Hi all
Adam graciously invited me in on the conversation - though I have been keeping my distance from overtly connecting my work with my faith for the last couple of years, this looks like a good place to put my feet back in the water. I would say that I never really stop thinking about my faith when I think about my art, and visa versa, but by the standards of CIVA and the like, I have been steering clear of certain "christian art" conversations lately. My frustrations with CIVA and other christian art organizations is deep and recurrent, so I'll warn you up front that as long as we're talking about faith and art I'll probably keep coming back to talking in reference to what I think others are doing wrong.
1) First, a little link. If you go the website for the music group Boards of Canada (one of my favs), there's a sweet little interactive bit about jet streams...
http://boardsofcanada.com/
2) I can relate to the experience of longing after jetstreams, yet I have to say that when viewing representations of jetstreams like this one, my first associations are with disaster - if I see a jetstream in print or video I jump to thinking something must have exploded, ie. The space shuttle columbia.
3) I wonder what our enjoyment of jetstreams shares with the enjoyment of train whistles by our progenitors. There's a Nathaniel Hawthorne journal entry set near walden pond where the protagonist begins observing every detail of the immediate surroundings, getting lost in observation of the seen, the empirically verifiable details of "nature." His reverie is interrupted, however, by the whistle of a train in the distance, an unseen presence of that which is wholly absent to the eyes, touch, body and apparently contradictory to the senses. Hawthorne is enraptured by this paradox - Leo Marx says this is the essence of the american pastoral, the liminal space where americans place themselves in "nature" only to long for the urban, and revel in the paradox...
Anyway, I bring this up because I spend less time thinking about the present "shadows" or "reflections" of the eternal-divine than I do thinking more generally about all the ways in which we establish belief in the unseen distant.
4) I had this series of photographs planned around 9/11 that I scrapped. I wanted to sit outside airports and photograph every plane in the air, titling each pic after the destination of the plane. The plane in air says only "go" and yet we rarely have any information about where it goes...
5) I've been thinking a lot about everyday instances of faith in the unseen, especially in the case of long-distance communication. There's this great book from a few years back called "speaking into air" about how our uses of each new telecommunicative technology borrow from religious belief - that is, in order to understand where we are talking to when we talk through a new conduit across distance, we refer to activities like prayer, seances, or other contact with the spiritual world. I would be very interested in addressing this more directly for the UICA show.
6) It seems to me that if we're under the title ordinary AURA then we have to think about Walter Benjamin too - his idea about how modern means of reproduction cause the loss of aura in objects. I've never wholly understood this, but in the artbrain of the world if you google aura, you get benjamin, so I suppose it has to be dealt with.
7) One of the things that pushed me away from CIVA and contemporary christian art was a continual degrading of the ordinary and an overdependence on art as a means of transcending the everyday. A famous american puritan preacher (I forget which one now - maybe edwards?) wrote once of how humiliating it was for him to suddenly find that while relieving himself by the fence, a dog had joined him in the act. He had been trying to focus on God while he shat, but then the presence of the dog dragged him woefully back into the mire of the temporary. My experience of CIVA was dominated by artwork that seemed to want to forget that it shat. Was shitting part of God's curse? The Bible doesn't say it was. Isn't it possible to be content with aspects of this world (not sin of course) without seeing them as shadows of the divine? Matter is GOOD! God made it!
8) Sometimes the quasi-gnostic tendencies of christian arts organizations, continually contrasting spirit and matter, eternal and temporary, remind me strangely of central modernist tenets. Baudelaire, for example, described modern art's task as the pursuit of the eternal, the immovable within the transient and fleeting. This sounds at first like trying to think about heaven while you fart, but then you keep reading and you find that baudelaire's favorite modern artist is basically a street fashion photographer, a coolhunter, who captures in sketch the exact cut of a man's cuff that will never happen again and yet captures the moment in perfection. How does baudelaire end up there, while gnostic-christian artists end up making pictures of angels?
I think I'll stop throwing plates in the air for now.
I really really really want to recognize that you all started this conversation first, that I'm a latecomer and a stranger and that I might not fit. SO PLEASE feel free to say if you don't think I'll fit with what you want to do. Really, I'd be happy to just be a part of the conversation for a bit.
Thanks
Kevin Hamilton
Posted by chris at April 24, 2004 12:42 PM