Not until after my own talk did I realize how strong the contrast was between my talk and the main speakers’.  Before I got up, Harold Best shared a lot of great ideas (which you can listen to here), emphasizing the Christian’s freedom to explore all kinds of subject matter in art making.  He expounded upon his view that art is a poor carrier for truth and that we should let art be art and not expect it to do what its not made to do.  He emphasized engaging art based upon how it’s put together, or its composition.   He also expressed frustration at the way too many people expect a quick answer to “what does it mean?” instead of engaging art as it is in itself.

To many people, I’m sure his talk was probably a very freeing experience, allowing Christian creatives to see the wide world of possibilities before them as fields for fruitfulness.

As Alan Vales illustrated in conversation with me, “It’s like the chains were coming off.”

Unfortunately, when Alan described my talk in relation to Harold’s he put his hands around his throat and gagged.  The shackles were back on.

This was certainly not my intention, to keep Christian artists, songwriters, and writers under the weight of spiritualized pragmatism.  Seriously, God forbid.  I’d like to take the opportunity to clarify some of what I obviously didn’t make clear in my talk.

The title of my talk was “The Struggle To Make Life Affirming Art.”  I chose this as my topic because of my own personal struggle with negativity, ungratefulness, and a critical spirit.  This sinful attitude, a heart condition, often colors the way I make artwork, even if it’s not evident to the viewer solely based on the photographs I make.  So, this need for confession and repentance drove this talk into development.

Hesitant to just talk about my own issues in front of everybody, but eager to illustrate the struggle to affirm life while working, I showed the work of two contemporary art photographers, Alec Soth and Robert Adams.  I also shared quotes from the artists reflecting how they think about their own work.  While both artists’ photographs often include a degraded landscape and human alienation, one thinks of his work as life affirming and the other doesn’t seem to.   This conclusion was based almost completely on the reading I did of the artist’s own verbal communication, not on the work itself.  I wouldn’t begin to judge whether or not these photographs were redemptive, or life affirming, without hearing the artists speak.

And even then, what I’m judging is not the artworks themselves.  What I was attempting to do was speak about a matter of the heart, and of course acknowledging that I don’t know these artists’ hearts outside of what they’ve said publicly.  I wasn’t as concerned with judging the final products of their labor, but instead I wanted to show how these two artists, who were both making important and valuable photographs, were spiritually in two different places (again, just based on the written material available).

To talk about how that spiritual condition of the artist gets embedded into the work itself is tricky to discuss.  Like Harold Best and Nicholas Wolterstorff, (and unlike Francis Schaeffer) I don’t think the artwork will necessarily illustrate the artist’s worldview, but I do know, both by experience and photo history that to some extent every photograph is a self-portrait, even the seemingly detached landscapes of Robert Adams or Alec Soth.  I imagine the same is true of a painting, or a song, or a short story too.  But as I said, that conversation is tricky and I’m not prepared to have it.

So, because Harold’s talk emphasized a Christian’s freedom to explore all kinds of subject matter, my discussion of some art as life affirming and some not, appeared to be saying instead that you have to use the kind of subject matter that is life affirming.   I seemed to be contradicting Harold, and anyone can tell just by looking at us that Harold is going to win in the wisdom category.

I wasn’t contradicting him though.  I wasn’t talking about subject matter.  I wasn’t talking about CONTENT.  I was talking about INTENT.

I think most of the confusion could have been clarified if I emphasized I was discussing INTENT rather than CONTENT.  I wanted those listening to consider for themselves in what they make, “Are you affirming life with what you make?”  This question is not based on the thing made, but based on the heart attitude and intention of the artist.

While we, as Christians, are free to consider any subject at all, our intentions are in full view before Christ, and because of our love for him, we want to submit our intentions to him.   In submitting our intentions to him, we desire to be shaped into the kind of people that are thankful for the life given us.  And then, by being the kind of somebodys who affirm life, the intentions of our creative endeavors will be to affirm life.

Astoria Scum River Bridge from Jason Eppink on Vimeo.

This video describes a great example of how artist Jason Eppink used artistic creativity make real, physical social transformation happen.

This month’s devotional cover image depicts Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son as recorded in Luke 15. Rembrandt has chosen the moment of embrace as the image to paint. The son who had wondered away foolishly now returns, and the father embraces him without reservation. The older brother, who has always been ‘’the good son’’, watches coldly from afar.

Who do you identify with in this image?

In Henri Nouwen’s book The Return of the Prodigal Son, the author asks this same question of himself. Throughout sequential decades as he reencountered this painting and Luke 15, he found that he could identify himself with each of the three main characters – the wandering son, the pious older son, and at the time of writing he was hoping to become more like the loving father.

photo: dinner at Ramsi’s.  Joe is the tall, smiley one in dark blue.

Most people are shorter than me.  But Joe Johnson is not.  He’s 6’5”.  He teaches at University of Missouri at Columbia.  Among other awards, he was a runner up for the Aperture Foundation Prize in 2008.  He was an apprenticing assistant for Abelardo Morrell for 3 years (one of my favorite art photographers).  He grew up in Kansas and went to school in San Francisco and New York.  He’s been published in a bunch of places and has had fancy exhibits.  In short, he has the whole list of accomplishments I myself dreamed of having while I was studying photography at UofL.

I could have mentioned any of that this past Friday night when I introduced him before his artist talk, but I didn’t.  Instead, without thinking really at all, I just stepped up to the mic and blurted out what was essentially a disclaimer about his words being only his own, and not necessarily reflecting the views of the venue or the church.  I had the thought to give that sort of disclaimer earlier in the week only because he was going to be talking about megachurches and if his opinions about megachurches came out I didn’t want people to think that those were shared opinions with Sojourn.  Fair enough, but it’s not cool to just give a disclaimer and not share a single fact about how awesome Joe’s work is, or how swell of a guy he is, or anything.  Anything.

It wouldn’t have been extra terrible except that somewhere in the process of giving this stupid introduction, I must have stepped on the power cord for the projector so that the projector needed to be plugged in and restarted, making an awkward introduction more awkward.  In the end though, Joe got up there and gave the best artist talk I think the 930 has ever had.

As soon as my little fiasco occurred, I was embarassed, but that night and the next morning my bafoonery was ringing in my head.  I’m such a moron.  I’m such a moron.  Why do I get to be the director of this awesome arts ministry if I can’t even introduce an artist without disgracing him and unplugging his powerpoint?  These are the thoughts I was having.

Now, it’s Tuesday and I’m not waking up with those thoughts ringing in my head.  The thought process that stopped the ‘voices’ went something like this:

Why do I cringe so bad at my own faultiness?  Do I really think I’ve ever deserved my position at the 930 and Sojourn?  No, of course not.  If I got everything right all the time, where would God’s grace be found?  It’s grace that anybody would let me get in front of a microphone.  It’s grace that I’ve got the ‘job’ that I’ve got.  It’s grace that I get to meet artists that are like heros to me.  It’s grace that Joe didn’t hold such a bad introduction against me.  It’s grace that secures a future for me, not my own accomplishments. God’s grace is sufficient and maybe it will grow me to not screw up in the same way next time.

I ripped it out of a national geographic.  Macro/Micro.  Intelligent Design.

A couple of weeks ago he, Kevin DeYoung, posted an attempt to lay down some common ground and common sense for thinking about the intersection of the church and the arts.

It’s a shame that art, to some extent, divides the church into two camps (art is weird vs. art is the answer).  Of course it’s not the fault of art.  It’s our fault.  It’s a shame that Christians are so confused about the appropriate functions of art in the church.  I appreciate the original post’s attempt to bring common sense to this issue.  That’s exactly what is needed.

In the end, there’s plenty of freedom in the gospel and in God’s mission for our local churches to be very involved and intentional about the use of art or not.

We can talk about the relative importance of the individual points he made, but common sense in the context of God’s whole purpose for the church is exactly what is needed and his post takes a good stab at that.

His main points were:

1. We must allow art to be art.

2. Art is valuable, but so are a lot of other things.

3. Art can do some things, and it can’t do some other things.

4. Our worship should strive for artistic excellence, but our worship will inevitably be “popular” and propositional.

5. Churches can learn to welcome artists, but artists should not expect the church to be an art gallery.

6. Artists can help us see our idols, and artists have idols of their own too.

I’d like to borrow some of Kevin DeYoung’s points, and mix them with ideas I’ve gathered from other great thinkers like Harold Best and Betsey Steele Halstead to form a revised set of common sense principles for the church’s use of visual art.

I’ll publish the conclusions here soon.  Feel free to comment with principles that you think should guide the church’s use of art.

In the context of today’s contemporary art there are so many artists who are doing art that serves to love their neighbors.  I expect most of these artists are not followers of Jesus, but nonetheless a consideration of their work can hopefully help open up the realms of possibility for Christian artists who have limited the aims of their art making too much.

Jon Rubin describes his project ‘FREEmobile’ like this: “Every weekend during the summer of 2003 a custom modified 1968 Chevy step-van, with the word FREE boldly painted on it’s sides and a funk-based soundtrack coming from it’s speakers, toured through one south Seattle neighborhood (Hillman City) much like an ice cream truck. But instead of selling ice cream, the van hosted local residents or families who shared, for free, what they like to make or do with their direct neighbors.

The project publicly acknowledges the idiosyncratic hidden talents and resources of the neighborhood. Like a moving museum that goes out to meet its audience, the FREEmobile was a dynamic venue for exhibiting and distributing local folk culture. The truck also became the stage for a weekly interactive performance. By allowing neighbors to share what they are naturally passionate about, the FREEmobile presented a comfortable way for people to meet each other. Each host individual or family was introduced to a larger segment of their community and visa-versa. The FREEmobile also presented a model for bypassing the commercial market system of mass-produced goods and services by keeping the entire project local and homemade, handmade, or homegrown.”

See Jon Rubin’s other projects at http://www.jonrubin.net/index.php

picture from the midway series by Chris Jordan

Digital artist Chris Jordan has done a lot of work dealing with consumption.  In his newest series, called Midway, he has made photographs of albatross chicks who have died due to eating too much plastic.  These birds live over 2000 miles from any mainland yet there’s enough bottle caps out there to kill more than 10,000 of these birds each year.  Chris Jordan has figured out that the capabilities of photography and of digital imaging can make statistics overpowering.  His wall-sized prints from the series ‘Running the Numbers’ show things like ’28,000 42-gallon barrels, the amount of oil consumed in the United States every two minutes (equal to the flow of a medium-sized river)’ and ‘one hundred million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees cut in the U.S. yearly to make the paper for junk mail.’

See the images on his website, http://chrisjordan.com/

Another example of a contemporary artists expanding the possibilities of art making and loving neighbors (my words, not the artist’s) in the process is a personal favorite, Harrell Fletcher.  Harrell is known for developing what he calls ‘art + social practice’ which gets himself and other artists out of their individual studios and working in a social setting.  Often the most important part of his work doesn’t exist as an art object, but rather the relational situations he creates.

In the project ‘Lawn Sculptures’ he partnered with other artists to make ceramic portrait lawn ornaments of his neighbors.  These were given to the neighbors after being shown in a gallery.  The idea for this project came about after the artist noticed that a neighbor had one of his previous lawn ornaments vandalized.

In ‘North Beach Parking Garage’ he and artist Jon Rubin gave each parking spot in a garage a different fortune, transforming the utilitarian garage into a creative space.

Check out Harrell Fletcher’s work at http://www.harrellfletcher.com/index3b.html

These are just a few good examples out of many.  Sadly none of them come from an artist who is known to be working from a Christian understanding of the world.  For some reason Christians have not yet widely found a way to make art that is (1) motivated by the gospel, and (2) fulfills a social need outside the concerns of the art world and religion.

Does anyone have examples that prove otherwise?

Richard Fudge, from down in Memphis, asked me to take part in a really cool project he’s started called ‘To Send a Prayer’.  He’s mailing three journals around to Christian artists around the country and asking them to make one spread in the journal into a personal expression of prayer.

The picture above is my addition to the project.  I came across a striking song lyric that inspired a prayer in me that inspired me to make this image.  There is a Mount Eerie song ‘Lost Wisdom’ in which the writer has a mystical experience in nature.  At one point the song sings, ‘I open the front door and the back door and let the wind blow through.’  For whatever reason this line really stuck with me.  I didn’t even consider that he might be talking about a physical door.  In my mind, the door in this line refers to a door to a human spirit.  The doors are opened and the Wind comes through, the Pure Spirit.  I hope this image conveys both an emptiness of the human spirit and the capacity for God to dwell within us.

I’m sure some people will read it as a t-shirt that doesn’t say anything, but that’s what I get for not putting any words on this spread.

To see other spreads from the project and to see if you can get involved, check out http://2sendaprayer.blogspot.com/

Recently, I was given the task of writing up some notes for how ‘the artist’ can be a metaphor for leadership. Once Mike Cosper and I come up with the final draft, maybe I can post it here, but for now I’ll just share my first thought. The first thought I had when trying to wrap my mind around this topic was to remember Adam’s first words upon seeing Eve for the first time.
“‘At last!’ the man exclaimed.
‘This is bone from my bone
And flesh from my flesh.
She shall be called woman,
Because she was taken from man.”

Adam, from the start, was leading his family well from the well of joy he was experiencing. His poetry was a blessing to Eve and a spontaneous praise to God who created her.

Artists are leaders. They are at the front lines of cultural trends and artists create the contexts in which we all live our lives. Architects shape the space of our living. Visual artists can change the mood of a whole room with a small piece of artwork. Musicians shape the emotional range of our work places and our homes. Of course, the emotional range created by artists can set the tone for bitterness, or fatigue, or mindlessness, but I think it’s also possible for artists to shape contexts into a tone of joy.

I chose the picture above of Jason Crigler during the installation of his current exhibit ‘Ethiopia’ at the 930 because I think he and the other artists that worked on that exhibit created a context for joy. Partially because of Jason’s contagious smile, and partially because of his deep understanding of joy in the midst of poverty, I think the Ethiopia exhibit and the artist behind the photographs lead us toward joy.