is art. Everything else is everything else.
—Ad Reinhardt2
Works of art are instruments by which we perform such diverse actions as praising our great men and expressing our grief, evoking emotion and communicating knowledge.
—Nicholas Wolterstorff3
The world is full of problems: war, homelessness, global warming, domestic violence, AIDS, hunger, drug abuse. The list goes on and on. In a world that seems to be always on the brink of disaster, there is an endless amount of work to do to help the earth heal from pollution of every kind; to insure adequate nutrition, housing, education, and health care to every person; to bring peace among the nations and in every city and village and home. And yet, if all of this is done, and there is no art, then the world will still be a sad, sorry, joyless place.
Still, in most of the developed world, and especially in those parts of the world most influenced by the Protestant churches, art is often treated as suspect, as Jeremy Begbie puts it “a luxurious ornament,”4 a frivolous frill that is easily discarded whenever resources are stretched and other needs seem more pressing. In the face of diminishing budgets and continual insistence on raising test scores, public schools in the United States are consistently pressured to reduce or eliminate time spent on music, dance, and drawing; the National Endowment for the Arts is repeatedly threatened with losing its funding; and local arts organizations constantly operate on the edge of budget disaster.
Some of the sources for this attitude may be found in the complex relationship that Christianity has had with the arts at least from Augustine onward, describing them at once as a good gift from God and as a distraction from true worship. Other sources are deeper, dating back to early Greek philosophers who posited a dualistic universe in which the physical, material world apprehended through the senses was understood as an unreal shadow of true reality, which could only be apprehended through reason.
The church, broadly speaking, both influences and is influenced by the attitudes of the society around it. Because of our collective discomfort with the arts, both the church and the world tend to think about them in ways that are problematic for artists as well as, ultimately, for society at large and the church in particular. Sometimes, we instrumentalize art, turning it into a means to achieve didactic, propagandistic, or other pragmatic ends. At other times, we commercialize art, turning it into a commodity to be bought and sold, with little or no regard to its intrinsic worth. In other circumstances, we demonize art, seeing only its potential as the object of idolatrous worship, on the one hand, or as the tempting purveyor of other illicit thrills, on the other. Too often, we trivialize art, seeing it as the province of children or as a recreational activity for adults with both time and money to spare from what are regarded as more important pursuits. Finally, we may spiritualize art, ignoring its sources in the concrete materiality of life while believing that art will somehow save us from ourselves, or that artists have a better pathway to God than everyone else.
Too rarely, we see art as an answer to a real—though hard to define—human need, as a legitimate response to God’s call on all our lives to love and serve the world. Many of the ways in which art has been characterized are misunderstandings about the nature and function of art, or address some kinds of art while ignoring others. These mischaracterizations divert us from recognizing how the arts actually help us to understand, interpret, and communicate our experience of the world around us. Instead, they either strip the arts of their genuine power or elevate them to a status that they do not deserve. Such ideas also tend to alienate artists, who think about an artwork in terms of how it operates on the senses; how it fits into its historical, physical, and spiritual context; or how subtle changes to visual, auditory, or physical configurations can shape our experience and touch us at the deepest places of our being. In this chapter, we will consider the ways that churches and artists tend to talk past one another when they think about and use art, and begin to sketch the outlines of a deeper conversation.
Instrumentalizing Art: Reducing Art to a Single Meaning
Art speaks to the senses in ways that are too complex and subtle to be able to fully define in words. We respond physically and emotionally to the colors, shapes, textures, rhythms, timbres, pitch, or other aspects of a painting, a song, a poem, a film in ways that are difficult to describe, but still very real. These responses contribute to our sense of the meaning of the piece, frequently below our conscious awareness, even more than any overt subject matter that might be implied or overtly stated.
Too often, however, art is reduced to its supposed message, as though an artwork were simply a kind of shorthand or diagram for an intellectual idea. While it could be argued that even diagrams are a type of artwork, these tend to be dry, simplistic, and as unambiguous as possible. When a multivalent, well-wrought artwork is treated as a diagram, the very sensory qualities that the artist labored to create are ignored. This happens, for instance, when the words to a hymn are changed for didactic reasons and without equal regard to how they sound or the ease with which they can be pronounced near one another. Too often, such changes alter the aesthetic integrity of the hymn to the extent that people find it impossible to sing.
Too often, artists and theologians seem to talk past one another. My theologian friend who had wondered why anyone should care about art continued to think about the question, responding to my reply with another idea:
I asked myself, What is art? I answered myself, Art is a human construction. What kind of human construction? Communication. What kind of communication? Communication about what matters in itself and thus distinct from illustration, which points to something else that matters. So what matters in and of itself?
On one level, my friend was trying to make an important distinction that artists, themselves, are often at pains to figure out how to explain. Why is illustration often considered to be something less than real art? What is the difference between the kind of art that is seen in museums and the kind of art that is seen in most churches? Why does the art world often disdain Christian art, dismissing it as mere illustration?
One answer to these questions has to do with the observation that illustration relies on its connection to a verbal description or story outside itself, while contemporary museum art is expected to say something profound without an external narrative. This distinction is, in part, what my church friend meant when speaking of “what matters in and of itself.”
However, while what art has to say may correctly be understood as communication, it can be misleading to define art in that way. The problem is that when art is defined solely as communication, it is too easy to reduce any given artwork to its supposed message. This kind of oversimplification is rampant in the church, which too often rejects complex, multivalent artworks in favor of tendentious, single-message lessons. As soon as we say that art is communication, and leave it there, we omit all the other things that art also is and that other forms of communication are not.
Many of the roots of equating art with communication may be found in the Reformation. Although there is a popular conception that the Reformation was an iconoclastic movement, that is only partially true. Many Reformers did reject the use of religious images, especially those that they understood to be used in idolatrous ways, but others accepted or even encouraged their use. Both visual art and hymnody, for example, were permitted in many places. However, these arts were accepted primarily as didactic tools rather than for their emotive or symbolic qualities. This bent towards didacticism tended to strip art of all of its affective qualities, reducing it to a visual analogue, a one-for-one translation of discursive language. This is exactly what my friend describes as “illustration.”
A comparison of the spare woodcuts that accompany many Reformation texts with
