Where Have All the Artists Gone? (Part 2)

I asked a few weeks ago, "Where have all the artists gone?" The Washington Post today featured one answer to the question: Makoto Fujimura, and other evangelicals in the arts.

Fujimura (who also goes by Mako) has for several years been associated with Campus Crusade for Christ's outreach to leaders in New York City, a place of art, theater, music, and film, where the word "creative" often goes with "leadership." (Because of changes in Campus Crusade's work there and the passage of time, I do not know if he is still involved with that outreach or not.) I met him there and had a tour of his studio about ten years ago. His art is abstract; the medium he uses is a unique metal-on-metal form of painting; the result both dazzles and provokes the viewer to thoughtful reflection. Visit his web page, and each time you refresh the page it will present a different painting of his. The photos are small, though, and lacking both in light and texture. They give you only the barest hint of what he does.

I'm a musician, not an art critic. I understand that Mako is a major New York artist, and that his work causes both delight and almost a troubled kind of wonder in me. I know also, from meeting him and hearing his heart, how deeply he yearns for a kind of thinking Christianity that respects imagination, beauty, and all forms of art. But Christian art so often is overly obvious or too overtly didactic. Much as I love The Chronicles of Narnia, I find more power in the less obvious yet still very Christian expression of The Lord of the Rings. (This I say by way of illustration, not as an insult on C.S. Lewis; the Chronicles were children's books, after all. And his other novels, especially Till We Have Faces, are a considerable challenge to the imagination.)

Mako founded the International Arts Movement to encourage Christian involvement in the arts. He spoke about this at the Redemptive Culture Conference at Ground Zero early this year, including this:

"International Arts Movement exists for this type of wrestling of faith, culture and humanity. It starts with the admission that living and creating in ground zero means you live with both Jesus and monsters."

These are not necessarily literal monsters. They are the monsters of a child's imagination, they are the monsters of our inward contradictions and struggles, or they could even be the monsters of 9/11. Christian art need not be "safe" art. He goes on to say,

"Wrestling in this way, we give ourselves permission to ask deeper questions. What if the monsters do take over? That would be a concern of parents in this room for their children. That may be our current cultural condition of fear. But, in reality, I think the situation is reversed: monsters have already taken over in reality, and the only hope we have is to imaginatively work backwards. We are to take charge of the situation, and we mediate both the sinister and the good. Just like in Pan’s Labyrinth, we need to know we have a greater inheritance waiting for us.

"Some have called the 21st Century the 'Creative Age.' Phil Hanes, philanthropist and arts advocate, at a recent National Council on the Arts meeting, began a discussion on how we need to prepare ourselves as a nation to address this shift. Richard Florida, Thomas Friedman, Daniel Pink and others have noted similar shifts in culture: The Information Age is behind us, and yet we, in America, are educating our children to thrive in that past. The skills and knowledge for Information Age are now outsourced, but we are ill equipped to lead in the age of imagination, the age of synthesis. While a hard term to define, The Creative Age will certainly mean one thing: we would have to reconcile living with both Jesus and monsters in our imaginative territories. We have to reconsider the artists’ role in society, in our education of our children: and we need to redefine how we see ourselves, all of us, as creative human beings who need art in our lives so that we can preserve a child’s innocence in the midst of horror and unspeakable evil, and help them to prosper and thrive in the creative age."

He illustrates some of what he means through a thoughtful analysis of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and reminds us that "The Bible begins with Creation, and ends in a wedding." God loves creativity. Much of the Bible is poetry. The art of the Tabernacle was symbolic and not all representational. The universe itself displays God as Artist.

As a writer I have often bemoaned the difficulty I have writing fiction (not to mention poetry). It's more powerful, closer to the heart in many ways than what I usually do here. The little I've done has been my most satisfying writing, to me at least. There is still music in me, though!

So where have all the artists gone? They haven't all quite disappeared, and by God's grace and the encouragement of people like Makoto Fujimura, God's own creativity will be revealed more and more through his people again, as was the case in years past.

See also Where Have All the Artists Gone (Part 3).

Posted: Sat - July 28, 2007 at 10:07 AM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Where Have All the Artists Gone? (Part 2)

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson