Sanctifying Art. Deborah Sokolove
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of high art against those who never step foot in a gallery, museum, or concert hall.
One of the problems in conversations like this is that artists are often tongue-tied when asked to explain what seems self-evident to them. So, it took a while for me to find the right words, but eventually I was able to say to my friend two, quite different things.
First, my answer to the question, “Why should the art in a museum or gallery matter as much to other people as it does to me?” is, “Maybe it shouldn’t.” Because of my life experience, or simply because of how my mind works, or how my body responds to color and form, I happen to have a taste for certain kinds of high art, much as I have a taste for chocolate. Just as I wouldn’t try to argue my husband into liking chocolate when he prefers vanilla, I have no need to convince anyone to spend time in an art museum when they would prefer to walk on the beach or listen to rap.
On the other hand, an awareness of what is in museums, concert halls, and theaters, and the ways that certain paintings, pieces of music, poems, stories, and other artworks have affected the overall cultural, theological, and spiritual discourse, is part of being an educated human being. Much of what can be known about the church, as well as society at large, in earlier eras is available only through the medium of the arts. To ignore that evidence is to ignore a large part of human experience.
The second thing that I said is that, despite the statement to the contrary, I am aware that art—defined more broadly, at least—does matter to my friend the theologian, as well as to most other churchgoers. To take the most obvious example, the music used in worship is a matter of passionate debate in many congregations. Whether the congregation should sing hymns, praise choruses, or chants from the Taizé community is not simply a matter of taste, but is profoundly formative on individual piety as well as how (or whether) worshippers understand themselves as interdependent members of the Body of Christ. Somewhat less obvious, but nonetheless real, is how the quality, presence, or absence of various kinds of arts within the worship space and the church building overall affects people’s relationship to one another, to the church, and to God.
Beauty and Theology
While my friend was aware that not all art is beautiful, many theologians tend to talk about art and beauty in the same breath. For them, of course, God is both the source and the measure of all Beauty—which they tend to capitalize along with those other transcendental virtues, Truth and Goodness. But it is often a short step for theological aestheticians to move from assertions of the absolute beauty of God to declare that this or that piece of art, or this or that type of art, is not only beautiful, but a sanctified manifestation of the beauty of God.
It wasn’t always so. For nearly 500 years, visual art was suspect in most Protestant churches; drama was largely absent; and dance was considered virtually synonymous with seduction and sin. Music (mostly in the form of hymnody) and poetry (mostly in the form of prayer) were the only arts that were encouraged. Even in those churches that commissioned expensive stained glass windows or elaborate furnishings and decorations, the imagery was largely conventional and the artistry subordinated to the message. Although Roman Catholic churches continued to use statues and paintings as the focus of devotional and worship practices, by the late nineteenth century these had become mostly mass-produced plaster copies of a few accepted forms. While there were, of course, exceptions, by and large Christian worship offered no place for contemporary art by living artists. In the late twentieth century, that began to change.
For a variety of reasons, including but not limited to an experimental attitude toward worship sparked by the Second Vatican Council and the liturgical renewals that followed in both Roman Catholic and Protestant worlds, the arts began to find a new—if still somewhat uneasy—acceptance in Christian life. Much has been written in the last few years about this renewed relationship. Nearly as many books have been written on theological aesthetics in each of the last ten years as in the previous 100 years taken together. Theological seminaries are adding courses on the integration of the arts into Christian education and worship, as well as rewriting courses on Scripture and church history to include the use of the arts as evidence of attitudes and understandings in a variety of historical periods. At the same time, many Christian artists have found a new boldness in using their faith as the basis of their work, seeing their artistic process as spiritual journey and their product as evangelical witness.
What is missing from this growing attention to the arts in Christian circles has been a critical discussion of what art does and does not do, and why we think so. Art has been lauded as a means of apprehending the holy; as a form of prayer; even as revelation, however imperfect, of God’s own beauty and truth. In many ways, the arts, once vilified, are now sanctified; what was once feared as a tool of the devil is now embraced as a means of grace. This volume is an attempt to look at these and other claims that have been made about art, identify the sources of these claims, and consider them in the context of Christian devotion, corporate worship, and theological study so that both artists and the church may take one another seriously as partners in conversation.
Art and Aesthetics
For a variety of historical reasons, the fields of philosophical and theological aesthetics have come to center on the notion of beauty. This is especially true in much current writing on theological aesthetics, which (as I read it) seems to center on the understanding that God is the source of beauty and that any standard of beauty ultimately derives from God. While I have no dispute with these formulations, my own understanding of aesthetics comes less from philosophy and theology than from my practice and education as a visual artist.
When artists speak of aesthetics, they are not usually speaking about beauty, but of the relationships (harmonious or otherwise) among the various elements of an artwork, and of how those relationships express ideas or emotions. The root of the word, aesthetic, after all, derives from a Greek word meaning “perceptible to the senses.” In the singular, an aesthetic is a particular attitude, or set of values, which affects such diverse qualities as color palette, subject matter, medium, attitude, and more. Aesthetics, for artists, is about what can be perceived with the senses, and the effect that such perception has on both emotion and meaning.
A Life in Art
So this book grows out of my life history. While many of the details are quite ordinary, certain particulars will illuminate the source of the concerns that this volume addresses. I have been an artist in my own right for over thirty years. For ten years before I claimed that identity, I was married to a painter. I have worked at various times as craftsperson, fashion designer, graphic designer, and seamstress. I come from a family of musicians, dancers, actors, screen-writers, and artisans. One grandfather designed embroidered skirts for starlets and sequined shirts for Hollywood cowboys; the other was a clarinetist who left the Borscht Belt Klezmer circuit to found the first music store in Southern California. My mother’s mother worked as a mill girl in Poland and became a milliner in the Bronx. I have always made things with my hands. One way or another, my life has always been connected with the arts. For the last thirty years or so, I have been a working artist with an active exhibition schedule and occasional liturgical commissions,
In 1965, the year that I turned eighteen, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened its new building on Wilshire Boulevard, not far from where I was living. The first exhibition that I recall was of large, flat planes of color; canvases full of splashed and poured paint; and the silk-screened repetition of giant soup cans. It was all a very long time ago, and my memory may be conflating this with one or more later shows, but what I recall was that I was transfixed by my first sight of works by such artists as Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Willem de Kooning, and Brice Marden. The Andy Warhol works probably came later, some time after the scandalous Back Seat Dodge ’38 by Edward Kienholz, shown to much controversy in 1966. The precise chronology doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the effect these works had on me and my subsequent understanding of what art is, what art does, and why so many people care.
Up until those shows, I probably had a rather conventional understanding of art. To the extent that I thought about it at all, I thought that art was about representation, about drawing things as convincingly as possible. I was never singled out at school or anywhere else as “the artistic one,” even though I was always making things. But sewing up gypsy outfits for my parents