Thoughts About the Sacredness of Art in Times of Corruption and Absurdity

During my sabbatical this summer, I spent a little time in Santa Fe, NM before I made my way eventually for a spiritual retreat at Ghost Ranch, NM.  Thanks to one of my favorite web sites, Atlas Obscura, which points visitors to wacky and often profound sites around the globe, I came across Ethyl.  

Ethyl is a piece of public art on the campus of Santa Fe Community College.  This artwork is a life-size blue whale made entirely out of hand-recycled plastic.  Here is the intention behind Ethyl from the SFCC web site:

"The 82-foot life-sized sculpture of a blue whale is made of hand-recycled plastic trash to bring awareness to the ever-growing urgency of the negative impact plastics have on our environment. Ethyl is not just a work of art; she is a message: plastic is destroying our oceans. She is a presence, inspiring us to do better. To think more environmentally. To be more proactive. She represents a call to action to champion using alternatives to plastic that don't destroy our planet."

Ethyl is rather shocking to look at, because she is an 82-foot long whale laying in the middle of the desert!  The thought of a whale so far from water and the suffering and death of such a noble creature is alarming.  Alarmed is what so many of us around the world feel today at the utter inaction of world leaders in the face of the devastating effects of climate change.  In a time when a sixteen year-old Swedish girl seems to be the only sane person at the United Nations regarding climate change, and at the same time her outcry is cruelly mocked by those in power, art may be the only way to express the absurdity of our world situation.  Mere words are not enough.

There is a sacredness to artistic work, because it requires awe in order to create it and appreciate it.  Brother Thomas said, "Skill and art are not the same thing, and the only real measure of art is astonishment."   Art can pull our gaze away from selfishness, greed and short-sighted gain earned at the cost of future generations so prevalent right now.  I think it is fair to say that when religion is done right, it serves the same purpose, causing us to experience what is greater, more loving and more gracious than we imagine.  In our time, when corruption in government and business are on flagrant display and those who benefit from it face no accountability, rather than giving into despair art (and religion done well) can instead provide us with astonishment.  In turn, that sense of awe can provoke us to act for a better world, in spite of the odds stacked against such an outcome.  In Christian terms, awe of God's glory enables us to realize God is on the side of those who work for justice and peace in the world.

Scripture gives us plenty of examples of how art produces awe.  The prophets of Israel who were so concerned with justice in their society can perhaps best be understood as performance artists.  Isaiah walked around the country nude for three years to warn his people of coming destruction (they didn't listen).  Ezekiel baked bread, covered it dung and then ate it to show his people their failures to follow God's decrees (they didn't listen).  Most of all the prophets wrote poetry and most likely performed it publicly to jerk their audiences' attentions away from their own selfishness and toward awe in the face of God's glory.  

Thus says God, the Lord,
    who created the heavens and stretched them out,
    who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people upon it
    and spirit to those who walk in it:
I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness,
    I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
I have given you as a covenant to the people,[a]
    a light to the nations,
    to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
    from the prison those who sit in darkness.
I am the Lord, that is my name;
    my glory I give to no other,
    nor my praise to idols.
See, the former things have come to pass,
    and new things I now declare;
before they spring forth,
    I tell you of them.

--Isaiah 42:5-9

Walter Brueggemann (who just happens to be part of the United Church of Christ) writes that prophets (and I would add artists) exist to offer an alternative reality to what he calls "royal consciousness>  Royal consciousness, the worldview of the powerful elite, was marked by three characteristics:

--"an economics of affluence in which we are so well off that pain is not noticed and we can eat our way around it;"

--"a politics of oppression in which the cries of the marginal are not heard or are dismissed as noises of kooks and traitors;"

--a religion of immanence and accessibility, in which God is so present to us that {God's] abrasiveness, [God's] absence, [God's] banishment are not noticed. . ."

(The Prophetic Imagination p. 41)

Despite our stereotypes of the prophets as offering only doom and gloom, they offered what Brueggeman called "the language of amazement."  He writes:

"It is a language that engages the community in new discernments and celebrations just when it had nearly given up and had nothing to celebrate."

(The Prophetic Imagination p. 69)

To hear an interview with Brueggemann on this subject, click here.

A world where those in power (and those of us in the middle class too) are not in touch with our own pain, much less the pain of the world; where those in power (and some of us) are removed from the cries of the oppressed; and where for those in power (and some of us) God is nothing more than a means to political power is an ugly world.  Prophets command our attention and invite us to see a different world.  So do artists.

James Baldwin said of the United States, 

"We are the strongest nation in the Western world, but this is not for the reasons that we think. It is because we have an opportunity that no other nation has in moving beyond the Old World concepts of race and class and caste, to create, finally, what we must have had in mind when we first began speaking of the New World. But the price of this is a long look backward when we came and an unflinching assessment of the record. For an artist, the record of that journey is most clearly revealed in the personalities of the people the journey produced. Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with [their] society is a lover's war, and [they do], at [their] best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to [their-self] and, with that revelation, to make freedom real."

Artists' pain often comes from broken hearts and the best of them somehow convey their love for their subjects in spite of their pain.  As we face this absurd time in our nation's history and indeed in the history of our planet, the pain is great, but we are invited along with artists and prophets to reveal our love in spite of the pain it costs.

Michel Foucault wrote, "From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art."  Without wanting to diminish the power of human agency that the French philosopher speaks of, I would offer that from a Christian perspective, we can say God creates us as a work of art and our task is to join in the divine artist's work.  Doing so necessarily involves pain when we discover the ways injustice tarnishes the Artist's work, but as we see in Christ, love is never ultimately overshadowed by pain.

William Sloane Coffin, a prophet of the 20th century who was the minister at Riverside Church in NYC and chaplain at Yale, repeatedly called his work for social justice "A Lover's Quarrel With America."  I think Baldwin and Sloane Coffin are correct in that we are called to struggle in love with our absurdly corrupt culture.  If we are to be co-artists with God, we have no choice.

During my sabbatical, my friend Sterling and I were privileged to have a wonderful guide showing us around western Turkey.  One afternoon he took us to an artist workshop where traditional Turkish rugs were made by hand.  Today, most Turkish rugs are made via machine, and we discovered why when we learned the painstaking work that goes into making them.

The lousy camera on my IPhone 5 (don't judge me) cannot do justice to the amazing colors and designs of these masterworks of art!  Also, my bank account cannot do justice to their price tags, but for handmade works of art which are passed from generation to generation I believe the prices were reasonable.

The head of the workshop graciously educated us on the art of weaving Turkish rugs by hand.  We were able to observe some of the weavers tying by hand the tiny dyed silk threads one knot at a time over and over again.  Thousands upon thousands of tiny knots go into even the smallest rugs--the more knots per inch the more a rug is worth.  We saw rugs the size of bath mats which were worth more than rugs covering large rooms, because the sheer quantity of knots had taken weavers years upon years to complete the work.

The head of the workshop explained to us how the whole process of making a rug begins with a silk worm larva which spins a cocoon out of silk that it makes from its own saliva.

Fragile threads of silk are spun from the cocoons into spools.  Then they are dyed and the weaving begins.  

As I said, most Turkish rugs are today made with machines, and the weaving of them is a dying art.  I felt deeply humbled as I saw each rug rolled out on the floor before me.  Every one of the rugs was the result of a years-long process of exhausting labor.  Each one was stunning in its beauty.

Seeing such masterworks and understanding the effort it took to make them was a religious experience for me.  Their beauty brought tears to my eyes  Since I'm a minister, I couldn't help but draw parallels between the astonishing effort it took the weavers to make these works of art and God's artistry in making all that we experience.  

Our trip to Turkey occurred just days before an election was to take place for the mayor of Istanbul, Turkey's largest city.  Everywhere we went Turkish people were focused on this election, because whoever was elected mayor of Istanbul would likely become a future president of the country.  Also, everywhere we went Turkish people would tell us about the corruption of their current president, Recep Erdogan.  We heard tales of Erdogan using the power of his office to silence political rivals, attack the free press and enrich his own family (sound familiar?).  In the days we were in Turkey, there was an air of hope for a better future intermingled with the pain of living under a corrupt regime.

Yet, in spite of their disheartening political times, the weavers of the rugs continued their work.  They continued to produce works which inspire awe and point to a greater reality.  They also point to a different future, because they will outlast the corruption of the days in which they were made.  

Like those master weavers, God seeks to create art which interrupts the fear and pain of these days.  We are called to be co-artists, co-creators with God to not only craft ourselves but the world around us.  The innumerable threads which form our lives are each individually tied by God's hands and ours.  The beauty of God's artwork enables us to hold onto love in the midst of the pain we experience over the corruption and absurdity of these days.

Frederick Buechner writes, "If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in."  It is through the frame of love that God sees you and God invites each of us to look through that same frame at the world around us.

Know you are a work of art which is still being created, woven into a larger fabric which makes up our world.  You may be helpless to overcome the pain of our world or your particular place in it, but together with God you are far from helpless.  Dare to enter into a lover's quarrel with this world and our nation.  With God's help love is worth the pain.

Grace and Peace,

Chase