness. Nails have a religious connotation, especially when they are hammered into the wall. A bit of biographical information since we’ve had a good amount of thoughtful interaction with it so far: Yamamoto reimagines the inner thoughts of her grandmother, who was a Japanese immigrant laundress in Hawai’i who committed suicide after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
4. Theme: the Body
1. Having a body is a messy business, something that is not often acknowledged in older art.
2. The body is fragile, easily broken and not as strong as we wish.
3. The body is evoked, but not represented.
4. We don’t fully understand our bodies, but our creator does.

   As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything. - Ecc. 11:5

5. Gonzales-Torres, Placebo slide. 1200 pounds of foil-wrapped candy in a rectangle on the ground. The guard tells you that you can take a piece. Taking something from a memorial. A body that is disappearing, dissipating.
5. Theme: Identity
1. How you concive of yourself and each other in relationship to others.

   Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Ecc 4:9-12

6. Theme: Globalization
1. Effects of imperialism (British, Soviet, American, etc), especially in Africa and South America.
2. New histories, new stories.

   Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. - Ecc 4:1

3. Ghana slide. Foreign-looking large piece of textile from a distance, but closer inspection shows that it is made of liquor bottle wrapping. Effect of European liquor on Africa. Recycling and reusing what other people throw away.
7. Theme: Commodity
1. Use of consumer products

   He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity. When goods increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes? Ecc 5:10, 11

2. References to popular visual culture.
3. Collapse of art into life.
4. Krueger slide.
5. Flune slide. Corporate design aesthetic infiltrating our visual lives.
8. Theme: Play
1. Viewer participation, touching, looking at it in different ways
2. Surprise!

   When I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done on earth, how neither day nor night do one’s eyes see sleep, then I saw all the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. However much man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out. Even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out. - Ecc. 8:16-17

3. Donovan slide, untitled (plastic cups). Taking something that you can go out and buy, turning it into something amazing, pleasing, beautiful.
4. Oppenheimer side. Cuts holes in walls, creating tunnels in vision allowing you to see architecture in a new, different way.
5. Eliason, your imploded view slide. View of self and surroundings changes.

Discussion Thread #2

Comments/questions concerning Elissa's class.

Why Look? Engaging Contemporary Art: Class 1 Notes

Why look at contemporary art — this week
How — next week
Who — third week

Art is a cultural product for human interaction

1. Calling it art doesn’t mean it is good. There is bad art.
2. Focus on how to engage with the art our culture is producing. Slides will include art we like, and art we don’t.

   “Art is art because it encapsulates a part of the human experience and elicits a response.” David Giardiniere, It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God

3. Good art does not leave you where it found you.

   “Good art takes us to a world we wouldn't have imagined ourselves. It does not leave us where it found us.” Ken Meyers, All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes

4. Van Ruisdale:
   
1. 
2. Common Reactions:
   
1. It is visually pleasing.
   
2. It is skillful.
   
3. Therefore it is good art.
   
4. Therefore it glorifies God.
   
5. Therefore it is true.
3. These are common, historically Christian ways of responding to art.
5. Hirst slide.
   
1. 
2. Reactions:
   
1. Empty assertion of title.
   
2. Belongs in a natural science museum.
   
3. Doesn’t fit in any categories of art.
   
4. What kind of shark is it?
6. Tempting to throw the shark out the window along with all contemporary art. Contemporary reformed theologians often only want to talk about representational art made before 1920.

   “If art is by its very nature part of God’s creation, inextricably historical, conditioned by the society in which it is made, and necessarily permeated by a committed spirit in one direction or another, then I believe it is wrong to view art as a luxury.” - Calvin Seerveld, Bearing Fresh Olive Leaves

7. Art is nether superfluous or extraneous. Art is made because there is meaning to what we do.

   “Humans have art because they understand, perhaps at an intuitive level, that there is meaning in what we do.” - Tim Keller, It was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God

   
   

Practical reason and two theological reasons to look at contemporary art

1. Practical: we live in an image-driven culture.

1. “We live in a generation raised on a steady diet of the visual.” - William Dyrness, Visual Faith

2. Movies, ads, websites, all visual.

3. "The human experience is more visual and visualized than ever before.” - Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader

4. Tide vs iPod.
   
5. Just as Paul on Mars Hill, contemporary apologetics of God’s truth must engage visual culture.
2. Theological: John 1:14.
   
1. The incarnation is visual, the sacraments are visual, the cross was visual.
   
2. The Word becomes flesh, submitting to a certain time and culture. He dressed according to the culture, he spoke in parables that were set in that culture.
   
3. Incarnation compels us to engage art from the culture that produced it.
3. Theological: the Christian metanarrative.
   
1. Creation—Fall—Redemption—Consummation.
   
2. Not a linear progression (today is a result of yesterday, which was a result of the day before, so on). But the Christian progression proceeds from our eschatological belief. Our understanding of the past is driven by what we believe about the future.
   
3. Creation’s existence through time is meaningful and worthy of study because Christ is coming back.
   
4. Christians, because we know the ending, are the freest to engage with contemporary art.
4. Example: Kiki Smith
1. 
   
2. What is the role that art has in contemporary culture?
   
3. Further, does the role of art change over time?
   
4. 
   Medievally, art is functional or decorative. Medievals didn’t do still lives or portraits, since it was instructional, didactic.
   
5. Smith slide. She looks fat, stretched, distorted, grotesque, cartoonish. You wouldn’t want to hang it behind your couch, but that is why we have museums, so that you can see art but not have to see it every day.
   
6. The technique used to produce the image is reminiscent of the Mercator projection of the earth. The Mercator projection makes Greenland and northern Russia HUGE.
   
7. Contemporary culture is obsessed with making the female body smaller and smaller. The technique in My Blue Lake makes Smith bigger and bigger.
   
8. The absurd, broken human being. The grotesqueness of rejecting our multi-dimensional real selves in favor of some distorted, culturally idealized female form and human condition.
   
9. Jesus came to save the grotesque and the sick.
5. Taking the metanarrative, we can look at ugly contemporary art and redeem it in our looking, though it may be disconcerting or unsettling. We are tied to our cynical, grotesque culture, but Jesus offers redemption to that culture too.

Comments

• But I couldn’t have understood the Smith slide without that background explanation.
  
• Just look at the piece and make associations. What does it remind me of visually? A map? What kind of map, what makes that map special, etc.
  
• Nothing in the explanation given used anything extra outside of just looking. No artist statement, no critical theory, etc.
• What did the artist intend, what is the statement? There seems to be no intent, not like older pieces of art.
  
• But if we train ourselves to work with contemporary visual associations like we did with the map.
• Hearing the Smith example made me realize that I’ve been arrogant when I walk through a gallery, not wanting to really understand what the artist is bringing forth with their work.
• I could have never come up with the ideas you put forth in your reading of the Smith work.
  
• Contemporary art museums like the Kemper have education directors that are just there to walk through a gallery with you and give you some meaningful prompts and associations.
  
• Museum’s web sites often have lots of important biographical information so that you can research before or after your visit.
• Is the textual hermeneutics idea of communities of discourse and hermeneutical spiral useful for art?
  
• Yes, interpretation is best done in community.

Resources (Part 2)

1) "Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts," by Steve Turner


2) "It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God," by Ned Bustard

Some Music We Listened To In Class:

Death Cab For Cutie

Sufjan Stevens

Kings of Convenience

Discussion Thread #1

Class discussion for Sunday, March 16.
Taught by Nathan Gemayel.

Resources (Part 1)

Resources for a Christian perspective on the arts (Part 1).
1) “State of the Arts: From Bezalel to Mapplethorpe,” by Gene Edward Veith

2) “Art for God’s Sake: A Call to Recover the Arts,” by Philip Graham Ryken

3) “Art and the Bible,” by Francis A. Schaeffer


More to come…

Welcome

Welcome.

This blog is meant to supplement “The Arts in Christian Perspective,” a Memorial Presbyterian Sunday school class.

For the thirteen weeks we will be meeting, this blog will serve as a vehicle for further discussion pertaining to our Sunday morning class.

Please feel free to ask any questions you would like relating to our classroom discussion and/or bring up any new topics pertaining to the arts.

We (meaning Noah, Elissa, Nathan and myself) will also be posting information from our lessons for the benefit of those of you who are interested in further investigation.

-Adam Porcella