The Visibility of the Invisible
With the March/April issue B&C has yet again fulfilled its mission well, providing an open and generous forum for debate and critique in the exchanges between Oden and Gundry. Yet elsewhere in the current issue is the start of a less explicit debate that I hope will have opportunity to surface in the future. Within the special section “The Visibility of the Invisible” (and Metaxas’s article) lie murmurs of dissent on some very strong assumptions regarding the nature of the artist’s work in the twenty-first century. As this section announces itself as an “occasional series,” I hope to see the focus on art continue, but I would like to suggest some important places to start the next exchange. The subject offers another opportunity for B&C to take the lead in providing a forum for difficult conversations.
At issue in these articles is the relation of matter to spirit, of visible to invisible, or familiar to unfamiliar, for the artist working today. (Though contemporary art is not the stated scope of the discussion, Metaxas, Wuthnow, Morgan, and Siedell all deal with either living or dead twentieth-century artists.) Metaxas expresses disdain for art that fails to “transport” us out of the banal vernacular of the current sitcom joke; Wuthnow presents a picture of artists as lone wolves, hill-dwelllers, sociophobes who work out of mystery or blind instinct, absent of intention or will.
In each of these views we find an art straining to depart the present condition, resisting society and fashion in favor of “transcendence.” Morgan and Siedell in their reviews hint at the precedence of such views in modern art, that “secularization” in art has not been as complete as was rumored; Morgan’s review presents us with some who would argue that modern art at its best eschews this desire to transcend and accepts the present condition. I would like to call attention to what is at stake in the gap between these disparate interpretations of the artist’s role in modern life.
There are plenty of reasons why Andrei Rublev is a better film than Jurassic Park, and I share Wuthnow’s hopes for finding inspiration for a creative faith practice in the practices of modern artists. However, art’s capacity to transport or evoke mystery is not a good foundation for these discussions, especially given modern art’s predilection for separating faith and reason. Such an approach to art at least misses a good opportunity to connect to contemporary culture, and at worst is a dangerously uncritical approach to defining “otherness” and mystery. We cannot ignore how our definitions of what is visible or invisible, familiar or strange, come about through the work of sinners who often choose what they see and do not see. We are apt to construct such categories in support of prideful and anxious motives, which we only escape by the grace of God.
Thus the desire to transcend the present condition through an experience of an “other” (or via the uncanny) requires the construction of an other, just as to experience mystery we have to decide what we already know (and perhaps know too well). The precedent in modern art for discovering “otherness” has not been good—usually the represented “other” gets the worse end of the deal. (This is as true for the watercooler joke as for the museum , where Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon groups women and African artifacts together into one fell swoop of otherness, creating a terrifying invitation to look and marvel, look and fear.)
With spirit and matter so thoroughly separated, the past century has seen plenty of aims at transcendence and “transport” through art, more often than not landing us in a gnostic wasteland. The more wild-eyed modernists, alluded to in Morgan’s review, sought to straddle ambiguities rather than choose between empty banality and super-spiritual dematerialization. Baudelaire, for example, situated his ideal modern artist deep in the fearsome street throngs, examining closely the latest cuts of every fashion, looking to distill the eternal from the transitory. “By modernity,” writes Baudelaire, “I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” Though in a world where incarnation is impossible such a position seems bent on madness, it seems to me an ideal place for a believer to locate the contemporary artist.
To look to the cut of a pant leg instead of an ineffable word, however, is not to settle for less than we hope for from the artist as priest. Instead it is to be open to otherness where we did not seek it, to be less careful with what familiar and known we are ready to expose to the strange and unknown. Strangers don’t just wear odd clothes and speak in subtitles, after all. They also sit next to you in the theater, rapt with suspense at Spielberg’s too familiar stories. If you think the reason for their amusement is simple, take a look at what a gamble the box-office business remains every weekend. Though these mysteries are less spiritually glamorous, they persist largely unattended by believers. If we don’t learn to “de-sanctify” our hopes for art, we run the risk of becoming another avant-garde, a band of aesthetic Pharisees who know better where and how the populace should be “transported.”
The hope for an art that redeems, that takes us out of ourselves, coincides with a desire for ritual. Ritual provides, codified and collective, a time for temporary transformation of the everyday into fantastic, radically strange experience. We can hope and aim for this in our art, but as rituals are no longer codified in a modern individualized society it will not be an easy task. Our boundaries of familiar and unfamiliar, what we are willing to have turned upside down for a time and what remains outside the circle of the dance, vary vastly. Thus what is presented to us as transformative today often either underwhelms us through making plastic what we held not sacred in the first place, or jars us through the seeming desecration of holy artifacts. (Walter Benjamin spoke of this “shock” as the essential modern experience.)
To experience transformative art, then, we must either hole up with a group of people whose boundaries we share, or remain willing to renegotiate what we allow to be a mystery. These negotiations are exciting stuff, and determine what the map will look like when the good Lord returns. I hope to find in future installments of “The Visibility of the Invisible” some discussion about these borders as we negotiate them, within the church and without.
Kevin Hamilton Whitinsville, Massachusetts
Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
