Art and Authenticity, Part 2

Life is funny sometimes.

I went to Western Illinois University in a pre-Facebook world.  What that basically meant is that when I lost track of people they were basically gone.  For the most part this wasn’t a problem for me.  I’d been, as I’ve mentioned before, something of a social outcast.  I’d had a few friends and I’d mostly kept track of them.  Still, sometimes truly wonderful people disappear.

I was a history and education major at first.  So I had to take education courses, but I had to start from scratch at WIU, since there were no courses of that nature to speak of at juco.  I got to my first education class late on my first day (story of my life.  I always know what time it is, but I have no concept of the passage of time).  The prof was taking attendance and he’d already missed me.  But I got there in time to hear him ask for a Marc Nelson.

One of my best friends in grade school and junior high was Marc Nelson.  I’d quickly figured out that it was a common name when one of my junior high youth pastors was named Mark Nelson.  I think I’ve run in to at least three since then.  But even though I could only see the back of the head of the person who responded to the professor’s calling of that ever-so-common name, I was pretty sure that there was only one Marc Nelson in the world that could have been in that room.

I met Marc back in grade school.  I don’t remember when.  He was cool, though.  He was certainly way cooler than I was, which admittedly wasn’t that hard a feat to accomplish.  Still, we were friends.  He loved the Middle Ages and Shakespeare and art and I loved history and wished I was an artist.

We used to hang out and pretend we were knights having sword fights.  One afternoon we were pretending to fight with staffs in my driveway.  He had armed himself with a length of wood my parents had put in my garage to hang clothes on for a garage sale and I had an old broom handle.  We traded blows for a while, then I lined up for an overhand blow and he raised his weapon to deflect it.  But that clothes hanger was not designed for such a task and my broom handle shattered it in a single motion.

We didn’t pretend we were knights after that.  Well, not really.  A couple years later my dad took me to the Bristol Renaissance Faire and I begged him to take Marc, too.  We both armed ourselves with pretend wooden swords.  At one point someone came up and told me that I had to “peace tie” my sword and I asked why he didn’t say the same thing to Marc.  The man told me that Marc’s was wood and mine was not.  As it turns out, mine was, too.  I’d made it myself out of wood, but it apparently didn’t look like it from a distance.  I was pretty proud of that.[1]

But that’s not the point.  Somehow, through those strange coincidences of the universe, I’d ended up in the same class as a dear friend.  While I’d been futzing around in juco and an entry-level job in corporate America, Marc had been getting an art degree.  Then he’d been learning that it’s really hard to make money as an artist, so he’d decided to get a teaching certificate.  That was how we’d ended up in the same class at Western Illinois University.

Marc had always been an artist.  I’m sure that anyone who knew him knew that he’d make it as one someday.  I certainly did.  As a matter of fact there is a poster print of a contribution that he made to a book of art on its way to me right now.  A modified version of that same print is the cover of a book, too.  I love that I can say that I know someone out there who has used art to change the world in some way.[2]

That’s what art does.  That’s what art is supposed to do.

But art is fundamentally subversive.  This is why authoritarian cultures take the suppression of art as the first and most important act.  If we’re going to talk about art we must acknowledge what art is and create a working definition.  Art, at its most essential, is an expression of the human condition.[3]

Ultimately, this is why I find the idea of a church that has an artist in residence so interesting.  More specifically, it’s why I find what is basically an Evangelical church with an artist in residence so interesting.  Because, really, a church that recognizes the importance of art isn’t surprising unless your only exposure to Christianity comes from a Calvinist Protestant mindset.  Y’know, like a certain earlier incarnation of me.

A decade or so ago I decided I was going to write a book.  I’d already written a book I was intending to sell as the first in a sci-fi trilogy, but this book was going to be literary fiction.  It was also going to be about a man’s search for god.  Being young and naïve, I believed that the only possible audience for such a book would be the audience that would buy books at a Christian bookstore.  So I decided to write a book for a Christian fiction audience, as in the sort of people that would only shop at the Christian book/music/gift store I’d worked at.  As such, it required a certain set of limitations that have been oft discussed over at Slacktivist.  Those limitations removed a lot of the humanity from the book.  I knew it when I wrote the thing, even as a sheltered nineteen- or twenty-year-old.  As such, it’s never seen the light of day.[4]

Whether my book was any good or not remains to be seen, I suppose.  Maybe it doesn’t.  I don’t know.

Here’s the thing, though: art is, by its very nature, subversive.

Art is about what it means to be human.  That means that art is about love and hate and life and sex and death.  That means that art is about fear and desire.  If you want to control people you have to make sure that they don’t think about love and sex and desire.  You have to make sure that they only think about what you want them to think about.  As such you have to turn the human condition in to one of obedience and fear.  This is why all authoritarian positions have to start from a position of suppressing art and burning books.[5]

It is impossible to be human and not seek meaning.  This, ultimately, is the purpose of art and the purpose of religion.  It’s why I’ve stopped going to church but haven’t stopped reading Slacktivist.  It’s why I’ve developed a tendency to disagree with PZ Myers but have spent a lot less time taking umbrage at Fred Clark.  Science, I believe, tells us about the universe we inhabit.  Religion, I believe, tells us about who we are and who we want to be in reaction to the universe we inhabit.  Mockery, I believe, only takes us so far.

One of the things we used to ask for in prayer was discernment.  In the old timey religion I grew up in “discernment” meant “rejection of all things that disagreed with doctrine.”  In the world I inhabit now I still seek discernment, but discernment now means “appreciation for that which makes the world a better place.”  This is why I love science and skepticism, but I also love art and appreciation for the wonderful irrationality that is the human condition.  Science tells us that we live on a planet that has been here for 4.5 billion years.  Skepticism tells us to question anything and everything that presents itself as truth just because it knows more than us.  But art tells us that there are some things that must be appreciated because they are human and humans are not always scientific or skeptical.

Ultimately, I have no problem with god.  I have no problem with the idea of god.  We’re all searching for meaning and we all need to put a label on what that meaning is.  I believe that I can find meaning in sitting down across a table with another person, pouring out a good pint of beer, and asking, “So what matters to you?”  I believe that I can find god by seeing someone in pain and asking, “What can I do to help?”  I believe that I can find god by seeing an injustice and asking, “What can I do to make this right?”

Ultimately, I believe that the church I grew up in got it wrong.  I was told that the whole idea was to go out and make disciples of all the world.  But I’ve read the Bible.  And I know that in that same Bible it says that Jesus will separate the sheep and the goats – the worthy and the unworthy – according to those who saw need and responded and those who saw need and did nothing.

I’ve never been to the Chicago church called The Line.  But I know Jon Guerra.  And I know that he’s good people.  I know that he’s a fantastic musician.  I know that even though he ascribes to a worldview I don’t necessarily agree with that he creates worthwhile art from that perspective.  And I know that the world is a better place because of that art.

As such, if I ever get around to becoming my generation’s Lawrence Weschler, I want to sit down across from Jon and ask him about art and meaning.  Religion may well be an irrational aspect of humanity, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valid.  Because on a fundamental level all art is irrational.  By extension all humanity is irrational.

And I’m totally okay with that.

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[1]Later on, though, I wasn’t proud of that day as a whole.  I’d basically ended up hanging out with my friend and ignoring my dad.  I was maybe fourteen or fifteen at the time, so that’s an expected behavior for someone of that age.  But eventually you hit the point where you’re old enough to realize that the things you did when you were young and stupid were often dick moves.  Then, sometimes, you move a thousand miles away from the place you’ve always called home.  The fact is that my parents were far from perfect and I would probably be completely justified in being really mad at them for some of the things that have happened over the years, but life is way too short for that and, well, if I can live long enough to regret the crimes of a single afternoon a decade and a half ago…

[2]And this has been yet another episode of “Geds Talks About Interesting People He Knows.”

I’m actually thinking of trying to leverage this in to creating a career as a sort of Gen X/Y Lawrence Weschler.  How cool would that be, really?  It would be different than what Weschler does, obviously.  For one thing it would be more musical than visual art.  But I imagine doing long-form interview pieces with people like Marc and James from the Lost Immigrants and Jessi Lynn and a bunch of storytellers and letting them talk about the world as they see it and what they’re trying to do.  That would be so cool.  Especially since the entire point of Weschler’s work involves him standing aside and letting the artists speak for themselves.  So much of what we have now is what I shorthand by using Chuck Klosterman’s style: art as an impact on the consumer of the art.  But what about art from the perspective of the artist?  We’ve become such a selfish culture that we seem to have lost what matters about that.

[3]This is both too limiting and not limiting enough as definitions go.  It’s too limiting in that there is some art that is about people that isn’t necessarily intended to be about the human condition as a whole.  Art holds a function of trying to tell humans what they should aspire to, for one.  It’s not limiting enough in that there is some art that isn’t really focused on the human condition at all.  For instance, and here I find it necessary to plug a television show, there are many things that I consider art that are only tangentially related to humans.  Consider the show Brew Masters on the Discovery Channel.  It’s about the Dogfish Head brewery in Delaware.  I consider the beer brewed at Dogfish Head to be art in the highest order, and I say this as someone who has a glass of Midas Touch in front of him right now.  Beer isn’t about the human condition, but it is a part of the human experience.  There are some people who fundamentally understand that the creation of beer isn’t about making money through alcohol, but about making something that is beautiful.

I consider the addition of beer to my world as a thing that makes my world better.  But I do not think of the making of beer as being necessarily about me, or humanity in general beyond a simple correlation.  Still, I consider those who take the time to craft good beers to be artists, even if the art they create does not necessarily make a statement about humanity in general.

Since I feel like it, I’d also like to point out a few breweries that I consider to be creators of genuine art:  Two Brothers and Metropolitan will always be Chicago to me.  I’m also partial to Bell’s, Founder’s, and New Glaurus as Midwestern beers.  Dogfish Head, Lagunitas, New Belgium, and Boulevard as general American beers are fantastic.  And, seriously, Texas would be much impoverished if it weren’t for St. Arnold, Rahr & Sons, and Franconia.  Also, there’s the Mustang Brewing Company out of Mustang, Oklahoma.  BeamStalk, if you haven’t had Mustang, you need to get on that.  Also, if you’re planning on coming down to Dallas, feel free to drop off some Washita Wheat for me on your way through town…

[4]Other than me, I can only think of two people who have read it: Big A and one Marc Nelson.  I think Big A thought it was pretty good and I recall Marc thinking so, too.  Honestly, I love the book and, more importantly, the characters and every once in a while I consider rewriting it.

[5]One of the biggest difficulties I have is in the application of religion to these principles.  I grew up in a variety of religion that wanted to control art and, through that, the human experience.  I recognize that this is not all that there is to religion, but I also cannot avoid the conflation of religion with the denial of humanity.  This, ultimately, is why the idea of a church that supports the arts so intrigues me.  I love people.  Therefore I love art.  Therefore I stand against the sort of religion that I once aspired to represent.  That does not mean that I stand against religion itself.