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Evangelicals seek ‘creators of culture’ role IAM News Release: http://www.iamny.org/about/press.php
Fujimura’s abstract works speak to his evangelical Christian faith. But to find it takes some digging. After the 2001 terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center, three blocks from Fujimura’s home, his work explored the power of fire to both destroy and purify, themes drawn from the Christian Gospels and Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.” “I am a Christian,” says Fujimura, 46, who founded the nonprofit International Arts Movement to help bridge the gap between the religious and art communities. “I am also an artist and creative, and what I do is driven by my faith experience. “But I am also a human being living in the 21st century, struggling with a lot of brokenness — my own, as well as the world’s. I don’t want to use the term ’Christian’ to shield me away from the suffering or evil that I see, or to escape in some nice ghetto where everyone thinks the same.” By making a name for himself in the secular art world, Fujimura has become a role model for creatively wired evangelicals. They believe that their churches have forsaken the visual arts for too long — and that a renaissance has begun. On the grass-roots and institutional level, evidence is mounting to support that view: Art galleries are opening in churches; prominent seminaries are investing in new centers exploring theology and the arts; and, graduates from evangelical film schools are making Hollywood movies. These artistic evangelicals, though still relatively small in number, are striving to be creators of culture rather than imitators, said Dick Staub, a Seattle-based radio talk show host and author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian: A Manifesto for Deepening Faith and Enriching Popular Culture In an Age of Christianity-Lite.” There is a desire, he said, to avoid inventing a parallel arts universe with Christian knockoffs for Christian audiences. “They want to make art that connects to everybody,” Staub said. “The call is first and foremost to make good art.”
As a result, Fujimura — whose work has been displayed at museums in Tokyo and Washington, D.C. — gets questions from his fellow believers dubious about abstract and modern art. “The Bible is full of abstraction,” said Fujimura, an elder at a Greenwich Village church he helped start. “Think about this God who created the universe, the heavens and the earth from nothing. In order to have faith you have to reach out to something, to a mystery.” It isn’t always an easy sell. Evangelical unease with the visual arts dates to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Andy Crouch, editorial director for Christianity Today’s Christian Vision Project, which examines how evangelicals intersect with the broader culture, notes that Protestantism traces its origins to an era when noses were snapped off sculptures in a rejection of Catholic visual tradition while the word of God was elevated. Attitudes began to change in the 1960s and 1970s, when Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer and Dutch art historian Hans Rookmaaker challenged believers to emerge from their cocoons and engage the culture, including in the arts. “The very parched nature of evangelical visual culture is making people who have grown up in this culture thirsty for beauty,” he said. Increasingly, that ground is being explored on seminary campuses. One of the most ambitious examples is the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., founded in 2001 and bankrolled by a $15 million donation from a Virginia couple that earned a fortune in information technology. The center aspires to be an evangelical arts think tank, with five stand-alone institutes focused upon worship and music, film and moving images, art and architecture, drama, journalism and creative writing, preaching and the study of the “emerging church,” which incorporates painting, dance and other fine arts into worship. Craig Detweiler, co-director of the center’s Reel Spirituality Institute, said students are fascinated with finding the sacred in the mundane and exploring life’s mysteries. In other words, themes with far-reaching appeal. “Maybe 20 years ago, young filmmakers wanted to tell stories for their own audience,” said Detweiler, a screenwriter. “Today’s young filmmakers ... find holy moments within mainstream movies and want to create more of the same. “For too long, Christian art has implied pale imitation,” Detweiler said. “We’re trying to get back to the days of the Renaissance, where the church was the patron of the finest art.”
“If we as Christians believe that creativity and imagination is a gift from God, why have we neglected it for so many years?” said center director Steve Halla, a former Dallas Theological Seminary professor and a woodcut artist. Even before the success of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” Southern California was home to a Christian screenwriting factory called Act One, an on-the-rise film school at the evangelical Biola University and a film studies center sponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities. More recently, evangelicals have turned their attention to the contemporary art world. For the past two years, students primarily from Christian colleges and universities have studied and interned at galleries and graphic-design firms through the New York Center for Art and Media Studies, a satellite of Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn. “We are not trying to recruit missionaries into New York City or anything like that,” said James Romaine, an art historian and the center’s director. “We’re helping young artists grow and become the best artists they can be.” Echoing others, Romaine describes an evolution in evangelical thinking about the arts. “For people of my parents’ generation, there was always a question of, ’Can you be a Christian and an artist?”’ he said. “When I was a student, the question was, ‘How can I be a Christian and an artist, in a philosophical sense?’ Now, there’s a sense of, ‘Let’s get to it. How can I be a part of this art world?”’
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Book Review: New Art City and the city of GodComment Magazine, May 2006 - V. 28 I. 1 After years of soul-searching and testing the waters of a career in art administration, I decided to leave California, go to New York City, enter graduate school, and set my sights on becoming an art dealer. I was leaving one place in life for another, wanting to arrive, or at least to climb another step as a young adult in the art world. At the same time a close friend of mine, an architect and art enthusiast, recommended Jed Perl's New Art City to me. He remarked, "If you can memorize this book, then you will have arrived." To my mind, New York City was the place to be. To my friend's mind, New Art City was the book to read. In New Art City, Jed Perl deftly traces the ferment of intellectual ideas at mid-century when abstract painting was still at its infancy in America. Concurrent with America's economic boom following World War II, New York City uniquely prospered by receiving many European artists to its shores. The abstract painter Hans Hofmann was an influential artist-teacher. The Hofmann School and its dialectical "push-pull," "hard-soft" forms of painting is given its due by Perl. However, the dadaist Marcel Duchamp is accorded only a cursory glance. Throughout the book, Perl dotes on the lyrical painters encouraged by Hoffman's pluralist methods, but he seems to disapprove of later Duchampian artists. What he calls Duchamp's "hijinks" early on, he plainly dismisses as "a poisonous attitude, I believe," towards the end of the book. This is surprising since Duchamp is arguably much more influential among today's artists than is Hofmann. Today, more than ever, art has become the doppelgänger of religion, and every critic and art historian chooses his or her own set of dogma. Devoted observers of the religion of modern and contemporary art will recognize many perennial assumptions when Perl refers to the Abstract Expressionists' "Golden Age," and then proceeds to pronounce a "Silver Age." By the time abstraction and vanguard artists were given the stamp of approval by rapidly expanding institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, Perl sounds almost mournful. Most of the readers are already familiar with that clichéd question: "What is (good) art?" But really, for most art sophisticates, the question could be, "Whom should art serve?" For Perl, good art means idiosyncratic visions and lyrical styles. And if confronted, Perl would contend that art is ultimately in service, not to the public or its collectors, but to the artist—his or her positive response to the natural, the surrounding world, and even to artistic materials themselves. In New Art City, Perl seems to hate any kind of art that is self-critical and conceptually calculated. His position makes it difficult to enjoy the Pop Art of the 1960s and much of what follows to this day. I see a parallel in the story of the Apostle Paul's conversation with the philosophers in Athens (Acts 17): "So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: 'Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, To the unknown god.'" The playground of artistic judgement Judging cultural artifacts does have a moral component. The Apostle Paul opened his address by commending the Athenians' public show of religiosity. Paul is perplexed by their altar marked "To an unknown god," but he confidently responds, "What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you." Modern and contemporary art is really Western society's agnostic cultural square. Is it not all too easy to dismiss today's vanguard art just because its content is difficult to understand? Is art evil merely because it does not hold our ideas of beauty in authority? Artistic creativity is a gift of God. But art as we understand it today is also a man-made place where one is may be free to create different senses of meaning. Although often philosophically rigorous, artistic judgment ought to be conceived of as a playground. The written rules within art are for democratic participation and enjoyment, not to condemn your neighbor's involvement. Perl has his romantic, artist-centered bias, and this has allowed him to write sincerely about many talented, serious artists who have never made it into the pantheon of textbook history. The story of art is touchingly humanized when Perl tells of Jackson Pollock beaming with pride to his colleagues at the Cedar Tavern when he received a postcard from painter Earl Kerkam, who apparently approved of Pollock's show in Paris. This is the strength of New Art City. In what other book would the legacy of an artist like Kerkam live on? On the other hand, as the book enters the 1960s, Perl has a hard time accepting the inevitable sophistication of the art world. That artists were not as interested in responding to a naive Nature, whether inward and outward, but were oriented, instead, to the ominous structural forces gathering around them. Jed Perl's affirmation of the earlier generation of artists may represent the human longing to capture beauty as in the Eden God first intended. But no less real are the elements of fallen humanity, which could be described as occupying the attention of artists like Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and many others of at least the past two generations. In reality, any good art then or now is a complex weaving of both sensibilities. Nine months since first being told of the book, now living in New York City, I can tell my friend back in California that not only have I read New Art City, but that I am writing a review recommending the book. Jed Perl offers us a well-researched account of the defining moments in modern art history, with strong prejudices. One of the most interesting segments is at the end, when Perl curiously closes the book by comparing two "empiricist" artists who couldn't be farther apart in style: the landscape-loving painter Fairfield Porter and the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. Perl emphasizes how Judd like Porter pragmatically concentrated on the material specifics of the urban city rather than reacting to past history's lofty concepts. In all likelihood, it seems just as true that Judd's work was minimal precisely as a rebuff to the expressive painting of his predecessors. Christian teleology allows for a unique freedom—at which New Art City only hints—to appreciate something of all art and all cultural forms. As the Apostle Paul exhorted his listeners, "[God] himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us." © Work Research Foundation 2006 6 Posts in 60 Seconds5/9/2006 1. GIRLS OUTPACE BOYS IN USE OF TECHNOLOGY: They mature more quickly, are said to be more responsible and do better at school. Now media-savvy girls are putting another one over the boys by leading the digital communications revolution. After one of the most comprehensive studies of the effect on children of the explosion in media choices of the past 15 years, the regulator Ofcom said girls aged 12 to 15 are more likely than boys to have a mobile phone, use the internet, listen to the radio and read newspapers or magazines. Only when it comes to playing computer and console games do boys overtake girls. The study, focusing on children aged between eight and 15, also showed the extent to which mobile phones and the internet are taken for granted by primary school children. Their 11th birthday appears to be the tipping point, with eight of out of 10 children having their own handset by that age. The phenomenon of children setting the timer on the video recorder while their parents struggle with the instruction manual also appears to have translated to the internet age: two-thirds of those parents also admitted that their children knew more about the medium than they did. (The Guardian, UK) 2. ADVERTISERS TARGET CREATIVE CLASS: BMW breaks its first TV work from GSD on Monday with commercials that compare the luxury carmaker to risk-takers who dare to defy convention. The new BMW theme "Ideas are everything" derived in part from GSD's alliance with writer Richard Florida, who penned The Rise of the Creative Class. (Florida, who has worked with GSD as a consultant, identified the agency's hometown of Austin, Texas, as the top market for what he calls the "creative class.) In a spot that shows architect Frank Lloyd Wright's famous "Waterfall House" being hit by a wrecking ball, the message is that corporate thinking has no respect for unconventional points of view. (AdAge) 3. "BUZZ" CONFERENCE SEEKS CREATIVITY IN THE CHURCH: Hosted by Washington’s National Community Church, the two-day event was formed from the convictions that: the church ought to be the most creative place on the planet; the greatest message deserves the greatest marketing; and the Church is called to compete in the middle of the marketplace. Pastor Mark Batterson led the first session of the Buzz conference with the title of “The Buzz Commandments,” explaining the term “buzz” and how to create buzz. “Born on the wrong side of the track in the Judea outback, working in a carpenter shop until he was 30, he never wrote a book, he never held a public office, and his ministry only lasted three years,” said the Batterson. “Yet 2000 years later two billion people claim to be his followers. How do you explain that? I think the answer is ‘supernatural buzz.’ It was a word of mouth revolution. Let me tell you what Buzz is not. Buzz is not a marketing gimmick. Buzz is not a publicity stunt. Buzz is an ancient mandate. It is our job to redeem technology ...” 4. NEW URBANISM AND THE AMERICAN DREAM: Almost without exception, the message we have heard, a message of deep concern, has been the same: the American Dream just doesn't seem to be coming true anymore. Life at the dawn of the millennium isn't what it should be. It seems that our economic and technological progress has not succeeded in bringing about the good society. A higher standard of living has somehow failed to result in a better quality of life. And from mayors to average citizens, we have heard expressed a shared belief in a direct causal relationship between the character of the physical environment and the social health of families and the community at large. For all of the household conveniences, cars and shopping malls, life seems less satisfying to most Americans, particularly in the ubiquitous middle-class suburbs, where a sprawling, repetitive, and forgettable landscape has supplanted the original promise of suburban life with a hollow imitation... (Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream) 5. STORYTELLER AS LIFE'S POET: "A storyteller is a life poet, an artist who transforms day-to-day living, inner life and outer life, dream and actuality into a poem whose rhyme scheme is events rather than words -- a two-hour metaphor that says: Life is like this! Therefore, a story must abstract from life to discover its essences, but not become an abstraction that loses all sense of life-as-lived. A story must be like life, but not so verbatim that it has no depth or meaning beyond what's obvious to everyone on the street." 6. HOW TO MAKE IT IN NYC (AND OTHER CITIES) AS AN ARTIST: It is still possible to thrive as an artist in New York City, according to several recent reports, conferences and hearings, as long as artists follow some simple guidelines.
Launcher: Still want to be an artist? Brewing Culture (BC) is a faith-based 501c3 non-profit dedicated to creating, commissioning, and celebrating transcendent art and media. BC has two main goals: to build creative communities in ten American cities, and to recruit 10,000 patrons to give the price of a movie ticket a month to support redemptive art and media. This email, Six Posts in Sixty Seconds, gives you the latest on BC, as well as some "creative space" for contemplation and conversation about life's deepest, most defining questions. Please email: sixposts@brewingculture.org us articles, news or announcements. Artists as ReconcilersThe IAMNY Conference 2/23-25/2006 Abraham Lincoln spoke here. A.R.T. Introduction2/13/2006 
Image by Pamela Moore, "128 Cooper B"For the upcoming International Arts Conference’s 15th year anniversary conference, “Artist as Reconcilers,” I am preparing the following series of essays about art called “A.R.T.: Awareness, Reconciliation and Transformation”. Here is my introduction section. The whole content of “A.R.T.” will be initially be available to IAM members only, so if you are interested please join IAM membership ($40 annual, $25 for students) via the conference section of this site. What is A.R.T.? We shall not cease from exploration Little Gidding, The Four Quartets About A.R.T. (Awareness, Reconciliation and Transformation) Introduction: I write this in order to encourage artists and to help facilitators of the arts understand their role in cultural stewardship. While About A.R.T. is an effort to broadly describe what Art is, it is not by any means a complete definition. I am drawing upon my own experience as an artist and what I find myself teaching to others. I do believe that these principles are helpful to understand the role of creativity in our lives, and to contextualize our creative activities in society. I am ultimately interested in a dialogue that move toward a stewardship of creative gifts, and how we may as a society see artistic roles, and creativity in general. I also write here to begin a dialogue among church leaders and Christians who desire to understand the arts. While this dialogue is not directed only to a Christian audience, I do speak and write as one, with all of the worldview assumptions attached to that pre-supposition. I make this premise because in all of the recent effort to define the importance of the arts, and critique of art and arts education, I have noticed writers such as John Carey (“What Good Are the Arts?") and James Elkins (“A Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art”) specifically describing their worldview as strictly secular. I find their discussions helpful, although I find that presupposition often breaks down in their own turfs as their ideas evolve, and they may not be as consistent in their worldviews as I am trying to be for mine. Nevertheless, I do think it is important to start out with a premise. I am not a secularist, so I have certain presuppositions that frame my discussions. I do believe that creativity is a gift of the Creator. And because of my theological framework, I believe that such a view of the arts will produce more diversity, more content and more color to all of the arts, Christian or not. We are created to be creative: and we have stewardship responsibilities that come with that gift. The more we find fittingness in the God given responsibility, the more freedom we will find in our expression. It has been noted that we have entered the Creative Age. The Information Age, for us Americans and other non third-world countries, is over. India and China, and other countries have taken over the role of dispersing technology and executing productions: the only resource that we have that cannot be outsourced is our creativity. Thus, we are at a crucial moment in history in which we are witnessing a paradigm shift in culture, a shift that may be as significant as Gutenburg’s invention of printing. Just as the invention of prints caused many shifts in cultural values, the Creative Age, with her accompanying technologies, will usher in principles that formerly were considered unimportant for the everyday needs of the society. Some have called this time “post-Human” as our boundaries of creativity begins to have serious ethical and moral boundaries. Before Modernism, artists depicted flowers as flowers, asking “How do you depict a flower?” Modernism asked “What is a flower?” and Post Modernism followed with “Is there a flower at all?” And in post-Human time we ask, “Can humans combine their DNA with a flower?” In other words, we are at a point in which what we create and what we imagine will not merely be virtual, but are actualized into reality, and quite possibly, into our DNA. If Gutenburg brought books to us, this age brings CG technology, virtual realities, and DNA manipulation. So do we study the sciences to find answers and guide our path? The sciences cannot reach into the supernatural, nor into the mysteries of our realities, because they are bound by natural, measurable data. Art on the other hand should and can reach into the very heart of existential mysteries sciences cannot tackle. But we need to have a clear understanding of how art functions, in order to begin to understand this role. Art of the past, it seems to me, is a great place to calibrate our place in history, and press our existential marker into the shifting tide of culture. Some have moved away from the study of the classical and traditional in favor of erasing boundaries of the past. But we have found ourselves anchorless, without any agreed upon boundaries at all, ever so fearful of the future as a result. I believe that what we can learn from Rembrandts and Shakespeares of the world is even more significant today because they give us hope in turmoil, and therefore give us a picture of mediation to this age, in the power of technology today. The sciences and technology need this trans-historical dialogue on the arts, because arts determine our cultural values, and determine what the culture sees as beautiful and true. Recently I spent some time visiting friends who work as insiders in Hollywood. There is a significant effort, I found, among the industry experts to create a more principled way to develop creative content, movies and the new media. After the success of Lord of the Rings, and now Narnia, we desire for more Lewises and Tolkiens to come out. These creative resources are not birthed out of a vacuum, but over generations of commitment to nurture and value creativity. The church has been mostly reluctant to take the lead in cultural production, fearful that those who enter Babylon will come out tainted by her, unable to speak for her values. And since there is still a vacuum in culture that the church abdicated to general culture, even if we desire more Tolkiens and Lewis, the church, in her present status, will be the first to reject them as misfits. In order to have meaningful dialogue in this condition, we Christians must reevaluate our definition of creativity and art. On one hand, Biblical literalists and separatists (such as the “Left Behind” authors) may insist on that all of what is discussed in art must be literal interpretation of Christian stories, an approach which forbids certain art to exist at all. On the other we have secular purists who desire art to be left alone to the “good” desires of our hearts, self reliant and (in most cases) necessarily alienated from society. My approach in A.R.T. is neither of these routes. In order to lead, and teach our children to lead, Twenty First Century with creativity, we must speak in to our culture to value art and steward her with proper boundaries, and lead with a sense of responsibility. At the same time, we must realize that art is neither a mere tool to be used for ours or other ideologies. A.R.T. must ask deeper questions: what I have began to call “a five hundred year questions.” What we create matters: all art products cast their vision of what the artist consciously or unconsciously desire for the world to become. We are, and will become, what we imagine: and if we do not understand both the power and the danger of our imaginative powers, we will not begin to birth meaningful, and hopeful works of inspiration. - Makoto Fujimura Next chapter, “Awareness,” will be released after the conference for members only. Image: Pamela Moore, "128 Cooper B", mixed media on paper, 30x36 inches |
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