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A weekly Renovare group meets in my house on Friday mornings. My daughter AE calls it my "chanting group" because we end by praying the Lord's Prayer together. We follow the format from The Spiritual Formation Workbook. This group has been meeting for over ten years, with members moving away and others joining. I am one of the original members, as is JT, whom Katherine E. knows up in Fort Worth.
Among other things today, I talked about last night's art exhibit that I described in Art, where I wondered about my adequacy in determining art. It is good to talk in community. Several members of our group (who had also attended the lecture last night) brought other angles to my outlook. Watercolor artist JDH could speak to me about art without the "arty terms." She told me the pink tapes on the wall are just that--and not to make myself try to see something I didn't! And she didn't get any feeling about exclusivity, which I seemed to get. (But I could counter that she is part of "the group" and I am not.) Social worker JS described exuberantly being in the room with all the blue sacks and immediately going into the middle--how she jumps into things and doesn't skirt around the edges. I am more cautious and don't want to go "in" until I know "how." That was a beautiful example of how to live, especially when experiencing art. Child protective social worker AB dated the ex-curator of the museum until he moved to California a few months ago, and she told me that he would be so pleased that the exhibit had gotten me so stirred up and inquisitive! JDH told me that art is an experience and is transformative, though not everything labeled as "art" will affect each person.
I can see that I've grown even from last night in my understanding of what art is. If I don't get stuck in the analytical attitude towards art where I have little knowledge, I am starting to see that I might view art more as an experience than something to be looked at and judged. This is a new beginning for me and seems more inviting than any other way I've glanced at the subject before.
It helps that I found this quote at What is Art? What is an Artist?
Arthur Danto, professor of philosophy at Columbia University and art critic of The Nation, believes that today "you can't say something's art or not art anymore. That's all finished."
That helps me to understand a little more the modern climate for art and why Tony Feher does what he does. Just like I was once told I needed to form my own Christology, I guess I need to define "art" for myself. That'll take quite awhile, but so is my Christology.
Somehow there seems like an opening and more space around the subject of art for me. It is not so alien as it seemed. At the moment, I don't feel so resistant. Is this the beginning of transformation?
1 comment:
It seems too easy that we can't say what art is anymore, which is true enough but leaves us yearning for meaning. What once was a convenient term -- "art" as opposed to, say, "science" -- has become burdened with too much ideological and critical freight. Perhaps what's changed is not so much that we can't say what art is but that we must instead focus on what art does; indeed, what it does with us. Jan's beloved friends speak this way, as though art interpreted them, and Jan's insight is keen -- that knowing art is less about judging than letting otherness speak, which is a form of faith. We may not like what we hear. We may reject it or embrace it; or we may let it be, as most things are, suspended in the tension we might call knowledge of ignorance, content that, at the very least, it is of God's providence if not God's grace. The "how" of art seems not to be susceptible to labeling as, for example, "beauty" or "truth," for these static terms tend to short-circuit the process of knowing. To say something is "true" or "beautiful" artificially freezes a moment of apprehension, while it is clear that God calls us to continuous yearning for the "how" of continuously unfolding truth and beauty or love or, for that matter, meaninglessness, hopelessness or death.
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