I am not a detail oriented person. I loathe paperwork. It makes my eyes glaze over and if my success in life is tied to bureaucratic due diligence, I will die a pauper. But, when it comes to visual art, I notice every tiny detail. I love detail in art. I love it in movies, paintings, drawings, patterns — almost anything visual.

Look at these amazing details of dots and dashes!

Sun Over A Walled Wheat Field, 1890
By Vincent Van Gogh

Cova, over on Hyphen, has noticed an interesting trend popularized by the younger generations: weird ephemera are becoming stylish and cool. Things like bread clips, receipts, washing instructions, and dot matrix paper. Personally, I know a few highschoolers who are buying CDs again.

I echo her question:

“Why are we suddenly captivated by the fragments we were never meant to keep—and what does it all mean?”

She sees the fascination with these small and forgettable aspects of the designed ecosystem and tries to find a common theme. She uses the term “micro-design” to try and capture all of the various ephemera under one umbrella. Cova notices all of these objects were designed to serve specific functions which are embedded in their form. “[T]he design of [these] things… are unapologetically honest about where they come from.”1

We aren’t supposed to notice the objects of micro-design, yet at this moment in time folks are noticing them.

Why?

She surmises we are kicking against the fashions of the “polish era” (2010-2020), and we are already fed up with the “slop era” – which started in 2022 with public release of generative “AI” models.2

This led to a reactionary aesthetic opposing both: unpolished and handmade.

“Unpolished visuals, which were once considered “sloppy”, have started reading as cool. Meanwhile, polished AI visuals have became[sic], quite literally, called “slop”. A complete inversion of value.”

She expands on her reasoning by noticing a shift towards hyper locality and honesty. “...a bread clip exists just to tell you what it does. That lack of an agenda now reads as deeply honest…”

The final point is where she makes her most monumental claim:

“For centuries, creativity meant making things. Now, when making becomes infinite, the creative act shifts: it’s no longer making.

It’s noticing.”

Which leads to her optimistic conclusion, “…we’re learning to find wonder again in the smallest things that make us human.”

Here are the brass tacks of why I want to riff off of Cova’s article: art making augments how you see the world. Specifically, it helps you see more of the world. Things you couldn’t see before present themselves to you. In the words Paul, from Norman Maclean’s story A River Run’s Through It:

“‘All there is to thinking,’ he said, ‘is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.’”

Is there anything new about Zoomers or Alphas liking the detritus of our current consumerist age? No.

Look Warhol did it:

Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962
By Andy Warhol

DuChamp did it:

The Fountain, 1917
By Marcel Duchamp

I am pretty sure natural history museums and archaeologists are just people who are fascinated by old garbage. Even a philatelist has noticed a small thing, about the same size as a bread clip, and become obsessed. Petitioning the government for new designs. Setting up contests for those designs. Voting on those designs. Finally, collecting those newer and newer designs. For those of the younger audience, a philatelist is a stamp collector.

We still design stamps even though they are not necessary — the post office can just put a nice, concise, inhuman barcode on there for you, you know. There are tons of fashions in stamp design — giving hope for job security to the bread clip designers of today.

Every generation seems to kick against the goads of their upbringing and since Cova is younger than I, I trust her identification of the “Polish Era” and “Slop Era.” I should point out, slop is not derived from sloppy. It’s derived from pig’s slop, which is often sloppy, but is made up of leftovers and cast off detritus from the butcher room floor and garbage. Slop is simply whatever the pigs will eat. Which is anything.

Gloucestershire Old Spot, 1800-05
By James Ward

The slop era is not about calling polished AI imagery sloppy, it is about realizing how these companies view the public. I think it was Madeleine L’Engle who bemoaned letting marketers and corporations call us “consumers” in the 70s and 80s.3

I think the desire for handmade quirky aesthetics has less to do with anti-polish and more to do with honesty. Pragmatic design objects, like receipts and breadclips, have no pretense. Whereas the slop fed to us by social media feeds can’t be trusted on any level. We don’t know if it is real, who made it, why it’s in our feeds, if it’s any good, if it’s true, or if it’s wholesale poison in short-form video content. The flies are circling our social feeds — which just might mean the feeds are rotten.

Breadclips on the other hand. No flies. No lies.

So what of Cova’s final claim?

“For centuries, creativity meant making things. Now, when making becomes infinite, the creative act shifts: it’s no longer making.

It’s noticing.”

I love Cova’s articulation of this. She is wrestling with such interesting ideas and I understand its hyperbolic effect. I want to break it down because it’s like a geode: a crusty, grey, and unfinished spheroid on the outside, but inside there is something glimmering.

“For centuries, creativity meant making things.”

Yes and no. It really depends on what you mean by make. I know, I know, college professor here (at least for a few more weeks). This is a common misconception about artists; they make things. I will point back to last week’s article in which I nodded toward Tolkien’s notion of sub-creators.

Human beings “make” by copying, combining, and transforming the materials and forms we find around us.4 In the fantastical myth-infused language of Tolkien sub-creation means we take what God made and jumble it up. What’s surprising and joyous is that somehow, despite Solomon’s proclamation “there is nothing new under the sun,” new things emerge.

But are they really “new” things?

Hold that question for a moment, let’s take on the second part of this quote:

“Now, when making becomes infinite, the creative act shifts: it’s no longer making.”

This is hyperbole. “Making” is not, nor will it ever be, infinite. Cova writes this less as a statement of fact and more of an expression of feeling. This is how my students feel as well. They throw up their hands and wonder if AI is going to make all the advertisements, designs, videos, paintings, and photos what are they going to make?

It feels like AI has infinite potential. After all, many people think it will be god. A digital god who can do anything.

The youths of today are told to “kick rocks” and so they look around at the rocks they’re left with — after the data centers have milked the internet dry for “training purposes” — and are left wondering:

“What are we supposed to make, then?”

The only things they find to work with are the things our tech-overlords overlooked: Breadclips. Receipts. Old-timey tech like dot matrix printers. Stuff deemed worthless. Stuff that is garbage. Stuff like the tops of pull top cans:

Vukawo, 2025
By El Anatsui

Which leads to the real gem inside this geode:

“It’s noticing.”

Is art making any different now in the era of slop? No. But now a younger artist like Cova is realizing the truth of what art making is. Of what art making has always been.

Art making is not about “making” something new. It’s about practicing a way of tending to the materials and forms around you which gives dead things new life. This happens without the artist really even realizing it. George Saunders, in a long metaphor I have taken to calling The Parable of Stan, points out: the primary task of the artist is to notice some aspect of their domain and then make a change to the domain.

Is this really “making something new”?

No. The materials of the universe remain exactly the same. Yet, something seems new to us.

Art making has always been about noticing not making. The artist helps you notice something we had not seen before.

Monet helps me notice the beauty and depth of color in the surface of water:

Water Lilies, 1915-26
By Claude Monet

Turrell helps me notice that light is way weirder than I can understand:

As Seen Below, 2025
By James Turrell

Rembrandt helps me notice, well, the love of the Father, the chasm between the father and the judgmental son, the darkness shrouding the world, the love of one hand and the strength of the other, the fetal posture of the penitent, the bare foot caked in dirt by living the life of hedonism. He helps me notice how disheveled the prodigal is, since slop is the only thing clinging to the walls of his belly. I wonder what the roasting calf smells like as the servants in the background are told to slaughter and barbecue it? Now I am smelling something invisible. I am noticing something unseen.

Return of the Prodigal Son, 1668
By Rembrandt

All of this helps me become even more hopeful than Cova ended.

A few years back I launched my YT channel. I made several videos about AI. My main concern back then was that generative diffusion models would hijack the creative process. The models would further convince the world that creativity was about imagining something and then executing an image of said thing. What George Saunders calls “the intentionality fallacy.”

I was afraid young people would not learn how to be creative. Creativity is not a skill like how applying paint with a brush is a skill. Creativity is a way of being. It’s a practice. A habit. A way of seeing.

Creativity has never been about making. The making is secondary.

Creativity is about noticing something amazing happening in the world around you and responding to it!

It’s seeing a sunset and singing a “new” song.

It’s finding a treasure in a field and selling all you have to buy the field.

It’s seeing a faun with an umbrella under a lamppost in the depths of winter and wondering, “where’s he off to?”

Creativity is noticing. And like the fisherman Paul in A River Runs Through It said, once you notice something, then you will notice something you didn’t notice and before you know it you are seeing the invisible. As if a veil had been lifted between you and the Life behind all of Reality who is Love.

I was afraid the youths would never become artists. But there they go, noticing breadclips can be art. Maybe most of the breadclip art isn’t much deeper than slop, give it some time man. Have patience. Even daffodils take a few days of sunlight to grow.

All art movements, art forms, and artists take time to grow and discover the greater reaches of what they can notice. It took my friend Adam quite a few years before he started noticing big-box-store paint swatches were a ready made palette he could rearrange just like flowers picked from the garden.

Swatch Arrangement (Strong Enough to be Out), 2022
By Adam Matak

Will breadclip art be up there with Rembrandt one day? No clue. But the young artists who are out there noticing whole fields reading for the harvest will certainly have a better shot than those whose eyes are covered by blinders.

The First Things article will be first — cheeky, I know.

My name is Greg, and I’m a conservative artist.

It’s not my fault! I didn’t ask for this, I blame Overton! But the first step to overcoming a problem is admitting you have a problem. As providence would have it, First Things’ March 11th newsletter published an article by Dave Greene titled “Why Can’t Conservatives Create Art?”

Finally, I can admit all the stuff I have made isn’t art and find the answers to rectify all my failures! What were the answers Greene gave?

He argues that conservative artists have a duty to reverse the devastation of the past century of progressive cultural dominance. The reason conservatives have struggled to do so is because they have a misunderstanding of art and culture. The proper understanding of art, in Greene’s estimation, is that it must “direct the [desire of the audience] toward something the artist believes is good,” rather than trying to give the audience what they want, because “for media to be good, it must make people love it, not just mildly satisfied with it.” The audience is sitting “in a state of spiritual stupefaction, waiting to be told what is good and what is worth fighting for.” This moment in time is “an incredible opportunity to forge a new vision for the future.” In conclusion, conservative artists should not hold back, and they should prioritize not making a living, rather prioritize: condemning the failures of progressives, denying the consumerist demands of the audience, and creating “bold, unapologetic visions of the truths you believe, and the world will recognize them as art, politics be damned.”

The crowning jewel of his argument is his definition of art:

“In fact, the use of beauty to make people love higher things is probably as good a working definition of ‘art’ as any.”

Here is a noble example of this definition in action:

The Death of Socrates, 1787
by Jacques-Louis David

David was a neoclassicist who was trying to argue for the return to a more philosophical and principled age just before the French revolution. Suffice to say, this painting’s call to higher things, beautifully embodied in Socrates’ index finger, did not sway the society away from the draw of the guillotine.

So, what is my duty as a conservative artist? To use beauty to make people love higher things, which will effect cultural change. My vision will rise to dominance, and the masses will finally have a proper avante garde to follow. All I need to do to achieve this is stop pandering to the audience, gain a proper vision of how the world should be, and then refuse to apologize! Then the world will deign to recognize my work as art.

I wonder why they didn’t teach me this in my secular art school. Wait, maybe they did. Let me just jimmy a few words around—after all, no one would dare utter the “B” word (beauty) in art school. Also, the word “people” is not grand enough; it allows for too much individualism. “Higher things” is far too vague; we don’t want any stoners to get excited. Here’s our new definition:

In fact, the use of aesthetics to make society love progress is probably as good a proletariat definition of “art” as any bourgeoisie definition.

Like this:

Look familiar?

Greene is actually falling for the same traps as the progressive Marxists. Namely, as George Saunders calls it, “the fallacy of intentionality.”1 This is where the fallacy crops up in his article: “Belief in a higher vision gives a piece of media its freshness and force.”

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying an artist cannot have beliefs. I am saying:

A propagandist is someone who tries to propagate an idea in society. Propaganda categorically defines the ideological goal beforehand, then crafts a delivery mechanism. This is not a good way to make art, it produces mere communication—but with the moral superiority of sloganeering.

Greene’s definition and the progressive Marxists’ definition captures only a part of what art does, and both focus on a single function of art. Can beauty direct my attention toward higher things? Yes, of course. In fact, much of my favorite art does exactly that. But those works of art were not made through a process that began with an artist’s understanding of societal good then shaping his message with the trappings of formal and aesthetic beauty. Most art that begins with the goal of changing the world flops like a soggy foam sandal washed up in a tide pool.2

Misunderstanding how art is actually made is what both Greene’s answer and the activist professors get wrong in their advice and instruction. Let me illustrate: The most common question a professor asks a student in an art school critique is, “What was your intention?” This is the epitome of the fallacy of intentionality. Look to Saunders, or Shakespeare, or Malcolm Guite, or Twyla Tharp, or Madeleine L’Engle, and you will see that artists do not set off with a goal in mind. They discover a work of art through their process. Dostoyevsky did not set off to predict the fall of Czarist Russia. He tried to wrestle with the suffering of children in his home nation, and what came out of his wrestling was The Brothers Karamazov.

This is not the post to develop a better vision of the creative practice here, but I recommend Kenneth Steinbach’s book Creative Practices for Visual Artists if you would like to further understand the way creatives actually make their work.

Beside a better understanding of how art gets made, we need a better definition of art as well. Let’s start with a painting, because I believe art can help:

The Swing, 1767-68
by Jean-Honoré Fragonard

No one in their right mind would say this is not art. Even if we start with Greene’s definition, we have to acknowledge that it’s beautiful. Look at how the composition is asymmetrical yet balanced, making the whole painting float up like the woman on the swing. The light filtering through the trees onto the maiden is glowing. The angel statues in the background have moved into a joyous embrace as the fair gal arches higher and higher toward things only known to the likes of Icarus and Chuck Yeager.

The stunning skill of beautiful brushwork draws my gaze aloft until… What on earth is that dude doing down in the bushes? Well, his eyes are being directed toward higher things, I suppose. In case the FT audience is too naive, let me spell it out for you: he’s a peeping Tom, and apparently he’s peeped quite the elevating sight!3 Like most Rococo art, it is not meant to elevate but titillate.

If I define art by its singular function of drawing me toward “higher things,” then I am simply ignoring the many other functions art can accomplish, and I end up rejecting artworks like The Swing on moral grounds. This sort of limited definition is dubious for anything like art which has more than one function. Art does more than just draw us towards higher things. An example of a similar multifunctional phenomena will help.

Take the term “language.” It must be defined broadly because it functions in a plethora of domains; from Miriam Webster: “an organically developed system of communication used by groups of humans: such as…” a list of examples follows including: written word, spoken word, body language, etc.

If we were to define language as “beautiful communications that make people love higher things,” we would deny the many other uses of language by prioritizing one preferred linguistic function over all other functions. Some of those denied functions include instructions, jokes, and the scathing critiques Greene is calling for.

Language is too broad for such a strict definition as “beautiful communications.” Language is a familial category. We also need to define art as a familial category. We need a definition which will acknowledge that art is a phenomenon experienced, not an object observed:

What do I mean by “meaningful”?

I don’t mean an artwork solely communicates a message. Rather, an artwork can also move you to tears. When you hear a moving piece of music, it is not simply sound. The music actually makes you feel an emotion. The artist arranged the sound, and you felt joy. Like Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 17 in B-Flat K. 570:

Where did the joy come from? It’s not in the sounds. It is not in you. It is found somewhere beyond the sum of sound + eardrums. The meaning I am talking about is the experience found by the viewer through the artwork. This meaning makes whatever the work is, art.

Why do I say man-made? Because I agree with Tolkien’s notion of humans as sub-creators.4 God creates ex nihilo while humans rearrange God’s original creations like remix artists. From this, new expressions of the meaning God hid in his creation are found.5 This is an artist’s work and duty.

I understand where Greene is coming from, just like I understand my Marxist professors. We want this world to change. Greene’s motivation was the dueling Super Bowl Halftime shows this year. In both cases the creatives involved were functioning as propagandists. Hell, I grew up in the 909. If anyone is supposed to like Kid Rock and hispanic culture, it’s me. Neither spectacle was elevated me to higher things, to say the least. Neither was great art. If I use the halftime show as my metric, then I should ask: “Why can’t either the right or left wing make art?”

Bad Bunny vs Kid Rock LAPRESSE

If we look closer we see Greene is actually attacking conservatives for being conservative. Look closely at what he is saying: “What holds conservatives back is a mindset that prefers the familiar over the good.” This is what it means to conserve. You must prefer the familiar, even if the new thing is better. If you don’t prefer something that is familiar to something that is new and strange, then you will not conserve the old and familiar. This is why the progressive critique of conservatives is that we are “backwards thinking.” Greene even states, “Instead of looking backward, creators must look forward.” He is implying that you have to be a progressive to make art.

I cannot say that conservatives can’t make art. Of course we can. In fact, back to the notion of sub-creation, all artists are a little conservative. All artists look to the past and remix it to become fresh. An artist without roots to the past makes anemic, rootless, and vapid art. But the solution to making deep art is not by forcing your ideals into an artwork. That is the propagandist’s practice and conservatives shouldn’t make propaganda, because we can all smell propaganda. It convinces no one.

Both halftime shows were mere propaganda and no one was moved by either. Only the choirs, on both sides of the aisles, were in any way entertained.

I understand Greene’s desire, but not only is his definition of art poor, he is also standing on a faulty premise. His first sentence says, “Modern conservatives recognize their duty to reverse the devastation wrought by nearly a century of progressive cultural hegemony.”

Conservative artists should not recognize this as their duty. Art does not make culture.

Look at this:

Lascaux Cave Paintings, estimated between 17,000 and 22,000 years old

The painter of this cave wall did not make his culture into hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers made this painting. Art is a fruit of culture.

Cultures produce art like trees produce apples. The kind of work we make buds from the way we live our lives. The duty of artists—conservative, progressive, or moderate—is to live as righteously as possible and make the best art they can.

If all the artists, no matter their political leanings, did this, the culture would be healthier. But only if the culture followed the examples of the artist’s righteous lives.

I agree that we should not pander to our audiences. I agree that our culture (on the left and right) is sick. As Don McLean said, “Music [is] a good barometer, I guess. All you have to do is turn on a radio and you can find out where we’re at spiritually.”

To everyone reading—Greene, First Things readers, even the AI web crawlers—I say this: expand the radio frequencies you listen to. There are great artists making work that celebrates higher things that align with Christianity and the great traditions of the past. Art that conserves respect and love for the past while also remixing it to make the past forms fresh for today. If you want to find some, check out the Rabbit Room, or read Jonathan A. Anderson’s writings, or look for the nearest James Turrell installation. There are far too many great artists working today to list here, and if we gave them more attention than we give to halftime spectacles, our culture would grow stronger, because we would become a culture of people who value art experiences over propaganda and advertising.

Saint’s feast days are spread all throughout the year but I notice them more during Lent because of the contrast. Because of the little joy in being able to break a fast early. But feasts during Lent also feel a bit odd. I am reminded of this wall drawing by Ethan Murrow:

Plethora, 2016
by Ethan Murrow

Murrow’s mural is a still-life feast filled with all the trappings of a Martha Stewart cornucopia, plus the inclusion of a figure. An imposing figure at that; reaching over the table laying claim to the bounty. Scroll back up and look at the top of the wall drawing.

The hook and rope were drawn as well. The pot has plummeted, covering the man in what I imagine is chili. The hoarding figure becomes a fool. The tension between sustenance and opulence is as in-your-face as the stock pot which covers his.

Today, during Lent, I feel like a pot of feasting has been spilled on me by accident. Is this because I live in a culture where every meal is basically a feast?

American eating habits always remind me of Stefan Sagmeister’s poster/performance art:

Binge, 2003
by Stefan Sagmeister

Sagmeister locked himself in a room full of junk food and ate everything over the course of a week. He gained 25 pounds. You can see it on his body. His website says it was, “Not an enjoyable binge.”

Is Lent supposed to make me more conscious of how I feast? Even conscious of what I feast on?

Feasting during Lent seems to bring out more guilt than joy! Some might argue that is the point of Lent — focusing on guilt and the need for grace. It’s at least one of the points. Here is another artwork which wrestles with the excesses of feasting and the guilt often felt when extravagant sensual experiences are enjoyed:

In brief, a French chef serves a group of Danish puritans a lavish feast. At first they religiously vow to withhold all sense of enjoyment but as the courses keep coming, as the wine keeps flowing, as a well cultured general keeps complimenting the food, their hard puritan shells begins to crack.

My favorite moment is when one of the elderly women takes a sip of water and is unsatisfied with it compared to amazing wine at hand. But the beauty of the feast mends old wounds as lips, which hardly speak otherwise, utter confessions and forgiveness given in exchange. Joy is not only tasted, it spreads to all. A fracturing community ends in song holding hands around the village well.

So should I feel guilty about my privileged American feasting in a season of withholding?

The first year my wife and I lived in Boston we had a lavish meal. We traveled to New York for the first time together to celebrate our wedding anniversary. We visited the MoMA and saw the Water Lilies. For dinner, we spent way to much money on a meal. For us, it was a special occasion, our third anniversary — for others in the restaurant, it was just another Thursday. I cannot judge the folks who were regulars but the joy we had soaks my memory. The meal was special. It was different. It was a celebration of something worthwhile. If we had it every day it would quickly become mundane. So mundane that often a waiter will ask a guest whose plate is nearly clean, “are you still working on that?”

Working! Eating can be work. Often our feasts are labors of consumption.

But Lent, like the anniversary celebration, turns the feast back into something special. It soaks up the mundane work-a-day stuffing of one’s face for a time. Lent is the long spring cleaning of the body and soul. The feasting is highlighted in stark contrast to the fasting.

I don’t feel guilt when I break my fast for a feast day. I joyfully praise God for the rich history of the church and the saints. I am reminded, that though my sin is ever before me, so is the infinite mercy of Christ. The Lenten feasting makes me look ahead to Easter feasting with longing, rather than gluttony and guilt.

It’s not a week or a month. It’s not four weeks or seven. It’s forty days. Except, Sundays. Sundays break it up with a festive pause. Then there is Holy Week which is like Super-Lent. But Lent itself, apart from Sundays, is 40 days long. Why?

Well, Jesus was in the desert for 40 days:

Christ in the Desert, 1872
by Ivan Kramskoi

Forty days and forty nights with no food in the desert. I love how Kramskoi liters the landscape with stones which will be used by the devil to tempt Jesus. Apparently after forty days even stones start smelling like baked bread.

But, why was Christ in the desert for 40 days? (Obviously, I was never an annoying child repeatedly asking: “Why?”)

The 40 days reflects the 40 years the Israelites spent wandering the desert. And the 40 days of Noah’s flood. Still, why all the 40s?

It has something to do with this poem:

I live my life in widening circles
by Rainer Maria Rilke
trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, that primordial tower.
I have been circling for thousands of years,
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

Circles are the key to understanding the ancient symbolism of numbers and the reason why the number 40 occurs over and over. Circles are primordial, more so than squares or triangles. Why? (There I go again.)

Go stand on a mountain top and what do you see? You spin in a circle and see the world as a circular disc. Observe the Sun and Moon, they look like circles, and what do they do? Go in a circle. In the words of the great scholar, sage, and jokester James Acaster, “My eyes are circles.” We see circles everywhere: wedding rings, kings crowns, black holes, wheels, and, as Acaster said: pupils.

Circles have always had sacred significance. In fact, there is a whole movement of thinkers trying to define what they call “Sacred Geometry,” which uses a circle as the foundation from which all the other shapes unfold:

Liber Divinorum Operum, 1165
by Hildegard von Bingen

There is to much under the banner of Sacred Geometry to unpack here so let me focus on the where the 40 comes in.

Plunge a stick into the sand on the beach. Tie a string to it with a loose loop that slides so the string does not wrap itself around the stick. Tie a second loop on the other end of the string and place another stick, or your finger, in the loop. Draw a circle by swiping it all the way around the center stick (just like the horizon line around you when you were atop the mountain earlier).

Now, take the string (in geometry terms this is the radius of the circle) and start counting how many times it wraps around the edge of the circle (the circumference). It will always be the same: just over six — not quite seven — times.

If the world is made of circles how do you divvy up time to make it more workable? Start with the circle. Six full days with one as a remainder. Remind you of anything? The Jewish notion of a week: six days to work and one day to rest. The remainder, the incomplete seventh section is set aside for the Sabbath.

Should everything be divided into sevenths like a circle? Well the Moon throws this for a loop since it finishes twelve cycles1 for every one of the Sun’s cycles but what other things can be divided up into sevenths?

This:

This series of sculptures by Damien Hirst are title The Miraculous Journey. The average pregnancy lasts around 280 days, give or take. If you divide 280 by 7 you get 40. What about the give or take? Remember how the seventh section of the circle is a remainder? The remainder is where divine wiggle room comes in: the last day might be a bit short or a bit long.

If we think of pregnancy as a circle (broken up into 7 parts), then 40 calendar days makes up one day in the “week” of pregnancy. It might be odd, but it is human. Just like these sculptures are odd, but human.

One of the reasons I like the Imperial system of measurements over the Metric system is because of how many human elements are baked into it.2 If you are a man, take your thumb and measure your bare foot from heel to toe with the width of your thumb’s knuckle. It will be about 12 thumb widths. A foot. Take a stride and you will see about three feet fit between your two feet from toe to toe. These are human measurements.

40 days is a very human measurement of time — it’s a day in the week of your birth. There are other types of measurements, specifically I am reminded of nature’s time. John Grade collaborates with nature’s time through his art:

Collector, 2006-08
by John Grade

Grade constructed a split circle of wooden lattice which he carried out into a variety of wildernesses and left it to weather the elements. He submitted it to the seasons and patterns of nature. It was submerged in water:

It was dried in desert winds:

As it hung on the mesa, desert wrens ate the seafood encrusted to it like mana.

Throughout its journey it collected bugs, crustaceans, and bird poop. It was scoured by sun, water, and wind. It was strapped to his back. It was strapped to his truck. It was placed in a ravine. It became a dry and crusty thing when it was finally placed in a gallery:

Like old hands that bear the cracks and calluses of years, the sculpture has lived at the speed of nature.

Regardless of how we measure time I think Rilke is right about the shape of our lives. Perhaps we could adjust the poem to say, “We live our lives in widening circles / that reach out across the world.”

But we do not circle one thing. We are more like a cluster of circles circling the center “primordial tower.” Rilke sees himself as a bird, a swirl of storm clouds, or the notes of a song. I imagine our circling like orbiting planets. As we orbit the God center of our lives, other things join our orbit. Your spouse may become a tidally locked moon. Or your job may pull you to one pole, off from the center.

We are moving, rotating, Fourier Series.3 This series of drawings is made by using only circling circles, which then make a strange orbit as seen in this gif:

The refocusing of Lent, the deprivation I wrote about last week, helps us shed some of our other orbits. It refreshes our path so we circle God, the center of our lives, with less turbulence. The length of Lenten time, 40 days, allows us to grow.

After all, 40 days is linked to gestation. Lent is long enough for the impact of the disciplines to remain, if not for a whole year, then for the majority of this cycle round the sun.

We are collectors of many orbits and gravitational pulls. Some of which make the arc of our lives more beautiful. Some which throw us off from the center. You might be leathery and desiccated at the end of your life, like John Grade’s sculpture. Lent is the time in the desert where the birds pick the crustaceans away. The day of growth through pruning. Lent will reduce the drag on your circular orbit and you will draw closer to the middle this time around.

Collector, 2006-08
by John Grade

I will chalk-it-up to “movie magic” and return my attention to veils. The veils of Lent are similar to mourning veils.

Study of a Mourning Woman, 1505
by Michelangelo

The function of the veil is to hide the face of the mourner, it serves as a privacy screen allowing others to be sensitive to their private woes.

The Lenten veils are not there to cover a mourner though. Instead, they are there to remind us: we are all mourners. The veil hides but it also draws attention to whatever has been veiled. The Victorians understood the double function of the veil: traditionally a widow was to dress in black with a veil for an entire year after the death of her husband. This practice was spoken of as “the trap re-baited.”1

The veiled object stands out from the crowd. It’s concealed but in another way it’s revealed. This is why romantic restaurants are usually full of shadows rather than the fluorescent lights of a cafeteria. The veil often causes us to look at the contours of the face instead of at the eyes. It causes us to see the form of whatever is veiled. Like this:

Wrapped Trees, 1997-98
by Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Without the scrim veil these two trees would blend into a mass of branches. Instead we see how they have grown to both fit together and spread apart. Notice how the right hand tree leans over and toward the smaller tree on the left. The tree on the left is branchless on the right hand side of its trunk.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are masters of the veil. They have hidden the L’Arc de Triomphe:

L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, 1961-20212

Their work highlights by hiding.

This is my favorite image of the trees:

The veil makes us take stock of the thing as a whole. Which reminds me of funeral veils — not mourning veils worn by women. The veils put over a corpse:

Veiled Christ, 1753
by Giuseppe Sanmartino

The funeral veil shrouds the body. The details blur, especially in Sanmartino’s sculpture, and we begin to see the general shape of the person. We no longer gaze on the living face but rather see the body mixed with the flowing fluidity of the veil. Sanmartino’s skill is incredible! The funeral veil directs us away from the body and towards a remembrance of the lost one’s life.

All of these veils remind me of the verse in First Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

My eyes are drawn to that which is hidden. The familiar face, the overlooked tree, the corpse, even the cross in church whose presence is assumed more than noticed. We take so much for granted. The gesture of the veil hides for a time so I might truly see once again, after the veil is lifted.

After fasting for Ash Wednesday the most salient topic on my mind and in my gut is eating. How can art help me think about eating?

Gnaw, 1992
by Janine Antoni

If you know my work or if you read my post — err, article — about wrestling a few weeks ago, then you know I like performance art. NOT ALL OF IT!2 In general performance art reminds me of Old Testament prophets, and this piece by Janine Antoni really reminds me of Ezekiel.

Why?

Well, the two blocks up above started off as a 600 lb chocolate cube and a 600 lb lard cube. Take a closer look at the detail shot:

Have you ever left something out in the garage and found it chewed up by mice?3 Antoni gnawed on the cubes. Her website describes the entire performance like this:

Gnaw comprises two 600-pound cubes – one of chocolate, the other of lard – and a three-paneled, mirrored cosmetic display case. Using her mouth as a tool, Antoni nibbled the corners of both cubes, leaving visible teeth marks in the material. The chocolate fragments, blended with spit, were melted down and cast into 27 heart-shaped packages for chocolates, while the lard residue was combined with wax and bright red pigment to create 135 tubes of lipstick.

Here are the cast chocolates and lipsticks in their exhibition display cases:

My mind goes in a few directions all at once. First, she is not really gnawing on the lard or the chocolate. She is scraping it with her teeth and then spitting the material out. I wonder how long she scrapped at the blocks? All I can find online is she gnawed until she reached a state of physical exhaustion.

I am reminded of the connection between food, eating, and beauty. The glass cases house the chocolate and spit cast into valentines chocolate hearts and the lipstick is the classic seductive red. What could female beauty products made from the artist’s mouth scrapping at the raw materials mean?

Many critics focus on the feminist message, how women’s beauty standards in the 90’s began to become inhuman. Treating women like bulimic cogs in the assembly line of beauty products. I can certainly see that, but I think there is also more.

Artnet quotes Antoni saying “The reason I’m so interested in taking my body to those extreme places is that that’s a place where I learn, where I feel most in my body.”

If Antoni’s work is speaking of the inhuman treatment of women how does this performance make her most “in [her] body”? She also said, “I’m really interested in the repetition, the discipline, and what happens to me psychologically when I put my body to that extreme place.”

Which draws me to the extreme place of the prophets I mentioned earlier:

Saint John Devouring the Book, from “The Apocalypse”, 1497-98
by Albrecht Dürer

God tells St. John to eat a book — and he wasn’t the only one. Ezekiel was commanded to eat a book as well. The crux of this action is the same as the aphorism, “you are what you eat.” Both John and Ezekiel are filled with the prophetic messages they receive and are fueled to fulfill God’s mission for them.

Ezekiel in particular embarks on a ministry which would be described today as performance art. These actions included:

• lying on his side for 430 days

• cooking bread over dung

• shaving and dividing his hair

• packing as if he were going into exile then digging a hole in the wall of his house so he and his family could escape at night

• making a scale model of Jerusalem and building up small siege engines against it

I think Antoni was the most “in her body” during her performances because, like the prophets, her actions were meaningful messages in and of themselves. Her personal focus was on the discipline needed to complete the task. She is simply exploring her teeth as a sculpting tool. She is observing how the things she bites are shaped by her. Perhaps the gnawed objects are just as shaped by her as she would be if she swallowed all the chocolate. We often think of eating and dieting as sculpting only us. Does our eating also sculpt the world? Does it sculpt the world at all like how St. John and Ezekiel’s eating did?

I see the lipstick and chocolate hearts as a cheeky way for the artist to make some cash. How does one sell a performance like this? Make vanity objects out of it.

Eventually the lard decomposed. But the work keeps gnawing at me.

The blocks were set on marble plinths. The lard in particular reminds me of marble. Michelangelo once famously said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Perhaps every performative act — the block of stone for performance artists — has a meaningful action somewhere inside of it and it is the task of the performance artist to chip away at the edges until something is discovered.

For me, the work ultimately reminds me of how small and insignificant I am. How all of my work is merely a nibble at the corner of life. How my paltry offering is akin to chocolates and lipstick. It reminds me, especially during Lent, the only food which will satisfy and shape me is the spiritual food of the body and blood of Christ.

George Herbert had this little bit to say at the end of his poem Agony: “Love is that liquour sweet and most divine, / Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.” I might nibble at chocolate but I gobble the body of Christ, which I taste as bread.

How does an artist accidentally make an altar to the unknown god in the first place? How could Burnham and Bazan get close but ultimately fall short? These altars are the products of unintended consequences. An artist sets out with some goal or notion and, unbeknownst to them, their work begins to worship God. Thinking of it as wrestling helps me to understand this.

Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1855
by Gustave Dore

The artist carries with them into the studio with all the baggage of life. Then, with their hands the artist works the materials, meanwhile their souls wrestle with the difficulties of life. It’s through these difficulties we find we are wrestling not with the earthly materials of art making, but with spiritual things. The artist is looking for an answer to the same question Job had, “why?”

Side note, I love how Dore’s interpretation of the wrestling match looks like the angel is about to pummel Jacob with his own hands while chanting, “Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself.”

My two favorite depictions of Jacob’s wrestling — of all of our wrestling — are Gauguin’s and Van Gogh’s.

Vision After the Sermon, 1888
by Paul Gauguin

The Sower, 1888
by Vincent Van Gogh

I made a video a few years back explaining how these two paintings are in conversation with each other (link). If you have a few minutes watch it great, but here is the gist:

Gauguin made the first painting and then Van Gogh made the second in response because he disagreed with Gauguin’s placement of the wrestling match. Notice the tree is the similar in both compositions, Van Gogh was making sure to quote his friends composition. Gauguin, after listening to a sermon, made a painting of pious people looking past the tree into a heavenly realm. This is where wrestling with God occurred for Gauguin. Van Gogh says no, no. We wrestle with God in the here and now, this side of the tree. We do it through our work. Through sowing seeds.

I like both paintings because I think both are right. We wrestle in the realm of ideas (spiritual) and with our work and toil (earthly).

No artist embodies wrestling in both realms quite like Shiraga Kazuo:

Challenging the Mud, 1955 (2nd execution)
by Shiraga Kazuo

The artist isn’t mud wrestling. He is wrestling with the mud.

A little art historical context is necessary to see beyond the childish nature of this work. Kazuo is Japanese and he is part of a group of artists known as Gutai. Gutai roughly translates as concrete or embodiment. The Gutai artists are not interested in making beautiful artworks like the traditional Japanese scrolls.

They want to encounter the materials of the world on the material’s terms. They want to have a new experience with materials which have been overlooked or, in the eyes of the Gutai, misused, in the past. Through their work they see the “innate beauty of matter is reemerging from behind the mask of artificial embellishment.”

Normally, when and artist uses mud as a medium, the mud is made into clay which is then shaped into pottery. Shaping mud into a vessel for human use is “the mask of artificiality” — mud does not naturally become a mug or teapot, it only becomes so through artifice. The Gutai reject this “mask” and want to encounter the mud in a new way. Why? Because their entire culture was defeated like this:

The Japanese artists were wrestling with defeat, and moral failure, the deposition of their emperor. All the weight of World War II required they change the mode of their creativity. And of course they witnessed not one but two nuclear bomb detonations.

The Japanese artists are not unlike Jacob, who is returning to his brother Esau’s land having cheated him of so much.

The question of the wrestler, the one who is wrestling with something big, is how can I move on? How can I live, admitting this defeat? It feels like an insurmountable foe. Like wrestling with an angel or with the entire world.

Challenging the Mud, 1955 (aftermath)
by Shiraga Kazuo

Performance art like this reminds me of the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel. They did the strangest things — like laying on their side for days and eating bread cooked over cow dung. Or hiding a cloth beside the Euphrates river only for it to rot. I am reminded also of the time when Jeremiah was thrown into a mud filled cistern for days. For the prophets, every action, no matter how small or strange, could be meaningful.

I see Kazuo challenging the mud and even though he stands next to the mess, he has not won. He is a small speck wrestling with the entire planet. The performance was over not when he won, but when he gave up. I hear the writer of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

We are all wrestling. We are all going to fail. This Challenging the Mud is an altar to the unknown god. It makes me realize all I can do is hang on tight and cry out, “bless me!” before the sun rises. Then, maybe I will see the embrace I have been striving against — struggling to break free from, hoping to gain the upper hand — is not a grapple but a hug. Maybe, as my strength is failing, I will have Rembrandt’s vision of the great wrestling match:

Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, ca. 1659
by Rembrandt

But then out of nowhere the right work of art finds you (my explanation is the wild goose called the Holy Spirit):

The Secret
By Denise Levertov 

Two girls discover 
the secret of life 
in a sudden line of 
poetry.

I who don't know the 
secret wrote 
the line. They 
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it 
but not what it was 
not even

what line it was. No doubt 
by now, more than a week 
later, they have forgotten 
the secret,

the line, the name of 
the poem. I love them 
for finding what 
I can't find,

and for loving me 
for the line I wrote, 
and for forgetting it 
so that

a thousand times, till death 
finds them, they may 
discover it again, in other 
lines

in other 
happenings. And for 
wanting to know it, 
for

assuming there is 
such a secret, yes, 
for that 
most of all.

Levertov is encountering the same phenomena I have been writing about. It’s not like the girls were misunderstanding her poetry. The girls were actually understanding it on a far deeper level than Levertov. Cast aside the melancholic tone, for even though we are a forgetful species, the looking for the secret of life is how it will be found. “Seek and you will find.”

We artists, as wrote, are merely the first audience members of the strange happening in our studios. Owen Barfield thought of the artist as an Aeolian Harp — a box with a string which is set in front of a window for the wind to play. The artist, like the harp, receives the wind, and responds with their music.

I think sums it up best in what I call “the parable of Stan” from his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain:

We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he wanted to express, and then he just, you know, expressed it. That is, we buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same.

The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and beautiful and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.

A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices that he’s arranged his hobo into a certain posture, the hobo seems to be gazing back at the town. Why is he looking over there? At that little blue Victorian house? Stan notes a plastic woman in the window, then turns her a little, so she’s gazing out. Over at the railroad bridge, actually. Huh. Suddenly, Stan has made a love story. (Oh, why can’t they be together? If only “Little Jack” would just go home. To his wife. To “Linda.”)

What did Stan (the artist) just do? Well, first, surveying his little domain, he noticed which way his hobo was looking. Then he chose to change that little universe, by turning the plastic woman. Now, Stan didn’t exactly decide to turn her. It might be more accurate to say that it occurred to him to do so-in a split second, with no accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal “Yes.”

He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he’d had the time or inclination to articulate them.

In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.

I don’t want to dismiss the decisions the Stans/artists make. The music of an aeolian harp requires the tuning of the string and the hollow resonance of the box. The artist, their life, their skills, all of who they are matters. But what matters more is how the artist responds to the deep intuitive “yes’” that occurs when they work. Or the way they say “no” to the callings in the studio that they disagree with.

From these moments of dancing with the wind surprises emerge. It’s the whole reason why, as Joseph said, we can intend an artwork for one thing, perhaps an evil thing or a narcissistic thing, and yet it can be used by God for good.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle intended Sherlock Holmes to be a critique of the modern rational man, now Holmes is the archetype of rationality as man’s savior. George Lucas thought the real power of Star Wars was the fact that his universe was large and cohesive without continuity contradictions. Because of his inability to see the underlying truth in his own films, he failed to make the prequel trilogy into a compelling narrative. It merely developed the details of his galaxy far far away.

I don’t know what my artwork means. I know some of what it has meant to me in the past and present. I do know what sort of model railroad domain brought me to see the little moments of a love story. Little moments that I was able to help shape so that others might see them as well. My artist talk will not be about what my art “does,” or any conversations it “engages in.” Rather, I will tell those who attend about the little domain I get to move pieces around in.

I will try my best to intimate where my mind saw compelling connections between “Little Jacks” and “Lindas.” But my opinion as the artist is by no means the definitive one.

The secret of life might be found somewhere in my work by someone. If so, I hope they tell me about it. A response like the one Levertov received would be a delightful morsel to sustain me.

Ravens to Supply You, 2023
by Greg Lookerse

As I have said before, art is a product of culture. Art doesn’t make culture so much as culture induces it. If there is a dark and inhuman culture you should expect to find dark and inhuman art. Though we are not looking for the dark and inhuman, we should not be surprised when that is what we find. We are looking for altars (in this case artworks) which are lights within and through the darkness. We are surprised when somehow a dark and inhuman culture produces and altar to an unknown god. Especially since it happens quiet often.

So far in this series I have explored two works of art which, in my opinion, are on the safe side, Wake Up Dead Man and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. In both essays I suggested we do not have to take an artist’s word for what their work means. The artist’s intention is not what matters most. The apostle Paul knew whoever made the altar to the unknown god in Athens was not intending it to be an altar to Christ, yet this is what he argued it was. In practice, the altar was made for an anti-Christian religious system.

Like Paul, can we find altars in artworks which are intentionally made by artists to be blasphemous or to deride the Christian faith?

If we are to do this, we must remember what C.S. Lewis said about encountering an artwork in his book An Experiment in Criticism:

“The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)”

You cannot judge a work of art with a cursory glance. You must experience it. This is difficult with artworks which are actively made to be anti-Christian. Please note, this does not mean you need to enjoy the artwork. Surrendering to it does not mean you believe it’s message or like its aesthetic. Rather, you do not pre-judge the work until you have tried your best to see the work for what it is.

Then you judge.

Paul did not say all the altars in Athens were actually pointing towards Christ. Only the one.

Lewis’ methodology, like Paul’s methodology, is one of charity, “Look. Listen. Receive” before you shout ‘heretic’ and start piling bundles of sticks. My methodology builds on this foundation of charitable openness. You might point out that my methodology changes on a case-by-case basis. Correct. I am always seeking the most charitable interpretation of a work of art. An interpretation which brings it as close as possible to the Truth of all Reality. Sometimes I need to take into account an artist statement about the artwork, sometimes I need to ignore it. It’s not my intention to use a consistent methodology — rather, I am searching for the greatest depth of truth I can find in each artwork I encounter.

Some works of art are not truthful. Some are false. I don’t spend much time condemning blasphemous art because I am not surprised the world makes blasphemous art. There is a place to condemn sin, but I don’t think it is mine.

With the lengthy preamble out of the way, where might we find blasphemous art through which we will wade as we look for altars to the unknown god?

At an exhibition held by the Kunstlerhaus Museum in Viena titled You Should Make an Image of Yourself.

This exhibition came to my attention because of a post by condemning the exhibition as “Hating Jesus.” Do I think the artwork or artists there might hate Jesus? Yes. Most definitely. At the very least they hate His church. Even the exhibition title is a call for artists to construct idols, as it’s a reference to God’s dialog in Genesis about making man and woman in His own image.

But, after all, Christ warned us the world would hate him and us. I am not surprised by this exhibition. I am surprised by this work included in the exhibition though:

Tender Christ, 2019
by Renate Bertlmann

What is this piece?

It is a crucifix but instead of a traditional sculpture of Jesus on the cross the Christ figure is made up of latex nubs. Dreher notices, “the head of Christ, at least, is unmistakably made of simulated maggots.”

In the catalog for the exhibition the curators express that Bertlmann (the artist who made the piece),

approaches religion and the church with playful critique, a rejection of institutional authority, and a pointed examination of its repressive effects on women. Her works serve as artistic rebuttals to religiously rooted social norms. In [this piece] she transforms one of Western culture’s most potent symbols into a tactile, erotically charged object. This radical feminist critique of religion profoundly questions conventions, creating both a provocation and a poetic proposition: a reimagining of belief, body, gender, and sexuality through tender, life-affirming symbolism.

If we take the artist statement at its word, although it is a bit confusing because of the overly complex artspeak, the artwork is meant to be a critique of Christianity and the institution of the church.

This crass and banal depiction of Christ reminds me of this insulting graffiti (which I have discussed previously):

Alexamenos Graffito, ca. 200 AD
photo by Justin Benttinen

It is hard to make out the details so here is a tracing:

It roughly translates: “Alexamenos worships [his] god.” A donkey headed man crucified.

The drawing is intended to insult Christ and his worshiper Alexamenos. The artist scrawled his statement as a part of the piece so there can be no mistaking the intent. Yet, I like this image. I like it as a devotional image. I don’t think it is some clever twist, a justified critique of a corrupt institution, or a more accurate depiction of the face of Christ. I know it is none of those things.

So what stands out about this image, intended for insult? Why do I see it as a source of devotion?

It reminds me of donkeys. Seeing as this post is filled with crass imagery I suppose I should say jackasses. Several donkeys come to mind: instagram reels of donkeys kicking, the sound of a donkey which woke me up at a conference in the middle of Texas, Balaam’s donkey, the donkey Christ rode into Jerusalem, and especially the donkeys constantly showing up in images of the nativity. Donkeys are all over the bible, even though they are ugly, obnoxious, and unruly.

Despite those attributes I have an affinity for them. I think it began with this song:

This lyric jumps out:

The Donkey whispered in his ear
“Child, in thirty-some-odd years
You'll ride someone who looks like me
(Untriumphantly)”

The song goes on to praise a mangy goat, another often derided beast in the Bible. The song shines quite the positive light on the goat and donkey. The twist of calling the Triumphal Entry “untriumphant” causes me to see these animals in more of a positive light.

Which reminds me of the post I wrote about St. Luke and the ox which is included in images of him. The ox symbolizes the Israelites and the law but in most scenes of Christ’s birth there is also a donkey. The donkey symbolizes peace. Christ does not ride a war horse into Jerusalem like the Greeks and Romans. He comes in peace. He comes as a beast of burden. The young shepherd David brought a donkey load of rations to his brothers fighting in the war. Donkeys are unruly and said to be untamable (hence the great instagram reels). Which is why they came to be a symbol of the gentiles. Those who were outside the covenant God made with Israel. The donkey in the manger scene, along with the ox, is a symbolic expression of Christ coming to bring peace to both the chosen people of God and the gentiles. Mary rode a donkey to Bethlehem and Christ rode one into Jerusalem the week of his death.

I am not so sure giving Jesus a donkey head is actually much of an insult. Is Christ like a donkey? Like a beast who caries burdens, who is symbol of peace for the whole world? Like an animal who kicks against the goads of society? Yes, yes he is.

The story of Joseph, after he has saved his entire family from famine comes to mind. In Genesis 50:20 Joseph says to his brothers, who sold him as a slave, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

The donkey Christ, though it’s intention was to insult, embodies a beautiful truth: Christ became low, the lowest in fact, so all might be risen with him. He humbled himself to a miserable death, worse than the fate of any donkey.

If the Donkey Headed Christ can be seen as an altar to the one and only God let us return to the nubs. I disagree with Dreher’s interpretation of the piece. If you take the time to visit Bertlmann’s website you will see “latex nubs” are featured throughout. Some of them have darker tips because latex is darker when it is not stretch. They are not meant to simulate maggots. If you go in to an idolatrous exhibition without the posture that C.S. Lewis suggests, then you will find maggots. If you go in with a more receptive posture you might not see maggots. Before passing judgement, you might ask some basic questions:

What are nubs? Nubs is slang for pacifiers. They are latex pacifier nipples.

That really changes things doesn’t it? Go back and read the artist statement again. If the artwork’s latex growths are meant to be monstrous, how do words like “tender” and “life-affirming” or “erotic” make sense from the curators? These words make sense because they aren’t strange growths or maggots. They are nipples.

The artist intends for this covering of the crucifix with nipples to be primarily a sexual act. Yes, it can be interpreted that way, but, as we all know, this is a limited view of what nipples are for. A Christian response to this artwork, in line with St. Paul’s example, points out nipples are the source of nourishing milk necessary for the growth of a infant. Paul uses the image of milk vs solid food in his own writings.

An image of Christ made from nipples connects to the ancient images of harvest goddesses which are women covered in many breasts. Yet, here is a man, the Son of God, covered in the same sort of “nubs.” Could it be true that the real spiritual food, the real spiritual milk, comes from Christ’s body and his blood?

Those many breasted harvest goddesses symbolized bounty. The kind of bounty Martha Stewart’s cornucopias symbolize today. Christ calls, “all who are thirsty” because he is able to satiate their thirst.

From one point-of-view this is an altar to an unknown nipple covered S&M crucified god. It’s what I expect to find in most art today. But from another point-of-view, one which takes into account the rich history of Biblical symbolism, a different flame can be found burning on this altar. It is an altar to the one true God who is a spring of living water. An altar made despite the artist’s intentions. Can we, like Paul, recognize the universal human desire for true nourishment found in the Tender Christ and how it rightfully expresses Christ as the ultimate fulfillment of our desire?

Christ is tender. “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters.”

Not only is the artwork set in winter but it’s a poem by Robert Frost. Whose name is rather chilling and whose work is typically hard to nail down. Frost was famously vague and cagey when it came to explaining what his poems “meant”.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   
To stop without a farmhouse near   
Between the woods and frozen lake   
The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   
To ask if there is some mistake.   
The only other sound’s the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.

I am not a Robert Frost expert, but I was trained in a largely Postmodernist art school which was leaning towards Transhumanism. Many folks would see attending a school like this as a negative, but there were many prime opportunities to learn some of the good interpretation techniques pioneered by Postmodernists. Namely, it is permissible to ignore authorial intent.

As in, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what Frost wanted to “communicate” via this poem. What I receive through the poem matters more. I can hear many people with rigorous methodologies raising their hands to reject this notion — but let me defend this Postmodernist method by pointing out how true it is for most of life. When someone cuts you off on the road, do you stop to consider their intentions or do you hammer on the horn and curse like a sailor? Doesn’t the anger boil up in your belly before you wonder if a pregnant woman is huffing in the back seat and the driver was headed to the ER? Don’t you interpret the action from your own point-of-view before you have any idea of the other driver’s intent?

The true Postmodernist, of which there are few, would completely ignore the author’s intent but we don’t have to. We can let the poem wash over us and then ask if the author’s intent adds to our experience of the work. We can take the positive aspects of relativism for what they are worth and move on to other methodologies; such as reading a statement about the artwork written by the author after we have seen the work of art. Which, as a methodology, acknowledges once an artwork is released into the world the artist has very little control over how it is received. Just as the message conveyed by a driver who does not check blindspots fails to communicate their righteous intentions as they cut you off.

Furthermore, old Rob Frost didn’t like to give us clear “artist statements” about his work. Which leaves me in the Postmodernist realm of just relying upon my own experience.

So, is there more to this poem beyond the story of a traveler stopping in the woods on a snowy evening to take in the beauty of the dark woods before carrying on with his (or her) duties? I think so.

The first line which strikes me is “The darkest evening of the year.”

Second, the traveler thinks he knows the owner of the woods but “His house is in the village though”.

Finally, I see (hear) the night is very quiet: “The only other sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.”

This person is traveling on the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. Last year it was on December 21st but traditionally it was believed the winter solstice was December 25th. You might recognize that date, at least you might if you’re a child hoping to receive a Red Rider BB Gun. One of the interesting aspects of the Christian calendar is Christ, the “light of the world,” is born on the darkest day of the year.

Also, in ancient times a day began at sun down — rather than midnight. So this Snowy Evening is not after Christmas morning, it is before Christmas morning. We would call this Christmas Eve but the ancients would have called this Christmas night.

This person is traveling on Christmas Eve alone through the woods.

Before we think any further about the traveler, let’s look at the woods themselves. Whose woods are they? Obviously Frost does not give us specifics, only the owner’s house is in the village. Given the Christmas associations in my mind, I cannot help but think of the owner of all woods: God.

His house is the church, which, in a proper pre-modern village, would be the center of town. Most likely there would be a vigil service happening there. The church would be filled with carols and light. But the traveler is here instead. Watching the woods fill with snow.

The lines about the sound of the woods continue to remind me of Christmas because there is hardly any sound. One might call it a silent night. The only animal stirring is the horse who makes the harness bells ring. I imagine those harness bells might sound quite similar to sleigh bells.

Why is this traveler out here in the dark and deep woods? The answer we receive is some sort of obligation in the form of a promise. I like how vague Frost is. It calls to mind all the folks who, rain or shine, clock in. Even on holy days. From civil servants to Waffle House cooks.

There are always some poor souls who must sacrifice the joys of Christmas worship so our modern world might keep working. Is there any comfort for them? Frost seems to think so, look at the melancholic pleasure in his description of the woods: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” This line reminds me of the American Transcendentalist movement.1 (Not to be confused with the Transhumanist movement.)

The woods are dark and deep, yet this traveler stops to see them fill up with white snow. Instead of being angry or afraid, the traveler sees it as lovely. Much like how the American Transcendentalists saw God in the wild nature of America.

Is all of this what the poem is meant to mean? I don’t know.

Is there any chance Frost had Christmas on his mind? Is there any chance he was writing about God and His creation? In 1947 Frost described himself in a letter as “an orthodox Old Testament, original Christian,” whose approach to the New Testament “is rather through Jerusalem than through Rome or Canterbury.”

I think this means he was more like an Eastern Orthodox Christian. A tradition which finds God emanating through all of creation; even when passing through the cold snow when one is forced to travel away from home and hearth. Even in the middle of the darkest night. I don’t think its much of a stretch to see this poem as an appreciation of God’s grace at all times. Even when we are alone in the cold.

I also imagine Frost would have found a kinship in Bill Watterson’s approach to a snowy woods:

Calvin and Hobbes, 1995
by Bill Watterson

Often, in the Old Testament, altars were made of uncut stones. Stones which had not been carved but were used just as they were found. Stones carved by time and nature’s forces. I think both Watterson and Frost are able to make altars out of the snow itself. Much like how my Catholic friends at Hope College make an Ice Altar each year — weather permitting:

Image from the Saint Benedict Institute at Hope College.

I am not going to write an in-depth plot synopsis, you should watch the film first before reading what I have to say about it. If you don’t care to watch the film, you can find my brief synopsis below and you can get a sense of the movie from the trailer:

As with the other Knives Out stories, the audience is presented with a motley crew of suspects. All of whom have their own reasons for why they might be suspected of murder. Also, Blanc takes one of the naive suspects under his wing as the pseudo Watson to his silly southern Holmes. It is not the setup, structure, characters, or complexity of the crime that makes this film interesting.

In comparison with the first two movies in the series, this third installment treats its subject — the question Johnson set out to answer — as less of a critique and more of a conundrum. For example, the first movie, Knives Out, uses a metaphoric portrayal of America as a expensive mansion. In the film’s telling the mansion is built on a fiction and the heirs are unworthy of such a valuable inheritance. You can find more of my thoughts on that movie here, suffice to say, it was a whodunit meant to forward a particular view on immigration in America. The second movie, Glass Onion, is about narcissistic tech billionaires and social media influencers endangering the world through their inflated egos and rings of corruption. The ultimate answer of the film is to let the elite’s true colors shine through their own stupidity. Finger wags abounded more so than a serious mystery.

Both of these films were used to critique the cultural and societal forces at play within the plot. Wake Up Dead Man is a palette cleanser compared to the other two. The first two movies seemed to argue for a certain philosophical point-of-view but Johnson, by his own admission, returned to the basics of film making for the third to make an interesting movie:

It's the basic fundamentals of storytelling. … Who is your protagonist? What do they want? Why do we care? And, why can't they get it? And how are they going to get it in the end in a way that they didn’t expect, and hopefully we didn't either? You have to start with that. That's something that I learned very quickly … the only thing that's going to keep an audience in their seats and give them an emotional payoff at the end is a character they care about, and following that character all the way through a true story.

I want to dwell on those last two words, “true story.” Obviously this movie is not a retelling of a historical murder which took place in the past. All of the characters are fictitious as is the location. Given the context of the quote I think Johnson merely means a “good story.” But I wonder if this quote isn’t revealing of a deeper aspect of the film itself?

This is the first in a series of posts about how artworks can be altars to an unknown god. (mentioned earlier this week.) As I watched Wake Up Dead Man the first time I was certain there was something much deeper happening than the mere plot slowly unwinding. There is a truth in this film. A truth about the church and the state of faith in America today but also a truth about Christ.

Before I get into the stones that make this altar, I must give you a Spoiler Alert:

A brief plot synopsis: The movie begins with a young priest, Father Jud, explaining to the investigator, Benoit Blanc, the terrible character of Jefferson Wicks, the older priest. Jud also relays the backgrounds of all the other suspects involved in the parish. Wicks is a caricature of a MAGA priest who preaches condemnation of the world while ignoring the wayward habits of his inner circle of parishioners. During a Good Friday service Wicks is murdered, via a knife in the back, while he is alone in a closet. “A perfectly impossible murder.” Blanc, working with Jud, unravels the threads to reveal that the dutiful church secretary, Martha, after discovering Wicks’ corruption, works with two other characters to murder Wicks. Allowing the blame fall on Jud. Her ultimate goal was to stop Wicks from getting a MacGuffin,1 referred to as Eve’s Apple — a gem of tremendous value. The gem is the key to unraveling the mystery as the co-conspirators murder each other trying to claim the gem for themselves. Of course this leads to the question, who is the dead man in need of waking up? It may refer to the false resurrection of Wicks, which takes place midway through the film. An impossible murder is followed by a supernatural resurrection.

However, none of that is really the important part. The plot does not make the film “Christian” despite involving members of the church. Most people are praising the film as Christian because of one character: Father Jud.

Father Jud’s character is summed up in one of his quotes: “Christ came to heal the world not fight it.” This quote comes from Jud’s introduction where he professes his role as a Christian and priest to be one of hugging the world not fighting the world. There is one scene in particular, a little over midway through the film, when Jud and Blanc are following a lead. Jud calls a construction company that was hired days before the murder to open the crypt in which Wicks would later lie. Jud tries to hurry through the conversation as the office manager rambles on about the inner workings of the business. In a telling moment, the woman breaks down and asks for prayer from the priest. Jud’s face falls as he remembers his true vocation is not to solve murders, it is to tend to the flock. It’s a breath taking scene. The beauty of Jud’s love is contrasted with Blanc’s frustration and cold boredom.

Jud’s powerful character of love aligns with most orthodox interpretations of the Christian faith. This is one huge point for the Christian Art column.

What else about the film could be praised or condemned as Christian Art?

The counter balance to Jud is Blanc who is often smack dab in the middle of the sacred space with his skeptical demeanor:

During his character’s introduction into the storyline Blanc lambastes the church and the entire faith with a long winded diatribe in which he says he feels “the intended emotional effect” of the architecture

“and its like someone has shone a story at me that I do not believe. That’s built upon the empty promise of a child’s fairytale, filled with malevolence and misogyny and homophobia, and it’s justified untold acts of violence and cruelty, while all the while, and still, hiding its own shameful acts. So, like an ornery mule kicking back I want to pick it apart and pop its perfidious bubble of belief and get to a truth that I can swallow without choking.”

In fact, compare the lighting in the film-still above, which comes right before his poetic condemnation, with this one below which comes during the monologue:

Throughout the film Blanc’s rationality is colored with cool blues and Jud’s love is colored with warm reds and oranges.

“Popping the perfidious bubble of belief,” seems to chalk one up for the anti-Christian Art column. In fact many complain about Jud’s rather simple response that indeed, the emotions felt in the church building are a form of storytelling.2

Back and forth we can go. Blanc humbles himself in the end and sees the value of mercy and confession. The sacrament of confession is desecrated over and over throughout the film. The themes of redemption and forgiveness are heavy throughout. Sin is only condemned via the parody of Wicks as a political preacher. The Gospel is not preached succinctly and Blanc does not “come to Jesus.” There is violence throughout and should we really be showing this to the kids? A bust of Jesus is even used to crush a statue of Jesus:

I have read and watched the arguments back and forth and I must say, I don’t care. What I do know is there is a much deeper truth embedded in this film. A truth which these surface level enactments of faith and doubt miss or obscure. Though, Blanc wrestling with Jud’s faith is wonderful — it could have been the entire focus of the film and I still would have been gleefully surprised that a movie in the year 2025 dared such an endeavor.

But after the first watch I could not shake the feeling that the whole film reminded me of The Brothers Karamazov. In particular, the most famous chapter from the great book, “The Grand Inquisitor.” Which is what makes me begin to see the foundation work of what I can only imagine is an altar. An altar to a God who Rian Johnson once proclaimed but has now turned away from. Johnson said, “I grew up very, very Christian, and I'm not anymore.”

The reason I am reminded of “The Grand Inquisitor” is because of Eve’s Apple and what Prentice Wicks does with it as a clergyman:

Jefferson Wicks’ grandfather, Prentice, secretly swallows the valuable jewel as his last communion and dies, it is buried within him. Later, his materialistic daughter, Grace, dies trying to find the treasure. All the commentary I have seen discussing this object either treats it as a MacGuffin or as a symbol of the Pearl of Great Price.3 But it isn’t just a MacGuffin and it isn’t the Pearl of Great Price either, it is Eve’s Apple. In fact it is L’Eveil Appel:

Which, when properly translated from French, says, “the call of awakening.” Once again the question comes to my mind — who is the dead man who needs to wake up? If you follow the plot of the fake resurrection of Wicks then you assume the title refers to Wicks. But he is dead through and through and never actually rises.

What if we interpret the gemstone to be what the film calls it over and over? The fruit Eve plucked from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. Making it a symbol of the fall of humanity into a state of sin. In other words, it is a symbol of the ultimate problem with all humans. In fact, Wicks says this in a sermon when he sums up the problem of sin as a need for “Eve’s apple [to be] returned to the tree.” We need the original sin to be undone.

Even Prentice Wicks, Jefferson Wicks’ grandfather, says as he holds the gem, “Eve’s Apple, my entire cursed fortune. All the sin in the world. All that Eve hungers for, I have trapped it, it shall never again be plucked by evil hands.” Then, he ingests the stone as his final communion, chokes, and dies. He chokes on the truth of sin. Earlier in the storyline Blanc said he wants to “get to a truth that I can swallow without choking.”

Like Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Prentice (the church) tries to keep the world from Eve’s Apple so the church might save the world from sin. But Grace dies when the freedom to fall, the choice to eat the apple, is taken away. Literally, the character named Grace dies.

So what happens to the stone in the end? Where does it end up? Is Eve’s Apple returned to the tree? This is its final resting place:

Let me see if I can weave this together. Eve’s apple is swallowed by a priest to save his evil daughter from sin. It then tempts a good woman into murdering a priest, allowing an innocent man to take the blame. The conspirators frame their crime as a miracle, all the while the mastermind knows it really needs to be returned to the tree. Then a pious priest places the stand-in for original sin inside Christ’s chest and hangs him on a cross.

That is how Eve’s apple is returned to the tree. As Father Jud puts it:

“There’s no hiding from that (guilt), there’s no solving it, God didn’t hide me or fix me, he loves me when I am guilty. That’s what I should be doing for these people, not this whodunit game.”

A whodunit game all about finding the guilty. Standing in front of a motley crew and pointing the finger at the perpetrator.

The symbolism of Eve’s apple being born upon the tree by Christ on the cross is the gospel: Christ is the only one who can swallow Eve’s Apple without choking. Christ is the only one who can restore fallen mankind. The truth all people can swallow, if they choose to, is Christ has swallowed the apple in our place.

The gospel is buried in the layers of this film. Which may have been intentional, or it may have been a happy accident of having to invent someplace for the stone to end up. Personally, I imagine Jesus isn’t done with Rian Johnson yet.

But I come back around to the question, who is the dead man in need of waking up?

I think it is Blanc.

Blanc’s skill is the same skill as Wicks, finding guilt and explaining how the guilty deserves condemnation and justice. In fact, as Blanc begins his final “checkmate” he stands in Wicks’ pulpit and screams for silence as Wicks might have. Blanc is famous for his way of finding out the sins of the guilty and dragging them into the cold hard light of reason to face justice. Just as Wicks used his pulpit to condemn the sins of newcomers to his church.

Yet Blanc, unlike Wicks, is a strange sort of detective in the whodunit genre. He senses innocence through leaps of intuitive empathy, not logic. He then tells a story, the story which brings together all the disparate details to find the truth. In the end Blanc has a “Road to Damascus moment” when he realizes his condemnation merely accuses — it leaves no room for grace. Blanc recognizes if he halts his prosecution, the love of Jud can offer a way for the guilty to come forward and confess. For the guilty to be restored. In that moment, a truth is revealed to Blanc, a truth which he can swallow and indeed he does swallow at great personal expense.

Not only does Blanc desist from his closing argument, he allows his audience to believe he failed to deduce the culprit. A moment which is recorded and shared publicly. He sacrifices his checkmate moment, tarnishing his reputation for the world to see, so Martha might have the chance to confess of her own free will.

Martha takes this chance offered to her by Blanc. As Martha confesses her sins her grip loosens and Eve’s Apple falls from her hand. She even realizes her guilt in shaming Grace by hiding Eve’s Apple from her. What is the truth Blanc finds? Guilt can be overcome with healing love, a love which does not deny guilt.

The truth is all are guilty. Only Christ can bear guilt back to the tree. The tree of the cross. That is the realm of belief Blanc steps into. And that is the realm of belief where grace leads Martha to let go of her hate and forgive. Blanc is the one who needs to wake up and remove the choking fruit from his mouth in order to swallow the only truth which won’t kill him.

The altar of this movie is hidden, but it is undeniably present. In fact, I would argue it’s more than an altar to an unknown god, it is an altar on which Christ prominently stands as the only true offering. Making this a true story.

When a movie subverts the audience’s expectations, it is being Postmodern (think of that the amazing film No Country for Old Men). When a movie is trying to promote moral or philosophical relativism, it is being Postmodernist (think of Forrest Gump).

Because Postmodern art shares a similar name with the philosophical movement Postmodernism, many have written off any value to be found in Postmodern art. This is a shame because many of the developments in the arts discovered through Postmodern artists are amazing. The Postmodern focus on the audience’s perception reveals a number of false frames that served only to limit how and with what art can be made. Framing is a great term to summarize the focus the Postmodern artist’s focus.

Literal framing? Sometimes.

Love is in the Bin, 2018
by Banksy

Banksy manufactured a frame with hidden roller and razors built into it, which then activated when his artwork was sold at auction. The mechanism failed partway through only shredding part of the image. Banksy went to great lengths trying to subvert the auction and upend the monetary value of his artwork. But like Duchamp, he failed. The work was considered even more valuable after the partial destruction.

More commonly, the Postmodern artist is not creating elaborate razor filled frames, rather, is challenging all manner of framing devices. Framing devices are anything which contextualizes how a work of art is viewed. Here are some examples: the wall text at the beginning of an exhibition, the architecture of the gallery, the manner in which the gallery attendants respond to the audience, the way a painting is hung on the wall (imagine a painting hung 30 feet up on a tall wall), or any other “frame.”

Most often the Postmodern artist starts with a question about some sort of framing implementation. A question such as:

What if the standard dimensions of the frame are altered?

What if there is no frame?

What if the walls aren’t white?

What if the work is outside?

What if the work is difficult to see?

What if the work is made of materials we don’t associate with art?

What if the work is temporary?

What is the work isn’t a physical object?

What if the artist doesn’t touch the work with their own hands?

All of these questions take a preconceived notion about art and reconsider whether that notion is necessary for a work to be considered art. For the specific questions listed above, the notions questioned include: the necessity of a frame and its overall decorative qualities, the neutrality of the museum white walls, the value of sterility in the gallery space verses the living outdoors, the need for an artwork to be clear and distinctive, the aesthetic value of costly materials and minerals, the concrete permanence of great artworks, the objective value of the object nature of an artwork, and the importance of the artist’s touch.

These are the same sort of questions Marcel Duchamp was asking when he made his famous piece — Fountain — with which he was attempting to end art making. However, it was Robert Rauschenberg who started making truly interesting artworks in response to these sort of questions. His artwork was not merely destructive anti-art, but artwork that raised thought-provoking questions and revealed ancient influences in all of art.

Monogram, 1955-59
by Robert Rauschenberg

In the 1950s Rauschenberg started making art with all manner of unusual and unexpected materials. In this “painting” a canvas is laid atop casters, on top of which a stuffed Angora goat stands. The goat is intertwined with a painted tire and the goat’s face is smeared in paint. Rauschenberg called this, and other works of a similar technique, Combines. That is, he was combining sculpture and painting.1

You can imagine Rauschenberg asking the question, “what makes a painting different from a sculpture?” It may seem obvious — three dimensions — but after seeing Van Gogh’s heavy brush strokes you cannot argue that paintings are truly flat.

He is even playing with the term Monogram by using it as the title of this strange piece. A monogram is a sort of logo made using only intertwined letter forms. (Think of the “GE” in General Electric of the “LV” for Louis Vuitton.) There are a couple letters included in this artwork, notably “D” and “A,” which might remind us of the artistic movement Duchamp was part of — the Dada. Rauschenberg did not derive the title of the piece from using the Dada letters though, he derived it from the way the goat and tire were intertwined.

What?

Here is a different view:

What do a goat and a tire have to do with letterforms? Well, this might be a stretch, but it reminds me that all letter forms were originally pictograms. You know how Egyptian hieroglyphics are pictures of actual things? All letters started this way. Take the letter A. It’s an abstracted image of a bull. It doesn’t look much like that now, but here is the chart showing how it started and what it is now:

Okay, so the goat and the wheel could be seen as inspiration for letter forms in ancient days. What does the origin of letterforms have to do with this crazy collage painting which is obviously a sculpture not a painting?

I think this question really helps us understand my frustration with the Avant-garde argument in particular. Modern and Postmodern artists were not looking and moving forward. They actually, most often, were looking and moving backwards. Back to the roots of art.

Rauschenberg asks: When did we start to think of painting and sculpture as different? Why do we want/need to separate the two mediums? When did a monogram become abstract letter forms instead of physical realities?

I think for many the Combines feel like a chaotic deconstruction. Like these Postmoderns are merely tearing down all the institutions and mediums which culture has painstakingly built over hundreds and thousands of years. This is not the case.

Postmodern art is not deconstructive necessarily, rather it is looking back at the evolution of art to see if there were any missed off-ramps. If the camera brings about the death of painting as we know it, might there have been a different path to take?

Here, let me prove it. When the Modern abstract artist Kazimir Malevich painted a black square in place of an icon of Christ, many, including Hans Rookmaaker, argued he was stripping God from art:

Black Suprematic Square (1915)
by Kazimir Malevich

This was considered a “new” attack on God, and was only possible due to the atheistic nihilism of the 20th century.

But wait a minute. What is this?

The Nothingness that was Prior to the Universe, 1617
by Robert Fludd

Nearly 300 years before Malevich, an artist who was endeavoring to make diagrams of the philosophical and theological underpinnings of Christian dogma made this image. Malevich is trying to grasp the paradoxical nature of God’s infinity and the reality of the incarnation of Christ. Fludd is trying to grasp how to depict the only “thing” that existed before anything existed — God. Both artists are asking the same question: How do you make an image of an infinite God who exists outside of space and time?

Malevich was not marching forward. He was looking back. The Postmodern artists often have more in common with the medieval artists than they do with the Modern artists.2

The Postmodern questioning of our preconceived notions can certainly lead to dumb and dangerous denials of truth; but they can also reveal how we have pulled the wool over our own eyes with assertions about art that hobble entire mediums. Painting in the 1800s was a very limited medium because its parameters were so restricted by the academy.

The Postmodern movement has freed up what materials artists can use. Reminding artists all manner of materials can be meaningful as art. This leads to urinals, feces, blood, and other banal materials, but it also leads to Andy Goldsworthy. An artist well known for his work with and in natural settings. He takes leaves and rocks and makes them, well, into art. How? Not by grinding them into pigment. (Actually he does do that with some stones but he doesn’t paint with it. He stains puddles with color.) Most often he merely rearranges what he finds in nature. Like this:

Void Series, ca 2001
by Andy Goldsworthy

Questioning the established standards of art in the 20th century allowed an artist like Goldsworthy to explore mundane primal materials. Thank God for he is an artist who is able to find the glory of God in even dying leaves that are blown away a few minutes after the photo. Like grass thrown into the furnace.

If you have time, I highly recommend this documentary on Goldsworthy. While you watch, remember this form of artmaking was only made possible by Duchamp’s misguided notion that art is meaningless. Thank God for his foolhearty attempt to destroy art. For rather than destroying it, he shook off the shackles.

If the turn of the 19th century was a time of change, the 1970s is when the rate of change increased exponentially. This is why most definitions of Postmodern do not look to characteristics of style or subject in the art, the definitions seek to find a common philosophical framework to understand what makes Postmodern Art, Post-Modern.

Most often the philosophy of Postmodernism is understood to emphasize relativity. Relativism, a philosophic point-of-view, questions the existence of truth and whether humans can even perceive truth in any way. In the day to day this philosophy is seen in statements like, “you do you,” “my truth,” and this:

The Big Lebowski, 1998
by Joel and Ethan Coen

Postmodernists (notice the “ist”) might say something like, “There is no truth.” To which one must always respond, “Is that true?”

But, as I have just demonstrated, Relativism in its extreme is both absurd and, most often, not what anyone actually believes — though they may say these sort of statements. Because this view is logically untenable I want to turn away from the philosophic movement and instead turn towards the notion of relativity in the sciences.

What does relativity refer to in science? Two things: Classic relativity and Special relativity.

To understand classic relativity take a look at this very simple gif:1

What do you see? Hopefully a depiction of the Earth spinning in space. Classic relativity points out that you don’t know, from this point-of-view, if the Earth is spinning or if the camera capturing this image is orbiting the Earth. The word “relative” refers to the fact that the view of the Earth is seen from a position in relationship to the Earth (or relative to the Earth). We would need a view of another object, stars in the background, or a second view letting us see the position of the camera relative to the Earth to know for certain if the Earth is spinning or if the camera is orbiting.

There is only one problem with Classic relativity: it’s too simple. We can thank this guy for the realization:

Einstein pointed out the problem with classical relativity: even if you had a second camera looking at both the first camera and the Earth, what if all of them were moving in the same direction? Say, orbiting the sun. Though the view from one camera seems fixed and ultimate, its view is not in fact fixed and ultimate. No view could be, unless you were able to zoom out all the way and see the entire universe in order to determine every bit of movement of all objects in relationship to all other objects. This is where Special relativity begins.

Don’t worry, I think I am done with the science part of this essay.

I brought this up to point out two things: first, relativity is true. We can only see things in relationship to other things. (This is the classic dilemma of a question like, “Is an elephant large?” The answer depends on what the elephant is being compared to.) Second, Einstein’s understanding of physics upset the entire Modernist presupposition: by splitting and dividing we will get to the bottom of all things and then mankind can build up from there. Einstein’s theories reveal an objective understanding of the universe is not possible for us human beings.2

How does all this scientific theory relate to art? Let me show you, with some art.

What colors do you see in this image?

I think the predominate answer will be yellow.

There are some greens, as well as some muddy yellows, maybe ochres. Hints of blue.

Now look at this image and tell me what the main colors are:

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884
by Georges Seurat

The truth is the first image is a detail of this second image. The first detail is as if you are standing really close to the painting. Like Cameron:

Seurat mastered a technique called Pointillism. He used mostly unmixed colors in little dots and dabs to create an optical effect. When you stand up close to the canvas, it is apparent the green lawn just to the left of the little girl in the middle of the canvas is really made with mostly yellow paint. But, as you move away from the canvas the colors mix in the eye and you are able to perceive them contextually (in relation to all the other things). You see the grass and the other figures and your mind automatically starts color correcting, adjusting to what you believe the color of grass is. (If you aren’t fully convinced by my brief demonstration check out the video in the footnote.3)

My point is this: Einstein discovered we must do our best to understand the position from which we are viewing a thing. We do not have a fixed view from which all truth can be observed objectively. We have a relative view and so our position as a viewer must be taken into account.4 The same is true in art. Modernists believed getting to the bottom of art was the key, but they were assuming their view was neutral (and that there was a bottom to reach). Their relative viewpoint was not taken into consideration. After all, Ad Reinhardt believed he was making the last paintings that could be made. He thought he had reached the bottom. Yet painters keep painting — despite Clement Greenberg’s best efforts.

The artists figured out the viewer is biased by his very biology. Look at the date on this painting! 1884. They were on the road to relativity way before Einstein, they just couldn’t explain it with maths like he could.

This is why I view Postmodern Art as a hyper version of Modern Art. Modern Artists split and divided the subject and mediums of their art. Postmodern Artists split and divide as well, except they shift their attention to the perceptions of the viewer (which includes the artist’s perception).

Remember that silly urinal?

The Fountain, 1917
by Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp was trying to force the audience into realizing art, all art, is subjective and therefore meaningless. He believed beauty standards were meaningless. He believed we might just as well consider a urinal as a fountain. This is Postmodern art and it is Postmodernist art.

It’s Postmodern because it turns our attention toward the perception of the viewer and it’s Postmodernist when it claims there is no such thing as beauty beyond social constructs.

If you define Postmodern art as when the artist is conscious of the viewer’s perspective as a primary part of the artwork — allowing the point-of-view to be manipulated, changed, challenged, and played with — then the developments of art after World War II make much more sense.

Postmodernist art is a whole other beast. Postmodernist art is just as contradictory as the truthfulness of the statement, “there is no truth.” Look at what happened to Duchamp’s urinal. He meant to say the world is meaningless, now the urinal has become full of meaning. It is a symbol of how anything can be art. How did it become this sort of symbol when it was meant to do the opposite?

Because art is just as much about the object as it is about the observer. Duchamp said, look at this meaningless object. The audience responded, “wait a minute, actually, there is meaning here.” It’s not very much meaning, but it was a huge step in freeing art from elitist academic constraints on quality and craft in particular. Some of folks might not like this freedom, but I do.

Why do I value this freedom? Let me show you, rather than tell you:

Whaam!’, 1963
by Roy Lichtenstein

Because Postmodern art attracts our attention towards how we perceive art, other questions begin to bubble up, questions like, “why aren’t comics considered art?” Painter Roy Lichtenstein started using the comic format in large scale paintings, including the dots and printing techniques of off-set printing as a sort of combination of Pointillism with “low art.”

Why do I like this? Because Lichtenstein’s work legitimizes the work of Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, among others. It sloughs off the arrogance of academic art and points out the hidden gems in the realms of comic illustration. Gems often far more noble and deep — despite their cartoonish quality — than even the work of true masters like John Singer Sargent.5

What else does the Postmodern shift bring to light?

Behind the Scenes of Warhol’s Screen Tests, ca. 1964

Andy Warhol used the mass communication medias of advertising and video as his medium. As a whole his work shone a light on the tricks and techniques in the advertising industry by highlighting the effect on individuals. I wish every social media influencer was forced to take a deep dive into Warhol before going viral. His famous quote, “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” is not emphasizing a good thing. It is not empowering, it is diminishing. Warhol knew this — it’s why his works are quite gross. Does the repetition of Marilyn make her more attractive or less?

Marilyn Diptych, 1962
by Andy Warhol

Warhol points us towards the artists instead of the artworks. His work makes me wonder if celebrities would be better off ignored outside of their art.

Speaking of celebrity, Postmodern art also points us toward human activity instead of just the products of human activity:

Rest Energy, 1980
by Marina Abramovic and Ulay

Performance art, including the duo above, turns our attention away from the objects artists make and towards the things artists do. If you recall back to my writings on Pollock you will see this as a natural extension of his “action” painting. The Postmodern turn away from the artwork to look at the viewer, also turns us away from the artwork to look at the artist. Are artists special? Are artists normal? Are the artists alright?

Do not get me wrong. I am not saying all Postmodern art is good or beautiful or a triumph of culture. My argument is much more modest. Most folks, Christians in particular, scoff at Postmodern art because it is incredibly weird and highly intellectual. Art in the 20th century became primarily interested in the conceptual aspect of art. I am simply arguing this is not inherently bad. In fact there is much good to comes from the Postmodern shift towards perception rather than the art object. The shift is inherently limiting though, as Iain McGilchrist points out:

Art is by its nature implicit and ambiguous. It is also embodied: it produces embodied creations which speak to us through the senses, even if their medium is language, and which have effects on us physically as embodied beings in the lived world. The enlightenment is concerned primarily with the intellect, with all that ‘transcends’ (from the enlightenment point of view) the limitations of the contingent and the physical, the incarnate and the unique. Enlightenment art is, therefore, something of an oxymoron. The two art forms that are least vulnerable to explicitness are music and architecture — not because they are congenial to it, but precisely the opposite, because they are so inherently implicit (The one can ask what a poem or painting is ‘about’, The question becomes vapid when applied to music or architecture).

I think the strangeness of Modern and Postmodern art is a result of this:

Turris Babel, 1679
by Athanasius Kircher

When the camera displaced the primary role of visual art — the role of documenting the past and present — it was as if another tower of Babel fell. The artists scattered into a variety of domains. Some became photographers. Some became commercial artists and advertisers. Some became artisans of dying art forms. Others did like so many before them and joined the Modern project of splitting and dividing. They joined the intelligentsia of the time and adopted the same practices which allowed science to grow and flourish.

This opened up new areas of exploration, lush fields for the sheep to graze. Some of these fields were not as hearty as those fields of the past, which were now dominated by lawn mowers and no longer needed the masticating mandibles of sheep to stay trim.

If it weren’t for the Postmodern shift in focus, we would not have fourth-wall breaking t.v. shows like The Office and House of Cards, masterworks of collage and appropriation like Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse, the hilarity of internet memes, or the rise of anti-heroes. Because Postmodern artists acknowledged the relationship between the viewer and the artwork they were able to discover rich new fields. They were able to ask, “who is the audience?”

Which reminds me of my favorite work of Postmodern Art, by John Cage. Yes, that John Cage. (The one who composed 4 minutes and 22 seconds of silence.) But this is one of his other, perhaps stranger, pieces:

His work is not the Modern Art sculpture outside this church. It is the church in a way. This is St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany. Inside is an organ which will be playing a song until 2640 A.D.

Here are its bellows:

and here is the organ:

The piece is titled As Slow As Possible. It was made in response to one of Cage’s instructions to an orchestra, “Play as slow as possible.” An organ, properly maintained can theoretically play forever. Inside this church the song goes on. It is a long droning noise. In fact the song began with a rest which meant there was no sound produced by the organ for the first two years.

One could argue this is not music. Or one could ask, “who is this music for?” More questions bubble after:

Why is it in a church do you think?
Who can actually comprehend a song that lasts for 639 years?
Why 639 years?

The length of time was determined by the timespan from the invention of the organ (ca. 1361) to the conception of Cage’s piece in the year 2000 — 639 years.

What if every organ in existence has actually been part of one single song? A song meant not for us, but for someone else.

To us, mere humans, most of Cage’s work is hardly music. But what if there is someone with a different perspective? This quote from Andrew Klavan’s book The Kingdom of Cain comes to mind:

Eternity is not a long time, it is all time, and it is impossible for mortal man to imagine. In eternity, for instance, you may not be reconnected to your lost loved ones, you may find you never lost them at all. In eternity, you may not find that God makes good out of evil, you may find that it was always good, you simply did not see it complete.

Because of this, the knowledge of good and evil is a curse to man, not a gift, because he sees it in time where it makes no sense. In his ignorance, all he knows is the injustice of the moment.

Maybe art is not primarily for us. Maybe we are just a beneficiary, servants peaking through the curtain for a moment, while the true audience looks on from a much greater vantage point. One where all the dots become a much much grander picture than we can ever imagine.

But there I go, sounding a bit like a Postmodern mixed with religious sensibility.

I am certain I’m not in knots over the contradictions of United States history.

The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1914
by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe

Every human idealizes the past in one way or another. It’s nostalgia. Look at the date of this painting. Of course it isn’t accurate, Brownscombe wasn’t there to witness the event. Is this a denial of the atrocities of the past? Is it someone hoping for the end of “The Great War” as it was known as then? I don’t know. But, there are plenty of places where you can hear the arguments for and against the merits of this civic day.

These difficulties do not twist me around. I am in knots because I read this poem yesterday:

Thankfulness
By Adelaide Anne Procter

My God, I thank Thee who hast made 
       The Earth so bright;
So full of splendor and of joy, 
       Beauty and light;
So many glorious things are here,
       Noble and right!

I thank Thee, too, that Thou hast made
       Joy to abound;
So many gentle thoughts and deeds
       Circling us round,
That in the darkest spot of Earth
       Some love is found.

I thank Thee more that all our joy
       Is touched with pain;
That shadows fall on brightest hours;
       That thorns remain;
So that Earth’s bliss may be our guide,
       And not our chain.

I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou hast kept
       The best in store;
We have enough, yet not too much 
       To long for more:
A yearning for a deeper peace,
       Not known before.

I thank Thee, Lord, that here our souls,
       Though amply blest,
Can never find, although they seek,
       A perfect rest,—
Nor ever shall, until they lean 
       On Jesus’ breast!

Can I recite this poem with an earnest heart? Especially the lines: “I thank Thee more that all our joy / Is touched with pain;”

It’s hard for me to acknowledge how pain leads me to being more thankful. I think this is why so much American art about Thanksgiving strikes me as hollow. I wasn’t thankful for being able to walk until I had back surgery and had to use a cane for several months. Now I am thankful everyday when I get out of bed and my legs aren’t burning.

We need the opposites, joy and pain, to know the one by the other.

Oddly enough, Norman Rockwell —famous for his nostalgic work — starts to hint at the duality of joy and pain here:

Home for Thanksgiving, 1945
by Norman Rockwell

The painting is the epitome of nostalgia: perfect pumpkin, cranberries in a pot, joy in peeling potatoes (often a punishment in military settings), a bushel of apples, a boyish posture, a loving motherly look, wonderful picnic patterns, a bounty from the harvest, cozy chairs. Americana. A bit trite, but again, look at the date. He could have chosen any of the armed services for this painting and yet Rockwell chose the Air Force. Why?

The atom bombs had been dropped a few months before Thanksgiving of 1945. Look at his posture. At first it seems childish. What man would sit in a chair like that? The mother’s gaze sees her little soldier boy.

I think there is another layer, a painful layer. In reading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller I recall that the bombsight, the device used to aim the dropping of bombs, required the airman to be hunched over looking down at the nose of the plane. Like this but in much tighter quarters:

Still from the Declassified “The Norden Bombsight” Training Film, 1943
USAAF Training Film

The nose of the bomber was so tight the training film had to be recorded on a stage.

I think Rockwell is acknowledging the pain that was necessary, or at least seemed necessary at the time, in order for that year’s Thanksgiving to arrive. The nostalgia is possible because of the suffering the military men of the 40s went through. Yet when we are nostalgic we forget the pain in the past remembering only the pleasure. We turn the posture of a death dealing bomber plane into a comically large man sitting in a boy’s chair. Why are we so quick to forget the pains?

Adelaide Procter’s poem explains why we are nostalgic: we “seek, / a perfect rest.”

Yet a rest, a deep and true rest, can only be had by one who is tired. I am not justifying any war, but rather pointing out, we are most thankful the year after a war has ended.

Procter has another strange reminder in the middle of a poem about thankfulness:

“…Earth’s bliss may be our guide, / And not our chain.”

A nostalgic posture is a pose that chains one to an idealized past. I think this is why my favorite thanksgiving painting is similar to my favorite still-life paintings. A good still-life is not just bountiful fruits and flowers, it always has a memento mori — a reminder of death.

The Thankful Poor, 1894
by Henry Ossawa Tanner

Great art always has a mix of joy and pain, or beauty and ugliness. It does not sweep one under the rug but holds both in tension with each other.

If you found Procter’s poem helpful or meaningful I highly recommend Word Made Fresh by . The book would make a great Christmas present for anyone who wants to understand poetry more and even begin to write their own. But, more importantly, Van Engen points out: the largest and longest book of the Bible is a book of poetry (Psalms). Most of the prophets and even the first few chapters of Genesis are poems. The Lord’s Prayer is a poem. If you want to understand the Bible more deeply, I think you should have some understanding of poetry as a medium. Word Made Fresh is a great resource, and so is Van Engen’s podcast.

I hope your Thanksgiving awakens a yearning for that perfect rest, which cannot be found here on Earth.

In fact, here is a TLDR to reiterate my point. To begin discussing Postmodern Art, we must first ask: “What is it?”

Well… Post means after. It is simply art coming after Modern Art. If you are a logician you can see the quagmire. The title Postmodern does not help to define the movement because it is apophatic. Apophatic is a fancy word for negative definitions. Postmodern does not tell me what this type of art is, it tells me what it is not.

Another way of titling it would be: Not Modern Art but the Stuff that Comes After. (NMASCA — catchy, isn’t it?)

I had to talk about Modern Art first because Postmodern Art uses it as the foundational reference point. Postmodern Art begins when Modern Art ends. When did Modern Art end then?

The 1960s.

Five Feet of Colorful Tools, 1962
by Jim Dine

What a bunch of tools.

By the 1960s Clement Greenberg’s notions of what defined Modern Art had won the day (he is the guy who wrote about the “Newer Laocoön” I talked about in the first post). He wrote a new essay titled “Modernist Painting.” Note the “ist.” Greenberg, some 20 years after his “Newer Laocoön” essay, defines Modernist painting as such:

The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic, and while he withdrew much from its old jurisdiction, logic was left all the more secure in what there remained to it.

This is a tighter and more definitive definition of what I previously characterized as “purity.” Greenberg was more precise in his later essay than he was in the 40s. Let me break it down:

The essence of Modernism lies… in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself…

Modernism is when a discipline, say painting, is used to look critically at the discipline itself. So, when painting criticizes the act of painting. This is why it makes sense to start Modern Art with this painting:

Luncheon on the Grass, 1863
by Edouard Manet

Manet is using painting to point out the conventions of painting.

Greenberg continues:

…not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.

Now this is a fun dodge. This is how Greenberg side steps Duchamp. (I won’t show the urinal again, I think you remember it.) The Fountain was meant to subvert art, not solidify an art form in the place where it is uniquely capable of being meaningful. Which would be “its area of competence.”

In short, Modernist Art uses the medium to critically engage the medium in order to drive the medium to its unique place as an art form. (I wonder why the public lost interest in “Fine Art” by the end of Modern Art?)

There are tons and tons of essays online talking about the ramifications of Greenberg’s definition. Rather than try to explain it more let me show you where it leads:

Abstract Painting no. 4, 1961
by Ad Reinhardt

You might have to adjust your screen brightness to get the full effect of this piece. It is a black painting. It has some variation, but if you are having trouble seeing much beyond a black square, you are seeing it similarly as to how you would see it in person.

Further on in the essay quoted above, Greenberg champions the idea of flatness. In the 40s Greenberg was a fan of Pollock but by the 60s Pollock was dead. Also, there was a core problem with Pollock’s “Action Painting.” The act of flinging paint onto canvas gave it quite a bit of dimension. The paint literally piles up. The mess of paint piles refers back to the painter even though the brushstroke has disappeared. Pollock’s paintings are not about painting. They are about the painter dancing above the canvas. His dance partners? A mixture of gravity and paint.

Reinhardt sees Greenbergs dissatisfaction and takes a different tack. Reinhardt came to be defined as a Post-Painterly Abstract painter.1 The “painterly” abstract artists were folks like Pollock. They were painterly because the paint oozed like mayonnaise. There was actual texture in their paint. The paintings weren’t what Greenberg wanted, they weren’t flat.

What makes Reinhardt’s black painting align with Greenberg’s 1960 definition?2

Here is Reinhardt talking about all of the choices to make what appears to be a black painting with a tiny hint of a grid inside of it:

A square (neutral, shapeless) canvas, five feet wide, five feet high, as high as a man, as wide as man’s outstretched arms (not large, not small, sizeless), trisected (no composition), one horizontal form negating one vertical form (formless, no top, no bottom, directionless) three (more or less) dark (lightless) non-contrasting (colorless) colors, brushwork brushed out to remove brushwork a matte, flat, freehand painted surface (glossless, textureless, non-linear, no hard edge, no soft edge) which does not reflect its surroundings – a pure, abstract non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting – an object that is self conscious (no unconsciousness) idea, transcendent, aware of nothing but Art (absolutely no anti-art).

Did you get all that? Didn’t you see it in the painting?

Reinhardt was taking Greenberg at his word. Reinhardt said these are “the last paintings anyone can paint.” If Greenberg was right about Modernist Art, then this was the end of the line. Reinhardt got rid of every aspect of a painting which is not intrinsic to the medium itself. He made a painting which only engages in the trench of its medium. Purely paint. Like Greenberg wanted.

This is the end of Modern Art:

The Black Paintings at David Zwirner Gallery, 2013

Well, Modernist Art. Why do I keep going back and forth between the “ist” and the sans ist? I think Modernist Art is different than Modern Art. Modernist Art is what Greenberg says it is. Which is why he has to add that anti-art is not Modernist. This is how Greenberg skirts around the issue of Duchamp and all the weird art he mostly ignores. The ist on the end of Modernist refers to a philosophy. Duchamp did not align with the Modernist philosophy.

When I use the term Modern Art I am referring to the practice of splitting and dividing which Marshall McLuhan described, not a philosophical framework which artists are pursuing. By his own measures Greenberg is describing a small subset of artists within the Modern Art movement who focused on a very philosophical goal. A goal Reinhardt completes.

And Greenberg didn’t like it. I don’t like it either. It’s boring. It’s even more boring than some of the boring Mondrian paintings. Reinhardt’s statement reads like it was written for/by a robot.

It is also wrong. As in, the statement is false. Look back at it.

Sizeless? What does he even mean? Of course it has a size. Relationless? What? Black, as a color, has plenty of relationships. Changeless? No. All physical things change until the universe reaches a complete stasis at absolute zero. Heck, if you brought a flame close to those paintings they would change real fast.

This artwork is trying to be as self-referential as possible in order to be pure of any other art form’s baggage. But where did you get the canvas Reinhardt? Where did the paint come from? What about the black paintings other artists had made before (no, he wasn’t the first)? What about the religious connotations of a cross? What about the fact that Reinhardt’s paintings are awfully similar to these paintings:

The Rothko Chapel, 1964-71
by Mark Rothko

In becoming as “pure” as possible Reinhardt’s paintings revealed, intentionally or not, “purity” of medium is an illusion. You cannot separate out the material of paint as a medium in a vacuum. There is always some sort of relationship.

Reinhardt’s paintings confront Greenberg’s ideas, which ends the notion of purity in one of two ways: Either, he purified painting — in which case those were the last paintings to be made — or, there is no such way to purify painting down to its base level. There were a lot of reasons why Greenberg was the most popular voice in the 20th century, but after the 60s this was no longer the case.3 I think this was because the Minimalist movement, which Reinhardt is part of, contradicted Greenberg even while it tried to conform to Greenberg’s notions.

Reinhardt was the end of Modernist Art, but he was not the end of Modern Art.

The Modern era is the era of scientific progress where the primary M.O. was to split and divide as one searches for the building blocks of the universe. The presupposition of this search is: at the bottom of all things there must be a base unit — originally theorized to be the atom. But, we know now, the atom is made of smaller parts. And those parts of made up of smaller parts. And things don’t become simpler and more building-block-esque as you get smaller. They get weirder.

They become quantum. And relative. Which is where art goes as well. Like all of culture we are sheep flocking to new fields. Einstein opened up a huge landscape with his theory of relativity which was the technological gate opening the pastures up which lead to the philosophy of Post-modernism.

Postmodern Art didn’t start in the 1960s, or after “Modernist” art ended. It started when Modern Artists began making anti-art.

On that note, I thought I would get to Einstein today but he will have to wait until next week. It is really important to emphasize this main point: Reinhardt’s work tried to find the building blocks of painting. In reaching the “bottom” or the “atoms” of a painting we find a flurry of relationships we did not expect. Just like Einstein found within the atom and outer space.

The second-most-common grand narrative is the Avant-garde narrative — I should note that these are not the only grand narratives folks have proposed over the years, they are simply the two most popular I have encountered in all my schooling.

What is Avant-garde art? It’s this:

The Fountain, 1917
by Marcel Duchamp

And this:

Marilyn, 1967
by Andy Warhol

But also this:

Abstract Painting, 1906-65
by Ad Reinhardt

Once again, we have a broad, catch-all term trying to cover all of Modern Art. From urinals, to advertising aesthetics, and even minimalist abstraction.1

So, what does Avant-garde mean? Well, it’s actually a whom, and they are these guys:

Scotland Forever, 1881
by Lady Elizabeth Butler

Avant-garde is a French term for the advance guard or the vanguard. They are the military troops who make the forward push in battle.2 They are not the defenders, they are the attackers. They push the ball forward.

You might think it’s odd for artworks or artists to be referred to in military terms. I think so too. Why would anyone think of artists as being akin to soldiers, especially soldiers on the front line?

Matei Călinescu tried to track down when people started using “Avant-garde” to refer to non-military things. His conclusion is that since approximately the 1500s it has been used for many things, all of which related to societal progress. The term’s usage as a description for art seems to have begun, or at least been popularized, by a French political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon. In his book De l’organisation sociale (1825) Saint-Simon writes:

…in this great undertaking the artists, the men of imagination will open the march: they will take the Golden Age from the past and offer it as a gift for the future generations; they will make society pursue passionately the rise of its well-being, and they will do this by presenting the picture of new prosperity, by making each member of society aware that everyone will soon have a share in the enjoyments which up to now have been the privilege of an extremely small class; they will sing the blessings of civilization, and for the attainment of their goal they will use all the means of the arts, eloquence, poetry, painting, music; in a word, they will develop the poetic aspect of the new system.

In short, Saint-Simon is saying artists will first need to imagine a better future. Then, make art based on this new imagining so everyone’s imagination will be expanded. A sort of Field of Dreams approach to art making.3

This is a very different approach to art making than any guiding philosophy in the past. Before this no artists were not told to imagine a better world and make pictures of it — they were told to make pictures of the king, or to serve their religion, or make monuments to past greatness. Often artists weren’t imagining the future at all, they were imagining how great things were in the past.

Saint-Simon calls artists to become prophets of a better future. Avant-garde art is any work of art that pushes society forward. Art becomes a force for progress. Artists become soldiers in a cultural battle for a postulated utopia.

This is how art become political.

It’s how we arrived here:

The Fountain, 1917
by Marcel Duchamp

How in the world could a urinal set sideways on a pedestal further society towards a future when everyone “will soon have a share in the enjoyments which up to now have been the privilege of an extremely small class”?

The goals of past artists before Duchamp were very different. If we compare the urinal to another work of art, it will help us reveal what direction Duchamp was charging towards with his saber drawn in the form of a urinal with a haphazard signature.

Take this painting for example:

Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, 1602
by Juan Sánchez Cotán

If you read the wikipedia article for this painting, or do a little art historical research, you will find much humbler goals than ushering in the Golden Age!

Sánchez Cotán seems to be simply demonstrating his tremendous skills, brag about the fact that he is wealthy enough to let food go to waste, and perhaps engage in the sort of allegorical tropes of still life painting (memento mori, like rotting fruit, we all die).

I’m not saying this painting did not change society. It might have. But that was not the goal. Even the great masterpieces of the Renaissance, which did change society, were not made to change society. The difference in intention is important (not for understanding the art, but for understanding why the Avant-garde is a failure).

As soon as you create a painting, or any other art object, with a goal in mind you are actually designing. Which means you are trying to propagate a particular view or effect some change. Which means your artwork, which is to a degree propaganda, can either succeed or fail. Every artist does a little bit of designing in every work of art they make. Even Cotán.

Cotán’s painting could have failed to show off his skills if he was unskilled. Or it can fail to brag about wealth since all of society has super markets and access to fresh fruit for cheap. It can fail to communicate its allegorical meaning once society has forgotten shared visual symbolism. But it does not fail as an artwork. As an object that people find more meaningful than the sum of its material and subject matter. There is something more than just the design goals of the artist, which is why we keep looking at it. (That more, is what makes it art. In the future I will write about what art is.)

So what was Duchamp’s goal with The Fountain? Was it more than a designed object of Avant-garde propaganda? Was it an artwork?

Regarding the urinal Duchamp said in a 1968 BBC interview:

in that case my idea was to find, and remember not even decide, but to [find in] truth an object that wouldn’t attract me either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it.

You can watch the interview here. It is strange. He stumbles all over himself trying to wrestle with what his work means. We are now some 51 years later, but I think I know why. His design for the urinal failed.

The interviewer went on to ask: if his work was meant to be anti art,4 wasn’t it ironic that it fueled a resurgence of art? To which he responds:

“I [contributed to the furthering of art] in spite of myself.”

His stated goal was to prove art is unnecessary. Anything could be deemed beautiful if you look at it long enough. Duchamp was a nihilist. His artwork was not “art” in his mind. It was a piece of philosophical propaganda he used in an attempt to prove nihilism was the truth of reality; nothing is actually meaningful at all. He was trying to prove that we are fooling ourselves when we look at works of art as meaningful.

The urinal “attacks” the aesthetic standards of the day (1917). It’s goal was to move society forward. To leave behind the judgements of beauty or ugliness and move into an age without those sorts of arbitrary and meaningless assessments.

But even in ‘68 Duchamp acknowledged it didn’t work. The urinal had in fact become full of meaning. Like other urinals are filled with… well, you know, urine. It had become an artwork which was more meaningful than a simple attack on aesthetic standards of the day. It became a symbol of how absurdity isn’t pure chaos, it can be interesting.

Many artists, Duchamp included, tried to be Avant-garde. When I was in grad school one of my peers was specifically trying to invent a new way of painting for the sake of being new. He did not care at all about the subject matter or the compositional dynamism of his paintings, he simply wanted to invent a new way of applying paint to a canvas surface. So yes, Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary artists were and are actively trying to be Avant-garde. Remember my post on Artivism?

Joseph Beuys took this to an extreme. Beuys has a long backstory, but suffice to say, he flew for the Luftewaffe in WWII and was shot down. After the war he became an artist and certainly did Avant-garde things — such as cover his head in gold leaf and honey then sit in a museum explaining the works of art to a dead rabbit.

How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965
by Joseph Beuys

Beuys wrote:

Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.

But wait a minute Greg, aren’t you just supplying more and more evidence that Avant-garde is correct? Yes. But no. Correlation does not causation make.

Look back and what Saint-Simon said, “by making each member of society aware that everyone will soon have a share in the enjoyments which up to now have been the privilege of an extremely small class.” The goal Saint-Simon set up was achieved (largely, but not perfectly of course). The average prosperity of the lower and middle class in the 20th century in the developed world rose to be greater than nobility in the medieval ages. There is less death, more convenience, more access and upward mobility, etc. Look to the hockey stick graph.

I am not denying that this happened. But art didn’t accomplish it. Did your parents tell you about how their imagination was expanded by Beuys’ talking to a dead hare? No. Did they stop looking at and buying art because a urinal was put on a pedestal in 1917? No. No one did. Art historians filled pages with how meaningful and how great of an artwork that piece is in spite of it’s “maker’s” intentions.

Avant-garde art, in 1917 or 1965 or 2012, does not change society. Why? Because understanding Modern Art as an Avant-garde societal force requires a couple of premises I think are unstable at best. The first problematic premise is the movement of the advance guard is forward.

Looking back on the 20th century I am not convinced we should say society or aesthetics “progressed.” I think it is more accurate to say society and aesthetics “changed.” After all, who is to say which way is forward? Look back at my previous post where I placed images of Manet, Monet, Picasso, Mondrian, and Pollock. Would you argue that is progress? Only from a certain point of view.5 Maybe artists are some kind of societal evolutionary force; but how do we know they are the vanguard? Maybe they are actually moving us backward, or sideways, or underground, or up a tree.

Societal movement in any direction, let alone one that is seen as progress, can only be judged from the outside. Those within the society would not have the perspective to see which way was forward. This is why military forces are directed by generals who stand outside the field of engagement. None, neither artists or critics, are outside the field of engagement. No one is outside of society and culture.6

Which leads to the next premise and the problem of using a militaristic metaphor for the arts: art is culture making.

It isn’t. Art does not make culture. It reveals culture. (I will write more on this point in my next Depths post.)

Saint-Simon’s claim is: by presenting images of a utopia, men’s imaginations would be opened up and they would change their culture. Just think about this, all through the post war era we were shown ideas of the future: Star Trek, The Jetsons, anything sci-fi. Yet, the future has not become anything like those images!

We can look back at the 20th century and see the imaginings of a better future were not achieved. The best we can say is: if the premise of “art as culture making” is true, then art inspired some of the worst atrocities in human history. But, I don’t think this is the case. Art may have inspired a few imaginations but it was not responsible for the large scale shifts in the 20th century.

The militaristic metaphor also reveals this. If artists are the vanguard they are not the generals who are the actual directing force. The social theorists who are defining what progress is are the directing force. Within the Avant-garde framework is the subtle notion that artists must be subservient to a greater directing force of social planners. I think history shows that social progress happened in spite of all the bad ideas that were being propagated by art because of other means.

The Avant-garde theory, which believed since art had no transcendent aura, and mass production of images was possible, then art should be used to make the world a better place. Well, neither fascism on the right nor communism on the left delivered the promise of a better world — and both movements masterfully employed the arts7. Look around, if the premises of the argument are correct, we either have really bad artists or utopia is a lot crappier than we were led to believe it would be.

I would downgrade the Avant-garde theory to a hypothesis. Saint-Simon should have said something like, “Maybe artists can imagine a better future, then paint it. Maybe that will convince us to be better!” Then, we would see as clear as day that he was wrong. It is an overreaching claim to say art is responsible for any of the cultural shifts in the 20th century, let alone any “progress.” I would ask those who think it is a good way of explaining Modern Art to show me more evidence.

While I don’t ascribe to the notion of the Avant-garde, it is helpful in a way. It reveals how politics and art became intertwined and how many artists felt their work was a righteous vocation. But, as in any field where ideology becomes mixed in, the ideology then defines the value of the art. The Avant-garde theorists used their own secular Marxists ideals as the benchmark. As such, we can judge (based on those marks) and conclusively say: they were wrong. The Avant-garde belief art was best used for social change is also why art schools and art departments are propagandist training grounds and brainwashing centers.8 They have fallen for the ploy that their work can serve to make the world a better place. Which, as I said about the Renaissance art, some artwork does. But I can’t think of a single piece of art which has made the world a better place by design. Great art is better understood as being discovered and changes the world as a secondary effect. But that is another subject entirely.

With the preamble finished, why not enjoy a plum brandy and a cig:

Plum Brandy, 1877
by Edouard Manet

Did you know that you just looked at a piece of Modern Art?

Well, if I am honest, it is arguable if the paintings of Ed Manet are Modern Art. But, regardless of academic quibbles, most people would not think of that as Modern Art. When they hear the words “Modern Art” they think of something more like this:

Number 18, 1950
by Jackson Pollock

The term “Modern Art,” is confusing. We tend to think the word modern refers to the modern era (which most people assume we are living in2), which then makes us think that Modern Art is modern art (notice the lowercase “m”).

Modern Art is actually a term to delineate art made during the Modernist period. Which is a philosophical movement. One that started sometime around the middle of the 1800s and ended sometime around the 1970s or 80s. Please notice that these are broad timeframes. Academics across disciplines argue about exactly when Modernism began and when it ended.3

So, how can Manet and Pollock both fall under the same type of art?

Because the artwork is defined less by what it looks like or when it was made, and more by what kind of philosophical underpinning is necessary in order to make/appreciate this kind of art.

There are two main approaches art critics have tried to define the philosophical underpinning of Modern Art:

1. A New Laocoön - I will spend the rest of this post on this subject.

2. Avant-garde - I will spend next week’s post discussing that.

I don’t think that these ways of explaining Modern Art are satisfactory, but most everyone else does. I’m going to summarize these views of Modern Art in order to show how they fall short. This is important because I will later argue that Postmodern Art is actually more like Hyper Modern Art. There is a deep connection between the two that will help us learn to appreciate the strengths of art in the 20th century but also recognize its shortcomings.

Onwards toward a new Laocoön!

Well, what is that?

This is Laocoön and his sons:

I pronounce it Lay-Oh-Khan. It was made around 27 A.D. by an unknown Greek, according to Pliny the Elder.4 Pliny hailed this work of art as the greatest Greek work of art. I mean, you can see why can’t you?

It most likely took three sculptors years to carve this from a single block of marble. The knowledge of the human form would have to be extensive. Just look at the toes as you scroll down. Even the toes show agony and no two feet are alike. Look at the folds of cloth. Remember, that cloth is stone. The drama and flow of forms is magnificent.

What does this ancient statue have to do with Modern Art?

In the 1940s an art critic named Clement Greenberg looked back at art over the course of the first half of the 20th century and tried to come up with an answer to why art was changing so dramatically. His answer was an essay titled Towards a Newer Laocoön. The crux of his argument is that Modern Art had been progressing away from the notions of medieval and renaissance art towards a newer idea of the ideal work of art; that is, towards a newer Laocoön.

How can a newer Laocoön be achieved? Through the purity of an art form.

I know, I know, this is getting deep in the weeds. Here, enjoy this dapper gentleman:

Abraham Lincoln, 1865
by George Peter Alexander Healy

For those of us who like skill, who like ‘Merica, who like drama — this is a painting! Let me ask you, what does this painting mean to you?

Most of the answers will come in the form of thinking about the life and death of Abraham Lincoln. Very few people will look at this painting and talk specifically about the paint and how it is handled and moved. The majority of people who might mention the paint will probably point out how the paint creates a sort of glow around Lincoln’s face. This might mean his ideas and thoughts are illuminated by his sense of justice and freedom.

Greenberg would argue that this kind of explanation as an impure explanation.5 Why? Because you aren’t talking about the paint you are talking about the man and his life. Which means you aren’t really talking about the painting. The painting is serving the story of Lincoln’s biography. Which means the painting is secondary to the story. You jump off from the painting to your thoughts on Lincoln himself.

Greenberg wants to know, can a painting be the primary focus?

What would that look like?

Classical music. Here listen to Bach’s Cello Suite as played by Pablo Casals:

Let me ask the same question as I asked about the painting of Lincoln. What does this song mean to you?

Whatever your answer, it will invariably be about either the way this song makes you feel or your understanding of the musical composition. Either way, you will be talking about the effect of the music or the structure of the music. You are not directed towards ideas of Lincoln and stories of virtue and nobility. You will be talking about the “pure” music.

This is what Greenberg argues all Modern Artists are actually seeking. A way to find the essence of what makes an artform an artform in and of itself. A way for painting to be experienced primarily as painting, not a depiction of an event. Or for sculpture to be about the material and shapes the sculpture takes, not the skill of how well it reproduces a human form in a non-human material.

Notice that when Greenberg wrote in 1940 he did not say that Modern Art had achieved a new Laocoön, rather that Modern Art was moving towards newer and newer Laocoöns. Which means we can track the movement of Modern Art from art that serves narratives towards art that becomes just about the medium.

This narrative does a very good job of explaining how we got from Manet painting like this:
Luncheon on the Grass, 1863
by Edouard Manet

To Monet:
Rouen Cathedral, the Facade in Sunlight, 1894

To Picasso:
The Young Ladies of Avignon, 1907

To Mondrian:
Composition No. 3, 1929

And finally to the Pollock we all know and love (or love to hate):
Cathedral, 1947

Greenberg views Modern Art as the path artists took towards painting as purely an experience of paint. His idea of what the “Newer Laocoön” should be is Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings.

After all, consider the original Laocoön — the crazy detailed marble one. For most people it means something along these lines:

The story goes, Laocoön and his sons were about to warn the Trojans to fear Greeks bearing gifts — namely a big wooden horse filled with blood thirsty Greeks. Athena sends a sea serpent to kill Laocoön and his sons before he can relay his prophetic words. What an image of the pre-Christian era. Prophets being strangled when they actually have a salvific message. What better way is there to summarize all of history and the slow progress of nation after nation killing its prophets? It is a meditation on the beauty of the tragedy of prophets of old. Their wisdom is only ever recognized in hindsight.

Compare that to a Greenbergian understanding of a Pollock drip painting:

In the past all paintings were made by artists pushing around paint with brushes and palette knives — not unlike spreading mayonnaise on a linen shirt. The artist shapes the paint into the forms that serve his purpose, most often depicting a story, communicating some sort of message about life. But the Modern Era is a new era. God is dead, as Nietzsche said, so there are no prophets for us to strangle. We need artists who are not trying to portray some message through their art. We need pure experiences of the mediums. Mediums like painting. What do we find in the paintings of Pollock?

In Pollock’s paintings there was rarely even a single brush stroke. The canvas was laid on the ground and he flung paint from above:

Pollock let the paint do what paint does when it is flung into the air and surrendered to the action of gravity. His canvas merely caught what paint does on its own. Pollock’s control of the paint was secondary — it was literally a step removed from the canvas unlike the painters before him.

Another art critic, Harold Rosenberg, coined the term “action painting.” As in, the Pollock painting is the documentation of an action rather than any sort of depiction of an action. The photo above depicts the action of Pollock painting. The painting itself, it is the outcome of the action of Pollock painting.

Greenberg loved this. It fit his narrative of Modern Art. Painting was finally doing what only paint can do. Just like the notes played by Casals earlier do what only music can do. For Greenberg, this was the main narrative that all Modern Artists were seeking, whether they knew it or not.

But he was wrong. How so?

First, I have to finagle the timeline of images I presented above to make it look at all like a linear movement. Second, Pollock himself grew tired of Greenberg’s ideas.

Pollock famously said, “I am nature.” At first pass this sounds egocentric. Almost akin to the words that emit from the burning bush to Moses, “I Am.” One could see this as an atheistic way of claiming that the Modern Artist is akin to God. However, this is not what Pollock meant.

He meant that just like how the wind blows waves, the waves rearrange sand, the drops of rain mark the cement, the gales carry pollen, the stars slingshot around each other — his paint fell on the canvas. He was just as much a part of nature as wind and rain so he surrendered his paint to nature.

This is not purity of paint. It is not a depiction of nature. It is man collaborating with nature, then putting it on display. What is the product? Something akin to the stars in the sky. Pollock painted in the same way it seems God spun galaxies, which then flung stars and planets into orbit, casting comets like paint globules. Chaotic forms come together with arms arching outward. Colors mix and the ground of the canvas dances between foreground and background. Through all that chaos, either of paint or twinkling sky, there is a rhythm. Constellations can be imagined. Connections can be made. Here is a painting that you can be gaze at like the night sky, instead of “reading” it like a book telling you a story:

Autumn Rhythm (No. 30), 1950
by Jackson Pollock

Pollock’s work, regardless of whether you are a fan of it or not, is not simply about experiencing paint. It is about experiencing chaos and finding an underlying resonant structure. Even when all the orderly techniques of the painter are stripped away, even when all imagery is stripped away, even when all moral message is stripped away, one can still wonder at the layers and layers of line and drip. If you find a Pollock out in the wild, stand close enough to it so that it fills your vision. Don’t look at it. Look into it. Imagine how a man might imitate those first moments after the words sung through space, “Let there be light.”

There certainly were some artists, even Pollock for a time, who were trying to achieve Greenberg’s sense of purity. He was right in some ways. Wrong in others. His narrative partially explains the weird methods Modern Artists used to make art. But it is not the grand arching narrative of Modern Art. It is a sub-theme.

Next week I will dive into the other narrative which tried to encapsulate all of Modern Art: Avant-garde.

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If you are a free subscriber please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I publish one paid post per month (I call them depths posts) and next month’s post will be my detailed explanation of a narrative that better explains Modern Art than the two narratives mentioned above.

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Judge, 2025
by Banksy, photo by PA Media

What is this? Spray paint vandalizing a wall, depicting a wigged British judge beating a protestor with his gavel. It’s hard to claim that this is any sort of new media, after all paint has been around for a long time. Yet, look at what happened to it:

Judge (scrubbed), 2025
by Banksy

There is a ton of controversy surrounding this image, a new artwork unveiled by the (in)famous street artist Banksy. Is vandalism a new medium in the modern era? One could argue that the 20th century allowed for vandalism to be taken seriously as art. But no, it’s not new. Vandalism and protest have been taken seriously for thousands of years, especially ones involving art.1

The new medium Banksy wields, like Rembrandt wielded a brush, is bureaucracy. Before I explain I must go back and address the original work before it was “restored” or “cleansed.”

Banksy is not a very subtle artist. Most street artists aren’t. A wigged judge is attacking a protestor with a gavel. The most surprising aspect of the work, in my opinion, is that the sign the protestor holds is blank — aside from the spattering of his own blood. Why am I surprised by this?

There is a common term for protest or activist art, artivism. It is a smashing together of the words art and activism. Usually the “art” made under this theoretical framework is about as clever as the the person who thought to smash art and activism into the horrible portmanteau artivism. Most artivism is both bad art and bad activism. It usually only rises to the level of “preaching to the choir,” or turning a political pun into a witty slogan. At its worst, it is just blatant insulting of individuals. The fact that the sign is blank means that Banksy is not simply trying to “get a message out.” In fact, the blank sign is a problem for most pundits and protestors.

There are many protestors walking the streets of London and everyone is speculating about which protestors Banksy is siding with. The “statement” of the art is unclear. Is the government beating all of the protestors down? Who is Banksy supporting? Why won’t he just say it clearly?

I think the ambiguity is the point. That is why I think Banksy’s medium is not so much spray paint as it is bureaucracy.

As soon as he pulled off the completion of the artwork he had won. The statement was made, “the people are being crushed by the rulers.” These rulers could not let this stand. They had to scrub it off.2

The act of scrubbing it off proves Banksy’s point. His painting was a protest. The scrubbing which ensued was the force of the gavel coming down.

It doesn’t matter who Banksy supports, if anyone, in the current protests. His art form reveals a deeper truth that actual protesters could learn from. This is the message that should be learned by those who want to effectively protest:

This is the same advice given to writers. It’s one of the reasons why everyone should learn how to write a bit of fiction.3 Banksy has received this lesson, taught by the famous protest artworks of the past. Like this well-known photo from the civil rights movement:

Parker High School student Walter Gadsden being attacked by dogs, 1963
by Bill Hudson

The power of this photo is not is what is says but in what it shows. A seemingly peaceful young man is being attacked by a dog. What kind of person are you if you side with the officer with the attack dog?

Banksy’s artwork, by accident or intention, has the same sort of showing quality. The painting by itself says, “The ruling class is beating us down.” After the scrubbing it shows, “The ruling class is beating us down.”

Regardless of his politics, regardless of his personal protest, the artwork reveals the true nature of power in a fresh way for all to see. I think it would be a shame to call this artivism. It is art. Art removes the film of familiarity from all things. Even bureaucracy’s grinding of the grist between the millstones of legislative authority and detachment.

Her stories are worlds filled with senseless violence, suffering, and death. People are not botoxed or surgically altered to fight the constant forces of gravity and time. They are grotesque. Good men are hard to find and often they get murdered or betrayed.

My friend Tim Basselin puts it this way in his book Flannery O’Connor: Writing a Theology of Disabled Humanity:

O'Connor does not say that the grotesque can be good. She does not offer the reader a pastoral platitude that God can use evil as a tool to work all things together for good. Good is not outside of the grotesque waiting to be bestowed. Instead, she says the face of the good is grotesque.

That is a strange statement. The face of the good is grotesque? I have seen a lot of grotesque art, do you see the face of something good in the following images?

Grotesque Sculpture on the Church of Santa Maria Formosa,
photo by Jean-Pol GRANDMONT

Of course the gargoyles may be a different sort of grotesque. They are a fantasy of a sort. What about Rembrandt’s accurate depiction of a real life human being:

Beggar with a Wooden Leg, ca. 1630
by Rembrandt

This etching of a beggar reminds me of a quote Josh Bishop shared on his Substack recently: “Evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.”

I suppose when I compare Rembrandt’s beggar to Christ I can see that there is something beggarly and grotesque about this:

Isenheim Altarpiece, 1512-16
by Matthias Grünewald

Ultimately, I think Basselin and O’Connor are onto something. Christ says that he comes for those who are sick, not those who are well. I think we all have far more in common with the monsters that fill the pages of O’Connors work, or the gargoyles that line the edges of churches, or the beggars out on the street corner than we realize.

But this is not something you can just be told. This is something you have to see. You have to see yourself as grotesque.

Basselin again:

O'Connor does not simply tell her readers of this mystery, for the mystery cannot be told. The mystery of Christ's salvation is not told in the Sermon on the Mount. The mystery resides in God taking on flesh and dying for the sake of the world. Christ had to live out the mystery of suffering, embodying it, and so did O'Connor, and so do we.

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The following two works of art help me see this from a sideways angle. Via cows instead of humans.

The Two-Headed Calf
By Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this 
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north 
field with his mother. It is a perfect 
summer evening: the moon rising over 
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And 
as he stares into the sky, there are 
twice as many stars as usual.

The Ascension, 2003
by Damien Hirst

Our imperfections highlight our needs. Where we are weak, where we are ugly, where we are old, where we are poor, it is there that we finally acknowledge that we are human and we need help. It is the beggars who are willing to receive the hand which is offering bread for them to eat. Many healthy people will pass on a free lunch, having eaten their fill.

The Feast at the House of Simon, 1737
by Pierre Subleyras

The two headed calf sees twice as many stars in his short life. The six-legged cow carries less weight on each hoof. We memorialize the grotesque because they challenge our imagination. They make even the most mundane task seem different. There is a flurry of activity happening in the painting above but hardly anyone is actually feasting aside from the dog.

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My whole career has been haunted by one common quote, “Those who can’t do, teach.”1 Yet, teaching art is a different can of worms. After all, many famous artists of the past century were teachers — how else are they going to get health insurance?

In the Studio, 1881
by Marie Bashkirtseff

The treachery of the art classroom is better summed up by James Elkins’ handbook titled, Why Art Cannot be Taught. The title alone makes me ask, “Well, what have I been doing for over a decade then?” I do enjoy, and recommend, this book though. I don’t agree with the title, but rather the book highlights the fact that making art is something more that what we expect from most disciplines.

Elkins acknowledges that art schools do teach the skills of being an artist; how to mix paint, how to think about composition and harmony, how to carve, how to build, how to stretch canvas, how to use a camera, how to develop film, etc. The fact is that there are many, many, many students who learn these skills and yet do not make or continue to make art. Why?

To paraphrase Elkins, the students — after acquiring some skills like Napoleon2 — goes into their studios, locks the door, do the things they have learned. Except, that isn’t quite right. They do something else and it is different for each one of them. Then, they emerge and we ask, “What have you done?(!)” and set to judging the product of what they did in the dark.

Art schools are very different than this:

No offense to Mr. Ross. You can learn many skills from Bob Ross but at the end of the video you are either just copying his painting or you have to figure out how to take what you learned and make something different. As one of my favorite video essays argues, Everything is a Remix, which includes the fact that all artists start by copying.

So how do we teach this thing that happens in the dark studio after all the copying gets tiresome?

The School of Athens, 1511
by Raphael

We look to Plato of course. In his dialog Meno Plato’s character of Socrates sets about convincing folks that learning is actually a form of remembering.3 In short, Socrates asks an unschooled slave boy a few questions about math, without using numbers, to help the boy arrive at the solution to a geometry problem that he was unable to answer before the series of questions. Socrates doesn’t offer any instruction during the encounter. Plato argues that the knowledge was already in the boy, unbeknownst to even the boy himself.4

This is interesting in a few ways. First, it shows that learning does not have to happen via the teaching of skills and feeding of information. The slave boy knows nothing about math but when asked a series of questions he is able to arrive at the correct solution without being told how to solve the problem. There is a fancy word for this, it is called educing. It’s the actual root of the word educate. To educe-icate. Here is a great visual example of what an environment of educing looks like:

Sultan Hassan’s School,
by Frederick Goodall

Unlike what most western schools look like:
photo by Gypsy Bev

The western school room is set for instruction, the circle of conversation is for eduction. Now, I am not condemning all instruction, like I said, we need skills. Rather, the mystery of what happens in the studio is a product of eduction not instruction. The way art is taught is not through the passing of information it is through the modeling of behavior.

Art making is about your habits. That is why Twyla Tharp names her book The Creative Habit. What Socrates does with the slave boy is not a passing of information but a modeling of a habit. The precise habit Socrates models is the asking of questions. It is a way of looking at the world and asking questions to see where those questions lead.

Art teaching is the way we as practitioners of this habit try our best to explain the strange idiosyncratic ways in which our habits have led us to making art. We “professionals” are often just as surprised by the habits it takes and what works:

Triple Self-Portrait, 1960
by Norman Rockwell

Art making can be taught, but it must be done as Emily Dickinson said, “slant.” To accomplish this, the art teacher should turn to the areas of education that have been practicing this mode of teaching all along: the religious monastics.

In his book The Monkhood of All Believers, Dr. Greg Peterson points out the benefits of spiritual practices—that the practices of monks are not just for monks. Notice that word practices. I just mentioned habits but another way of thinking about creativity is as a practice. There are things you can do that set the stage for the situation from which art emerges. Don’t believe me? Check out Creative Practices for Visual Artists, Kenneth Steinbach. He interviewed over 75 successful artists to see what they did in common. The verdict? They all had a lot of the same practices.

I hear a lot of people say, “I’m not creative,” and I don’t believe them. Every little kid draws, sings, dances, paints, and sees animals in the clouds. They imagine stories until, as Madeleine L’Engle tells it, someone accuses them of telling stories — as if it is shameful — equating stories to lies.

I would hazard a guess that it is not that you aren’t creative, it’s that your creativity is out of practice.

So what are the key practices of an artist? Well, too many to write here. Comment below if you’d like me to write more about creative practices and I will. But, in short: observing the world/life/God and responding in kind, as best we can, with the tools at hand, all while risking doing it badly.

We Used to Grade God’s Sunsets
from the Lost Valley Beach
by Rod Jellema

Why we really watched we never said.
The play of spectral light, but maybe also
the coming dark, and the need to trust
that the fire dying down before us
into Lake Michigan’s cold waves
would rise again behind us.
Our arch and witty critiques
covered our failures to say what we saw.

The madcap mockery of grading God as though
He were a struggling student artist
(Cut loose, strip it down, study Matisse
and risk something, something unseen–
C-plus, keep trying–that sort of thing)
only hid our fear of His weather
howling through the galaxies. We humored
a terrible truth: that nature gives us hope
only in flashes, split seconds, one
at a time, fired in a blaze of beauty.

Picking apart those merely actual sunsets
we stumbled into knowing the artist’s job:
to sort out, then to seize and work an insight
until it’s transformed into permanence.
And God, brushing in for us the business
of clouds and sky, really is a hawker
of clichés, a sentimental hack as a painter.
He means to be. He leaves it to us
to catch and revise, to find the forms
of how and who in this world we really are
and would be, to see how much promise there is
on a hurtling planet, swung on a thread
and saved by nothing but grace.