Refractions 32: Emanuel's Heartbeat

“If (artists) are any good, they make art because they have to ... they don’t do it to please the market ... (an Art fair’s) like a free jazz concert in here, with a drunken monkey working the mixing board.”   Dealer Jeff Poe, Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton (W.W. Norton)

 

“The audience was a tad restless.”  Woody Allen, Annie Hall

 

She leaned slightly toward her single snare drum, and her dark silk robe moved in the shadows over her lean body.  She closed her amber eyes, waiting, perhaps listening for sounds beyond the museum walls.

 

It was the annual fund raising event for The Kitchen, a bright and decorous affair like any art openings in Chelsea, with a few in spring dresses, but some in designer t-shirts, all mingling with wine, Champaign glasses and canapés.  My wife and I mingled about, purveyed the art on the walls, and above the clamor we heard one of the organizers trying to get the crowd’s attention.  “We thank you for coming to our annual fundraiser for The Kitchen, and we want to introduce several of our artists.”  A poet began to read, but very few seemed to want to pause and listen to him, or, soon after to the quiet gong percussion of a slight built Asian woman.  Even as she started to play her notes, the chatter only increased in the periphery of the large Chelsea museum.  We inched closer to her to hear the sound of her music.

 

 

She was obviously not playing for the crowd.

 

I approached her after about ten minutes of performance, shook her slim hand and said, “I’m sorry your beautiful sound was drowned in the chatter.”  She seemed rather unfazed by it all.  Perhaps she did not even know that only a few of us were listening.  I told her I was an artist, too, and gave her my exhibit card for my show coming up in TriBeCa.

 

 

I received an email from Susie a few days after The Kitchen event.  “You are having an exhibit? I’d like to see it.”  At Starbucks at Chambers and West Broadway near my exhibit, we spoke at length for the first time.  She was raising funds for a contemporary opera piece she had written called “Shangri-la,”  with a poet Yusef Komunyakaa.   She explained that the collaborative piece was about raising awareness of the underground sex-trade issue in Thailand.  “There’s this character, a ‘metaphysical detective,’ who looks for a missing girl.” She said playfully, inviting me into her creative thoughts. Then she looked at me, quizzically and abruptly, and asked, “I wondered if you would want to participate in the project.” She speaks in the way she plays: with a quiet, nuanced voice, explaining the details of the projects carefully, patiently.  But as she did, I sensed also a determination and drive behind her every word.  She was a visionary, too, pushing the boundaries of music, art, theatre and dance.

 

We began to do live painting collaboration after the Shangri-la performance at the Kitchen in 2003.  I do not recall the first time we talked about it: it came about as naturally as speaking to each other.  I began to “see” the colors of her sound, and she claims that she “hears” the gestures of how I paint.  I decided to use mainly gold and platinum powders mixed with hide glue, to narrow down to the gradual spreading of the heavy metallic elements on paper.  Paper can buckle and as it dries on the floor.  I had a paper maker in Imadate, a village in western Japan, create a particular blend of fibers and dye that would accentuate the subtle hues of thinly spread gold and platinum.

 

We asked Plywood Pictures to document our collaborations.  Our journey culminated in the American Composer’s Orchestra performance at Carnegie Hall and Annenberg Performance Center at the University of Pennsylvania, for which she invited me to participate by live-painting on stage.  But the film crew captured two private performances not seen by the public, one at Sara Tecchia Gallery in Chelsea and the other at the International Studio & Curatorial Program residency in Hell’s Kitchen.  The extended performance at Brecht Forum, an avant-garde space in Greenwich Village followed.  And most recently, her quartet that includes Bridget Kibby, a harpist, invited me to perform together at Le Poisson Rouge, now a renowned venue on Bleecker Street.

 

In all of these venues, however avant-garde or mainstream the venue, the experience is similar.  Very few people in the audience seem to fully take in the performance, or to grasp the breath and depth of what goes into them.  It seems we are to perform without much expectation, nor attention.  Yes, every time, for me as an artist, there are new discoveries and unraveling of the language of improvisation.  In this art form of collaboration, we cannot play to the crowd.

 

 

 

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In the famed Joshua Bell experiment  at L’Enfant Plaza subway station, The Washington Post had the violin master play as folks rushed to work, to see if anyone would stop and pay attention. Only a few people did (out of 1070), and he “earned” $32.17 in the 43 minutes of experiment, a repertoire that included “Chaconne” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor, and Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria.”  .  But one person, a demographer at the Commerce Department, did recognize him:

 

“It was the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen in Washington,” Furukawa says. “Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn’t do that to anybody.  I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?”

 

 

Joshua Bell regularly plays for concerts in which the best seats go for over $100 (he played at such an event the previous evening), and yet his playing could not slow folks down, rushing to work.  What kind of the city do we live in?  Well, it’s clear from the experiment that it is not the kind that recognizes beauty, classical or avant-garde, so readily.

 

So, if Joshua Bell with his 3.5 million dollar Stradivarius cannot stop people, none of us who creates music, art or work in iambic pentameters should expect much.  But then what good are the arts? Why would artists spend time collaborating, spending days working on something that would not be well paid, or pay nothing at all, without anyone to stop to take it in?  But we should note that this wasteful excess is being exercised in many hidden places, in homes where a child protégé plays his violin, on the canvases of self-taught artists, or on a humble square table filled with poetry.  They may or may not turn out to be Joshua Bells, or Grandma Moses or Emily Dickinsons, but the prerequisite for the arts never seem to be a guarantee of an audience, or income.  Artists are clearly not driven by mere monetary capital, but they are driven by another form of capital - creative and relational capital, the discovery of new ideas and thoughts and cultural geography.

 

 

But it is worthwhile to ask, “is Joshua Bell’s exquisite playing, or Susie’s quiet percussion, useful for society at all?” Is there a utilitarian reason for valuing their art?  The heartbeat of the arts resounds with internal significance that quietly pleads for Art to be more than a mere tool.  Art is the “organ of human life,” as Tolstoy would have it; co-joined with our deepest humanity.  We cannot “use” the arts, any more than we can “use” a human being.  This pervasive utilitarian view is a symptom of our greater cultural malaise, a view that can dehumanize the entire river of culture.  Artists need to transgress against this truncated reality that views utility above the life of art.  Thus, the essence of art needs to be useless, or use-less, because of the intrinsic nature of our excess.  What is extravagantly beautiful is a deposit toward a greater fusing of purpose and design of our universe.

 

 

The universe is full of hidden mysteries, micro realities that seem extravagant and excessive.  Why would a tiny little creature that lives in the deep, dark bottoms of the ocean (try Googling Munidopsis tridentatus, a Squat Lobster! Blind, and yet beautiful)   be designed so exquisitely?  Why so many stars in the Milky Way, and Hubble photographs (now sadly decommissioned) full of mystery and color?  Art pursues, and points to, these use-less realities, or the hidden realities of the universe, and conversely, nature seems to beckon us to generatively create after her. We are inspired by natural phenomena, whether that be a once a year rain that causes a congregation of thousands of birds and beasts in Serengeti feasting in the normally arid, seemingly lifeless earth  (see BBC’s upcoming effort,) or simply watching a sunrise over Stonehenge (see Discovery Channel's Sunrise Earth.)

Nature herself beckons us toward a journey to be misfits in a utilitarian society, inviting us to a strange, silent dance.

 

But, even if art is use-less, it does not mean that the arts are exempt from our need for a responsible stewardship of our gifts.  Our artistic expressions should act as a catalyst, or as a backdrop for the “theatre of God,” or at least the “theatre of Nature,” to mediate our communal experiences.  Art taps into the core of our humanity, preserving, invigorating and delighting our cultural memories.  Art, like Stonehenge, will become part of the landscape, through which the rays of sunrises see fit to embrace, but without being completely subsumed by nature.

 

And while art is not a mere tool, art creates useful tools like brush, camera or pencil to shape our expressions.  “We are human beings, not human doings” states Nigel Goodwin.  Our doings shapes our tools, but it is our beings that often leaving indelible marks of our exiled journeys.  Art uses these instruments (often beautiful in themselves) to translate from experiential gestalt; art should not a translation of a pre-set ideology.  Good art is not a one-to-one transaction, but a journey that sends us toward the possibility of one-to-many. Thus, each translation is unique to the context, and the language of the cultural reality, but at the same time refracting into the greater, enduring reality.  Therefore, created art (or the praxis of art) is rarely repeatable or transferable.

 

Art, thus, just like the woman in Shangri-la, is also caught in a metaphysical maze, or at least a labyrinth.  Like the detective in Shangri-La, we find ourselves confounded, even lost, in our post-Ground Zero haze.  How do we, as exiled citizens, journey in our labyrinth?

 

 

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As Plywood documentation rolls on, a viewer may see something rarely seen in avant-garde circles.  Susie and her husband Roberto, also a superb percussionist, were expecting a child. During our process of collaboration over time, Susie became painfully aware of the difficulty of being a musician who is also an expectant mother.  Many avant-garde settings are not set up, either in social acceptability or in slight gestures, to embrace a performer expecting a baby.  As soon as one tries to have a family, we become a misfit to the highly regimented, rugged individualized world of the avant-garde.  I’ve often had to explain to folks in these settings that I do have three kids, and am happily married and that reality seems to shock, and transgress, as much as any shock art of the 90’s.  It seems that being a father or a mother is transgressive in today’s art world.

 

Thus, at the performance at The Brecht Forum, the epicenter of avant-garde, progressive space, she decided, without telling anyone except me, to start the performance with the heartbeat of her baby inside her womb. She had just recorded it at her recent doctor’s visit.  As we quieted ourselves, the sound began in the background...Ta,ta, ta,ta,ta,ta,ta...As she began to build her sound upon the heart beat, I began to paint, first by dripping platinum and gold, and then with yellow malachite, and purple lapis pigments, poured over dark, wine colored paper.  The pigments spread, and I could feel the weight of the pigments on top of the paper, cascading as I lifted the paper.  The Plywood team set up cameras shooting Susie’s movements, and they set up my own video camera to project onto the wall, so I could video the surface of the paintings, and then have Susie’s face reflect in the puddles of water.

 

The resulting film/documentary is not a typical film that would be “released,” but meant to be part of future installations at galleries and museums.  It is a “self-aware” piece that is used to birth more documentations (see the recent Tokyo installation/perfomance), of a documentation within a documentation; an ongoing reflective piece that will incarnate itself in various settings.  There will also be unique art editions created using pieces of paper drawings used in actual performances, packaged with the dvd, in a specifically made Japanese gift box.  We will begin to release this set at the Space 38|39 collaboration in the fall of 2009.  

 

Susie and I did a live performance to open my exhibit in Tokyo. This performance was done as an offertory to generate a “gift economy” in gratitude to those who helped me to get my career in Japan started.  The performance included live painting, but with a surprise ending that “gave away” art at the end.  I was influenced, in part, by Yoko Ono’s performance of cutting up a map, distributing the pieces and asking the recipients to come back later to re-connect.  It was also an homage to Sen no Rikyu, the 16^th century tea master, whose art redefined communication in a war-torn, strife filled Japan.

 

 

After Japan, Susie was on her way to the Philippines, where she is working on a project to preserve the heritage arts of Philippino Kulintang gongs, creating a documentary overlapping the disappearance of heritage crafts and traditions with the endangered King Eagle, the national bird of the Philippines.  She has asked me to participate in the project, to add animated images to the footage.  The preservation of culture and nature thus can lead to the creation of new art.

 

Thus refracting in the pools of water in the avant-garde venues of New York, the Philippines and Tokyo, Susie’s drumbeat resonates humanity, continuing to draw those who are willing to listen to the quiet heartbeat from the womb of progressive art.  Every time we collaborate, the sound of her gongs grows within me, pointing me to an invisible reality, to what the Celts called “Thin Spaces,” a space between heaven and earth. I am glad my wife and I stopped to listen to the slender Asian woman at the Chelsea Gallery.  I am moved to be lead by the heartbeat of the unborn to collaborate.

 

And they named their baby Emanuel (God with us).

 

IAM's Curator Magazine

Dear Refractions Readers:

I have been writing for IAM's new Curator Magazine, edited by our Alissa Wilkinson. In the future, I will be placing my "review" like essays on art and film on the Curator, so please check it out.  My next Refractions on my collaborative journey with Susie Ibarra (most recently at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village and Shinseido Gallery in Tokyo) will be posted later this month.

My latest Curator "reviews" include:

1)On the Academy Award winning Departures

"Who would have expected a film about dead bodies to be so revealing of life and spirit, and such regional scenery to begin to dominate our urban journeys? How can a ritual to prepare a dead body be so compelling? And who are all these remarkable actors who produce a symphony (a la vintage Woody Allen movies) of allusive and memorable scenes?"

from  "Departures: the Art of Transformation" by Makoto Fujimura

2) Good Friday Sightings on the art of Steven Assael

"Steven Assael's portraits come close to the best of portrait traditions, but his subject matters are not conventional status quo sitters or dignitaries. They are ordinary human beings, teenagers, fellow congregants, and subway riders. They are given costumes to wear, like Superman's cape in one of this exhibit's paintings, or carnival headdresses and feathers in Costume Party #1. They may be nude figures, faces seemingly too shy to be drawn, and yet so delicately and affectionately depicted, holding a pair of binoculars or a camera."

From "Good Friday Sightings" by Makoto Fujimura

And....

Makoto Fujimura Solo Exhibit, Olana-Psalms of Ascent will continue at White Stone Gallery in Philadelphia

April 3- June 21st, 2009

I have been exhibiting devotional works never before exhibited, such as the Olana - Matthew Six piece shown above.

Special Offer: I have prepared special, handmade bookmarks to be available as a gift, only to those who purchase Refractions: a journey of art, faith and culture at the gallery!

An Easter Tribute

Photo “Reflections upon Refractions” by Marsha Gonzalez.

Sgt. Ron Kelsey sitting in a bomb shelter, in front of Saddam Hussein’s former palace in Baghdad, Iraq

Dear Refraction Readers,

Ron Kelsey was my intern during September 11th, 2001. He was an art student from Washburn University, also serving on ROTC.

Recently, Ron contacted me from Iraq, where he is stationed and is training to be a chaplain. The photo above was taken while he sat reading my Refractions book in front of Saddam Hussein's former palace in Baghdad, Iraq. Here's a recent dispatch from him, sent last night, on the eve of Easter.

Mako,

In today's moment of grief, I want to thank you for writing your essay "Operation Homecoming: Epistles of Injury." Yesterday, the 10th MTN DIV lost five Soldiers under its command to an IED. Today their families and the Soldiers of the 10th MTN DIV remain captured by the weight and burden of tragedy. On this day before Easter, I found hope in the following words from "Refractions:"

"Art should let 'the other ones loose' from the bondage of decay, apathy, and loss. To the extent we are able to do that, we will see a new language of expression that is not self-centered but self-giving and generous. Yes, I believe that art can, and ought to, exist apart from wars. But the only place in history where this has been the case --- a place called Eden, where a poet named Adam dwelled --- is today hidden inaccessibly beneath the rubble of Iraq...

In Jesus' Realism of 'such things must happen,' he was also reminding us that our sacrifice, either for just or unjust reasons, would not be the last word. Our efforts, however noble, will not end the cause for injustice. Nevertheless, we are all called to self-sacrifice. None is exempt, not even a pacifist thirteen-year-old secluded as far away from Iraq as humanly possible. And Jesus knows, firsthand, what it means to die an unjust death without picking up a stone or spear. Instead, he continues to breathe life into us in our funerary songs...

Our path back to Eden is blocked, but there is a way in to the feast of the selfless. Only the words of forgiveness, utterly stripped down to the core of faith, can echo the timeless, or the timeful, promise of an Easter morning. That is our true homecoming."

The realities of these words and the promise of Easter have become real to me in the shadows of heroic sacrifice. In the light of Easter's generosity, I wrote the following words in the essay "Inspiration beyond the Finished Work:"

"As Jesus spoke His last words on the cross, 'it is finished', it did not seem like a proper ending for his narrative or life's work. Could it be that His words were filled with a sense of longing, visions that went beyond His death on the cross, hope that would restore humanity, a peace beyond human measure? As the story unfolds, beauty is revealed through brokenness, upon a cross woven easel of man's own design, creating the possibility for a sequence of events beyond the grave. A saving grace remains beyond grief and sorrow, awaiting the resurrection of God's own design.

In consideration of Christ's generosity, I realize that there remains a greater calling in life. It is not enough to seek out audiences requesting that they make further sacrifices. Rather, as artists we should be the lens by which they see the value and beauty of the sacrifices they already make. As a reflection of the Creator upon the created, every artist has the potential to become a curator of the message of truth, which serves to resurrect the underlying hope within the audience of mankind."

In the Shadows of Generosity,
Ron Kelsey

Ron is writing a series of essays and painting to prepare for an exhibit that will benefit International Arts Movement. I will keep you updated on that. As we meditate on the hope that this day brings, let's remember those who grieve because "our path to Eden is blocked."

Makoto Fujimura, Easter morning, 2009

Ibarra Collaboration in NYC and White Stone Gallery Solo Exhibit in Philadelphia

"Olana - Matthew Six," 40x60" Mineral Pigments, Gold on Kumohada

Upcoming Event

Susie Ibarra, a remarkable percussionist and composer, has invited me to partake in collaboration via live painting and video I produced specifically for her new songs.  It will be at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village, NYC. 
On April 7th (Tuesday) from 7-9pm

Jennifer Choi - solo violin
Susie Ibarra Quartet
Featuring: Jennifer Choi - violin, Kathy Supove - piano, Bridget Kibbey - harp, Susie Ibarra - drumset and percussion


Upcoming Exhibit


Makoto Fujimura Solo Exhibit, Olana-Psalms of Ascent will open at White Stone Gallery in Philadelphia
April 3- June 21st, 2009

Opening Reception: Friday, April 17, 7-9 pm

I will be exhibiting devotional works never before exhibited, such as the "Olana - Matthew Six" piece shown above.

Special Offer: I have prepared special, handmade bookmarks to be available as a gift, only to those who purchase Refractions: a journey of art, faith and culture at the gallery!

Refractions 31: Trout, the Dow and our Bottom Lines Part II

Refractions 31: Trout, the Dow and our Bottom Lines, Part II



"...a work of art is a gift, not a commodity." Lewis Hyde, Introduction to The Gift






Canal Street, a few blocks from my loft, is known for her hustle and bustle, crowded sidewalks full of counterfeit watches and designer bags, leading from West Side highway to Chinatown. Canal Street spans the width of lower Manhattan from the Holland Tunnel, leading into New Jersey to the west, to Manhattan Bridge, beyond Brooklyn to the east. But Canal Street, historians tell us, was a trout stream teeming with native brook trout.

In "Manhattan: The Cradle of American Trout Fishing," author Nick Karas writes:

New Amsterdam was concentrated on the very southern tip of the island, most of it below present-day Wall Street, and its fishers favored streams on the island's southern end. Even in the 1700s, Harlem Creek was still to far "into the country" to attract urban anglers from New York City.

Needing to stay close to the city, i.e., closer to Wall Street, these urban fishermen took a walk up about a mile to a stream that the Native Americans called Ishpetenga. Karas continues:

It flowed southwest into the Hudson near the mouth of another trout stream. This one had its origins in a deep, fair-sized pond where Worth and Centre streets now cross. It flowed northwesterly, almost in a straight line, and became the course for today's Canal Street. The pond was known as The Collect.


When we moved our family into New York City, we rented a loft near "The Collect" used to be, on Worth Street. We thought we were moving away from nature, at least the grassy yards of New Jersey, but perhaps we were closer to nature than we thought. Just like in Eden (Genesis 2) where good materials were hidden deep beneath the earth, "The Collect" and the stream may be, even to this day, still there to be uncovered. Symbolically, Canal Street, one might say, is an economic tributary off of a river that flows from Wall Street to western shores, toward Main Street, U.S.A..


Dillon Gallery, my main art representation in New York City, used be in a ground floor space in busy Soho, a few blocks north of Canal Street. On heavy rainy days the basement would flood, not a welcome attribute for an art gallery. "The Collect" must have a necessary part of the geographical water management of the island of Manhattan, nature's way of collecting rainwater and diverting it into the Hudson. When we replace nature's system for our convenience, the inconvenience shows up elsewhere in the system, making it unsustainable.

On 9/11, if the "slurry walls," protective concrete walls surrounding the towers, did not hold, the Hudson River would have flooded the ash-filled Zero, thereby reverting the flow of water to what used to be "The Collect," sending water into the entire downtown arena. Since there are no diverting trout streams, the water would have not only been drawn to Centre Street area (where New York Supreme Court, and high security prison stands) but also to the subterranean labyrinth called the subway tunnels, possibly causing the entire area below 14th St. to collapse.


What would it take, when we consider the invisible collateral of urban displacement, to see Canal Street as a trout stream again? Yes, to see it as an actual stream teeming with native brook trout. Oh, that's the idyllic and idealistic dream of an artist, you might say. What are you going to do with trucks that need to get from Brooklyn to New Jersey, you might ask. I am sure these are reasonable, and rational, counter arguments. I contend though that the problem is not that Canal Street is no longer the trout stream, but that we no longer imagine that it ought to be one. The issue is succumbing to the futility of the situation at hand, and despairing of the world as it is, saying there's nothing we can do about it.

When we cease to seek a world that ought to be, and stop using our imaginative capacities generatively, we have forfeited our capacity to hope, and re-create. In this sense, recreation, even the leisure of fishing, points to re-creation, our central task of rebuilding a broken universe. If a trout, or other enchanted creatures of nature, cannot be allowed to inhabit our urban world, swimming against the currents of the economy and flowing into the currents of cultural production, we have already closed the door to the generative reality, making the re-humanization of our world unattainable.

We must also remember that the economy and culture starts at another kind of "The Collect," an upstream reservoir of the cultural and economic products of the world. Thus, our imaginative task in the sources of culture trickle down into the rest of culture. In the confluence of such an imaginative journey, economy and culture flow into each other, as double headwaters into our future world; therefore if we care about any of these streams, we must ask audaciously, "Can't Canal Street be a trout stream again?"


Art brings possibilities of re-creation back into the broken world. Artists are instinctively generative, and they are used to asking impossible questions. That's why they are the first to enter dilapidated corners of the cities, and to see before anyone else, the potential for re-creation in an abandoned loft. Far after the trout disappeared, artists moved into abandoned Canal Street. Soho then became home to many arts institutions, galleries and artists. The streets were teeming with creative talents. Paul Taylor Dance, a premier modern dance company, practiced there. The painter Romare Bearden, the first African-American visual artist to receive the National Medals, had his studio right on Canal Street. But Romare Bearden passed away, and Paul Taylor Dance Company has been replaced by the Gap.

I used to have my studio a block below Canal Street, beneath Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation above with hundreds of artists who took over leases there. But the building was sold recently, and now the building sits empty, an unfulfilled promise to be converted into a hotel.

When The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation entered the building in early 1991, the building was nearly empty, a ghost of printing companies that filled the warehouses downtown. I remember Joyce Robinson, the executive director, visiting my studio in Tokyo National University where I was a graduate student. She looked about, noting the height of the studio that I shared with Yuji Murakami (the brother of now famed economic juggernaut of Pop imagery, Takashi Murakami), and told me of her plan to meet with the foundation's artists advisory committee in New York to begin the studio program.

The advisory committee included luminaries of the visual arts world, such as Rob Storrs (then a curator at MoMA), Irving Sandler (critic), as well as artists Chuck Close, Philip Pearlstein, Janet Fish, Harriet Shorr and Cynthia Carlson.

What was a vacant building soon began to be rejuvenated by artists who decided to stay after their one-year term was up at the Sharpe Foundation. They moved into raw space, and began fixing it up.

When I returned from Japan, I visited Joyce and she suggested I check out the building as a studio option. When I walked into the building, only two days after landing in Newark airport, I found myself in a studio space in which one of the artists who leased the space welcomed me. He was measuring the space when I walked in.

I introduced myself as a friend of Joyce, and asked him what was available. I told him of my budget. He measured the walls of the space we were standing in, about 500 square foot space, and saw that it was exactly what I could afford. He shook my hand and said "that was quite serendipitous...my wife and I were wondering if anybody would take a studio down here."

Down here, in TriBeCa (stands for Triangle Below Canal, with its point at where the Trade Towers stood), was still inconvenient and a little dangerous. It was kind of a ghost town on weekends, with one supermarket and a few families. But the artists of the Sharpe foundation thrived there, and in a matter of a few years, the building was full of artists, designers and architects. In 1994, when I helped a friend Hiroshi Senju secure a 2000 square foot studio, the price was still around two dollars a square foot, one tenth of what it is today. I ended up calling the building my creative home from 1992 to 2007.

Artist Chuck Close, who lead the effort with Joyce, and other advisory committee members, felt that creating a community was one of the most important functions of the Space Program. In order to do so the Sharpe Art Foundation, even to this day in her new home in Dumbo, has a common room at the center where artists can gather, or run into each other. Even such transient encounters, given time, become significant relationships that create culture. By the time the developers decided to kick out everyone, not only was the building packed, but the surrounding area had become chic, with many new restaurants and amenities. Sharpe Art Foundation recipient Tara Donovan, began to be noticed and had a major exhibit at Ace Gallery three blocks north, which led to her recent exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, and a McCarthur Fellowship.

Such remarkable growth of a neighborhood, led by artists is not unusual or new. It happened in Soho from the 1970-1980's. It's happening in Williamsburg and DUMBO (District Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) from 2000-2008. But artists today no longer can even afford Brooklyn. Many now are moving away to Connecticut, New York state or Philadelphia.

Apparently, artists follow trout, or at least take up residence where trout used to swim. And if the trout are displaced, artists will be, too, eventually. If imagination and nature cannot be part of the urban landscape, then the forces of greed and efficiency has already overridden any hope of sound stewardship of culture, ringing in death-knells to our humanity. In such a world, we will continue to suffer, and be dehumanized, no matter how much the economy improves. If it is about humanity, as much as fundamental numbers of the company or gained revenues, then its waters must first be filled with evidence of substance unseen. Both activities, art and fishing, is re-creational, and re-creation requires faith.

What kind of faith is that? Well, it's the same faith that it takes to cast a first line for trout lurking beneath the waters, or the type of faith it takes to purchase a stock, to borrow or lend. With the same faith, I might add, a dancer leaps into the arms of another, and with the same faith an artist faces the blank canvas. Our imaginative capacity is our link to faith. Faith is, therefore, re-creational. Of course, I am using this word "faith" in a generic sense, to be distinct from religious use of the word.

But there is a pervasive sense that even the generic use of this word points to a greater reality. My journey of art and faith attests to the notion that my generic faith both conflicted with, but also preceded, my faith in God. In this sense, the great Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky speaks of a connection between art and religion: "In science, at the moment of discovery, logic is replaced by intuition. In art, as in religion, intuition is tantamount to conviction, to faith. "

There is a unique confluence between creativity and nature, and our generative faith borders on a deeper, personal connection with God. Both activities call to attention the origins of beauty: both realities of nature and art touch our deepest humanity. But in order to understand the generative realms of culture, the personal interaction between the intuitive and the divine, must be understood and delineated from the commerce of art. Art and nature are both gifts to be shared, more than commoditized products that can be bought and sold.


* * *

In a remarkably prescient book, The Gift, written in 1983, poet Lewis Hyde links such thoughts between economy of rampant commoditization and the killing off of artistic thriving. He writes in the introduction:

It is the assumption of this book that a work of art is a gift, not a commodity. Or, to state the modern case with more precision, that works of art exist simultaneously in two "economies," a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art. (xvi, The Gift, Second Vintage Books edition, 2007)

The extravagant gift, such as a trout, must be treated as a gift and not merely a commodity, and art needs to follow in their wake back into the pristine river of culture. But under the current river conditions, such release is not to be recommended. The river of culture has lead to a dehumanized view of art, its beauty robbed by over commoditization. Thus, a recovery of the invigorated ecosystem of art depends on the existence, and the recognition of, the principle that "where there is no gift, there is no art." Where there is no gift, there is not likely to be a pristine river either. Therefore, nature and art can exist in the absence of market economies; but one should argue for the corollary - a market economy, or a truly humanized economy, cannot exist apart from having a pristine river of creativity running at the heart of her cities.

Lewis Hyde identifies the blind spot of modern economics, and provides an alternative hybrid model, combining his "gift economy" and "market economy" into a model that takes into the account creativity, the arts and sustainability. He leads the way for inventive ways of sharing our creative gifts, such as creative commons, an agreement for open sourcing of creative gifts (for my attempts to participate in this, go to www.byfor.org, a site that singer/songwriter Michael Card is developing with Lance Mansfield.)

"In the North Pacific," Hyde writes, almost as an afterthought in the footnotes (his remarkable thoughts are packed in his footnotes, updated for the 25th anniversary edition, akin to Augustine's "The City of God" which really is a letter with many essay-length footnotes): "salmon stocks actually did decline as soon as European settlers began to treat the fish as a commodity to be sold for profit." (pg. 35, footnote). The reciprocal relationship that the Native Americans had with nature, a sacred bond that they recognized between provisions and natural cycles, was broken by the injection of commoditization as the sole the indicator of success. Artists, swimming upstream in culture, do as much to battle the pollution of such rivers as they do to paint, write or dance.

And now, when I consider the need for the churches to communicate their Gift to the world, reading Lewis Hyde was like walking into a wardrobe chest that lead to Narnia: Hyde's words reverberate into the enchanted heart of culture making, and what the Bible calls the gospel, or the Good News.


Hyde writes:

It is also the case that a gift may be the actual agent of change, the bearer of new life. In the simplest examples, gifts carry an identity with them, and to accept the gift amounts to incorporating the new identity. It is as if such a gift passes through the body and leaves us altered. The gift is not merely the witness or guardian to new life, but the creator. (pg. 57)

Though Hyde does not go as far as to say this, gift of God, "the bearer of new life" is in Christ, who the New Testament calls not only the savior, but the Creator (see the first chapter of Colossians.) Christ is not only an example of such a pure gift, he is THE Gift. In Communion, the Gift literally passes through our body and leaves us altered (or altar-ed, if you will, not only transforming us, but sanctifying us.) There's no reciprocity in this transaction: God likes to give one-way gifts that cannot be reciprocated. We cannot out give, or out gift, God.

And yet in our churches, we have treated the gospel like a commodity, shopping it around like salesmen, or worse yet, showmen full of savvy. When our churches look like gigantic malls, or hotels or even strip malls, and when we proclaim -- "salvation comes free, at no cost," we are unintentionally tapping into the language of consumer economy. Of course, informed decision-making needs to be part of the transaction, and we must have a convenient location to meet for worship. But the context and method for sharing the Good News taps too often into the consumer mentality. Yes, you might argue, but if that method works, and the Good News is preached, what's wrong with that?

The problem is in not spending time and effort thinking about the context of communication, as much as the content of the message. We may seek out experienced business minds to lead our church drives, but churches usually do not seek out artists who exemplify "the gift economy" to guide and direct stewardship, and communication. And if we do not consider the context, the context will define our message, as much as our preaching or singing.

Hyde notes "...just as gifts are linked to the death that moves toward new life, so, for those who believe in transformation (either in this life or in another), ideologies of market exchange have become associated with the death that goes nowhere." (Pg. 57)

He then interjects a sobering warning, noting that George Romero, the movie maker of the horror flick The Dawn of the Dead , had his film set in a shopping mall in Pittsburgh where "the restless dead of a commodity civilization will tread out their numberless days." (pg. 57) We apparently have a culture in which both the good news and a horror stories are broadcast in similar packages. No wonder that the culture is confused as to what the churches are meant to represent.


But the gospel is the gift: and a true gift, by definition, cannot be bought or sold, but can only be passed on, but possibly with a great sacrifice. The problem with our consumer mindset is both in accepting the gift and the rejecting the gift of the gospel as offered to us. In accepting, we tend to think of our "decision" to accept the gospel as bartering with God, saying something like "God, if you can get me out of this mess, I'll believe in you and be good for the rest of my life." Or, "what am I supposed to get in this transaction? What am I entitled to?" We, by saying this, still believe as consumers, we can somehow convince God to buyour goods, and it is our act to redeem ourselves, and not the utter dependence on the gift of life.

But more profoundly troubling is if one rejects the gift of the gospel with the consumer mindset. The rejection is our free choice, like saying "no" to a salesperson with a vacuum cleaner, and we reject the gospel without realizing what we are doing. If the gospel was The Gift, and the only true gift that leads to life, then such rejection is not a transaction, but a deeper offense.

In some cultures, rejection of a gift given from a father to a child is paramount to rejecting the father himself. And in the famed story of the Prodigal Son, that is precisely the offense against the father. The younger son rejected not just his inheritance, but told his father "I want you dead" by his actions (see Tim Keller's new book The Prodigal God.) If so, then we are not rejecting a vacuum cleaner for sale, one that claims to clean our hearts of sin, we are, like the white witch of the north in Narnia, striking Aslan down with our steely knife, thinking that we have won our battle against God.

But the "Deeper Magic" always breaks open our coveted notions, a surprising twist on Easter morning. Without this gift, we may be convinced that our hearts, like Canal Street, cannot be changed. Because the "Deeper Magic" of the gospel is that the paradigm itself transcends the boundaries of its own making.

The greatest miracle of the resurrection of Christ is not just the body of Jesus taking on a new multi-dimensional, transformed DNA; the greatest miracle is that miracle itself reveals the potential of a greater and deeper miracle, surpassing our imaginative, and natural capacities. By definition, God's miracle breaks nature wide-open, and such an act is the ultimate transgression in love by the Creator toward God's own creation. The true gift, if fully understood and embraced, will transform us from within and make us beings of hope.

Books like Hyde's rely on the borrowed capital of this Biblical paradigm. Without the idea of a supra-natural source of a generative reality, Hyde's argument would simply be wishful thinking. Would we be convinced of the existence of a pure gift apart from the notion that there was The Gift that transcended the notion of a gift? If you enter a basement and observe the billiard balls moving about, you would assume that someone had been playing a game of billiards. A gift economy works, according to Hyde, much like the billiard balls. Someone had to have made the first move. And precisely because Hyde himself leaves open the connection between faith and generosity in many of the remarkable pages of The Gift, we can read the book and rejoice.


In a world full of strife and common struggles for survival, would such a premise be too far-fetched and unrealistic? Are any of these thoughts, whether it be a gift economy, art or trout, appropriate for such a time as this?

In the book of Isaiah, I noticed recently rereading the famous passage for Advent, we note that the prophet anticipated the coming of Emmanuel. "Unto us a child is born," Isaiah proclaims, "to us a child is given. And the government will be on his shoulders." (Isaiah 9:6) But we need to realize the context in which such prophesy is given: it is made in advance of wars, a warning of escalating conflicts, of bloodshed promised by both sides of conflicts. Isaiah's startling vision came during the conflict such as now in the Gaza. There were strikes and skirmishes then, threatening the destruction of nations and citizens alike. In short, nothing much has changed, we just have bigger weapons. The promise of the Gift, who will rule with justice and peace could not have come at a more crucial time, but we would think that such a message would not be heard in times of crisis, where everyday life was under threat, or even if given, that it would seem as fantastic as the Narnian world beyond the wardrobe full of fur coats.

So it is with the trout stream on Canal Street, or any conversation about the gift economy. It's precisely when the economic mortars are being flown about, when everything is in doubt, that we can truly consider these radical thoughts. Just like the cave painters who painted beautiful animals knowing that they are dependent, somehow, on the gift of life to survive, we, too, must paint precisely because our brief lives are precarious and vulnerable. And in such refractions made within the dark caves of our lives, we will be certain that our motives have been made not out of greed or more power, nor mere survival dynamic. The lines we draw are prayers, calling out for re-humanized and generative creativity.

Hyde concludes his book, reflecting on Ezra Pound's writings. Noting the difference between willpower and reception of a true gift, he notes:

. . .there are limits to the power of the will. The will knows about survival and endurance; it can direct attention and energy; it can finish things. But we cannot remember a tune or a dream on willpower. . . The will by itself cannot heal the soul. And it cannot create. (pg. 300)

We cannot, merely will the economy to mend, or will to bring trout and artists back to Canal Street. We must first begin to create an alternate gift economy, a generous river of creativity flowing out of the cities, a river full of gems of art and nature. This must also be accompanied by a hybrid model of economy, combining capitalistic society with creative society, and must consider things beyond survival and endurance and "finishing things." It must be more like a process of creation that once filled Canal Street, and it must look more like the extravagantly beautiful spots of a native brook trout than the counterfeit designs of Canal Street watches.

A friend mused recently to me: "we may not see a Wall Street boom again for a long time, certainly not in our life time." Because of the banking crisis and possible nationalization of them, we may end up with a long protracted recession at best (which would make US more like Japan, by the way.) Possibly so, but what if in lieu of a Wall Street boom, we "invested" in different capitals, capitals of the gift economy? What is we learned from artists and nature what it means to have sustainable growth that re-humanizes, rather than a expedited, de-humaized growth? Can we not see that native trout and generative art needs to be at our headwaters, flowing in to every tributary? Had we known that our 401-ks will be "201-k"s as one commentator recently put it, would we have reconsidered our investment in something more generous, more life giving than protecting our wallets?

As I was finishing this essay, I got a call from Denise Green, who I got to know via the TriBeCa Temporary. We were introduced by Tiffany Bell (an expert on neon artist Dan Flavin whose studio was next to my first loft at Worth St.). Denise's studio looks over Canal Street. She is an Australian born artist who was the last student of Mark Rothko (Rothko, the great abstract artist, committed suicide in 1970.) She called me because she felt she had to share something with me. She told me that she was delighted to receive a catalogue of the N.E.A., and Institute of Museum and Library Services funded Vogel collection, initiated by the National Gallery, in which her work was included. Vogel collection has been called "one of the most remarkable American collections formed in (the twentieth) century."

The Vogels were not Guggenheims with inherited endowments, nor were they hedge fund managers with millions of dollars to spend: remarkably, they were civil servants who worked at postal offices, who spent their hard earned money helping artists and collecting drawings, and as their influence grew, they collected major works by artists who are now renowned figures in contemporary art.

Denise said, "reading what you have been writing of late, I thought you would appreciate to know this story." I told her that not only am I very aware of this collection, but as a Council member of the National Endowment for the Arts, I had the privilege to approve and celebrate the Vogel collection catalogue, as they desire to give away their collections to museums all over the US. I admitted, "I did not know that you were part of the collection, though." She said "what serendipity! I did not know your knew about this generous collection, nor that you are part of the decision making at the N.E.A." Generative reality is filled with such a word as "serendipity." We are awakened to a greater reality, one that connects us to a deeper layer of meaning. Small gestures, generously made by the likes of civil servants turned major collectors, grow over time into a forest of significance, affecting thousands of lives.

Then, when I shared with her what I was writing on, she said excitedly, "Oh, they are building a memorial to 9/11 in front of my studio, and it's going to be like a stream, in memory of that trout stream!" I went to take a look. In between the construction materials surrounded by a metal fence, sure enough, the graduated steps of a memorial (which looks remarkably like Denise's drawing of steps in the Vogel collection) that would have water flowing through them are being set up. No, no presence of native trout, but perhaps there is a wellspring of creativity that flows deeply into our lives. There is a "Collect" of desires inside us, a longing for that reconciled city where nature and art serves humanity. For sure, the generous river of The Gift flows right into the heart of The City of God where agape (sacrificial) love is our true bottom line.





Makoto Fujimura

Refractions: a journey of art, faith and culture book is now available

International Arts Movement Press Release:

Artist & Author Makoto Fujimura Helps The World To See With His Latest Book, Refractions

NEW YORK, NY (January 22, 2009) - As a painter, Makoto Fujimura practices an ancient Japanese technique using coarsely crushed mineral pigments applied to hand-crafted paper stretched over canvases and held in place with cow hide glue. The minerals are like prisms, refracting light and changing the artwork's appearance depending on the light source and angle of the viewer.

In his latest book, Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art and Culture, Fujimura's pen is also like a prism, refracting the light and circumstance of the world around him. The collection of essays, written between 2001-2008, was born out of his experiences as a New Yorker living two blocks from Ground Zero in September 2001. Many have said of Fujimura that he helps them to "see" - beauty, goodness and truth - and this has never been truer than in the pages of his latest book.

Fujimura's reflections on the falling of the twin towers become a meditation on the culture of Japanese teahouses - part history lesson, part aesthetic immersion. His first meeting with Ground Zero Architect
Daniel Libeskind - in line to vote at a public school - turns into an exposition of Hebrews 11:10. A visit to the Fra Angelico exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art leads Fujimura to come up with a five hundred year plan for his life. Fujimura, a Christian, has a unique eye to see glimpses of grace in unusual places, and these ruminations fill the pages of Refractions.

Makoto Fujimura served on the National Council on the Arts from 2003-2008, and was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Chairman's Medal in January 2009. International Arts Movement, a
non-profit art and culture advocacy organization founded by Fujimura in 1991, published his previous book, River Grace. He is represented by Dillon Gallery in New York City.

Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture is published by NavPress and is now available at www.internationalartsmovement.org.

A sample pages with a foreword by Timothy Keller and endorsements can be seen here.

Media inquiries should be directed to Christy Tennant, Director of Public Relations for International Arts Movement at christy(at)iamny.org or (917) 287-2581.

For wholesale book orders, contact Kris Wallen at 719.531.3588 or kris.wallen(at)navpress.com.


Praise For Refractions:

“An artist with the craftsmanship and global appeal of Makoto Fujimura comes along all too rarely. Mako is a fine writer. I learned, and was provoked and frequently moved by these reflections that through Mako’s eye have become unique refractions.”
— Philip Yancey, author, What’s So Amazing About Grace?

“Like his art, Makoto Fujimura’s essays harbor a depth of luminosity that requires and rewards patient contemplation. This collection is an important contribution to the conversation between faith and art and between art and our beautiful, broken world.”
— Andy Crouch, editor, Christian Vision Project; author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

“At once bold and gracious, these ‘dispatches’ from one of our finest living artists will provoke and inspire the reader at the deepest levels. If ever there were a time when we needed his profound evocation of art as a harbinger of peace in a fractured world, this is it.”
— Jeremy Begbie, Thomas A. Langford research professor of theology, Duke University

“William Blake wrote, ‘They must always believe a lie, who see with, not through the eye.’ Imagine the possibilities if the adverse of that statement were true. How profoundly could those who see ‘through’ the eye perceive the richness and depth of truth. Mako Fujimura has spent a lifetime of seeing ‘through’ the remarkable gift of his eye. He has painted for us, and now, remarkably, he has written for us about the truth he has seen.”
— Michael Card, musician; author; teacher

“These essays, like his paintings, are rich and thoughtful explorations of art’s redemptive power and its place in a violent, broken world. Rarely has a visual artist shed so bright a light on the wellsprings of his work.”
— Terry Teachout, drama critic, The Wall Street Journal

“In the pages of this book, you will find the work of a man who loves the Creator of the universe and the art his creation produces. I recommend it.”
— Mark Joseph, author of Faith, God and Rock ‘n’ Roll; columnist, Foxnews.com and the Huffington Post

“Mako’s art reaches from earth to heaven, and so does his poetic prose. His essays on the recent past bring out what a brilliant artist sees and a text-oriented historian might overlook: the texture, color, and poignancy of living in New York after 9/11 and viewing a world laden with both horror and hope.”
— Marvin Olasky, editor-in-chief, WORLD magazine; provost, The King’s College

“In these essays, Makoto Fujimura reveals himself to be an artist not only with pigments but also with words. His translucent prose warrants close, meditative reading to capture the subtle meanings refracted through its poetic lens.”
— Nancy Pearcey, author of Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity

“This elegantly penned collection sets a very high bar for future conversations about faith, art, and the hope we all have for the healing of our fractured world. Makoto Fujimura is a tender prophet of beauty and peace. The breadth of his spiritual vision is awe-inspiring.”
— Ian Morgan Cron, senior pastor, Trinity Church, Greenwich Connecticut; author of Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“Mako Fujimura’s personal memoir circles on the demands of art and faith and their final inseparability. Refractions weaves a tale of art with the flames of 9/11 flickering in the background.”
— Dale Brown, director, the Buechner Institute, King College

“Mako Fujimura is about making peace. And he has long striven to make peace in his art and life. Fujimura represents a new breed of artists, whose lives match their work in their power to inspire. They remind us just how much we need them to notice the miracles.”
— Reverend Sam Andreades, pastor, Village Church, New York City

“These essays weave a luminous tapestry of observation and insight and they’re a great read. Fujimura the artist has become a national treasure, and with these essays he demonstrates that he is also a serious writer and thinker… artful, moving, and bristling with wisdom.”
— Scot Sherman, director, San Francisco Theological Center

“In these remarkable essays — ‘refractions’ indeed — Makoto Fujimura takes us unflinchingly into what he calls the war zone of the human heart, shedding light along the way on how art, fused with a hope born of a deep religious calling, transforms and redeems.”
— Robert Love Taylor, author of Blind Singer Joe’s Blues

“Expanding upon the writing of Kathleen Norris, Mako Fujimura brings together spiritual reflections on the observed world with the devotion of an accomplished painter to his work. Through lived encounters, Mako traces evidence of healing and signs of God’s beauty and grace. Even in moments that seem to beg for closure, he pleads for a certain openness and wonder. And, offering us a glimpse inside his own art, Mako affirms every person’s human capacity to create and serve.”
— Reverend Susan Johnson, Hyde Park Union Church, Chicago, Illinois

Refractions 30: Trout, the Dow and our Bottom Lines

Refractions 30: Trout, the Dow and our Bottom Lines

Part I of II

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, pg 18

They were rising, or tailing the surface. “It’s hard to imitate,” Doug said. “They are feasting on something emerging.” I noted in the swirls of the amber surface a few mayflies with yellow bodies. The river waters smelled of fresh, cold rain from a few days ago. The brown trout (the Scottish kind Doug told me) were dancing not more than ten feet from where we were wading, but we could not see them, even with our polarized glasses. The autumn leaves floated in and out of the swirls, and my fingers no longer felt numb as they did earlier in the day.

The next thirty minutes, we kept on trying multitudes of fly patterns that Doug had in his small box. Inside the dark green lid, diminutive patterns lined up handsomely, from small dark nymphs, looking somewhat sinister with beetle like wings, to muddler minnow streamers with shapely little shaved heads. And then, finally out of options, I took the last pattern I had not tried, a red ant pattern, tied on a minute number 20 hook tightly wound with rust colored thin yarn. As soon as I roll cast the fly line, and the tiny ant turned over to float, I heard a gentle suction beneath the water and felt the line tighten. A small trout with orange spots shimmered in the water, with its silver belly moving sideways, churning the waters in its wake. “It’s a brown, but looks like a rainbow trout,” I said to Doug as he came over to help me take a look, and helped me unhook and release the fish. It was the first fish that took the fly all day. But as soon as I let the line out again, this time whipping it a little upstream, I would see the ant, now slightly battered, disappear again. Another trout, looking like a twin of the first, sprung into action, now tugging at my rod. As Doug released it back into the water, it nudged its head a few times against the sand, still feeling where the wire-thin hook had penetrated in its mouth.

Fishing works like that, I supposed, going all day without any success, but then in a few moments, with just two casts, rewarded with small treasures. Trout with miniscule brains can somehow outwit fishers with thousand-dollar equipment. An experience that convinces you, after all, that we were given permission to glimpse into their secluded world, a rare privilege as recipients of a moment of grace, before the veil closed.

Doug, my “guide,” really is the father of the bride my son, Ty, married over the summer. We had spoken of going out together to fish for a while. And now, in the waning days of the fall, we found a day to travel west from the city into the stretches of water near the border of Pennsylvania. He, an avid fisherman, let me borrow his equipment and lead me to the best spots, which is a substantial, and necessary, part of a successful trip.

Before we saw the day close, a bigger trout took Doug’s Cahill grey pattern, and he was in for a good fight. After Doug fought the sixteen inch brown with a distended belly full of insects, and released it back into the amber water, we packed up and headed for his Dodge.

*


As I imagined the trout going up and down in the stream to catch their morsels in front of me, I had a strange overlap of images. I could not help but to be reminded of the charts of the volatile market captured almost daily in the headlines. It was a few weeks after the Dow lost more than 1000 points, down to the 8000 level that we had not seen since 1998. It was to come up again, ever briefly, and dip to 7000. The volatile market would vacillate up and down, inevitably ending lower. The traders, and ordinary investors, were caught in a downwards spiral.

Unlike the market, you have only something to gain in the river (unless you lose your lures or flies in a snag), and even if you do not catch fish, you know they are there (and sometimes see them, a skittish few, swimming in front of you.) And groups like Trout Unlimited and B.A.S.S. have now made the “catch and release” policy popular, with many of the streams being “no kill zones”, so the idea is we come home without a trophy, worthy of bragging or not. Even without a catch, the serenade of the water, and the afternoon sun warming your face, all amount to a good day even without any action.

As I sought to untangle my lines caused by my inexperience of back casting a fly line, my mind kept on overlapping my effort to find elusive fish in a river, with the gyrations of the market (a tangled mess indeed). It was not long ago that catching fish, or hunting for deer was an economic necessity. Perhaps we have traded our grey Wall Street suit for waders, and the cold, dehumanized floors of Wall Street to a certain grace of the recreational outdoors, two ventures that share in a Darwinian quest for success. Just as we find the stretches of a river hard to read, even seasoned investors and hedge fund managers see the market as being perplexing and difficult to read. Alan Greenspan noted just as much in his recent congressional testimony, confessing that he had “found a flaw” in his ideology and “that’s precisely the reason I was shocked.” The murky river of the economy confounded even the best of the experts.

The forces of nature, too, can be wicked and unrelenting toward the Earth’s inhabitants. Last year, for example, the Delaware River in the Nor’easter of 2007, and surrounding streams suddenly overflowed and flooded overnight, washing away homes along the riverbanks. We might see such incidents as inevitable consequences outside of our control. But if the proper response to nature is to admit that we do not fully understand her mysteries, shall we not do the same with the market?

Lurking deeper beneath the currents of the economic ecosystem is an assumption, or perhaps a presumption. Greenspan had faith in the self-correction of the system, and he was shocked to find that greed and deceit had unbridled multiplying effects. Adam Smith, who many consider to be the father of modern economics, even speaks of the “invisible hand” guiding over each decision made in self interests, which he called “self love.” He stated in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, “by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” (Italics mine) We presume in such goodness, a self-correction, to guide our economic growth. But in these days when greed and fear melts down the economy, or when our favorite fishing stretch does violence to our world, we might do well to consider what the Bible calls the “substance of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1) at work that challenges our presumptions. For the question concerns issues of faith, whether it be our faith in natural or economic cycles or in the “invisible hand.” What can we learn when our expectations go awry? And will our economy, like the river, recover?




*



Doug operates a small elevator company called HandiLift, which serves the metropolitan New York area with handicap accessible elevators. As we negotiated the highways, he told me about his involvement with an entrepreneurial business group. They have success accountability and network sessions, but he felt he had a different bottom line than the others. In a recent newspaper interview, Doug stated:

"We could be a smaller business with more money," Boydston says. "But we’re trying to grow something here. It’s not just growth for its own sake…”

Seeking quality breeds quality, he points out. “If I don’t buy quality, (our vendors are) not going to make it for me.” Doug seems to run his company with multiple bottom lines, seeking more than profit for profit’s sake. He desires to serve his employees, helping them to thrive in his business environment, and raising the quality of his product, from service to execution.

A multiple bottom line would include concerns for ethics and community values. In my conversations with entrepreneurs like Doug, business leaders are increasingly open to considering multiple bottom lines, considering financial, social, environmental and spiritual bottom lines.

David Miller, another friend, founded the Avodah Institute in Princeton,
(and also teaches at Princeton University and serves as the Director of the Princeton University Faith & Work Initiative), to deal with these issues
between workplace and faith. He states in a recent book:

Businesspeople want the ability to bring their whole selves to work--mind, body, and soul--and are no longer satisfied with sacrificing their core identities.... People in the workplace of all levels and types no longer seem willing to leave their soul with the car in the parking lot.
(From God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement)

In my recent discussions with David, we spoke of the overlap of business and art, with a particular focus on this issue of multiple bottom lines. I, of course, advocate for the consideration for beauty, and a nuanced (think color, rather than black and white) approach to be considered even in a hard-nosed business environment.

But, apparently as I have learned of late, having multiple bottom lines from a faith perspective requires a deeper consideration of how we view ourselves, our motives, our priorities and values, or, as Augustine, the 4th century theologian put it, our “order of loves.“

At a recent Entrepreneurial Forum in New York City, I heard a lucid perspective of these questions. Dr. Tim Keller spoke to define the bottom line for Christians.

Tim quotes 1 Corinthians 12 and 13 of the New Testament. It’s the passage that ends with verses that are often used in weddings:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. (1 Corinthians 13:4-8)

“You are supposed to be loving your neighbor as yourself. That is your bottom line. And profits are a means to that end,” he stated. He went on to distinguish between motives that bring honor to only yourself, and the motive to give honor to others. Augustine framed these competing realities in “The City of God”: contrasting “the city of men,” driven by self-centered motives, with “The City of God,” driven by other-centered motives.


But this, assuredly, is easier said than done. Love is not just a sentiment or an ideal, but repeated actions of self-sacrifice for the good of others. This notion runs counter to our survival instincts. In the Darwinian competition of a business reality, it is hard to think beyond the bottom line of a profit motive.

Christians can easily do lip service to these verses, if we treat this verse as an “ideal” reality, but not possible to put into practice. We do often use these verses in marriage ceremonies, but Christian couples experience as much struggles in marriages as non-Christian couples. If we fall short of implementing this principle in our marriages, what are the chances of doing so in our businesses?

Surely finding a business with the bottom line of love can be as elusive as finding a native trout on a cold autumn day.

But the difficulty of execution does not prevent us from thinking through the inevitable consequences of not living in a principled manner consistent with Biblical ordinances. The consequences of not doing so may be far worse than the necessary cost and sacrifice required. We must consider the cost of the stripping of human decency based on a single bottom line of survival, and the effect of dehumanization that will make the enterprise ultimately not sustainable. Pollution due to industrial growth has taught us that inhospitable environments do not ultimately contribute to a thriving economy. Perhaps we need to look at the economy, too, as a river; a river that flows into and out of the heart of our cities. And that river has a reservoir called Wall Street whose tributaries trickle into Main Street.


*


When imbalance in the economy creates havoc, the tendency is to come up with regulations to safeguard us from experiencing another painful downturn, or to limit greed and pollution from taking over. And of course, such measures must be taken to force a paradigm shift in the industry. But corrective measures will not change human behaviors ultimately, for laws can be designed only to limit evil, but cannot create good. We need generative measures that will tap into the holistic realities of community and effect lasting change.

“But perfect love drives out fear,” writes St. John, “because fear has to do with punishment.” (John 4:18) As Biblical love casts out all fear, our efforts must formulate ways to invite creative risks that can counter fear. We need to change the meaning of success to include the holistic thriving of all inhabitants, in order to have meaningful reform. But to consider such a thriving, we must return to our first loves. To be convinced that rivers need to be cleaned up, we must remember the experience of a beautiful river that once was. We need to re-experience our love for the river that once was, so that we can come up with a proper stewardship strategy.

This re-envisioning involves a deeper reflection on the nature of loves, and even challenges the assumptions about economics, as did Adam Smith of the Scottish Enlightenment. Such a journey will consider not just the outcome, but the process of integration that moves us toward a change in belief system.

Dr. Elaine Scarry of Harvard, in her classic little book called Beauty and Being Just, states, “Beauty, sooner or later, brings us into contact with our own capacity for making errors. (pg. 31) In other words, the encounter with beauty convicts us, and that conviction causes transformation. She continues:

The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction – to locate what is true. Both in the account that assumes the existence of the immortal realm and in the account that assumes the nonexistence of the immortal realm, beauty is a starting place for education. (pg. 31)



I am well acquainted with the beauty of a trout. If not, I may not be so ready to release them back. And as I saw them swim away, I asked myself why was a trout made so beautiful if all it is asked to do is survive in the river? If the function of survival were its only bottom line, then why this wasteful extravagance in the details of intricate design? A gentle reminder of ephemeral nature of our lives does point to the beauty of the moment. And this does not require faith in the Creator. An atheist and a theist can share a common fly stream. Standing side by side, we can both be “educated” by the details of extravagance.

Then I asked myself, what is the object of such beauty that would sway our business to operate differently, to “locate what is true” in the economy?

*

St. Paul, when he was writing his epistle to a group in Corinth, was perfectly aware that such teachings and seeking after truth will seem “impossible” to mortal ears. And yet, he did not see himself operating in a gap between the ideal and the real. He saw it as the greater Reality at work behind the convoluted worldly system devoid of hope. That’s why he makes an audacious claim that “Love never fails.” (1 Corinthians 13:8) The impossible becomes the only path to the future, and the Good News is to claim that Christ, the very embodiment of love, prepared that path to appear before us.

And if he is right, then all things or systems that work against the principle of love will fail eventually. Sacrificial love, in other words, is the only sustainable operating force in the universe. We can complain that we simply cannot accept the assumptions proposed here; but Christians should not be able to operate, if we do indeed believe these principles, in some half way land, on one hand claiming to believe the ordinances, but also functionally accepting the worldly systems at work as the only reality.

The medium of beauty in a business world is the workers that make the businesses run. It’s not the stock options or profit. They comprise far more capacity, and far deeper longing and invigorated promise for future generations than the system gives them credit for. So the question is not whether they are paid enough, or given enough work: the question is, does the workplace enlarge humanity, or endanger humanity.

Thus, we need to see the market not just as a tool to make money, but a complex labyrinth with a generative creative order. In such an ecosystem, we need to consider investments as a form of stewardship. Conversely, we may redefine investments as a way to create and sustain beauty, rather than gain power for ourselves. And true beauty, at her truest aim, is a humble stream that flows through the heart of a city, re-humanizing its inhabitants, and allowing them to breath in what would otherwise be unbearable air.

Beauty flows out of love. Beauty is in the presence of love, an aroma of re-creation. A beautiful business would consider the context of that busy-ness, to create an opportunity for fully human expression to take place. I asked one Christian executive what a beautiful business would look like to him. He paused for a long time and said: “it’s when I had to fire my staff due to restructuring, and instead of having my human resources person fire them, I spent time with them to notify them personally and to ask if they would allow me to help them transition into a position with another company. It was one of the hardest times of my life, but looking back, I needed to do that.” Such care may not be taught in business schools (imagine a class called “Leadership 101: how to let your staff go.”) But would be part of a fallen, but re-humanized business practice.

The floors of the stock exchange, by contrast, can be a place of brutal commerce, devoid of that humanity. But the Exchange floors are not the only place where forces of dehumanization can work. Same thing can be said of Chelsea art galleries, our universities, or even church offices. Our art, education and spiritual endeavors must be hospitable, beyond just utilitarian functionality, to invite others to a journey toward the City of God. We must be invested in so much more than profit driven reality if our bottom line is sacrificial love, as defined by the Bible.

It does make sense to me, then, that Doug operates a Handicapped accessible elevator service. It even seems symbolic. He is considering service toward a re-humanized city. Often is the case that our limitations, even our handicaps, can point us to a greater innovation, even greater art. Even an elevator can be as beautiful as a trout stream.

Art, too, can refract beauty in its wake. Art follows nature, pointing to the same generative reality. Art, too, can serve, just as connected to the disabled realities of our lives. But art has also presumed in the “invisible hand” that guides the process, never questioning that ego-filled landscape of art might regress, rather than progress. Perhaps we need to consider that rooted beneath all of art is a much more sane and humble premise than celebrity or success. Perhaps art is to the economy what trout are to a stream: beauty that once caught, can be, and needs to be, released back generously into the cultural waters so that those who come after us can enjoy them. Perhaps that generosity is what makes waters teeming with created gems that delight our senses and sustain our well-being.


Makoto Fujimura, December 2008

image: Winslow Homer's Jumping Trout image overlaid with the Dow chart

Refractions 29: The Island of the Misfit Toys Part II

Matthaias Grunewald (1470-1528), Isenheim Altarpiece, Colmar, France





Refractions 29: The Island of the Misfit Toys, Part II

Jasper Johns, Grunewald and Life after Life after Death


“Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” Heraclitus, Fragments


N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, wanted the title of his new book to be “Life after Life after Death.” Harper Collins, his publisher, decided the title would be a bit confusing, so they re-named it as “Surprised by Hope,” surely more conventional, but an appropriate nod to C.S. Lewis’ classic book “Surprised by Joy.” I prefer Bishop Wright’s initial instinct; for the audacious reality of the resurrection claim does not invite easy, conventional titles. The claim of Christianity was, and is, a Jewish carpenter from Nazareth who redefined life, death and, the Life thereafter. The expression “Life after Life after Death ”invites us to a severe paradigm shift in our thoughts on life and death. What we think of as the end, is only a pause,: and the pause is only the beginning; a beginning of a new beginning.

N.T. Wright points out that the popular culture’s distortion of the idea of heaven has truncated the true message of the gospel. He notes, for example, Maria Shriver’s version of heaven, written in her book to children – “is somewhere you believe in… It’s a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk to other people who are there…If you’re good throughout your life, then you get to go to heaven…” (quoted in pg. 17) He argues that the language of heaven in the New Testament doesn’t work that way.” “’God’s Kingdom’ in the preaching of Jesus refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God’s sovereign rule coming ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’” (Pg. 18) Heaven, in other words, is not our final destination (as in speaking of Life after Death) : but the biblical writers spoke of the New Heavens and the New Earth, a reconciled whole in which we will inhabit, work and create (Life after Life after Death). We are called to assist in the creation of this new reality through our earthly lives, bringing justice, mercy and beauty into our broken realities. Instead of people simply “going to heaven,” The Bible tells us that at a future point in history, Heaven comes to us, and earth will be re-birthed in one glorious fulfillment of hope someday. “Heaven,” Wright continues, “is the place where God’s purposes for the future are stored up. It isn’t where they are meant to stay so that one would need to go to heaven to enjoy them; it is where they are kept safe against the day when they will become a reality on earth.” (Pg. 151)

This view of the scriptures directly impacts how we are to view our calling as culture makers. Especially in evangelical circles, many will argue that earth is to be burnt up in the Judgment fire of God, and everything will be destroyed anyhow, so why worry about culture at all. Wright walks through this issue carefully in his book, noting and clarifying many theological nuances deftly, correcting the knee-jerk anti-culture stance of the “Left Behind” theology. Even if you do not fully agree with all of his theological conclusions, his arguments are worth exploring.

I’ve always wondered why, for instance, in 2 Peter 3:10, it is not the earth that is burned up, but heaven. (“The heavens will disappear with a roar.”) And why 1 Corinthians 3 passages give a resounding nod to the remarkable idea that even our works, and not only our souls, will remain after the Judgment. Further, as another theologian Richard Mouw points out in his wonderful book, When the Kings Come Marching in: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem, Isaiah 60 and Revelation passages seem to point to the final celebration of the coming of this new Reality, would have pagan Kings and secular ships sailing into the edges of New Jerusalem. In other words, cultural influencers of all types, whether classified as Christians or not, seem to end up joining the parade in some way.

This pro-culture stance, based on what theologians call common grace, makes sense because our effort to bring beauty, justice and peace into the world is a universal calling. Theologically, I am not a Universalist, one that believes that all roads lead to heaven. But scriptures points to a universalistic bent of culture making that bring beauty and empathy into the world. After all, don’t we desperately desire to know that our efforts to create, to administer justice and to bring mercy into the world, are not in vain. To this longing, N.T. Wright goes further than mere affirmation. He states;

You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are – strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself – accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. (pg. 208)


In other words, earth is connected to heaven NOW. Further, anyone can be agents of change, partake in Godly activities without even having the assurance of our eternal destiny (i.e., not be a church going person who does not confess to being a Christian). By God’s sheer grace, we are invited to generate the new Reality of the “Life after Life after Death” into our broken realities of all of our Wasteland. Common grace allows for competency to be universal as well. This is why I would rather have a competent plumber who does not share my faith than an incompetent one that tries to give me a Biblical reason why I should hire him.

Culture shaping is not an escapist activity from our current woes: instead it is breathing life into the very ashes from our present and our past, and finding, with T.S. Eliot, “the still point of the turning world.” Generative creativity flows out of not just Eden, but out of this reality of “Life after Life after Death.” We can begin to deposit our efforts into the future, rather than hope to escape into our Edenic past. Our earth, no matter how bleak, is full of promise on this side of Easter. Heaven can invade into our art of life, right in the midst of our ground zeros.

And if the earth acts as a conduit of heaven, then this yeast-like hope can be worked into the dough of culture. Naturally, as I pondered Wright’s comments, I began to ask what if art is infused with heaven, what would that art look like? If true understanding of heaven is not mere escapism, but the physical manifestation of the “substance of things hoped for,” (Hebrews 11:1) then art needs to echo this promise into tangible reality. If Wright is correct, then even ephemeral expressions done in faith will remain etched in eternal reality, and somehow earth, all of earth, is fair game for heaven’s invasion. And every act, done in faith, will count.



AS I mulled over the enormous impact that Wright’s thoughts have had in recent days in my journey of faith, Jasper John’s recent exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum kept on sneaking into my thoughts. Of course, you might rightly ask, what has Jasper Johns got to do with N.T. Wright, or ask what has Jesus got to do with Jasper Johns, one of the most enigmatic of contemporary artists? But the “Life after Life after Death” notion does force us to ask such surreal and surprising questions. This heavenly invasion creates a ripple effect into the details of art and life: and that power cannot be tamed by any of us, but will spill out into the general culture. Thus the true test of this radical premise would force us to ask whether works by a contemporary artist that seem contradictory to themselves, and are agnostic at best can teach us something about the resurrection? Indeed, I am convinced that Johns’ works do this, but the key to understanding this principle is linked to John’s admiration of a little known German artist named Matthaias Grunewald (1470-1528), whose altarpieces are in Colmar, France. Grunewald, in my creative journey as well, stands out as one of the greatest post-reformation artists.



Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958, Whitney Museum

Jasper Johns, a central figure in the contemporary art scene, became famous for his encaustic flag paintings, setting a record at a contemporary art auction in 1980, selling for one million dollars. This turned out to be a bargain: recently David Geffin sold a Johns piece for $80 milllion dollars.



He has been known for his cryptic, zen-like images of numbers, more flags, targets and more recently, works that what seem to address multidimensionality constructs while still remaining paintings. The current Metropolitan exhibit surveys the last 50 years of his work, but to call it merely “a survey of a leading post-modern artist” would do injustice to his works. Even in our post-modern reality, the art of Johns is far closer to the reality of the post-resurrection, mirroring what Wright calls Life after Life after Death, than many would dare to admit. It is far more profoundly refracts the new creation reality than, let’s say, Thomas Kinkade’s sympathetic, cozy paintings.

In Johns’ later paintings, which the Metropolitan exhibit gives considerable attention to, writers note their many visual connections to the Grunewald altarpiece in Colmar, France. Johns repeatedly visited the altarpiece, and was moved by the painting. This connection has proven irresistible to me over the years, and to see Johns’ paintings is to rediscover the many hidden references to the altarpiece. For me, it is impossible to see his later works without pondering the visual reference to Grenewald. Of course, commentators typically limit the nature of this affection, as in “he may have been moved by its aesthetic properties far more than its religious mythology.” But knowing how a creative mind works, and how a profound experience can alter and, even, haunt, an artist’s imaginative vision, I dare say that any profound aesthetic influence is, in the essential core, spiritual.

After my journey of faith turned to Christ, a Japanese dealer gave me a magazine with a pull-out of images of the altarpiece. He said, “You now need to study him.” I remember with fresh faith and fresh vision, marveling at the details of Christ’s sore filled body, and the triumphant reversal of that violence in the moment of the resurrection of Christ. The images out of the magazine opened up a new vista of creativity, and the resurrection panel, especially, leapt out at me. It was one of the few images of the resurrection that felt weighty, and not disembodied, like Dali’s image of an incorporeal Christ.



The monastery of St. Anthony in Isenheim near Colmar, where the image was commissioned for, is known as a place where skin disease sufferers, commonly called “Saint Anthony’s Fire” or ergotism, was treated. “Annales Xantenses for the year 857: ‘a Great plague of swollen blisters consumed the people by a loathsome rot, so that their limbs were loosened and fell off before death.’”







Thus, the artist embodied the sores and loosened limbs in the body of Christ. When patients, who were taken in by the monks, looked up at the image of Christ, they saw Jesus suffer with him. And as they looked beyond to the panel behind the crucifix, they saw his bodily resurrection from life, and from the pain and suffering. And it was this resurrection panel that Jasper Johns profoundly connected with.




Richard Shiff, in one of the essays contributed for “Gray” exhibit catalogue, states:

The aim of an artist as a creative individual, Jasper Johns suggested recently, is to do ‘something a little more worthwhile than oneself.’…To be worth more, you would need to change in a fundamental way – change your life – or, at the least, experience change and become a channel for its communication.

In other words, art can function to mediate transformative experiences, and to create a conversation around them. Jasper Johns suggests here that in order to do so, one must transcend oneself in some way. This humble premise, one that stands apart as an anomaly in today’s ego filled art making, opens a way for a conversation of art as a catalyst for transformation, not just for the artist, but for society at large. Humility can lead us to a higher vista of creativity, and Johns’ process of creativity stands out in an Island of the Misfit Toys called Manhattan. His idiosyncratic journey, though shared with Rauschenberg and other luminaries of his time, is unlike any other of his time. His creative approach may suggest even a paradigm shift in contemporary art toward our new century.

Johns’ works are intentionally obscured by negation as a premise, as much as the affirmation of a path of “The Road Less Traveled.” Thus even his personal connection to Grunewald is also made unclear in his own works. The idea of direct connection to meaning, intent with the content of an artwork, is being refuted by Johns, and it is precisely this disconnect that has become his signature style. By disassociating himself, and his works, from conventionality, he takes simple, common imagery and turns it, with a deft slight of hand, into a philosophical and aesthetic riddle. If art is about asking questions, and not giving pat answers, then Johns’ works are creating a labyrinth of questions, one that, somehow, end up invigorating us, rather than alienating us.


Take, for example, his famed Three Flags painting (the one million dollar painting). Upon first glance (especially in photographs or on the web), the work seems to be a facile rendition of a three US flags, with differing sizes, stacked on top of another. But as with all of Johns’ works, a simple image provokes so many questions. Why paint the American flag (he claims to have seen a dream of the painting)? Did he have a patriotic cause in mind? Or is he mocking the subject? Johns’ answer would be simply that the flag was a convenient vehicle for the act of painting, or to ask questions that he desires to deal with, and to do it with an object that he found immediate access to.

The flag paintings are done in a typical Johns encaustic technique, an ancient wax technique of painting that goes back to Egyptian times. In the surface of the Flag paintings are torn newspapers, covered by melted wax. Johns creates deceptively simple, and flat, but when you look closely, the gestures undulates, complicating the surface.

Critic and art historian Max Kozloff writes:

This [newsprint] would be a hidden collage…The “real” is whatever is underneath, partially withheld from sight. Art reticently covers up or shields life, instead of assimilating and triumphing over it as in traditional collage.

In the accumulated collage of newspaper and wax, Johns actually goes beyond copying the imagery, and manages not to make the image banal. Somehow, in the execution of his painting, he imbeds tension and history, and creates a precious object. There is even a sense that the act of painting has become a private ritual of sacred order: but, at the same time, by choosing known ordinary objects, like the American Flag, targets, a beer can, he intentionally reduces the impact, deceptively making us question the preciousness of the object. With lesser able hands, the same motif, even with same materials, most artist would not come close to creating such a tension; art is both in the execution and in the revelation of the extraordinary.

I’ve heard many people say of contemporary art: “my kids can do that.” I encourage them, then to try it themselves, don’t let kids have all the fun! Try to make drip paintings like Jackson Pollock. Or paint an object with encaustic, layering color upon color, like Johns. Try silk screening images like Warhol. You soon find out that in the ordinary gestures and materials, there are deceptively complicated and sublime twists. Our drips become unnatural and confined, where as Pollock’s drips dance, and form delectable edges that seem to undulate in front of our eyes. Our edges of encaustic strokes become unshapely, because If you try working with wax (as I have tried to in college,) you find out soon enough that it is unforgiving, making it very difficult to create a clean, sharp definition. The melting wax constantly oozes, and moves about, and the colors muddle,. If you are finally able to paint a stripe with bright colors, the stripes would not resonate, in ways that Johns’ Flags do.

And that is to speak only of the method of execution. Johns’ works not only collage materials, but they also synthesize concepts, culture, the zeitgeist of his day. One may be able to copy his technique, but it is impossible to mimic the complex layers of confluences that he is synthesizing as he mixes beeswax and pigments. To Jasper Johns, the medium of his art is not really encaustic, the medium of his art is Time itself.

He stated:

I prefer work that appears to come out of a changing focus – not just one relationship or even a number of them but constantly changing and shifting relationships to things in terms of focus…I am concerned with a thing’s not being what it was, with its becoming something other than what it is, with any moment in which one identifies a thing precisely and with the slipping away of that moment.


Johns, like the Greek philosopher Heraclitus believes that “everything is in flux.” By “changing focus,” and dealing with “changing and shifting relationships,” his art focuses on what is not static. But then he intentionally uses objects and symbols of static fixture, like the American Flag and targets, to ironically remind us that even what the culture considers iconic as an American Flag is not a static construct, and targets can be, well, moving targets. His task is to force us to recognize “any moment in which one identifies a thing precisely and with the slipping away of that moment.” His use of encaustic, an ancient medium used in Egyptian times, makes sense in this emphasis on the ephemeral. The material itself is both vulnerable to heat and cold, but also remarkably stable, if kept in the proper climate,. Encaustic is a paradoxical emblem of change and stasis.

Thus, the art of Johns operates in “constant negation of impulses,” ( pg. 84) and therefore, his art cannot be simply “Pop” imagery, and is not readily digestible in the way Warhol’s paintings are. Johns’ creativity demands more of us, and his exhibits are full of maps (sometimes literally, in his series of American maps) that depict visual riddles swirling deeply in the currents of culture. The journey of a viewer on that river can be full of generative discovery. Good art gives birth, impregnated with meaning for future creative journeys.

But if the trajectory of his career only points to this paradoxical, and confounding “negation of impulses,” then it could fall short of providing a meaningful dialogue, and end up being just a game, or worse yet, an existential, and hopeless, end-game. What Johns found intriguing in the Grunewald panels, especially the resurrection panel, must have been a confluence of paradox, astonishment and transformative but also definitive, and static, reality. Therefore his later paintings, like “Untitled” 1992-95, which seem to irk the critics as they are less ironic, and more personal and dreamy, seem to me to be the most generative and inquisitive. They point to an ontological question (question of origins), rather than being stubbornly agnostic. As with all intuitive artists, such deep existential wrestling may release, in process, a deeper reality. Perhaps Johns found the greatest enigma of all; or perhaps he sensed that his art needed to point to the supra-natural enigma, not be trapped in a closed cycle of natural causes.


Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1992-94

If so, Jasper John’s trajectory points to a generative reality that very few contemporary artists have dared to tread. The supra-natural enigma is the question of Time, and how we, as artists, deal with the eternal timeful questions. Something happened at the beautiful little village in France called Colmar to one of the greatest living artists of our time. We need to pay attention to this journey. Perhaps we can make that pilgrimage ourselves to Colmar, France, transfixed, looking up at the ascending Christ, in wonderment and delight.

Makoto Fujimura, 2008

Makoto Fujimura's New Commission for a New Haven Church

Dear Refraction Readers

Thanks to Brad Guise, a premier fashion photographer, Christianity Today selected the image above for their cover this month. The background painting is "Splendor-Ghost," which was part of my Charis exhibit at Dillon Gallery. My wife and Judy and I were also blessed this summer by the marriage of our son Ty and his long time friend Priscilla, which also took place at Dillon Gallery during my show.



















I realized that this, too, was a fulfillment of promise that I wrote about in a Refraction essay "A Wedding and a City."

Valerie Dillon, the owner of Dillon Gallery, also told me that her friend had requested to have a memorial service at a gallery during my exhibit. So during my exhibit, my works stood behind both a wedding and a memorial service.

I now have a sense that my art should serve as a backdrop to the joys and sorrows of family and community. Art should mediate as a servant of humanity, to act as a theatrical backdrop to our human dramas. A friend of mine noted, musing, "it would be hard to imagie a wedding taking place in any other gallery in Chelsea." Imagine getting wed in front of a Damien Hirst (as much as I admire his art), or a memorial service in front of Jeff Koons? I told Valerie Dillon, who generously donated the space to my son and my daughter in law, that perhaps a gallery should take as a compliment that it is fit to host such meaningful functions. We are all looking for a "third place" in culture to wed, to lament and to celebrate our humanity.

My next Refractions entry on Jasper Johns will be out later this month. The book version of Refraction essays (up to 2006 and extensively re-written) will be out next February, so stay tuned...

Charis,

Mako Fujimura

Refractions 28: The Island of the Misfit Toys Part 1

Refractions 28: The Island of the Misfit Toys: New York's Avant-Garde Artists of the late 20th Century

Part 1: Robert Rauschenberg

Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. Gaston Bachelard

I had been working on a Refractions entry on the works of American contemporary artist Jasper Johns, when the news of Robert Rauschenberg passing away hit the news wires. Rauschenberg was Johns' comrade in the frontlines of the avant-garde art world. Both artists are now considered seminal and central to twentieth century American art. Along with other notable figures such as John Cage (composer), Merce Cunningham (dancer/choreographer) and avant-garde painters such as Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock, Rauschenberg redefined the landscape of contemporary art. The radical nature of their art challenged and shaped the new capital of art, continuing a century of dominance of American art, and of the New York art scene.

These artists left an indelible mark in my artistic vision during my undergraduate years, as I visited New York museums and galleries, having several notable "epiphany" experiences there (Gorky's retrospective at Guggenheim Museum in the early 80's being most potent). I wrestled with their art, often with the question of "what is art?" or even "is this art?" These questions continued during my stay in Tokyo as a National Scholar graduate student in the Nihonga department. As I learned the revered tradition of Japan, these artists, like characters in a theatre of the absurd, kept creeping into my consciousness, dancing in and out of the process of my works.

They were misfits, but the island of Manhattan did serve as a perfect backdrop to these artists' existential dramas. Surely, there was to be a unique destiny for those willing to eek out a meager living in their illegal lofts, without having to sell a single painting for many years, receiving ridicule after ridicule if they were fortunate enough to have their works shown. These vanguard creators always lived in tension, both in their art and in life, often juxtaposing contradictions together in a patchwork. No simple or singular definition of their art, or their lives, would suffice: they were surprisingly varied in their personalities, political persuasions, and aesthetic dispositions, but found a common ground in their ambitions and in their brokenness. They were quite like the toys on the Island of the Misfit Toys: and in Rauschenberg's world, Charley in the Box, the pink spotted elephant, and the red-nosed reindeer would all find a place in a single canvas.

In writing Rauschenberg's New York Times obituary, Michael Kimmelman states that Rauschenberg's work "helped obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life..." He made art with an extraordinary sense of design, appropriating media imagery, inventing with any found materials he saw fit to use. Beds, broom sticks, stuffed birds and animals, quilts, bicycles, cardboard, newspaper..., it seemed there were no materials forbidden in his art. His greatest contribution, though, may not be in bringing ordinary objects into museums; instead, he brought Art into life's ordinary objects. He, along with another seminal twentieth century figure, Joseph Beuys, desired to liberate art to the everyday person. His visual language of combining text, newspaper images, advertisements and objects, often in a contradictory manner, seemed eclectic and electric at the same time. He was never a profound artist: but every object was, to him, indeed profound. His art teaches us to consider every moment, every material as potential material for art. "You begin with the possibilities of the material," he has stated, "I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made of the real world."

Calvin Tomkins' book Off the Wall, one of the most interesting book on Rauschenberg's art and his contemporaries, notes that Rauschenberg as a child, as with Cage, had desired to be a preacher;

"Our church was so strict that it was a full-time job for any Christians just to search for evils," according to Rauschenberg. "Even so, I was going to be a preacher until I was about thirteen. I was really serious about it. Finally I decided I couldn't spend the rest of my life thinking everyone else was going to hell, but I kept on going to church - I still went when I was in the Navy and for some time afterward. Giving that up was a major change in my life." (Pg. 15, Off the Wall, Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, Calvin Tomkins, 1980 Penguin Books)

Indeed I find it remarkable that these avant-garde artists, while denying and often decrying the institution of Christianity, and living transgressive lifestyles, delved deeply into theosophy (Mondrian), Zen (Cage, Johns) and Jewish mysticism (Rothko, Kline), often blending these religious traditions, almost like Rauschenberg paintings. Mark Rothko equated the process of painting to a religious experience. Many of them, like Cage, Rauschenberg, and Johns were brought up in Protestant church. Often these influences are treated as footnotes in the accounts of the art and life of these artists. But when you consider their artistic trajectories, especially in what they chose to work against, and how they saw their commitment to art as "religious," then clearly their early development figures quite significantly.(1) Barnett Newman, the high priest of the religion on avant-gardes explicitly stated, "instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man or life, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings."(2) In discussion of contemporary art, such crucial details of counter-spirituality are often left out. In understanding culture and her spiritual journey, what the artists were wrestling against is just as noteworthy as what they embraced.

John Cage, in developing his compositions, or, perhaps it is more accurate to say, reducing things to non-compositions, worked squarely against the classical tradition. His 4'33", 1952 work is performed without a single note being played. Why 4'33"? Artist David O'Connell, a colleague of both Cage and Rauschenberg, states: "He did a survey and came up with the average time spent getting comfortable in their seats coughing, opening gum and candy wrapper etc... Both he and Bob had the ability to turn the camera around and point it at the spectator." The pianist, thus, simply sat in his chair, and the listeners were to hear the environmental sound as "music". He boldly asserted that "Beethoven was in error, and his influence, which has been extensive as it has been lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music" (Tomkins, Pg. 70). Not only was he working against the classical tradition, he wrestled against the conservative, controlling environment of the church he grew up in. He saw art as a way to explore his spirituality, seeking answers in Zen Buddhism and incorporating elements of I Ching (ancient Chinese cosmology.)


Cage often spearheaded other avant-garde artists' experiments, generating a new creative language of openness, freedom and transcendence. Though they did not intentionally intend to do so starting out, they created a new religion of the avant-garde, preaching their virtues eloquently, persuading countless numbers of artists to join in. The world they depicted anticipated the spiritual climate of post-modernity, and the multi-media culture to come. Avant-garde expressions and artifacts echo Hazel Mote's "Church without Christ" in Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood." If to O'Connor the south was "Christ haunted," then so was the avant-gardes scene in lower Manhattan. What is in the negative can be revelatory.

Negative spaces are just as important as positive shapes, so we learn in a drawing class. If a chair is to be drawn, a good instructor will help the student pay attention to the shapes in between the legs of the chairs, or the back rests, as much in the "positive shapes" of the chair itself. In the same way, these artists depicted the spiritual climate by negative shapes, but by doing so they effectively described the shape and influence of the churches they rejected. Their observations serve as an invaluable service for the church, as they gave shape to the spiritual vacuum that pervades our culture today. They are important precisely because they depict an honest spiritual wrestling within empty spaces.(3) In that sense, art can always point to the profound, and, even in perverse disagreements, artists accurately reveal the spiritual vacuum. But, while they rejected the church, I contend that they did not throw out Jesus altogether. Many of these artists, Warhol, Beuys, Newman...perhaps, do I dare say, all of these artists would be interested in Jesus of Nazareth simply because of the extraordinary means through which Jesus communicated to the world. Jesus often confounded his disciples, using unconventional terminologies. Jesus spoke in negative shapes, too, upsetting the authorities. Jesus transgressed -- but he transgressed in love. An artist is always interested in an Artist. For me, even to reflect on the work of a contemporary artist is to wrestle deeply with questions of faith. For me, the role of an artist and a follower of Christ in contemporary culture is to transgress in love, learning from Jesus.

In Rauschenberg's key work Monogram, an installation/combine piece with a stuffed Angora goat placed upon a collaged canvas. This important work reveal an artist surveying images from all around him (literally) walking about in his South Street seaport blocks, and salvaging objects being thrown out, appropriating all influences, but especially and notably specific Christian iconography. There's a clear overlap between Monogram and 19th century British artist Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat. Rauschenberg took Hunt's image of the goat as Christ, and re appropriated it. Rauschenberg may have walked away from the church, but spirituality, and even the tenets of the gospel, were never far from his creative core. Art to Rauschenberg was like a truth serum, and all of what he saw, experienced, and even rejected, was blurted out on canvas. Undeniably, he wrestled with the reality of Christ throughout his career. But the way Rauschenberg wrestled was unlike the way of a traditional artist such as Holman Hunt. No, Rauschenberg's process of creativity worked like a powerfully intuitive search engine that explored the deep recesses of cultural realities. A traditional artist like Hunt focused on communicating already accepted spirituality. Rauschenberg probed deeper. And in doing so Rauschenberg's vast speculative purveyance actually anticipated how we are to experience the world in the years to come.

Consider this: if my thoughts were to be projected onto a screen, even in the process of writing this, I am sure it would look a bit like a Rauschenberg painting. Part of this essay was completed while riding a transatlantic airplane 892 kilometers per hour, at 34,000 feet, assimilating various thoughts; I watched a Japanese movie (Yama san, a "salary-man" goes fishing, and ends up fighting against the company he works for. The company wanted to destroy the beautiful coastal town known for fishing with their real estate venture), I pondered the shapes of the terrains of Alaskan territories on a video map in front of me (thinking of Andy Goldsworthy's terrain drawings in the documentary Rivers and Tides), while listening to Alison Krauss on my iPod... these thoughts, and other random thoughts, are like elements of a collage, interdependent, but often competing. Our lives are "combines" being simultaneously worked on.


Of course, such thinking could become a self-fulfilling prophesy of an artistic kind. It could be that I see the world through Rauschenberg's eyes because I am trained to see the world through an artist's lens. But even so, to be given such an inclination is the mark and influence of a significant artist, one who facilitates the viewers' imaginative journeys. As Time magazine critic Robert Hughes has noted in Shock of the New, we will never see a cypress tree in the same way after seeing a van Gogh painting. Likewise, we may never see a worn out quilt, or the collage of competing neon signs called Times Square, in the same way after Rauschenberg.

***

In 1951, it was John Cage who became Rauschenberg's first collector (Tomkins, pg. 65). Although Cage could not pay the price being asked which was less than $100 then, he convinced dealer Betty Parsons to allow him to take a pink work home. But one day, Rauschenberg snuck into Cage's loft, and repainted it completely in black with enamel.


That painting would be worth tens of millions of dollars today. A Rauschenberg just recently sold for $14.6 million. Of course, the fact that their works now sell in the upper echelons of an auction market (often without the artists getting a single penny from the auction transaction) made these avant-garde artists newsworthy for the first time. But our interest here goes beyond the auction prices, to Rauschenberg's true cultural value as a pioneer. We must not forget that Rauschenberg was the first living contemporary American artist to be recognized and honored overseas. Others like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko who died too early to allow for such a retrospective. Rauschenberg's notoriety, after winning the coveted Venice Biennial in 1964, extended far beyond the reach of any other American artist. I remember the exhibit at Setagaya Museum in Japan in 1986, when he exhibited, among other pieces, the biggest print ever made (it was still in progress). His prodigious output took over the vast halls of the museum, and in Japan where small and compact things are the norm, Rauschenberg's works seemed delightfully outlandish and raw. By going to a Rauschenberg exhibit, the viewers were baptized into contemporary American art. By the time the viewers walked out of a Rauschenberg exhibit, the fresh "melting pot" called America had become a delectable collage, so democratically arranged, blatantly and confidently imprinted in their visual memory.





True artists swim upstream of culture, and their work will eventually affect the entire river. What seemed once peripheral, inconsequential gestures, their experiments and thoughts, now takes up center stage of a global popular culture. What was upstream a decade ago is now downstream. The jarring array of competing, but uniform patterns of the YouTube culture, ambitious collage of time events over vast geography in movies like Babel, the blurring of high and low art in Takashi Murakami's orgiastic world at his recent Brooklyn Museum exhibit, all can be traced to Rauschenberg's canvas (although, one can rightly argue that Warhol was ahead of both.) Takashi was my classmate in Nihonga department, so he must have seen the Rauschenberg exhibit of 1986. Our thoughts, our media and our conversations in general are filled with such Rauschenbergian incidental gestures, thinly spread smears of competing stimuli. Our lives, and perhaps even our identities, are collaged tapestry, sometimes neatly arranged, sometimes warring against another. What is now a ubiquitous hodgepodge of post-modern montage was not only anticipated in Rauschenberg's images, but they serve to warn us as an emblem of our overloaded, scattered lives. What Rauschenberg was appropriating was not just newspaper images, but actual experiences of our time: he froze the movements of contemporary moments that bombard us everyday, and he thereby mediated our fragmented realities. In that, he was exceedingly successful, often masterful. He breathed life into transient images, giving them reprieve from our disposable culture, literally rescuing our cultural memories from the dumpster. "Materials are never wrong," Rauschenberg said. "It's only me that can be wrong." (Off the Wall, pg. 213)


His materials may not be wrong, but they are not permanent. When I saw his last exhibit of his assemblages, including the famed "Bed" paintings, at the Metropolitan Museum, I noticed that the colors of these assemblages have already become pale, losing the zest and impact that I remember them to have when I saw them as a teenager. People passed by in a whisper in the hallowed halls, and Rauschenberg, according to a friend who went to pay homage to him at the opening, wept the whole time. He knew that the end was near for him. I wonder if the backdrop of the decaying assemblages spoke back to the creator of them, even more than the visitors' well wishes. Whether Rauschenberg's assemblages can be preserved remains to be seen. What we know for sure, though, is that contemporary art will not be the same again.


Rauschenberg's process-focused art refracts time, trapped in materials, in a generous spatial display. Did he generate more than that? We are not sure, yet. Kimmelman is right that Rauschenberg obscured the boundaries between genres of the arts: but it is also true that Rauschenberg obscured the notion of time itself. While his combines are decaying with time, his prints, including the largest print ever pulled, will outlast any of us, trapping time and sequence of historical events. Unlike other artists, he remained remarkably consistent in the signature style he developed, without the works becoming too staid and repetitive. The question that we must ask is whether he captured something deeper in the blurred lines of time and space.

The purpose of art is to mediate and steward Time. Artists do this via space and matter, being poets of materials. Writers can do this through words, dancers via movements of their bodies, architects via creation of space. Their work is to make Time freeze, and even "create" Time. When a gifted artist does this, the art creates, or taps into, Time-fulness. If the purpose of art is to mediate and steward Time, did Robert Rauschenberg not only capture time, but generate Time-fulness? That is the ultimate question he, or any artist, has to answer. Such deep quests need to be considered, and in order to do so, we must, for our next Refractions, turn our attention to his fellow journeyman, Jasper Johns, one of the few living artists from the heyday of the avant-garde movement of twentieth century. Johns delves into these deep philosophical, and metaphysical, questions. For if Rauschenberg danced with Time over his paintings in a blur, Johns imbeds Time right into his paintings.



Late in his life, Rauschenberg, influenced by the art and culture of India, stated; "everything is relative, that everything is acceptable, and that you don't have to be afraid of beauty, either." Of course, critics sneered, for the notion of beauty was taboo in late twentieth century art. When I began to show in SoHo in the 90's, it was still unfashionable to speak of beauty, or use beautiful materials of Nihonga. Perhaps the resurgence of material and beauty in the art world that we are experiencing today began with Rauschenberg's generous art. Quintessentially American, original and prolific, Rauschenberg's images do lead us, like a strange red nosed reindeer, right into the thick fogs of our post-modern night. His images, even in decay, would resonate to those who look for signs of good fortune from a strangely, but beautifully, collaged sky.



Makoto Fujimura


The author acknowledges and thanks artist David O'Connell, who knew "Bob," for invaluable assistance in preparing this essay.

Next Refractions: Part II Jasper Johns and "Life After Life After Death."


(1)"The development of abstract painting in the early 20th century was a religious as well as an aesthetic movement." (What Good are the Arts, pg 137, John Carey, Faber and Faber UK, 2005)
(2)Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, Knopf, New York, 1990, Pg. 173
(3)My wife, a psychotherapist, tells me that there is "negative space" in relationships as well. Children, for example, growing up in consistent parenting grows the ability to take the failures of a parent as "negative space" and infer, or learn, to take positive message out of a parent's failure. See www.judycares.com under "Judy cares about my parents."

Image:

Robert Rauschenberg
Retroactive I, 1964,
Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas,
84 x 60 in. (213.4 x 152.4 cm),
Wadsworth Athenuem,
Hartford, Connecticut

Refractions 27: A Wedding and the City

Refractions 27: A Wedding and the City

On a rainy Saturday morning in February, Judy and I attended a wedding in the city. The bride was a daughter of good friends involved with a mission organization that serves the poor in the city. The Kleinknechts became for us surrogate city parents when we moved back to the New York area in 1992, guiding us on school choices, shopping options and churches to check out. Their daughter, Morgen, and their son, David, both attended public schools. We did, after all, need much help navigating how to raise our kids in New York City. We have had many mentors in our lives, and we are grateful for them all.

The Kleinknechts were involved in a church planting project which became the Redeemer movement and invited us to their activities as well. We visited Redeemer and heard Dr. Tim Keller speak to a crowd of some two hundred folks (it attracts more than 5000 every Sunday now). Judy and I turned to each other after the sermon and said "That's like a humanities lecture at Bucknell, except it was about the (Christian) gospel."

Well, it turned out that Tim did attend our alma mater, Bucknell University, a few years ahead of us. We ended up "commuting" 40 minutes to the city from cozy suburbia each Sunday to worship with them. The Kleinknechts and the Kellers preached a new paradigm for Christians being involved in the cities. "We must love the city," Tim Keller would tell the leaders. "Many Christians are against the city, or become too much 'of' the city." In order to truly love the city, all leaders involved were challenged to consider moving into the city and raising our families here.

If their vision consisted of mere idealism, or mere passion, I am not sure that would have convinced both my wife and me to make the move. Every time doubts welled up and tempted us to move our family as far away from the city as humanly possible, we reminded ourselves that our friends had a deep theological grid to work from. They were not saying, "Be a hero, move into the heart of strife." They were communicating a gospel that we had never heard and understood fully before: If you want to affect the culture, you must plant yourself in the soil of that culture. If the early Christians were willing to move into a plague-infested city, we must be willing to move into a city dealing with the AIDs crisis and many other social ills. Of course, I knew that the city is one of the few places where I had a shot at making a living as an artist. But still, why move our family there?

"The city attracts the best," Tim told me one day as I drove him in our rusty Toyota station wagon, our last car before we gave up that mobility (renting our parking lot was costing us more than we paid for our first apartment after college) for city subways. "You have to seek the best if you want be the best, you need the city to shape you." Of course, he was not just speaking about being an artist. His theology would include the idea of shalom, the flourishing of humanity.

In short, he was saying, in order to be the best human you can be, we need the city. That idea of can be extended in a radical principle to raising your family in the city. As counter-intuitive, and most definitely counter-cultural, as it may sound, in order to raise our children well, we need the city. To be a church that desires to be a catalyst for the flourishing of humanity, we need to move in and begin the adventure of trusting God in the midst of strife, even if that means to "exile ourselves" from familiar comfort and conventionality. TriBeCa, in 1992, had few amenities, and local paper still reported occasional gang related murders in our streets.

Jeremiah 29:4-7 states: "This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper."

Planting trees and seeing our children wed in a city are not what many would consider "spiritual." But this wedding in midtown Manhattan was a manifestation of a spiritual principle bearing fruit. We were witness to a covenantal commitment between the bride and the bridegroom that transcends time and even the boundaries of this particular city. Glen and Carole, the bride's parents, have solely and faithfully served the inner city of New York driven by their spiritual principle of loving the city. Morgen and her new husband, a pastor, will carry out this same promise in Los Angeles.

Tim Keller's wedding message was, as usual, succinct and powerfully resonant. He began with Kierkegaard (1), who stated that at the end of history, we will have to take our masks off, as in the midnight hour of the masquerade, and reveal who we really are. "Marriage," Tim reminded us, "is a radical endeavor. It is radically discomforting and radically comforting at the same time. And the Christian gospel is the only paradigm that can bring these opposites together." Unlike the Kierkegaard metaphor, Tim continued, a marriage forces us to take our masks off; we are completely vulnerable. Marriage, therefore, can give us strength and confidence to move into the world, or it can devastate us from within.

In his new book, The Reason for God , Tim writes:

"God did not create us to get the cosmic, infinite joy of mutual love and glorification, but to share it. We were made to join in the dance. We were designed, then not just for belief in God in some general way, nor for a vague kind of inspiration or spirituality. We were made to center our lives upon him, to make the purpose and passion of our lives knowing, serving, delighting, and resembling him. This growth in happiness will go on eternally, increasing unimaginably. (1 Corinthians 2:7-10)"

(p. 219, The Reason for God , Dutton)

The cosmic dance is also a nuptial dance. The Church, as the Bride of Christ, is invited to a Feast. But in order to fully respond to this invitation, we have to get beyond the general sense of "faith" and move into God's banquet hall, a center room of his mansion. The Bible makes it abundantly clear that that mansion is in a city: The City of God. "The Bible begins at a Garden," Tim noted often, "and ends in a City."

After serving at Redeemer as an elder for two years with Glen, I jumped at the opportunity to plant their first daughter church, The Village Church. If this theology of the city was to work, I needed to put my efforts into the heart of culture, and create a church home for the creative. The Village Church, now in its 13th year, would become our family's exilic home. Our children know no other church; our son Ty, now at NYU, and his fiancée, who graduates from The King's College this June, both attend there.

Glen and I kept in touch, and I asked him to assist me in establishing the New York chapter of the International Arts Movement, an arts advocacy group to carry out this mission to see humanity flourish via the arts. Glen agreed to serve us as a founding board member from 1998 - 2003. He would often joke about the "farmer from Indiana" serving on the board of an arts organization. But I assured him that IAM needs to be able to speak to farmers as well as artists. The boundaries of art need to expand, to see all of life in the creative abundance of God. Besides, Glen was one of organizational gurus behind the Redeemer movement, and he knew instinctively what it meant to take risks that can impact the culture at large. If having him on the board only meant that I could glean from his wisdom on raising teens in the city, or receive occasional fatherly advice for my marriage, that alone would be worth it.

At a gathering soon after 9/11, Glen introduced himself as an "unwitting recruiter responsible for moving the Fujimuras into a loft three blocks from Ground Zero." I told him then, "If it was just you, then I don't think we would be here. It was Jeremiah 29. We just didn't know that we would be signing up to be Ground Zero residents."

Of course, I would think later, it WAS Glen and Tim who opened our hearts to the reality behind the scripture passages. They did recruit us, and it was a path that once chosen, we could not turn back from.

***

As we ate our splendid meal at the wedding banquet, I tried to convince Tim to have a jazz room in the new Redeemer building on the upper west side. Then, I shared my idea for a dedicated jazz space with Tom Jennings, Redeemer's music director, who was also at the wedding, hoping to enlist him. Tom quipped, "That's one sure way to make the building not succeed. " The fact that Tom is a noted jazz pianist makes this statement heartfelt and depressing at the same time. Tim sidestepped my ardent advocacy for jazz, and we began to discuss issues surrounding the New Atheism.

Tim has been on a book tour of sorts, speaking at various universities in Veritas Forums and debating atheist professors. I told him that I participated in one at Columbia University, being pitted against feminist artist Coco Fusco.

"So what was that like?" He asked.

"Well, it really never went anywhere," I said as I licked my sorbet, "because she kept on wanting to go back to the culture war days. I wanted to talk about being stewards of culture and creating a new language for culture, but she wanted to talk about governmental censoring of art. I told the organizers, that these debates may no longer serve us well anymore. We need a tri-alogue, not a dialogue, a mediated conversation that can create a third language to speak about an issue."

Tim asked me what I meant by a "third language." I explained that there is a huge gap in culture where the split between rational and emotive, between reason and the intuitive, has caused dialectical opposition. But now, because of the dehumanization this has caused, people are hungering for mediated conversation. "Obama is speaking that type of language, and that's why he is gaining ground," I pontificated.

Of course, it was only after I got home and began to read Tim's book that I saw his section on the "third way." In the introduction chapter, he notes that the entire book makes the case that authentic Christianity is "a spiritual third way" to mediate the current divides in culture. So at the wedding banquet table, a student was telling the master what the master already knows. I suppose the greatest reward of a teacher is when a student reshapes the thoughts being taught and thinks they are his own. Perhaps this embarrassing reality could be justified by the fact that I have listened to over 500 of Tim's sermons over the years. That has to somehow sneak into your subconscious.

***

The father was dancing with the bride now. Glen, my wife and I noted, is quite a dancer. As his feet glided across the floor, his flushed face and relaxed smile told a story: a story of a father truly willing to give away the bride and delighting in her at the same time.

He would understand that in this passage of time, a radical change is welcome, that a wedding in a city is a fulfillment of our exilic promise. Then the enchantment of folks beginning to join the dance made me realize that a wedding is indeed a dance, as the gospel of Christ is a dance, as Tim notes in his book. Jesus did start his ministry at a wedding at Cana. He would dance with those who follow him to the heart of strife. Refracting in the wedding banquet were the echoes of faithful promises kept, and love "increasing unimaginably." Christ himself did sup with us, filling our hearts with the golden light of promise, even in a dark February day in New York City.



Makoto Fujimura










(1) "Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all."

- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or II.146

Empathic Creativity: Generative Transformation

Delivered on March 1st, 2008, IAM Gathering at TriBeCa Performance Center



I begin with a photo of an installation at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (Credit: Melanie Einzig 2006
Courtesy: Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust), over looking the Hudson River, only a mile a way. Scottish artist, Andy Goldsworthy installed "Garden of Stones" as part of this museum's mission to create a "living memorial to the holocaust." As you can see these boulder rocks have been hollowed out and hold sapling Dward Oak trees. As the trees mature, each will grow to become fused to the base, and eventually, possibly, cracking the stone open.

Art, a sapling planted today in hope, can break open a boulder of cynicism, despair and corruption that pervades the art world. But we need to learn from someone who is not an artist, a sapling who did end up breaking open a huge boulder.

It was the early 1960's at Hudson on Hastings, NY about 30 miles north. Fred Danback began to work for Anaconda, a major factory where copper and wire cable were created. Fred Danback returned from World War II to come home, and to work for a now booming enterprise. But soon after, Fred found himself troubled by what he saw at the factory.

"I seen all kinds of oil and sulfuric acid, copper filings; my gosh, they were coming out of that company like it was going out of style..." He continues in his interview with Bill Moyers, "(shad fisherman started to lose) their business because there was oil in the water that would cause the fish to be contaminated with it and the Fulton market refused to take their weekly catch...(Anaconda) and other businesses were polluting a river and hurting a second business, the shad fisherman. I didn't think they had the right to do that. It used to really infuriate me. I became obsessed with fighting pollution..."

So Fred complained to the managers about his shad fisherman friends' plight. Each time he did, it seemed, he got demoted. He ended up pushing a broom for the company. But Fred never gave up. He worked in a custodian role, literally pushing his broom into every room of the company, and he also took copious notes and made maps of the company. What was deemed a punishment ended up to be the best possible opportunity to spy on the company inside and out (he had all the keys!).

We have to remember that there were no pollution laws. Fred and a few other pioneers of the environmental movement decided to sue Anaconda by citing an archaic law called the Refuse Act of 1899, which Fred found cleaning the local library. In 1972, when the US attorney's Office found a way to prosecute Anaconda, the attorney also used Fred's maps and notes as evidence.

"The company was fined $200,000 under the Refuse Act of 1899, you know... Even today for a polluter to be fined $200,000 is a big event. Back in the early 1970s, it was a huge event. It was like a thunderclap."(Fred Cronin)

Today, 3 million striped bass goes up and down the Hudson, because of Fred's efforts that lead to a series of changes in laws of the land.

Three lessons from the Fred Danback parable:

1)We need to be willing to be demoted
2)We need to remember our first love
3)We need to take notes

a)Become a custodian

To hold the "keys" of culture we may have to endure demotions.


By being demoted, we may gain a humble authority (keys) to unlock doors of cultural "factories".

Stewardship of culture and stewardship of nature go side by side. The activities of the arts are, in themselves, acts of stewardship. Many have seen the arts and entertainment as the enemy, or at least view them with healthy suspicion. The expression of the arts have twisted "the good, the true and the beautiful" in the same way that we have polluted our rivers. The arts are always upstream of culture, and artists are the creators of culture. The question is, how do we enact change?

Are we willing to be demoted to be custodians of culture? Cultural stewardship comes with needed sacrifice. Our "keys" are humility, integrity, determination and hope for things to come. In the art world in which ego, selfishness and self-destructiveness abound, don't you think you will stand out, eventually, is you have an ounce of human decency?

What if we are willing serve even one person, rather than do art for self-expression? What if we collaborated in humility and gave ourselves to serve, not expecting the world, or our audience, to agree with us, or applaud us?


b) We need to remember our first love

Fred Danback was asked by Bill Moyers, "What kept you going?"

FRED DANBACK: I love that river. It's a beautiful river. Look at it. It's your river, its my river, it belongs to everybody. Whose got a right to mess it up? That's the way I feel about it.

I still do, to this day.

It was his memory of the river, that beautiful river that kept him going. This beautiful painting by a Hudson River School master Jasper F. Cropsey (see below) keeps me going. What keeps us going?





Jasper F. Cropsey, Autumn on the Hudson, 1860 National Gallery of Art, Washington

We need to remember our first love. Our first love as an artist may have come when you drew something on paper that came alive to you. Or perhaps you were playing a character in a school play, and you realized you had entered another person's world, a world you never knew existed. Or perhaps as a dancer, you made that single leap that seemed to defy gravity.

By contrast, what is now causing you to lose hope now? Because artists are gifted receptors, sensitive to the world's woes, and we may be the first internalize, and be in despair.

It is this "first love" that can recognize a world that is "not supposed to be." It's important to remember our first love, or we will end up swimming in the river that is polluted, and we will lose the vision for why we live, and why we do art.

But, furthermore, it is this "first love" that allows you to empathize.

Fred empathized with the shad fishermen. He stepped into their shoes and walked around in them a while.

"You never really understand a person, "Atticus Finch tells us in To Kill a Mockingbird, "until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, around the same time that Fred worked for Anaconda. If Fred Danback remembered the beautiful river, Harper Lee remembered her country lawyer father, and via the character of Atticus Finch translated the principles of justice and equality in to a great art form.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, we see little Scout running around in the streets of Maycomb, Alabama chasing her brother, Jem, and her friend, Dill. "Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself," recalls Scout. There is an eye-of-the-storm stillness in the streets; slow, ambling folks who "shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer." The Great Depression has gripped the county, and our country had been deeply wounded by World War I. There were more conflicts to come. Harper Lee's classic work brings the reader into the heart of that American struggle via an inquisitive, feisty, creative girl. The former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor called the book an impetus for her desire to become a lawyer. In the days when the world was tainted by common bigotry, Harper Lee set out to tell a good story, a "simple love story" she called it, but it turned into a powerful catalyst for transforming the mindset toward human dignity and equality. The book precedes Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech by three years, and it foreshadows that speech, becoming one of the great catalysts for wrestling with issues of humanity in the twentieth century. This book serves as a model for us to speak of empathic creativity, that transforms the cultural river.

Atticus Finch, a country lawyer, defends Tom Robinson, a man falsely accused of rape, who is being held in jail. Knowing that the town is conspiring to lynch him, Atticus "sits guard" in front of the jailhouse, having set up a chair and reading light outside Mr. Robinson's window. Atticus creates incarnationally, using a theatrical prop to make his case, if you will, bringing his living room right into the heart of the conflict. A mob gathers. Scout, Jem and Dill walk right into that circle, making Atticus quite nervous. Scout then recognizes a face in the crowd:

"Don't you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I'm Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?... I go to school with Walter...he is your boy, ain't he? Ain't he, Sir?"

Scout remembered that: "Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in." Atticus taught her empathy.

So she speaks to Mr. Cunningham using a big word that Atticus taught her: "Entailment." Mr. Cunningham brought hickory nuts to Atticus in thanks for work Atticus performed in the Cunningham family in the beginning of the story. Now Scout reminds Mr. Cunningham about entailment, or a swap of one work for another, a sort of a code to unlock Mr. Cunningham's humanity. The code worked to not only help Mr. Cunningham remember, but she taps into a greater conscience of how a human being should treat each other, with dignity and respect. And she defuses the situation, in her determined innocence.

If we are faced with an angry mob, ready to do the unthinkable horror of our days, what would be our response? To fight back with fire against fire, respond in hatred against hatred? I suggest we follow Scout's lead in calling people to remember. Scout did not confront the bigotry by arguing for justice. What she accomplished in her naiveté was to step into the mob, to remind people that they were her neighbors. Within a culture that is full of cynicism, apathy and anger, we must remind one another to remember. Our task as artists is to remind people that they are our neighbors. Our arts should lead others to recall who they are. And by doing so, we may remind them, and ourselves, who we are. Our responsibility is to re-humanize the divide, to speak a "third language" of generative creativity that defuses the cultural war language.

Scout defused the situation by being fully human, fully a child.

The "third language" of culture speaks like a child, like Scout, innocent, and yet full of determined hope. The "third language" re-humanizes the mob and speaks in a generative way. The third language incorporates an attitude of cultural stewardship. That is how we can transform the world. The arts present the most powerful way of "nonviolent resistance." Scout's actions, in Harper Lee's lense of creativity, was to anticipate thousands of peaceful marches to come, by willingness to step into a conflict, and taking a risk (although she would fail the non-violent test, because, earlier, she kicks a man in his shin as he tried to physically remove Jem from the scene.)

Just like the mob in front of Tom Robinson's jail cell, the culture has blinded itself to the dehumanized forces of debased solutions. Debasement is a result bad stewardship, to allow for corruption to take over in desperation of fear.

"The third language" is a language of empathy, and empathy is a fruit of love.

c) Taking Notes:

Just like Fred Danback, we need to be custodians of culture, be given keys to the rooms of cultural production and "take notes."

How do we take notes?

Fred was not an artist: we are. Our notebooks should be filled with... drawings. We are gifted with creativity and expression. Our notes should be beautiful, good, and true.

Artists are leaders: they may never inspire with a speech, preach from a pulpit, or own a company, but they are leaders by the sheer fact of their awareness and observation. Artists are leaders because people see their work and can be influenced by it.

Dr. Howard Gardner of Harvard University, the author of "Multiple Intelligences," who has identified creativity as one of the many multiple types of intelligences, writes:

"Indeed, creators and leaders are remarkably similar. Both groups seek to influence the thoughts and behaviors of other people. Both are, accordingly, engaged in the enterprise of persuasion. Moreover, each leader or creator has a story to tell: A creator is contributing to the story of a chosen domain; a leader is creating a story about his group. Finally, embodiment is important for both groups: A leader must embody her stories in her daily life; a creator must embody his story by carrying out work in his domain. "

Artists are leaders simply because we are in the "enterprise of persuasion." If we are leaders in that sense, then, comes with that influence, great responsibility. We have responsibility to use that persuasive influence to create the "world that ought to be." Or, we can use that responsibility for self-destruction. One sure way to use our influence to transform the world is by leading in the path of empathy.

Harper Lee embodied the story of oppression and injustice she saw in her small town in Alabama. She created a story which generate empathy. Let's take Atticus' advise to be polite and "talk about what people are interested in" before we begin to think about self-expression. We might just have to step into someone else's shoes and walk around in them, and take notes.

And, we take notes with tears.

We must realize that that culture of the "world that ought to be," must arrive via understanding of the "world that was not supposed to be." Our task, in the day forward is to identify with, and empathize with, the brokenness of the world, as much as to give a vision of the world that is right and beautiful. Artists need to lead the way in taking notes of the polluted substance and lamenting.

The shortest, but one of the most potent, verses in the Bible is in John 11.

"Jesus Wept."

Before this passage, Jesus learned that his friend Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary has died. He goes to Bethany to resurrect him. And when he got there, he walked right into a Jewish funeral. Upon seeing his friends grieving, he wept. Why?

If he had the power to resurrect, why did he not wave the "magic wand" and solve the problem right away. Why did he "waste time" and weep?

Before this passage, John writes that Jesus was also "deeply troubled," which reminds me of Fred Danback's response to the polluted river - the death of his friend Lazarus infuriated Jesus. Was he infuriated by people not understanding him? No, Jesus was troubled by, and infuriated by, death itself.

"Jesus Wept"

Then his heart was again "deeply troubled". He took a deep breath and pronounced and commanded Lazarus to rise. And he did.

While I was preparing for this talk, I realized something for the first time:

The cultural river is made up of the "tears of God."

Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso, Max Beckman, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Yasunari Kawabata...etc. etc. Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Calcutta, Maycolm, Darfur. What Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail has called the "irreversable tragedies of our time." All of the 20th century was a century of lament, of angst, of anger. And Jesus wept. These expressions may look to some as if they are against God, but they are really not. They are not "pure" expressions of adoration, but they share in the same tears that Mother Teresa shed, and Martin Luther King Jr. shed.

Jesus wept, and he continues to weep today. Tears of God are powerful. They may evaporate, and soak the ground, but they never disappear. We breathe today Jesus' tears. And artists may be the first to recognize the invisible presence of divine tears. That's why the church needs artists. When we weep and join God, those are commingled with God's tears, and multiplied like fishes and the loaves that Jesus touched.

We take notes with our tears.

We also need to be moved, troubled deeply with the broken realities of the world around us. We need to stand in the pit of Ground Zero, and breathe in Jesus' tears. Then we can create. Do not let anger itself overtake you in despair. Let your tears lead to your small resurrections. If you find yourself perplexed, angry...take notes and imagine a polluting factory into an art factory of beauty, goodness and truth.




***

There's not a day that I do not think of Fred Danback. As I jog the promenade of the river, passing right by the Goldworthy installation, I thank God for him and pray that someday, the saplings will grow to crack open the rock, spilling dirt on to promenade. Fred's sacrifice was a sapling of sacrifice that cracked opened the rock of Anaconda. But there's more to the story.

On the day of 9/11, when the news began to unravel of the horrors of that day, the initial estimate of those who was thought to have perished was twelve to fifteen thousand. Then as the days went, the numbers kept on decreasing to, eventually, three thousand and some, still an unbearable amount, for sure.

I have a theory about why the initial estimate turned out to be so wrong.

9/11 was the first day of school. There are eight thousand students around the towers. The parents had just dropped off the kids, like my wife did that morning with my three children, and saw the sinister shadow of the first plane pass them in the schoolyard. Parents never made it to work. Or those who did, came down the steps right away, ignoring the famed announcement to "stay where you are."

You may not make the connection right away from Fred Danback to 9/11, but in my mind, there is a direct link. Here it is.

All of the schools around the towers were built after the late 1970's.

Because Fred Danback was willing to be demoted, the river became cleaner. Because the river became cleaner, the parks around the river became attractive. And the parents, instead of opting to escape to suburbia, decided to stay in their apartments in Battery Park designed for dual income no kid couples. Because there was tremendous increase in the population of children starting in the late 70's the city was to build all those schools, including P.S. 234, right here in front of us.

I am convinced Fred Danback made a difference on 9/11. One person's sacrifice, the ripple effects that caused because of that action, cannot be measured ultimately, but only be told in how we live our lives. Be a community of Fred Danbacks. Be willing to make your life count. And never forget the beauty of the river of your calling. One humble custodian changed the world. A sapling has cracked open a boulder, and the shalom dirt fills the empty spaces of our hearts. Psalm 46 is right, "there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God."

Makoto Fujimura

Refractions 26: The Epistle of van Gogh

Walking around the splendidly renovated Morgan Library in Holiday lit New York City, taking in the recent exhibit of van Gogh letters written to his younger contemporary, Emile Bernard, I had an epiphany. First, I was forced to admit the obvious: Vincent wrote and read in multiple languages. The letters were written in French, a foreign language for him. Then, I had to ponder the significance of a 19th Century "uneducated" artist, writing beautiful letters, full of drawings, in a foreign language.

The reputed image of van Gogh as an uneducated vagabond, threatening his society with unbalanced, rash acts of violence, and the real image of Vincent flowing out of these letters seem to conflict. Even knowing that he had series bouts with depression, and suffered from a rare form of schizophrenia, these words attest to his clear, analytical thinking. Troubled? Yes, but illiterate, no. Passionate? Yes, irrational, no. Vincent studied Thomas Kempis' "The Imitation of Christ" in Latin every day and spoke five languages.(1)

And yet Vincent would have been considered only partially educated in his time. To show how much things have changed in only a little over one century, the Dutch Reformed Church rejected Vincent in his request to be ordained as a minister, partly because he was not educated enough.(2) Education standards have eroded to such an extent that we would be astonished by the typical language capacity of 19th century "uneducated" artists.

The recent report on NEA's study on reading in America, "To Read or not to Read," depicts a dramatic erosion of America's reading habits (see http://www.nea.gov/research/Research_Brochures.php). Not only does the report give us hard data on the steep decline of reading at all levels and age groups (except the pre-teen years ... call it the "Harry Potter effect,") but it substantiates an alarming trend of communal disengagement. We are not only reading less, we are reading less well: we are not only reading less well, we are losing our capacity to focus and pay attention to the world around us with empathy. As I thought about this as I perused the exhibit, van Gogh letters began inject in my psyche an antidote to the problems laid out in "To Read or not to Read." Vincent communicated in a foreign tongue with his acute sensitivity, and to impress upon the reader what he felt as sacred. The key word is "communicate," and the report points out the severe consequences if we continue to lose our capacity to communicate. We may, if we go down this road, no longer have the capacity to be moved by van Gogh or any other artist: we would not have the patience and longing in our hearts to do so.

Take, for instance, the link that the study makes between civic engagement and reading: in short, folks who read are far more engaged in civic activities. They make better citizens. They are more likely to volunteer, more likely to go to a sports event, or to go hiking. Imagine that, people who you will find at local bookstores are ones you will see at a baseball field. They might have volunteered in a local charity event or have taken their kids on a hiking trail, or ... to a museum to see Starry Night.


"The data here demonstrate that reading is an irreplaceable activity in developing productive and active adults as well as healthy communities," Dana Gioia, the Chair of NEA writes, "Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media, they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading."

What was a shock to us at the National Council, the advisory board of the NEA, was that one of the new findings reports that college students read more coming into college than when they graduate. Every higher education institution should gather their board and consider what this simple data might mean to them. If we are not producing deeply engaged readers, and empowered citizens, then what is the purpose of education?

Businesses spend over 3.1 billion dollars annually retraining their entry workers to read, so they can process information given to them in business manuals. Learning to read translates into an immediate economic advantage, a fact that should make everyone pick up a book.

Vincent would stand out in the work force today for the simple reason that he could speak and write in multiple languages. Would he have been a ph. D candidate in theology if he lived today? Or a social worker? Perhaps he would be working for a major business firm, translating business manuals, working like Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener in some bureaucratic office building Paris, France. Oh no, likely not, you might say, for his impulsive, and destructive behavior would make him unfit; but, I would argue, modern medicine would have given him stability, and these opportunities. The point is, these van Gogh letters should compel us to ask deeper questions about the "progress" of our modern culture and education. They point, along with "To Read or not to Read" report, to a deeper malaise that is more troubling than the bi-polar disorder from which Vincent was suffering.


Some, I am sure, will point out that the mode of communication has shifted from the antiquated print culture to our current internet society; now we have a "visual culture," and are taking in information differently. But taking in mere information does not mean we are deeply engaged with the content. We may be able to scan for multifarious sensory input, and gather unreliable, but perhaps important, bits and pieces in our junkyard of amassed headlines. But the type of mental wrestling that reading a good book brings is irreplaceable. And walking about Morgan Library, I began to unravel a kind of visual code in van Gogh's letters that lead me to consider a deeper connection between reading and the visual arts. I began to speculate that the loss of reading could result in LESS images (at least meaningful, lasting images), and not more.

As I perused the exquisite drawings and letters done in brown ink, a deeper mystery began to unravel. An epistolary "code" opened up in my mind: a type of visual language that connected Vincent's language capacities and imagery. This link between images and words, could have led to Vincent's interests in foreign cultures, especially the Japanese. And I realized further, that all of the above were intricately tied in with his passion for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Vincent's visual language flows out of this cross-cultural curiosity and capacity. He began to draw and paint to communicate to the miners he ministered to in Borinage. He saw drawing as another "language," a visual language that connected heaven and earth. He writes to Bernard, a young artist he desired to mentor, of his intent on creating parables of color and lines. He speaks of his visual strategy to translate what he saw into a symbolic language akin to Japanese paintings and woodcuts. He saw his visual code the same level of synthesis that the pictograms of the Japanese art of the past exhibited. Significantly, he was writing and drawing these letters in reed pens, partly to imitate lines of Japanese woodcut prints.

Vincent adored Japan, considering Japan to be synonymous with paradise. In the fog of psychological confusion he was finding in Arles, he even claimed he was in Japan.(3)

Apparently the Japanese thought of woodblock prints in the 19th century in the same way that we consider yesterday's USA Today newspaper: useful wrapping to protect shipment. They never thought that such prints would end up being revered in museums around the world (a fact that should make us pause - would any newspaper design today be worth keeping?).

Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, and countless artists were influenced by woodblock prints. Vincent lived next to Samuel Bing's gallery in Montmartre, Paris, who exhibited thousands of woodblock prints. Van Gogh owned a few Hiroshige's. Vincent even copied one Japanese print in one of his paintings. He was translating visual reality into a type of calligraphy that created an alternative spiritual language.

The development of this heavenly language reached its culmination in twin paintings, always meant to be shown side by side: one of the Olive Trees, and the more famous Starry Night. (4) The Olive Trees were Vincent's symbol of Gethsemane, and Starry Night his version of the Resurrection. To understand the "codex" of color and forms that van Gogh desired to communicate, we must make an assumption we no longer make in today's cultural milieu.

In order to fully understand van Gogh, we need to assume the gospel of Jesus to be central to our creativity. That is what Vincent assumed. Thomas Kempis, who Vincent arduously studied, stated:

"He who follows Me, walks not in darkness," says the Lord. (John 8:12) By these words of Christ we are advised to imitate His life and habits, if we wish to be truly enlightened and free from all blindness of heart. Let our chief effort therefore be to study the life of Jesus Christ. (5)

Christ was the ultimate artist to him. This Renaissance idea of Christ-as-artist echoes throughout the letters at the Morgan Library exhibit. Theologically speaking, not only did Christ represent the Creator, Christ was the incarnate Creator of the universe (Colossians 1). Therefore, we are assuming the centrality of creativity in understanding Christ's centrality in history and culture.


The Epistle of van Gogh is a visual parable of what Vincent considered to be the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is what the Morgan Library exhibit (which runs though January 6, 2008) reveals. The curators note the importance of Letter number eight: what the curator considers central to the exhibit is Vincent's attempt to communicate gospel reality to Bernard. He writes:

You do very well to read the Bible - I start there because I've always refrained from recommending it to you ... Lived as serenely as an artist greater than all artists-disdaining marble and clay and paint-working in LIVING FLESH. I.e.-this extraordinary artist, hardly conceivable with the obtuse instrument of our nervous and stupefied modern brains, made neither statues nor paintings or even books ... he states it loud and clear ... he made ... LIVING men, immortals ... this great artist-Christ-although he disdained writing books on ideas & feelings - was certainly much less disdainful of the spoken word-THE PARABLE above all. (What a sower, what a harvest, what a fig-tree, etc.)


To van Gogh, such a quest for the living parable was no longer possible via the church. Growing up in a family of pastors, and once desiring to become ordained, Vincent's passion for the poor, and his desire to communicate the gospel via paint originated in the church. But while the church, especially the Dutch Reformed church, remained central in his life, he stood outside the tradition, alienated from her in experience and in theology.

Consider the Starry Night, the famed landscape he painted in Arles. Notice that at the very center of the painting is a white Dutch Reformed church, which did not exist in Arles. Vincent imported a church building of his childhood, pasting it into the landscape of Arles because he wanted to create a parable of his own life.


b. Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" without the church building. I used Photoshop to erase the church building. Visually, the painting loses its potency and dynamism.



If you are to take out the church (place a thumb over the church, or see my Photoshop version b) from the painting, the whole painting falls apart visually. It is the only vertical form, aside from the dominant cypress tree on the left, which juts out to break the horizontal planes. The cypress tree and the church are two forms that connect heaven and earth. Without the church, the cypress tree takes over the swirl of movement, and there's no visual center to hold the painting in tension between heaven and earth.

Notice, too, that homes surrounding the church are lit with warm light, but the church is dark. Van Gogh's message: the Spirit has left the church (at least the building), but is alive in Nature. If you follow the visual flow of the painting, your eye will cycle upward, but still anchored by the church building. Our gaze will end up on the right upper hand corner, at the Sun/Moon. Notice it is not just a moon, but a combination of the sun and the moon. Vincent wanted to show that the Spirit of God transcends even Nature herself, that in resurrection, in the New Earth and Heaven, a complete new order will shape things to come.


Vincent wrote to Bernard:

But seeing that nothing opposes it - supposing that there are also lines and forms as well as colors on the other innumerable planets and suns - it would remain praiseworthy of us to maintain a certain serenity with regard to the possibilities of painting under superior and changed conditions of existence, an existence changed by a phenomenon no queerer and no more surprising than the transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly, or of the white grub into a cockchafer. (B8, 23 June 1888, Letters 3:496.) (6)



The synthesis of sun/moon represented, for Vincent, this "superior and changed condition of existence," as he developed a visual diction of transformed experience. In other words, he "saw" the transformation before it happened, and by faith painted the world to come.

Again, Vincent was able to "translate" the "Word became Flesh" gospel into visual forms aided enormously by his cross-cultural and multi-lingual training (7). Wrestling with another language, or mastering writing makes one sensitive to the limitation of one's own language, and allows greater empathic capacity to relate to another of a different culture. I began to feel kinship in this experience with Vincent, as I myself wrestled with my bi-cultural upbringing, and with the lack of mastery of either language for a long period of time in my youth. I, too felt this longing for the universal language, and art provided a respite from my frustration in navigating between two cultures.

Vincent's alienation from church and society, his exilic and lonely existence only added to the urge to break through the cultural and linguistic barriers. But especially in his case, Art and language flow out of the same source, and complement each other. To be sure, he experienced the void within, but he also believed that the source of fulfillment was in the Creative God who delighted in his creation.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things ... one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper better and more. That leads to God, that leads to unwavering faith. (The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, To Theo, July 1880, Touchstone, pg. 124)

To him, there is a direct relationship between painting and loving God. The exhibit makes it clear, though, that he also loved to write letters, and to communicate the intent of the heart to others. This overwhelming desire to reveal his heart forced a unique synthesis. Every artist, too, wrestles with the limitation of one's existence: and attempts to unite fragmented pieces into something whole, as an offering to the world. Rather than narcissistically dwelling on ego, Vincent wanted to commune, and communicate with humanity.

If the report "To Read or Not to Read" is correct, then engagement with arts and civic activities is intricately tied with reading. But we need more than remedial reading classes to get to the heart of the matter. We need a creative milieu that would involve all of our senses, because deeply engaged reading leads to perceptual awakening, stimulation of the core of the intuitive and experiential . We need to teach that languages of any kind are limited in their ability to reach the true depth of our hearts, for the inherent limitation of a language echoes the divides of cultures. Creativity begins with our dialogue at that point of limitation, at that moment of frustration. We need then to help students to move toward a generative creativity, one that entrusts intuitive and perceptual intelligence to lead the way in creating a world that ought to be. The upcoming International Arts Movement's Gathering "Generative Creativity: Transforming the River of Culture" (you can register now at http://www.iamny.org) will explore that further. What reading and writing can teach us is a deeper empathy that leads us to desire the best for others who are entirely different from us, and to long to communicate with them.

"You never really understand a person, "Atticus Finch tells us in To Kill a Mockingbird (8), "until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Atticus Finch, and later Scout, are both able to rise above their worlds of injustice, and the hatred that surrounds them, because they had cultivated that capacity to leap into "another's skin." To be well read means not just to be able to score high on a reading score, but to develop an attuned empathy that allows us also to "walk around" in another's story. Love requires all of our senses.

Vincent loved and feared his world. Vincent heard in a contorted cypress tree the whispers of the Spirit: Vincent saw in a flight of crows in a Wheatfield a calligraphic trajectory toward his own mortality. And he saw in a family of poor potato farmers a sacred, warm light he never felt at home. His work embodied this kind of empathy, driven by his own limitations and brokenness. He therefore developed an empathetic language of hope, full of prismatic colors, that invites us to hope with him, and long for a renewed world.

This empathic language requires us to use all of our senses, Therefore perceptual education must be tied into our experience of learning at the highest level, one that makes visual education connect with intelligence. It is no surprise that Vincent sought inspiration from Japanese woodblocks. Japanese language fuses the visual ideograms of ancient Chinese with the phonetic lyricism of the Japanese Hiragana alphabet (9). In their art, especially in the Bun-jin ga tradition, merges various forms merge into one art expression, combining visual, poetic and descriptive.


Perception expert Rudolf Arnheim in "Visual Thinking," told us so a long time ago (1969) that such a multi-pronged approach should be the norm of education:

The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought. In fact, educators and administrators cannot justify giving the arts an important position in the curriculum unless they understand that the arts are the most powerful means of strengthening the perceptual component without which productive thinking is impossible in any field of endeavor. The neglect of the arts is only the most tangible symptom of the widespread unemployment of the senses in every field of academic study.

Visual Thinking, Rudolf Arnheim, University of California Press, 1969, pg. 3

Arnheim points out that there is an "unwholesome split" between reason and visual thinking today. The post-Enlightenment split between reason and intuition, or emotion, casts a shadow into our assumptions today. Theologically speaking, it is precisely this split that caused the gospel to be communicated as information only, a check list of do's and don'ts, and not as a cohesive life force full of mysteries and multi-sensory stories. Vincent brings them together. The Gospel as preached by St. Francis, would have meant full engagement of the senses, too. The Word becoming Flesh would not make sense otherwise.


If Vincent had not been such a deeply attuned and dedicated communicator, and a student of foreign languages and cultures, such power of synthesis would have been highly unlikely. He had, to borrow from Howard Gardner, "multiple intelligences." In his case, visual language developed because of his language interests, and not in lieu of reading and writing. He was painting not because he could not write: he painted these indelible images as part of the total communiqué package. He learned these mark making skills by studying pictograms, and was attuned to "walk around in another's skin," in all that he did.

If we desire to love the world, and communicate that love, we must use all of our senses, and our "multiple intelligences" to present the best case possible. Communicating in this visual age will require us to read more, and more deeply, than ever before. If Vincent serves us as a test case, his visual language developed as his curious mind and letters began to explore more depth and sophistication. Development of a visual language requires more than learning to depict what we see. We must thirst for deeper knowledge and probe the layers of mystery beneath what we see. Thus, education of any kind, whether theological or secular, must begin from the acknowledgement of deep connectedness between writing, reading and other forms of the arts. "To Read or not to Read," raises serious issues for education and reading: but after spending time with Vincent, I began to think that the report points to a demise of visual imagery as well, if we do not chart a new course of education.



My guess is that visual images pre-existed in Vincent's mind, a kind of supra-reality that his writings alluded to, but could not well explain. The potency of such a Reality resonates in all of this images and writings, to the extent that we must begin to admit a deeper connection and relevance, even if we do not believe in that world ourselves. In Vincent's letters we find a transfixed imagination, a window to see beyond the minds eye into the soul.


The art of the Creative or Aesthetic Age (10) must be able to provide similar window. Sciences, arts, philosophy and theology (and even business) must find a common tongue, a reconciled whole. At the same time, such a common tongue must honor and recognize the distinctive limitations of each language and each sphere. We need to see through the window of own brokenness to gaze into a salvific reality that graces our souls. In other words, we need to come up with a "third" language of synthesis that values the whole of humanity, both past and future, both in body and spirit. Just as the Spirit spoke via distinctive languages to bring reconciliation of nations at the Pentecost, Spirit continues to speak today, and is powerfully alive in the language of the arts. Vincent leads the way into this path of discovery. If not for this intervention of the Spirit, language of any kind, including the visual language, will continue to break up into debased fragments, unable to communicate the deepest conditions of our humanity.

Refracting in the beautiful halls of the renovated Morgan, are the letters and coded strokes of Vincent offering a profound mystery that probes the depth of our twenty first century condition. We need Vincent's beautiful, and sometimes awkward, meditations today because our current state of culture will not even come close to the level of articulation he mastered, even as alienated as he was from the church and society. In order to break the van Gogh code, we must first recognize that art and languages are intimately tied together in a Divine formula. The intuitive epiphany is at the core base of both, lighting the path of our creative journey. If we do not have a nation full of engaged readers and imaginators, we will also lack the creative mind that can mediate communication, or create new languages. We may have all the technology to communicate but have nothing to say to each other. More significantly, we will not feel for each other if we do not cultivate the inner lives of contemplation that reading and engagement with art brings. This exhibit highlights an artist writing and drawing to simply communicate with another artist of his time. And what he wrote tapped into a world that ought to be; a world where barriers of linguistic limitation are removed. Only painting full-time for three years, Vincent offered with such brevity and beauty meditations of such weighty substance. Would we, in a few decades, have the capacity to appreciate such offerings? And will we be able to create, above the clamor of fragmented splintered voices of the art/media world, and continue to trust that light can be resplendent with life, even in the gnarled twist of branches, like in van Gogh's olive trees?


Makoto Fujimura




(1)IAM lecture on van Gogh by Dr. James Romaine, November, 2007, Space 38|39, NYC
(2) See Kathleen Powers Erickson's At Eternity's Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent van Gogh, Eerdmans
(3)http://www.artelino.com/articles/van_gogh_japonisme.asp
(4) IAM lecture on van Gogh by Dr. James Romaine, October, 2007
(5) The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kempis, Pg. 3, Hendrickson Christian Classics
(6)Vincent van Gogh, Painted with Words, p. 190-192
(7) I realize that many theologians would disagree, at least in principle, with the idea that the gospel truth can be communicated via visual languages. What I am suggesting here depends on the assumption of what that language is, and ultimately what we consider to the truth communicated. I am not making an argument here that words are unnecessary to communicate the gospel, or any truth claims: I am suggesting the opposite, that Vincent's linguistic capacity allowed him a rare synthesis, and that words are central to his visual symbolism.
(8)Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Warner Books, Pg. 30
(9)One of two Japanese phonetically based alphabets
(10) I want to thank my son, Ty, for suggesting this term

Refractions 25: Traveling in China with Father Dowling

Traveling in China with Father Dowling


The road back from Xian airport felt dusty to my skin, even riding inside a comfortable bus for the US delegation. The pale sky seemed weighed down, thick with coal fumes from the nearby factories. Bicycles crisscrossed the road, even on the highways, farmers and workers somehow managing to swerve in and out, and from what we could see from the inside of the cool, air conditioned bus, their breathing seemed labored and resigned to the heat. We were on our way to Beijing, after an exhilarating day in Xian, visiting the terra-cotta warriors from the Qin Dynasty (211-206 B.C.).

Refreshing also were the conversations that I had on the bus, with fellow delegates from the President’s Committee on the Humanities and Arts (PCHA). I was there to represent the National Council, with Eileen Mason, the deputy director of the National Endowment for the Arts; Marc Pachter, the head of the Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian (expect our conversation will be a future Refractions piece); Irene Love, a world renowned archeologist; Henry Moran, the director of the PCHA; and Adair Margo, the head of the delegation and her husband Don. Bruce Cole, the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, with his wife Doreen, James Billington, from the Library of Congress, and his wife Marjorie accompanied us. And then there was Ralph.

Ralph McInerny has taught for over forty years at the University of Notre Dame, where he is the director of the Jacques Maritain Center. You might know his name, or know of his fictional character, as he has authored twenty-six Father Dowling mystery novels. I found out that Ralph even came to read and sign books at the local Mysterious Book Shop right near my loft in Tribeca. A Thomas Aquinas scholar, I began to grill him with questions after finding out about his connection with Jaques Maritain; and to my delight, he was also a scholar of Dante (see my “Water Flames” exhibit, based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, www.saratecchia.com.)

Maritain’s “Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry,” one of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, given in 1952 at the National Gallery of Art, has been a seminal work for my journey of creativity and faith. I have carried it around with me since college, and this French philosopher/theologian has sown seeds of faith and an integrated view of art and theology into my life and my work. It is not surprising that the Maritain center at Notre Dame chose someone like Ralph who is equally versed in Aquinas and Dante, as well as the genre of mystery novels. Maritain’s theology recovers art and poetry from being a specialized category exiled from the intellect, into an indispensable, central catalyst of the mind. Maritain, in doing so, to the chagrin of many academics then and now, validates “the Virtue of Art.”

"The activity of the practical intellect divides into human actions to be done…and the works to be made; in other words, it divides into moral activity and artistic activity…Art is a virtue – not a moral virtue…Art is a virtue in the larger and more philosophical sense the ancients gave to this word; a habitus or 'state of possession,' an inner strength developed in man…Art is a virtue of the practical intellect." (Jacues Maritain, Creative Intuition)

The "habitus" of an Aquinas scholar could include mystery novels, or to consider all creative activities to be a significant intellectual work. Whether art and poetry, a Sunday afternoon baseball game or gourmet cooking, we do not need to segregate art and creativity into a corner, an exiled “extra” of our lives.

Ralph confided to me, though, that he really began to write mystery novels as a side business; to put his kids through school. I told him that my wife is a mystery novel fanatic, and knew of his books. I, on the other hand, first “met” Father Dowling as Tom Bosley, in a TV mystery show in the Eighties. “They loosely based it on my novels,” he said in his jovial voice, “but paid me well.” Having a son at NYU, I nodded, knowing that a financial opportunity a purist may resist, a parent grabs onto for dear life. I began to even ponder what kind of a mystery novel I would write…"Murder at NYU" (a parent gets mysteriously murdered on his way to paying his son’s tuition)?


* * *

When we arrived in Beijing, it was Saturday. Ralph had asked one of our interpreters if there was a Catholic church nearby the hotel. They rushed about to find one, and they did, and found that they had a mass on Saturday evening. “If we rush, we can still make it.” Off they went, out of the VIP lounge at the airport, where we waited for our bags. He took one of our interpreters with him.

Later, I asked the interpreter, Jesse (a name given to her by her college English instructor), of her experience going to church with Ralph. She told me that she had a friend who got married there, so she recognized the place. She asked Ralph, though, what the difference between a Church and a Temple was. Not having gone outside of China, she really did not know the difference, she said.

How do you explain to a well educated Chinese, the difference between a church and a temple? Ralph told me that he began to explain, but the conversation soon turned to how she suddenly became a widow recently, losing her husband in a car accident. She had since become a Buddhist: “ I before believed in utopia, now I follow in Buddah’s ways to find peace.”

Father Dowling, Ralph’s fictional character, would have found himself drawn to this conversation. Instead of asking probing questions about someone’s present, though, he would have found something in common with someone’s past first, especially in someone’s loss and anguish.

As an “archdiocesan marriage tribunal, specializing in the misery of others,” Father Dowling spent much of his early career counseling broken marriages. But then he found himself carrying their anguish in his heart, silently. “He began to drink…A final binge, a cure, and then, as though into exile, he had been sent to St. Hilary’s in Fox River, a city west of Chicago. Fifty years of age, a failure in the eyes of many of his friends, he had come to see this parish as the sweetest consolation. God is merciful.”


Reading Ralph’s books now, (purchased at the Mysterious Bookshop with my wife’s help) I realize his books read as an interior journey of faith and brokenness—to capture the real mystery hidden within the very heart of a human being.

As we traveled about China, I began to see China as a mystery, a beautiful mystery.

Here’s a country that would spend a third of their GNP on preserving Xian and the thousands of terra-cotta warriors buried beneath the tomb mount, but at the same time creating a dam to wash away an ancient village. China is a country that would re-build the main road in Beijing to Beverly Hills glamour, providing thousands of workers with jobs, but would force people into retirement at 55, to make room for younger workers, and then displace these younger workers in order to make room for the tourists as the Olympics open. Their parks were filled with the over-55 group of ex-workers, kicking around a feathered version of a hackey sack, playing and singing all day to pass the time. Here’s a country that is investing toward a huge cultural infrastructure, supporting their own artists both at home and abroad, but at the same time carefully censoring the internet, the news and the media. A country that would print Bibles domestically (not many Americans know that for many years they printed their own Bibles for Catholic Churches, but forbade the foreigners to carry them in to China), and yet persecute and arrest Christian leaders in rural areas. They also highly value harmony between people and nature, and yet have one of the worst pollution problems in the world. We asked one of the officials, while riding through the glitzy Beijing streets full of smog, if a marathon can take place in the polluted air: “oh, they will shut the factories for two months before the Olympics.” No other country can be so confidently matter of fact about moving 500,000 workers out of the region to make room for tourists. Today’s China can afford to do so, and has the governmental control to carry that out.

We toured the “Egg,” the brand new Performance Center in Beijing, and one of the delegates who has been involved in building arts centers like this in the US commented to me: “There’s no way we could do this…we don’t have access to enough concrete!” Touring the center, which seemed overly extravagant, even at the half finished state, we were told that the center will be done this fall… which prompted another comment: “There’s no way our unions would allow us to build so fast!”

Each day, The China Daily was delivered to our hotel rooms. We noticed that there were front-page articles about the places we were to visit, often on a specific issue we were to discuss that day. At the end of our tour, when we saw the “Egg” was the subject of a top article with headliner indicating that the construction was on schedule, we realized we were in a bit of a Truman Show. The Chinese could re-create a city in several years, build the largest performance center in the world in a short time, and control everything about how it is reported to impress a small foreign delegation. Shaking our heads, we all had to admit, however, that we were still quite impressed.

From their perspective, to be fair, the US, too, must be a mystery. We speak of freedom of speech as our highest humanitarian virtue, and our internet pages are filled with pornography and other explicit forms of dehumanization. We are a nation swimming with individual wealth, and yet have no national insurance and a high percentage of homelessness. We are an advanced nation of educational opportunity, and yet have one of the highest illiteracy rates in the industrialized world. We are a country of innovation, in technology and the arts, and yet the first time we broadcasted the Superbowl live to China, Janet Jackson’s famed “malfunctioning bra” incident represented us instead. We bicker about the cultural budget for the National Endowment for the Arts, when the budget remains tiny compared to other nations, and a mere half of a baseball player’s (Alex Rodriguez, New York Yankees) salary.

And if you were to read China as a mystery novel, the opening chapter would be on the Cultural Revolution, exiling thousands of families into forced encampment. The trauma left deep wounds that still exist in the lives of people in China. The Cultural Revolution was their Ground Zero.

The vacuum that this Ground Zero has left in their culture, is now being filled by their fantastic drive to bring the world to the Olympics (’08) and then to the Expo (’10). The museums and arts districts are getting support and infrastructure, making even New York artists envious of China’s bourgeoning arts scene. On the way to Beijing, David Fraher of Arts Midwest, passed out a magazine article called “China’s New Creative Class,” highlighting “the next cultural revolution” from China’s creatives like Ou Ning (curator, designer), Lin Jing (furniture and ceramics maker) or Ji Ji (graphic designer). Apparently, the race is on for the creative domain as well, to see which culture can take the lead.

When we met and spent time with their Minister of Culture, Sun Jiazheng, we realized why they were making such a headway into a cultural development.

Minister Sun charmed us, a Renaissance man, who freely quotes philosophers and poets, and humanized every meeting by taking off his tie and his jacket, shaking every delegate’s hand personally. But it was his own poetry, shared at the banquet on the last day of our visit inside the Forbidden City, Jin an Fu Palace, that truly moved me. Our delegation head, Adair Margo, insisted that he share a poem he quoted at the table. He seemed reluctant, saying “such a sad poem should not be part of a grand celebration between two nations.” He explained that the poem was written after his friend, a Japanese author/composer and president of the Sino-Japanese Cultural Exchange Association, Ikuma Dan, suddenly passed away during his visit to China. He brought the poem to Sakuma’s gravesite in Japan, to read at the site.

April comes to Tokyo
The cherries should be at the height of their bloom
I’ve come to see the flowers
But spring came early and they faded too soon

April comes to Tokyo
This should be a glad reunion
Friends from afar once more together
Instead we stand bereft by your grave

Oh, honored colleague!
The blossoms have fallen, but spring still comes in all its splendor
You left with no warning; with whom can we share
The fathomless depths of our loss?

Graveside Reflections, April 2002, from "Dream and Pursuit" by Sun Jinzheng

It would have been a courageous enough act to reveal such a personal journey in public. But his offering was even more daring to me because of the current tense relationship between China and Japan. Even a few days before, the Japanese papers were full of questions regarding Prime Minister Abe’s response to Yasukuni Shrine, a Japanese holy site where many war criminals are buried and honored, including those invading China. Further, the Chinese have demanded an inquiry into the forced prostitution of Chinese women by the Japanese military in the 19th Century.

In that setting, Minister Sun’s poem was not just a balm to soothe such historical wounds, but a principled reconciling act based on common humanity, casting light into the divide.

Art moves into the chasms of past injuries, inspecting and noting each detail of a heart’s wounds. At the same time, Art and Poetry can feed us the manna of hope to malnourished, distrusting souls due to abuses of the past. In the age of terrorism and fear, that is why we need poets and artists. Artists have the potential of creating in love, providing an imaginative vision for their culture, a holistic language to deal with a fragmented, oppressed past. The result should be an even deeper longing.

Thus, Jaques Maritain wrote: “Poetry is spiritual nourishment. But it does not satiate, it only makes man more hungry, and that is its grandeur." That hunger cannot be filled by even the greatest of banquets in a Forbidden City. In Minister Sun’s poem for the Japanese composer, I felt a certain longing. There’s a mystery there, not a mystery of “who-done-it,” but a longing for a true Jin an Fu (a Place of Eternal Happiness), to finally resolve the irreconcilable brokenness within our hearts for eternity.

Mystery novels seek an answer for every wrongful death. But, really, every death demands an answer whether by murder or by accident. Jesse, our interpreter who met sorrow and death in her young marriage, began to search for peace in the midst of her tears. Father Dowling would always offer clues to such a journey, to re-discover the path home, not just to solve the crime, but for a spiritual home. For often, even in a mystery novel, the accidental turn of events can overwhelm the logic of the analysis of evidence. The Spirit of God, the true detective of our souls, searches via our creativity, a journeyer’s void within.

When Minister Sun read the lamentation poem, Jesse had to translate the poem impromptu. One of the assistants, rushed on stage with Minister Sun’s book in which the poem was translated to help Jesse. Jesse closed the book, gave it back politely to the assistant, and proceeded to begin to translate the poem with her eyes closed. Refracting in each word, carefully and tenderly given to us, both Ralph and I felt the weight of life and death. Father Dowling would have noticed that moment, too, as he, too, would peer deeply into the pain and sorrows of a poet grieving for a friend, and an interpreter grieving for a husband. That, more than even the splendid banquet, would reveal the mystery of our being, being transcribed and etched in our hearts, one word at a time.


Makoto Fujimura

Creating into the Void

Dear Refractions Readers:


This photo is from St. James Castle, Kinsale, Ireland.

My next Refractions essay on China trip will be uploaded soon (hopefully). I am pleased to announce that NavPress will be publishing past Refractions essays into a book, so I'll keep you updated on that.

I just spoke at my home church The Village Church. It is on Genesis 2, on a poet named Adam and why we need to be (even if you are not an artist) creating into the void...

William Blake wrote: "There is a Void, outside of Existence, which if enterd into 
 Englobes itself & becomes a Womb… " ( Introduction to Jerusalem)

Indeed, even in Eden there was a void...

Take a listen, if you are interested, at

http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/2007/09/creating-into-the-void/

Happy September!

Makoto Fujimura

Installation in Kansas City

Happy Fourth of July!

My recent installation photos in Kansas City are available at:
http://flickr.com/photos/jtoddm/sets/72157600258648228/

You will see a major installation for the brand new headquarters of DEMDACO.  The image moves from "Shalom Vision" (left) to "Golden Splendor,"(right)  taking the theme of "The world that ought to be,"  and our struggles to journey there.

DEMDACO is located at:

5000 West 134th Street
Leawood, KS 66209


Please make an appointment with Sharon (sharon.tompkins@demdaco.com) if you want to visit the painting.


I will be traveling to Kansas City later this month to spend time with a fellow National Council Member Joan Israelite and the the Chair of National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia.


Enjoy!

Refractions 24: The Resonance of Being

The Resonance of Being





In July, 1973, I landed in Newark Airport with my father, one of the leading phonetics research scientists in the world. Just before the airplane skidded onto the runway, feeling a bit queasy, I looked toward the east and saw the Twin Towers, freshly built.


My father was one of many pure research scientists recruited to work at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. He was to create their linguistics department, and ended up spending over 15 years there. The AT&T divesture would split the company in 1984, ending an era of the highest accomplishments in the areas of pure research in the modern times. He left then to head up the phonetics research department at Ohio State University.


Max Mathews, my father’s boss at Bell Labs, picked us up that hot day from the airport. Out of the window of their boxy sedan, my eyes were filled with green: the trees and grass seemed so sumptuous and luxurious to me. I saw an old man with a corduroy hat, mowing the lawn. I had never seen anyone mow a lawn in Japan. I stayed with the Matthews for the summer, while my parents got ready to move to New Providence, N.J. Though this land seemed so new, and the language seemed so foreign, I was merely reacquainting myself with the country of my birth.


When I was born in Boston, in 1960, my father was finishing up his post doctorate thesis at M.I.T. at the Research Laboratory of Electronics, where Noam Chomsky also had his office. Since then, he had always planned on coming back to the States. Even with his tenured position at Tokyo University, he knew he would not be able to quell his mission to pursue pure research. He would become the first tenured professor at the prestigious university to abandon his post, to the outrage of many of his fellow academics.


He had a humble beginning at Tokyo University, though. As an undergraduate student, in post-war Japan, he almost failed out as a physics major. His caught the attention of one professor who was creating a new area of information science research, and he began to do rudimentary studies with him. As it turned out, that was the best milieu for my father to exercise his enormous creative and linguistic gift.


He and my mother had another reason for coming to New Jersey. My brother and I were to be raised bilingually and biculturally. We were always told of this, even as small children. That eventually we would move back to the States, and my mother told us, though it would be a hard adjustment, would be better than staying in the regimented, exam-filled environment in Japan. My parents, it seemed, saw this as their primary mission for us.


* * * *


I ended up earning pocket money by mowing lawns on bright Saturday mornings in New Providence the first few years. I would soon find out that I was highly allergic to grass. That discomfort, of course, did not stop me from working around the yards of my father’s colleagues.


My father also hired me to create spectrographic prints as my summer job. I would put thermo-sensitive paper around the drum of the device. As the drum rotated, the voice data would translate itself into a visual dance in front of me, the needle jumping up and down like a seismic meter. The needle also made this faint scratching sound, and smelled like burning rubber. I made hundreds of these prints, so that my father could catalogue the patterns. He was working on a computer simulation of the tongue*.

Bell Labs was a bit like Starship Enterprise. The main building had gigantic wings spreading over the green hills. The copper roofs of the building seem to hover in the vast landscape, and they gleamed in the rain. When I went to help my father in the morning, I remember the hallway wings filled with conversation. Once, when I picked up my father at night, I was surprised how many scientists were there late at night. Bell Labs was the birthplace of many inventions, including the transistor, and laser technology, not to mention UNIX and C computer languages. When my father worked there, there had already been seven Nobel Prizes given to Bell Labs scientists. I suppose at that level of intellect and creativity, a regimented time schedule would not be needed. Today we are still benefiting from what my father and his colleagues developed in the Seventies. We will, no doubt, soon run out of that Research & Development capital. Looking back, Bell Labs was one of the most creative zones in the world.

At night, at Max and Marj’s home, they had gatherings of researchers who often brought in violins, and played chamber music. Often Lillian Schwartz, one of the world’s first artists who utilized computer morphed images (http://www.lillian.com), stopped by. She created a portrait of Lincoln with blocked shapes using computer analysis, which hung in Max’s living room. Max often took out a machine that he invented that turned violin music into trumpet blasts, delighting us. These things were just a normal part of the milieu that I grew up in. My brother and Max’s children talked about computer programming, and later attend colleges like M.I.T. and Stanford University.

For lazy summer afternoons, for lunch, Marj would often heat up Campbell Tomato Soup, and Grilled Cheese Sandwich. I’d never had those in Japan. I got used to it after a while, even learning to use the electric stove, and eating them before going out to use the long tree swings set up in the front yard, getting rope burns into my hands, swinging from a huge oak tree.


* * * *

The scientists were convinced that they would be able to simulate human speech completely as to be indistinguishable from the actual voices within a decade. I avidly perused (could not read English that well then) Popular Mechanics magazine sitting around in the Mathews’ home, imagining what the world would be like by the time I was thirty. There was an assumed optimism in the air, symbolized by the World Trade Centers, a twin confidence in information technology and commerce.

In Jeremy Bernstein’s “Three Degrees Above Zero; Bell Labs in the Information Age” (which my father signed and gave to me, one of the first published copies, in 1983), he mentions my father’s young colleague:

Mitchell Marcus, a thirty-three-year-old linguist and computer scientist at the Linguistics and Speech Analysis Research Department of the Acoustical and Behavioral Research Center in Murray Hill, conjectured that it might be within ten or fifteen years. He noted, “We are going to have fairly soon enormously powerful machines with the hardware almost for free. They will be in our TV sets, in our Waring Blenders, and in our microwave ovens, and the right way to communicate with many of them will be to talk to them.” (pg. 49)

Mitchell was one of the young scientists my father recruited to work for him. Mitch left his post at MIT to come to work for my father. I asked my father what his hiring policy was. “You take your time to get only the best, and you give them complete freedom once they arrive.”

Mitch Marcus: “I just didn’t believe I would have carte blanche (at Bell). It took me awhile after I got here to realize that it really is true.” (pg.66)


It is strange to think that while these things were going on, my father never tried to teach me, or attempted to groom me to understand scientific thinking. It seemed that he also gave me and my brother carte blanche, too. It was not until I was in college that I started to inquire about his work. While he drove me from home to college (Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA), we spoke about these things. I felt I had come to know my father as a person for the first time. Before then, he was a distant, but a generous, figure, one that a teenager would looked up to as brilliant, but bit of a mystery.




* * * *



In 1980’s, at the age of early 50’s,my father began to send a series of notes to his colleagues questioning the basic tenets of acoustics research, as he found them flawed and inadequate for the goals pursued. In my simplified understanding (over-simplification, I am sure), what the early research assumed was that by segmenting speech patterns, you could have enough data to rebuild speech. It would be a bit like dissecting a frog, and stitching it back together, only to expect it to jump again -- A typical reductionist/modernist assumption.


My father’s Converter/Distributer theory (C/ D theory) assumes that computer technology is now capable of anticipating contextual patterns of speech, and able to simulate an architectural structure to account for the morphing of speech production. Rather than the segmental approach, he calls his new thinking prosodiic, as it accounts for the complexity of speech and language. But it would take years of research to get to a point of presenting his new ideas to the linguistics/phonetics community. My father, who rarely had problems finding support for his research in his life, was in for a battle. Many tenured professors, I am sure, found his simple claims rather threatening to their own assumptions. He could not find funding, and found himself fighting the establishment of the research world, the very establishment he had helped to build. After my father’s many futile attempts to secure funding for his new research, my brother, a successful entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, stepped in to fund a post for a graduate student at Ohio State, to help my father compile enough data to be able to begin his research.


Now retired from Ohio State, he has been doing a research stint for International Institute for Advanced Studies in Kyoto. Recently, he was updating me on his recent findings and presentation he had been preparing for a major conference. I asked him what he was interested in pursuing for the next six months at the institute. He listed off five issues he was concerned with, including how we need to begin a movement of a non-air conditioned world (just plant more trees, he implores), re-examining the basic premise of Kanji representation in Japanese computer software, and the overlap of the architectural structure to evolutionary studies to account for complexity and mystery of living beings. Apparently, he has not slowed down at all, even after his supposed “retirement.”


In Creativity in Science, Dean Keith Simonton notes: “Highly creative individuals are said to have a flat hierarchy of associations in comparison to the steep hierarchy of associations of those with low creativity.” (pg. 105, Creativity in Science, Cambridge Press) And creative scientists display a definitive “associate richness” of divergent thinking. My father’s mind works in this divergence, while noting prosodic details of reality, but often going beyond the normative associations. He has the ability to seek and detect the underlying assumptions, a quality that Thomas Kuhn mentions in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” an ability that is essential in major paradigm shifts in scientific thinking.


“Discovery commences,” Kuhn notes (pg 52, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, University of Chicago Press) “with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science.”


* * * *

During my recent collaboration with Susie Ibarra at Brecht Forum, I found myself thinking of my father, as a great influence of creativity, and the thoughts that may lead into great paradigm shifts in sciences and in the arts. “The awareness of anomaly” must exist in the process of creation whether in the arts or in the sciences. When I told my father that I wanted to pursue being an artist full time, he immediately replied “Oh, that’s what I wanted to be!” He even bought a painting of mine that was selected for an invitational exhibit in Hartford, Ct. in 1984 for $100, but I did not know about it until I visited his home later. He was my first patron.


In the collection of portraits in Tokyo University hallways, my father’s portrait is included. But we need to note that it was a self-portrait, painted by my father himself. Yes, when asked by the University to hire a portrait artist, he hired himself! Such was the vision of a self-assured man who I consider now to be an artist, as well as a scientist. Adventurous and even mischievous, my father now, going on eighty, continues to research in Japan. Refracting in the layers of his research and his life is heard a resonance of his creative impulses. In my art, too, his influence constantly flickers, like the needle of a spectrographic drum spinning around and around in front of my eyes.

*Automatic tracking of tongue movement in speech utterances by a computer


Makoto Fujimura, June, 2007

Susie Ibarra + Makoto Fujimura Collaboration May 5 at 9pm

Photos from our recent collaboration at IAM conference (www.iamny.org has more photos). Taken by Alissa Wilkinson



Susie and I are working toward her Carnegie Hall debut in October (I will prepare the accompanying visuals, and possibly even paint live there as well). This collaboration will be much more spontaneous and experimental in nature. Plywood Film has been documenting the process of our collaborations since last year, and they will be taking footage at The Brecht Forum as well.

Makoto Fujimura

------------


Saturday, May 5

9:00 pm

NEUES KABARETT @ THE BRECHT FORUM

Susie Ibarra Drum Sketches

World Premiere, Brecht Forum Commission

Solo Drumset, Kulintang & Percussion with Visual Art by Makoto Fujimura

"Billowy cerulean, incendiary scarlet, and icy silver leapt from the exquisite paintings [of Makoto Fujimura] lining the gallery walls. Perched among them, Susie Ibarra coaxed sound from two small cymbals, rubbing them together before rolling her snares-off drum, eliciting the full range of sound and texture afforded by this austere set. Her elegant, minimalist musical statement harmonized with the visuals that inspired it and exuded the focused artistry and controlled technique that have made her one of the most highly regarded and sought-after drummer-percussionists in creative music.

Since asserting herself as a leader and composer in the late ‘90s, Ibarra has fostered an interest in cross-media artistic collaboration, such as the 2005 Sara Tecchia Gallery exhibit of painter Makoto Fujimura described above.

Inspired by visuals and drawing from a broad range of musical influences--from classical and opera to punk, free jazz, and Asian gong music--she has forged a sound as both a percussionist and composer that is unique." - Sean Fitzell

Admission $10

451 West Street, New York, NY 10014 - (212) 242-4201 - email: brechtforum at brechtforum.org

Check out www.susieibarra.com, too

Refractions 23: The Game that is Designed to Break our Hearts

Last summer, the year that the Saint Louis Cardinals won the World Series, I found myself sitting in their brand new Busche stadium, at seats A1 and A2 with my son Ty. I could smell the freshly cut grass, impeccably manicured in front of us, mixed with the rubber scent of a sparkling red dugout and seats. The Cards were playing the Dodgers that day, an unforgivably hot day in Missouri, and the American flag they foisted up got tangled up in the yellow arms of the crane, flailing about in the arcing symbol of St. Louis, seen behind center field. We watched Albert Pujols sway back and forth in front of us, with his massive arm resting on a giant’s bat. David Eckstein bounced around the bases, and I whispered to Bill DeWitt, the owner of the Cards, who had invited us, “he is one of my favorites.” Eckstein would go on, a diminutive player never expected to be a major leaguer, hustling about to win the MVP in the World Series. We got to enjoy two games in two days, the first day in the comforts of the box seats. It ended on a good note: as they swept the Dodgers, manager Tony LaRussa looked across from the dugout at us and winked.

I had come to know Kathy DeWitt as we served on the National Council on the Arts together. An ever-friendly lady, when we took cabs from the hotel to the Nancy Hanks building on Pennsylvania Avenue where the National Endowment for the Arts offices are located, she seemed to always end up chatting with a taxi driver in her affectionate raspy voice,, her curious eyes darting about. “Baseball,” she would tell me as we discussed baseball, which was often, quoting the former commissioner Bert Giamatti, “is a game that’s designed to break your heart.” I had promised we would come and visit, and here we were, a last trip my son and I would take together before he became an NYU undergraduate.

Getting out of the taxi, as we headed up to our Council meetings, Kathy and I would often discuss the NEA’s longitudinal study on America’s reading habit, called Reading at Risk. What came out, as one can imagine, is a precipitous and alarming decline in reading at all levels. The Arts and Civic Engagement document resulted, giving hard data behind what we presumed to be true: readers are more engaged in all spheres of life. But what surprised us was that the data revealed a curious correlation between the act of reading and attendance of sports events. That fact intrigued both of us. Listed under #2 of the 10 key findings is “Literary readers and arts participants engage in sports more readily than non-readers and non-participants.” (http://www.nea.gov/research/ResearchReports_chrono.htm) lLiterary readers are nearly two times as likely to attend sports events.

Dana Gioia, the visionary Chair of the NEA, then proposed to us an initiative called the Big Read, “designed to restore reading to the center of American culture.” Created was a network of cities and libraries to choose classics of American literature, like “The Great Gatsby,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “My Antonia,” or “Their Eyes were Watching God.” We would ask the mayor of that city to call for the entire city to be its own book club, and the NEA would provide resources that include radio programs and comprehensive audio guides (Sandra Day O’Connor, Robert Redford and Robert Duvall would take the lead in narratives, http://www.nea.gov/national/bigread/BigReadSampler.wma). Extensive teacher’s guides would be provided as well. Now in over one hundred communities, with over a dozen classics, The Big Read initiative has succeeded beyond even the Council’s expectations. The results indicate that people are hungry for responsible stewardship of culture, and right attention to the arts in education.

***




I had told Kathy that Ty and I became Yankee fans because they had brought the parade into our street. When the Yankees won the World Series against Atlanta in the fall of 1996, that was shortly after we moved into New York, and Ty got to attend the victory parade on Broadway right outside of our home. You could say that was the day we were baptized into the myth, that somehow, year after year, the Yanks would win again. For Ty, this parade and many to ensue, would enable him to play hooky from school (with the blessing of Mayor Giuliani), and this marked his childhood in New York City.

Kathy and I agreed that baseball seemed, of all the sports, to be the most subtle and art-filled (soccer would be a close second). I remember certain moments, like the infamous “flip” of Derek Jeter, against Oakland, in the playoffs of 2001. Our family was displaced in Chelsea, staying at a friend’s apartment after 9/11. That may be why I remember that moment, feeling that nothing could be so triumphant after all that we had gone through on those dark weeks, and the Yanks were about to see their first round series slip away in Oakland; but then Jeter came out of nowhere, a shortstop intercepting an errant throw by a rookie outfielder five feet from the home base, flipping the ball backhand to the catcher Posada, turning the series around, and turning my heart, for a brief moment, to the normalcy of that thrill. There was certain magic there: How did Jeter know that that ball was going to be thrown errant? The runner (Jeremy Giambi, not the slugger Jason, but his brother), certainly did not, even though the play was taking place in front of him, for he did not even slide into home base. He was, just with the rest of us, astonished that a shortstop would even be in that position to make that play. But Jeter did, and Posada simply had to catch the ball and tag out flat footed Giambi, and the Yanks came back to win the series. Baseball, it seemed, like in Malamud’s “The Natural,” filled my mind with the possibility of mystique, and as beautiful as art, like the stadium lights being turned on.


In reading great literature, the reader, too, can expect a “flip” in even a greater potency for change. Eudora Welty, in writing about another great southern master Katherine Mansfield, notes that at the end of one of her stories: “There is no collision. Rather, the forces meeting in the public gardens have, at the story’s end, passed through each other and come out at the other side; there has been not a collision, but a change – something more significant.” (Eudora Welty, The Eye of the Story) Jeter’s instinct created no collision, but a simple re-direction of a baseball: an author can do the same, but words have power to re-direct powers and “come out at the other side.” Art and literature can capture the transformation of a character, depict unexpected outcomes, thereby moving us toward a new trajectory. If Jeter’s flip caused a baseball series to turn, an author’s words, a maestro’s baton or a painter’s brush can cause our lives to turn to a complete new direction. Thus artists have the power to re-direct, but to what end?



Jeter’s heroics did not end victorious in the World Series that year. In fact, the Yanks never won again after 2000. We haplessly watched the ball bounce over Jeter’s head in Arizona, as the Yanks lost the World Series in game seven, bottom of the ninth; we could echo Kathy’s words that it is indeed a game designed to break our hearts, especially in our post-9/11 depression. Literature, too, sinks deeper into the heart of the darkness, leading us to seek out with Gatsby, the “green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.”

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning ---
So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby




***

“No batting practice today,” the attendant told us as he checked our field passes, “too hot”. We hovered near the home plate, looking at the expanse of Bermuda grass, when we noticed Bill coming out of the dugout. “Sorry about that…the players decided to bat inside…come on, let’s go in, too.” Ty’s face flushed as we entered the blast of cool air, being blown out to the dugout with force defiant to the sun; he could not believe he was entering the inner sanctum of the baseball world, his sandals flapping behind me to echo inside the corridors.


Inside the sparkling clubhouse, we chatted with So Taguchi, their sole Japanese player. “It’s Brad Penny today,” he told me in polite Japanese as he stretched, “so I have a day off.” As a specialist that gets to hit only with left-handed pitchers, he would welcome a day off, and a conversation in his native tongue. Bill rushed off and disappeared for a moment, and returned with two balls, with a logo celebrating the new stadium, and a pen; “here…I figured you guys would want these signed.” Then, a visit to greet Pujols, and the young catcher Yadier Molina, would follow, and also an introduction to an friendly Jim Edmonds. “Hi, I’m Jim Edmonds!” he engulfed my hand with his, as if we did not recognize one of the best outfielders in the game today. Then we peeked in at the manager’s office, and chatted with Tony LaRussa about my painting at the St. Louis Art Museum. “My wife loves to go there,” he said, “next time, I have to stop by the Japanese section, then.”

Bill gave us a full tour of the stadium, taking us to each area of a huge entertainment complex. What astonished us, and Ty would comment on this repeatedly later, was the fact that Bill had to carry his own ID and had show it to get into each area. Many of the workers did not recognize him; but, of course, once they saw the identification, they hurried to make sure that their boss was well attended to. The first day, when we exited the box seats after we watched the game, we actually walked down with the fans, exiting down the ramps. No one recognized us.

“Steinbrenner would never do that.” Ty commented. “The Boss would have a helicopter landing on the top, and a secret entrance.”

***


So it was, for perhaps a day, we had become bona-fide fans of the Cards. So Taguchi even got to bat that day, dashing to right field as Brad Penny exited. Refracting in our conversations as Ty and I headed home were a wise owner and his creative wife whose zest and passion filled the box seats in St. Louis, as well as taxi rides in Washington D.C. As Council members, Kathy (her term was up this year) and I (a year left) do often get to sit in the front of the arts scene, observing and learning about the arts, and applauding the remarkable turnaround of the NEA. I am privileged to know other passionate advocates for the arts, and be invited into their journeys. But what would remain deeply etched in our hearts from our St. Louis experience may not be the clubhouse encounters, or balls signed by a remarkable group of players, but the opportunity to witness a humble owner who had to carry his ID in his own stadium. Rather than looking for that ultimate “green light” with Gatsby, and seek after an elusive crown, perhaps we should emulate an owner whose goal is to see the fans have a good time, and join them as they exit the stadium. Perhaps that is a parable of the responsible stewardship of culture that allows each gift to be most fruitful. We would never sit in A1 and A2 ever again, I am sure, especially in New York, but after those hot days in St. Louis, we decided to believe that a good team and a good owner could actually be victorious, and not break our hearts.

Makoto Fujimura
www.makotofujimura.com

Being a Child of the Creative Age

Being a Child of the Creative Age
Makoto Fujimura, International Arts Movement's Redemptive Culture Conference, 2007, at TriBeCa Performance Center, Ground Zero.




Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.

Songs of Innocence, The Lamb, William Blake


Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame they fearful symmetry?

Songs of Experience, The Tyger, William Blake



1. Inviting Monsters into our Hearts

A child uses all of her senses to discover the world. She picks up and finds fascination with a dandelion, feels the bumpy bark of a tree, tastes the baseball, smells the fallen leaf.

If you asked a room full of kindergarteners “Raise your hand if you are an artist!” Almost every child would raise his hand. But if you ask a room full of adults, almost every adult would not. (At a conference full of artists like this, you might say we are not just a gathering of artists, but a gathering of children!)

And if you are an artist, you know you are seen as out of the main stream, as avant -garde, but you also have been treated like a misfit or patronized like a child. You struggle to find meaning and significance in that gap between the two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. “Grow up and do something useful for society!” The world seems to place in opposition pitting the Innocence against the reality of the Experience. We are caught between being able to have that curiosity, inquisitiveness and emboldened sense of discovery of a child and the reality of the “adult world”, a reality that forces us to realize that we all indeed live in fear, in a ground zero of some kind or another. In our conversation to create a world that ought to be, we must start at that zero point of devastation.

In a recent Fresh Air broadcast of Guillermo Del Toro, Terry Gross interviews the writer/director of Pan’s Labythinth (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7000935). A remarkable film. Not what you would call a family film, but as a kind of Narnia for adults, it delves deeply into the mystery of redemption within the cruel setting of the Spanish civil war. Terry Gross interviewed Del Toro about his upbringing, in which his strict Catholic grandmother tried to exorcize him twice because he was drawing monsters. He was forbidden to imagine a fantasy world. That was his “ground zero.” So he grew up having to bifurcate his moral sense of duty to his family, and his growing imagination. He was lead to believe that he could not have both imagination and religion, that the two worlds could not be reconciled: so he chose to journey on the path of imagination, leaving religion behind him.

Some of us identify with Del Toro, thoroughly. We feel that the church has tried to “exorcise” us of our imagination. Del Toro states “I invited Jesus into my heart as a young child…but then I invited monsters into my heart.”

International Arts Movement exists for this type of wrestling of faith, culture and humanity. It starts with the admission that living and creating in ground zero means you live with both Jesus and monsters.

Wrestling in this way, we give ourselves permission to ask deeper questions. What if the monsters do take over? That would be a concern of parents in this room for their children. That may be our current cultural condition of fear. But, in reality, I think the situation is reversed: monsters have already taken over in reality, and the only hope we have is to imaginatively work backwards. We are to take charge of the situation, and we mediate both the sinister and the good. Just like in Pan’s Labyrinth, we need to know we have a greater inheritance waiting for us.

Some have called the 21st Century the “Creative Age.” Phil Hanes, philanthropist and arts advocate, at a recent National Council on the Arts meeting, began a discussion on how we need to prepare ourselves as a nation to address this shift. Richard Florida, Thomas Friedman, Daniel Pink and others have noted similar shifts in culture: The Information Age is behind us, and yet we, in America, are educating our children to thrive in that past. The skills and knowledge for Information Age are now outsourced, but we are ill equipped to lead in the age of imagination, the age of synthesis. While a hard term to define, The Creative Age will certainly mean one thing: we would have to reconcile living with both Jesus and monsters in our imaginative territories. We have to reconsider the artists’ role in society, in our education of our children: and we need to redefine how we see ourselves, all of us, as creative human beings who need art in our lives so that we can preserve a child’s innocence in the midst of horror and unspeakable evil, and help them to prosper and thrive in the creative age.

In St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, he exhorts us:


“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19 The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”



Thus, if the whole creation longs for the revealing of God’s children, we see that creativity, too, longs for some reality. Creativity longs for our “fittingness” in God’s plan of redemption. But this “frustration” causes setbacks, and birth pangs.

In Eden, Adam the poet names animals, and then discovers his need for Eve. Before the Fall, Adam’s creativity revealed his inner lack. After the Fall, then, the whole creation longs for a redeemed humanity to appear, not to return us to the Edenic state, but to move us into a better longing, for the New Creation. Our longing is not just to be restored to the fullness of our being, our longing is for the glorious freedom of the children of God and for liberation of our creativity and Creation. Our longing is for nothing less than a coronation/wedding celebration. The glorious freedom is in anticipating what that day will reveal in us and in our creativity.



2. From Being an Orphan to a Bride:



In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte’s Gothic tale, I see a (romantic) parable for us for the Creative Age. Now, I have known about Jane Eyre for a long time now, as this book had a transformative effect on Judy, my wife, when she encountered it at the age of 13. I heard from her how God filled her heart via the voice of Helen, a little girl (probably about 13) who befriends Jane in the school for orphans. Helen sows seeds of belief into then very bitter Jane. Jane had a right to be bitter, rejected by her cruel aunt who adopted her, and bullied by the new siblings; she was not only cast as an orphan, and falsely accused in the process, and some often used Biblical reasons for doing so. But Helen spoke of forgiveness and her confidence in God, even though she was treated just as unfairly, and even as she lay dying of typhoid fever, caused by less than adequate facilities at the school.



Recently, I watched with my wife the Masterpiece Theatre production of Jane Eyre, which, by the way, sadly, but typically, took out Helen’s exhortation to Jane (although I did like the casting of Ruth Wilson as Jane, and Toby Stephens as Mr. Rochester). I realized, though, how this powerful story, written before the Enlightenment schism, anticipates the modern dilemma and opens new vistas. Jane Eyre is a story of an orphan who finds herself becoming a bride of inheritance, even a double inheritance. She perseveres betrayal, neglect, and abuse and breaks through class barriers. It is a parable of liberation of humanity from “our bondage to decay” to that “glorious freedom.” She is also an artist, learning to draw at the school where she was exiled as an orphan. Written in first person narrative, the depiction of her world is done via a first-rate artist’s eye. In short, if you have not read Jane Eyre, take my advice: “Beg, borrow, or steal it without delay.” Actually, I am quoting Charlotte Bronte here, speaking well of her Yorkshire native William Wilberforce.

“Beg, borrow, or steal it without delay;” she wrote, “and read the Memoir of Wilberforce,--that short record of a brief uneventful life; I shall never forget it; it is beautiful, not on account of the language in which it is written, not on account of the incidents it details, but because of the simple narrative it gives of a young talented sincere Christian."
http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/egaskell/bl-egaskell-cbronte-8.htm



Charlotte Bronte, consciously or unconsciously, fuses this Wilberforcian idealism into her creativity. In her novel, she makes art with the belief of liberation for all people. This is precisely why we need to be speaking about her at this conference. She incarnates our common call to “create the world that ought to be,” and speaks through Jane Eyre’s voice.


It humbles me to think that I have been married to Judy for over 20 years now, and have never read the most influential book in her life. When I told her this, she, with her typical gentleness, countered by saying “That’s why it’s so worthwhile to stay together. It may take 20 years to start to read each other’s books…we’re just getting to the good part!”

Jane Eyre is equally as patient, a plain governess who determines her path of forgiveness, choosing to love her enigmatic, brooding employer Mr. Rochester, despite his inevitable downfall. There’s quite a drama in this rich landowner conspiring to hide his past, and the disastrous path that he paves for himself. But somehow, throughout, he acknowledges Jane, an orphaned woman without glamour, a woman of intellectual and creative thirst, as his equal.

But because of Rochester’s failures, she is exiled and again abandoned, to be one without family or friends. If you know the story, she then gains the favor of a missionary suitor, St. John Rivers, who takes her in when she is at his door, in near starvation. He then discovers her to be a determined force. St. John Rivers wants to marry her to take her to India, to be a missionary although neither loves the other. Jane would tell Rochester later, her true love, trying to allay his jealousy: “He (Rivers) is good and great…but as cold as iceberg.”

I find it curious that Charlotte Bronte sensed in the early 19th century that just like St. John Rivers, the church will manifest the effects of the enlightenment: theology veering towards depicting the gospel intellectually and only as a set of facts or information, but not communicate with the heart. The church is “good and great… but as cold as iceberg.” Bronte, throughout the novel, ties in Jane’s spiritual state with her creative, artistic state. Jane is an artist, cast away by society and circumstances from her true love. And the missionary can only present a sound, rational argument why she should join him, and this without love.

This disconnect is, also exemplified in works of van Gogh, where the church is still present in the Starry Night, holding the image together visually. But the Spirit has left the church, swirling into Nature. Her lover Rochester is the emblem of that Nature, swirling in her mind as her salvation. But Rochester, once a wanton world traveler, now is haunted by dark secrets. Though initially, Nature taps into her hunger, Nature herself fails ultimately, as Rochester fails her. But even in a severe, literal hunger that Jane experiences, Bronte also paints a landscape of hope.


I was recently going through the Biblical book of Joel, which I find to be a stark reminder of the catastrophes all around us, and those to come. I had put a post-it note on Joel 2 that I had forgotten about. I wrote: “The world is 90% catastrophe, but 100% grace (not 10%). “

Theologically, the whole world, after our expulsion from Eden, is ground zero. But art can refill the world with the aroma of grace.



There’s grace at work deeply imbedded in the novel, Jane ultimately using words reminiscent of Helen to cry out to God in her wilderness. She is exiled from both the world and her lover. Meanwhile, Mr. Rochester has literally been blinded from tragic consequences, though he finally begins to “see” his real wretched state. Jane would chose to return to him. “It is time some one undertook to re-humanize you,” and she begins to comb his tangled hair.

Re-humanize: what a wonderful word. Rochester needs to be re-humanized. Jane needs to inhabit that enigmatic, but now repentant heart. Just like Mr. Rochester, we need to be re-humanized. This culture needs to be re-humanized. Culture has been a tangled “shaggy black mane” like Rochester’s, that Jane has to comb out, blind to it’s own misery. Modernism has resulted in a tangled mess, or perhaps a neatly categorized supermarket of ideas, as in this photo (http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2001/07/22/28891.html) re-presented in Andreas Gursky’s “99 Cent”.

As a result of the enlightenment’s tendency to seek specialization, and minute categorization, “ it knows more about the little things and less about the big things. It knows more about every thing and less about Everything.” (Peter Kreeft, pg 108, Seel). Without the macro perspective, the grand narrative, our tangles get smaller and tighter, and as a result our creative expression has had to focus on the details, like here in Yayoi Kusama’s painting (http://www.exporevue.com/magazine/fr/kusama.html).


Technological advancements, certainly, lead to better living conditions and longer lives, and we should be thankful for that. But it also means the expansion of not just supermarkets, but of ground zeros. We find ourselves there alienated and smaller and smaller, and our injuries greater still. Just like Rochester’s limb, at the end of Jane Eyre, culture has been disfigured by the horrid fires of Hiroshima, and the poisons of the Holocaust, the twin emblems of the 20th century. These ghosts still haunt our post-modern, and now post-human realities (here captured as Willem de Kooning’s “Woman I” http://www.moma.org/ecards/write_ecard.php?object_id=79810).



Artists, the “the canary of the cultural mine” (Marshall McLuhan), know and sense this reality of being disfigured and cut off, orphaned by society. They feel that beauty, and pleasure, are both tainted and cannot be trusted. They embrace everything “anti” but rarely have much to say about what they are actually for. I was recently at the Veritas Forum at Columbia University where I was asked to debate feminist/activist artist Coco Fusco. At the end of the night, I felt very saddened by the fact that our dialogue seemed to be stuck on the NEA related culture wars of 15 years past. But the church, seen as the main source of cultural hegemony and oppression, has not provided her an alternative vision. The church has not romanced artists. As a result, the artists are left alone to defend themselves in culture, and do not have many Helens to speak God’s hope into their hearts.

Like Jane Eyre, we are to face a ruined heart and a ruined condition, our ground zeros. Mr. Rochester is disfigured, in misery. Astonishingly though, she tells Mr. Rochester as she combs his hair: “You are no ruin, sir – no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous.” She, by saying this, forgives. She not only gives a nod to Eden here, but foreshadows the New Creation to come. She is able to do this because, somehow, she keeps her innocence and purity intact, while recognizing fully the fallen reality. It was indeed during the deceptiveness of her lover that caused the actual lightning to strike on the tree she refers to. It was God’s judgment. She sees now with a refined purity of having gone through the fire of betrayal, and having come through without dross. She stands faithful.


In his book, “Breaking Ground,” Daniel Libeskind, the architect chosen for Ground Zero master design, also stood in the pit of Ground Zero, and facing, and laying his hand on the slurry wall, and heard an Augustinian echo, “Take it and read it…take it and read it.” “Take it and read” the slurry wall of your ground zero. “Take it and read” the faces of those who lost their lives there. He called his Berlin office and told his staff to scrap everything they had done up to that point: “The slurry wall is an engineering marvel, a metaphoric and literal stay against chaos and destruction. In refusing to fall, it seemed to attest, perhaps as eloquently as the Constitution, to the unshakable foundations of democracy and the value of human life and liberty.” (pg. 43, Breaking Ground)

Artists, we are called to create in our ground zeroes, too. We need to be a voice of faith there. Yes, we have been alienated and orphaned. It is time to regard the age at hand, and take individual steps to move beyond the post-modern fog into the Creative Age. It is not time to remain bitter, but it is time to bring the words of Helen into our bitter culture. Helen embraced, even in her illness, the deeper voice of her God for her friend, Jane Eyre. You, along with other entrepreneurs of the age, are asked to hold your gaze true to your original call. Though the conditions are bleak, it is still our call to listen to the voices speaking through our slurry walls, our limitations and our boundaries. The Creative Age exists because of the opportunity presented by the crisis of our age. We face a precipice of despair and fear, a culture at a loss to offer what it means to be a human being. This culture herself is orphaned, and cannot see beyond her misery. We at IAM can see our “slurry wall” in front of us, a wall that somehow withstood the onslaught of ideological attacks that claim bondage to our souls. Within, there are millions of faces, victims of dehumanization, the holocaust, and the fragmentation of our time. It is time to read those faces, and build on faith. There’s no other choice; To love is to remain human. We need to romance the culture in this present crisis. Woo her to love, and not fear. To do that is to be a true artist of the Creative Age.


Artists have the empathetic capacity to embrace humanity even in the most destitute of times. But to do so, we have to see, like Jane, in a disfigured man a “green and vigorous” reality. She did not create reality, but she saw the greater reality. It is imagination guided by faith that taps into the New Earth and New Heaven. We need to note that she saw her own heart as disfigured, too, and she had to go through the fire of sanctification herself to know and recognize another cry, the cry of Mr. Rochester, out of that fire. Charlotte Bronte created a parable that echoes Romans 8. “Our sufferings are not worth the future glory…” We are destitute and orphaned, yet Christ sees a royal wedding and a coronation to come.



Artists need to remember that the reality of faith unlocks creative vision. Christ has been disfigured and orphaned for us. The great Artist, the Author of Life, who the prophet Isaiah speaks of as “crushed for our inequities” (Isaiah 53:5), released our souls from our own “bondage to decay.” The Spirit gives birth to creativity. God’s love flows into our hearts, via our creativity, to the world. In Christ you are part of the ekklessia, the new kind of community, that Jesus died for. You are not only invited to a wedding; You are the bride of Christ. Even if your stand alone, in you ground zero, you can stand like Jane Eyre, with a wedding dress.




3. The Bible begins with Creation, and ends in a wedding.



What does a wedding require for a Bride? We are to anticipate that day with all of our resources. We are always thinking of the Bridegroom. A wedding has all the genres of the arts represented; Dance, spoken words, art, culinary expertise, fashion and music. Children of the Creative Age are really wedding planners. We are to present the best, to spend the rest of our time preparing for that reality. This anticipation will usher a new age, and a new purpose. But it will cost, and it will require sacrifice. Do not listen to anyone who tickles you with a notion that we are a generation of Indigo children, and evolving into a new, and higher consciousness. No, instead, we are the children of God in a disfigured age. Our call is to love in that condition. Our call is to see through the disfigurement and tragedy.

Mr. Rochester cannot fully comprehend how Jane would be as “happy as I can be on earth,” to be with him. “Because you delight in sacrifice?” he asks.

“Sacrifice! What do I sacrifice? Famine for food, expectation for content. To be privileged to put my arms round what I value – to press my lips to what I love – to repose on what I trust; is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice.” She, apparently, loves him more despite his infirmities.

This is the heart of the New Creation. This parable gives us artists a new paradigm to consider. How do we love a disfigured world? How do we give sacrifice, without being conscious of it?

This sacrifice, that is no sacrifice to Jane, is precisely what we need now for true, lasting beauty, to re-humanize. Beauty is not cosmetic. Botox will not result in happiness. Jane Eyre is telling us we need to love even more our wrinkled faces. It is through this path that we will see creativity that not only restores but also redeems. We need, as the children of the Creative Age, not only to create in love, but to create what love means in this culture. By doing so our art will begin to re-humanize the world.

4. Enchantment of Jesus

So how do you indeed live with monsters and Jesus in your heart at the same time? How do we remain innocent and pure in the age of wickedness? We must live with groaning and expectation of Romans 8 at the same time. After all, our world is broken but also enchanted, in the sense of the medieval word for gospel – “Good Spell.” We have been cast a good spell by the words and breath of Jesus. The arts need to cast good spells into the world that is dying and cynical. Do not “throw out the baby with the bath water”: Jesus, the babe, is the source of life and art that no religious water can tarnish. So it is no surprise that all the tales of old that we were enchanted by as children, like Beauty and the Beast, seem to fit into our journeys. It is no surprise at all, that as we venture forward, we seem to give a backward glance, as in to this marvelous image of coronation by Fra Angelico (http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/Gowing/Fra-Angelico.jpg).

In a world that ought to be, we will have monsters dancing in our cosmic wedding. Our Experience, even our greatest of fears, will be rewoven into the texture of God’s design for the Innocent. You are not an orphan, but a prince and a princess of God. We are to receive more than a double inheritance. We need to begin to live like a bride expecting a great, cosmic wedding. We need to begin to act like Jane Eyre, the first child of the Creative Age.

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This keynote was delivered at a recent International Arts Movement conference. Other keynotes by Daniel Libeskind, Jeremy Begbie and others will be made available soon at www.iamny.org

*Image above: Still taken from Distintegration Loop by William Basinski (www.mmlxii.com/)

Here's a wonderful image from a sketchbook of John Hendrix (www.johnhendrix.com). He sketched this image as I spoke.

Refractions Volume 22:Operation Homecoming: Epistles of Injury

Operation Homecoming: Epistles of Injury
Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 22




I recently found myself at New York’s Symphony Space, listening to the voices of soldiers. As a National Council on the Arts member, I was representing the National Endowment for the Arts for the release of “Operation Homecoming” (Random House, edited by Andrew Carroll). The N.E.A. gave returning soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq an opportunity to write down their war time experiences in workshops lead by Pulitzer winning Vietnam era writers. With actors highlighting the evening, (Matthew Modine, Joan Allen, and, most memorably, Stephen Lang) and sitting next to one of the soldier/writers, I had a strange and uncomfortable revelation: a revelation that surely had been bubbling up in me in recent years -- How much of the world’s art and literature is linked to wartime experiences?

The writings of soldiers, or writing about wars in general, has indeed defined our literature and the arts, from Homer to Dante to Hemingway. If you remove works of art that do not in some way relate to, or respond to wars, our cultural landscape would be full of holes (think of Picasso’s “Guernica”). Perhaps that's what Jesus meant, when he warned us “such things (wars) must happen.” He did not validate wars by saying this, but he wanted to make sure we understood the inevitability of them: that our inner malaise will surely be translated into greater conflicts. But to have the Prince of Peace tell us that wars must happen is more than troubling. Must we be haunted by wars as part of God’s plan of redemption? Must art exist as primarily funerary?

In modern times, Rothko, Mondrian and other 20th Century masters wove the horrors of the atomic age into their work, as if to visit Hiroshima over and over again. Rothko gave that post-Atomic glow an ethereal transcendence even as Mondrian stubbornly, and valiantly, insisted on the order of grids against the approaching chaos. In both cases, they were exiled to New York, because of the dark specters of evil marching into their homelands. Surrealism (as the recent MOMA/National Gallery exhibit showed) screamed against the insanity of fear birthed in the trenches of WW1. These artists are often remembered for their anti-patriotic rants, or at best being ambivalent observers, and most definitely being anti-establishment. It is ironic that they are now seen as the establishment in the institutions of museums and academia. But the best of arts still can rise above the institutions and establishment that gave permission for them, or the conflicts that they escaped. The arts speak into a void, creating a moment of clarity, a pause in the frenzy.

Then there are the J.R.R. Tolkiens and C.S. Lewis of the world, whose front line experiences gave birth to the most resonant, faith-filled literature of our last century. Tolkien imagined through the dark trenches, surrounded by dying friends, and chose to speak directly against his own fear by naming one by one characters and places of imagined reality that would later form the basis for The Lord of the Rings. Lewis too, injured in the war, later recounts that his journey from atheism to faith was paved by his sense of loss, inconsolable violation (“the problem of pain”, he called it) that he felt in his bones. Having gone through such horrors is no guarantee of a recovery of faith, but it does suggest that faith and culture are linked to the crisis that surrounds us.

T.S. Eliot would have found this dialogue not so unfamiliar. His war-time journey to write the “Waste Land” could also describe our survey of Darfur and Afghanistan. In the “Four Quartets,” he describes “The unimaginable Zero Summer” of the atomic devastation but ends hopefully in the “still point of the turning world”, producing a rare articulation of the heart’s navigation from fear to love. But today, in the shadows of our current chaos in Iraq, and bullet holes in an Amish school still fresh in our minds, such sentiment can come across as too optimistic and even unkind.

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I read recently that most of early Christian art (at least the examples that have survived) were funerary in nature. Apparently, even in the world of faith, art is obsessed with death. Surely, it would be the darkest of confessions for any artist working today to admit that his/her visions are driven by the haunts of war and death, and, like Dante, that imaginative reality is filled with a vision of purgatorio. On the contrary, our recent contemporary art scene is rushing to escapism, lacking in engagement with the present darkness, and even without the disciplined skill to describe the horror. So such a confessional would seem welcome in today’s climate of superficiality. Pausing to listen to the writings of soldiers in “Operation Homecoming,” though, I have begun to see a glimpse of a new kind of realism.

These men and women chose to write staring into the abyss: to record both their fears and hopes, in this time of certain chaos, grieve over lost lives and opportunities; but they also speak well of their pets and ordinary sun-lit days. Theirs is a stark realism, observing the life surrounding the turmoil, wrestling against the fading memories of loved ones, comrades, and the stenches of war. So many of Operation Homecoming pages are filled with emails, which like radio dispatches, they will remain deeply etched in our minds as immediately potent. These are voices that are directed toward our private spheres, but now allowed to be make public: They deserve our hushed attention for their honest grappling with inner turmoil. Their accounts are true “Survivor” tales but without any shred of sensationalism. Told sometimes gingerly, sometimes in expletives, the soldiers seem to dwell, after a while, in my consciousness as my imaginary neighbors, people whom I might encounter in my street, or kick a soccer ball around with. I am surprised at how much humor fills these pages, not the sanitized kind, but the raw, grimy kind that belongs in beer halls and late night comedy shows. Refreshingly free of showmanship, in our glitz-filled cultural universe, their writings serve more than to recount the war: they speak into our lives with authenticity, and remind us somehow that, despite it all, humanity can still reign in a cruel kaleidoscope of fear called war.

There are poignant lessons, of a soldier writing home as he flew over Iraq, a geography lesson that span some 3000 years. “Have you heard of Mesopotamia?” writes Lieutenant Colonel Cohoes to his sons, “ Two great rivers of the word, the Tigris and the Euphrates, flow together here then empty into the Persian Gulf….King Nebuchadnezzar (I can’t say it either) build the hanging Gardens of Babylon about 2,600 years ago.” Of course, in the reading that took place at Symphony Hall, Matthew Modine could not pronounce “Nebuchadnezzar,” either.

There’s an account of a soldier of Korean descent who recounts his adoptive American father and grandfather fighting in their wars. Echoed throughout the book is generational lineage to wars, that it is not an isolated experience to one generation. Then there is Christy De’on Miller, in an essay she called “Timeless,” a single mom/soldier mourning over the loss of her only son, Aaron:

At times I believe I can learn to live a life without my son. After all, I must. I am certain there are other mothers who have lost their boys – car accidents, war, illness – who can shop for dinner at the local grocer’s without the macaroni-and-cheese boxes suddenly causing them grief. Moms who can roll sausage balls without tears; perhaps the festive food would even cause a smile. But the memory of him is planted in everything around me. Inside of me. So much is gone. Him, or course. But so much of him has been lost, is fading, breaking down. His blanket, his watch, his uniform…

The writings amplify the details of life, not just theirs, but ours. They let us into the writers’ worlds, to share in their grief, their loss, and their confusion.


Here was another revelation, then, after listening to the account after account of Afghan and Iraqi soldiers and their families that I, too, lived in a war zone. A different, milder version for sure, sanitized and packaged better. Photos of the bright new facades of “you can have it all” condominiums, to be completed in 2010, tell us that we are all better in downtown Manhattan. Their airbrushed architectural renderings are what a friend calls “architectural porn”. But nevertheless I live and raise my family in a place called Ground Zero, and reading the book opened my eyes to see the invisible collateral of a war far away shadowing us everywhere. Yes, even if there is no visible war around, there are less visible battles going on everywhere.

There are visible scars in culture though. The battle is about the imaginative territories of hope against fears, the sacrifice of love against a misplaced devotion, the anger of revenge against forgiveness. It is a battle that rages in the minds of youth as they negotiate the labyrinth of a techno frenzied universe, sharing a communion of broken promises. When the manifestation of such collateral damage ambushes us, like in the pastoral Amish landscapes recently, or in Littleton, Colorado in 1998, in a high school named after a delicate wild flower, we are astonished.

John Hewett, the development director of the N.E.A., and who also happens to be an ordained minister, told me a poignant story recently. When the evil struck the sleepy Amish community near Lancaster, when a gunman/milkman systematically shot girls one by one, there was a hidden story, in what he called “A Miracle Nobody Noticed.” He wrote:

I’m convinced most of us get through most days without thinking about God much. I was having one of those days a few weeks ago, until I heard about Marian and Barbie Fisher, two of the ten girls in the West Nickel Mines Amish School. Marian, the oldest, was 13. Her sister Barbie, who lived, is 11. When it became obvious what was about to happen that ghastly morning, Marian turned to the killer and said, “Shoot me and leave the other ones loose.” “Shoot me next,” Barbie said. “Shoot me next.”

Two children willing to lay down their lives for their friends. Wonder where they got an idea like that? That’s another miracle nobody noticed



Perhaps a new renaissance will be birthed out of the “mouths of babes” like these: “shoot me and leave the other ones loose.” Or it may flow out of a grieving mother/soldier like De’on grieving for Aaron, a Marine who lost his life protecting his wounded comrades. Perhaps we will see that whether we are soldiers, or housewives or Pulitzer Prize winning writers (or all of the above), we need to realize that we are not home, at least not yet. That’s the only faith that can compel us to say: “shoot me.” The girl did not complain that “this is unfair,” or argue, “this is unjust:” she just said “shoot me.”


Such fragile, but heroic, voices in the face of violence can easily be ignored, or simply not audible with our doomed ears. It certainly did nothing to stop a milkman from unloading his anger by pulling the trigger. Perhaps such otherworldly gestures look as pathetic, or beautiful, as the string quartet that played on as the Titanic sank. But I submit to you that here, in a miracle nobody noticed, is a bugle call also directed towards us artists. It begins in a belief that our lives are to be lived for others. Arts should let “the other ones loose” from the bondage of decay, apathy and loss. To the extent we are able to do that, to that degree we will see a new language of expression that is not self-centered, but self-giving and generous. Yes, I believe that art can, and ought to, exist apart from wars. But in only place where this has been the case in the history of the world, a place called Eden where a poet named Adam dwelled, is today hidden inaccessibly beneath, or above, the rubble of Iraq.

Operation Homecoming gives us authentic voices that seek be a responsible steward of their experiences. Why would that simple gesture seem so foreign and refreshing? Has our culture become so cynical that we no longer have the capacity to listen without having a wry, critical distance? Or has the media become so profit driven and sensationalistic that they no longer can mediate information responsibly? Because the soldiers have faced certain death, and stood over the rubble that might have crushed them, but having lived, they owned the experience, and chose to tell the tale artfully and carefully. If we all live in a war zone of some kind, should we not do the same? Words alone can impregnate promise or despair in such a precipice: the arts can inspire or despise humanity.

In Jesus’ realism of “these things must happen,” he was also reminding us that our sacrifice, either for just or unjust reasons, would not be the last word. Our efforts, however noble, will not end the cause of injustice. But we are all given a call for self-sacrifice nevertheless. None are exempt, not even a pacifist thirteen-year-old secluded as far away from Iraq as humanly possible. And Jesus knows, first hand, what it means to die an unjust death without picking up a stone, or a spear. Instead, he continues to breath life into us in our funerary songs. By listening to these soldiers/poets, though, we may even begin to feel that life-breath, a hint of a culture of self-giving. Despite the anguish, De’on writes with the same quiet surrender of the Amish sisters :

My faith doesn’t equal that of Job’s. I question. Why has God cut the fruit from my vine? Taken the only child that remained? Left me with no hope for a grandchild? I‘m certain there can be no more. No more children.

And yet I have no particular animosity for my son’s killer. He’s a nameless and faceless combatant to me. Should I ever have the opportunity to meet him, I hope that I’d forgive him. To me, the buck stops with the Father. His power stings at times. But He’s listened to me; perhaps He’s even cried with me. And yes, I do know what I’m talking about here. It’s a belief, man. Aaron’s words. You either believe in God or you don’t. Yes, I’d forgive. I do forgive. There is absolutely nothing I’d do to keep myself from spending eternity with God and Aaron.

Our path back to Eden is blocked, but there is a way in to the feast of the selfless. Only in these words of forgiveness, utterly stripped down to the core of faith, can echo the Timeless, or the Time-ful, promise of an Easter morning. That is our true Homecoming. Even if the condition is unbearably chaotic, or simply cruel, these authentic voices refracts in our fear dominated cultural landscape, mediating how we can choose to face a new day, and breathing certain hope into our stricken hearts.

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1/13/07 post script: Go and see "Pan's Labyrinth" (though not for children). The movie deals with themes of war and imagination, with echos of eternal longing. A must see.

Yoko Ono and Makoto Fujimura

During my recent exhibit for The City of London Festival (my installation art is documented below), I had a great pleasure of meeting Yoko Ono. We were the two visual artists selected for the festival's theme of Japan. She kindly folded an origami crane to celebrate our exhibits. Video can be seen at http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=7881168191579098779&hl=en

Makoto Fujimura

All Hallow's Exhibit

The All Hallow's Installation in London this summer consisted of three Mercy Seat that used my children’s arm measurements (Ty, 17, C.J., 15, and Lydia, 13) as their “portraits.” (see www.makotofujimura.com, under "essays" for more information on my Mercy Seat series). I also floated "Nagasaki Koi" video on top of the installation (thanks to Meryl Doney, The Hayward Gallery curator who selected me for the exhibit), and also had the video imbedded in the small boat covered with Japanese paper.

I will be using the Hiroshima/Nagasaki images again for my next exhibit in New York City, "Golden Fire" at Sara Tecchia Roma from Nov. 30th to Jan. 13th.

Refractions 21: Come and See: Leonardo da Vinci's Philip in The Last Supper

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 21
Come and See:
Leonardo da Vinci’s Philip in The Last Supper

Above: Leonardo da Vinci: "The Last Supper”: Philip sits fourth from the right. The top image simulates looking from below




“Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Nathaniel asked. “Come and see,” said Philip. John 1:46

The glass door automatically shut behind us as the guide motioned us to enter the inner chamber. We waited, and as another door opened, the cool, dry air enveloped us; a contrast to the hot, July heat in Milan. The courtyard of St. Maria delle Grazie sparkled outside in the morning sun, and I wondered if Leonard da Vinci stood upon the same rocks that I saw here, 500 years later.

Because of the Da Vinci Code phenomenon, I had received several inquiries to see if I could comment on the book and the movie, and my mind seemed to wander back to the same problem: “I have never seen Leonardo’s ‘The Last Supper’ in person…how could I comment on something that I have not seen?” Yes, I own a magnified version of the photograph of the painting (see plate B), represented in a magnificent book by The University of Chicago (440 pages of delight). And I have pondered the image as I have thought much about Andy Warhol’s series by the same title. Yes, I had seen a reproduction of Leonardo’s ‘The Last Supper’.

But I never had stood under it. So I came to Milan, Italy, to stand-under a painting.

“If you want to ‘understand’ something,” said my friend Bruce Herman, “you have to be willing to ‘stand under’ it.” Bruce, an art professor, went on to cite C.S. Lewis’ essay “Experiment in Criticism” in which Lewis, a medieval literature scholar at Oxford University, writes the following:

We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.

An Experiment in Criticism, pg. 18, 19 (Cambridge University Press)

In the essay Lewis makes a distinction between “using” art and “receiving” art. He argues quite persuasively that: “‘Using’ is inferior to ‘reception’ because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.”

Why is it important to experience a work first hand?

If we base our conclusions on merely what an “expert” has said, or on our own limited assumptions, it merely remains hearsay. We never get to discover, and ultimately create, out of an authentic experience.

Here’s what I discovered standing under The Last Supper: the most important visual catalyst for the painting is not the effeminate John, or Judas, nor even Jesus Himself. In fact, the key figure in kick-starting the visual movement of the painting is Philip.

It is Philip’s outstretched, distressed body and his cinnabar robe that we see first in the painting’s visual theatre. The whole painting is first experienced via Philip’s body. Our eyes go first to him; afterward they traverse to Jesus, the center of the work. Jesus’ mouth is slightly opened (discovered to be so through recent restoration efforts) and his hands are making powerfully emotive gestures. Leonardo was capturing the moment of Jesus’ announcement: “I tell you the truth, one of you is going to betray me.” (Gospel of John 13:21)

Leonardo painted in a grand, dominating scale for a small space. Even standing in the far back of the refectory, it is difficult for the eye to decipher the whole painting all at once. He painted “The Last Supper” in such a way as to force the viewer to enter the painting, physically and emotionally, and to viscerally become part of the narrative.

Only when the viewer stands under the painting can it be seen for what was intended (see plate A). Leonardo had a specific visual message to those who stand under the painting. He had a visual sophistication to carry off what very few artists could even dream to do then and now: he painted the complex psychology of betrayal. It starts with Philip, and ends in a moneybag. Invited to walk into Leonardo’s funhouse of mirrors, we are all meant to be part of this narrative, forever refracting within our own dark journeys.

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As an artist, I naturally try to identify the source of light in a painting, because I know that artists often use light to reveal what they want the viewer to see. In this painting, it would be easy to assume that the light is coming from behind from the windows, through which we see a Renaissance landscape. But the source of light in this painting actually is the face of Jesus reflecting on all of the disciples – all but Judas, who is under-painted with black, denied a brightened countenance.

The source of light points to what anchors the painting: the presence of Jesus. This is emphasized by the use of perspective, a Renaissance invention used to create an illusion of three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional space. The windows and other architectural elements create lines that end up in a single point, called the “vanishing point.” In “The Last Supper”, the vanishing point ends on the forehead of Jesus, the centerpiece of the painting. But if the painting were an equilibrium centered on Jesus, it would not create the psychological tension we feel from it. But the tension is there, and this is because Philip breaks up the visual stasis.

In any reproduction one sees in a book or a photograph (plate B), Philip’s body gets flattened. However, for a trained artist/viewer, the visual response to the actual piece is to see Philip’s body contorted, surrounded by negative spaces. The angle compresses his body and accentuates the movement of his reaction. Leonardo’s genius not only used the vanishing point to anchor the painting, but also to create waves of motion that shock us into shedding visual conventions.

If you are an artist working on a large commission, you know that looking up at a painting distorts what you paint, so you account for that by exaggerating the vertical. In other words, you make the figure taller than it needs to be. What I noticed looking up at the painting is that Leonardo did not make Philip’s body taller, but kept his body twisted, compressed and angular. That is why in reproductions of “The Last Supper” Philip’s body does not stand out.

If Leonardo did not elongate the figure, why does Philip stand out when you stand under the painting?

It took me the whole fifteen minutes I was allowed in St. Maria delle Grazie to understand what Leonardo did. And then the whole painting began to open up to me. In a true visual code, Leonardo reveals both his genius and the true message of the painting.

Philip stands out because he visually breaks the horizontal plane. The top of Philip’s head aligns itself with the perspective lines parallel to the windows. The eye attends to his head, magnetically drawn to the perspective line that juts out from the horizontal line. This only happens if you are standing below the painting . But there is another figure that breaks the horizontal line which is accentuated by the head of Jesus, and that other figure is Judas. “The Last Supper” is to be read from Philip to Judas, through the body of Christ, creating several visual “v’s” and “w’s”.

In the New Testament of the scriptures, Philip is one of the Seven, the closest disciple of Christ. It’s possible that he knew Jesus and his family, and may have grown up with Jesus. Philip is also noted in scriptures for having the ability to point others to Christ. He convinces Nathaniel to “come and see” Christ in the early chapters of the Gospels, and in the book of Acts (the historical document of the early church) he continues to draw many to Jesus, including the Ethiopian eunuch who was found reading the prophesy of Isaiah in Gaza.

It is clear to me that of all four of the Gospels, the Gospel of John is the one Leonardo relied on the most. The Gospel of Matthew reads more like a legal case to clearly convict Judas of betrayal. Both the Gospels of Luke and of Mark seem to focus on Peter, his betrayal compared to Judas, and eventual restoration to become the founder of the early church. But the Gospel of John records in detail what Leonardo depicted, from John’s reclining figure to Judas’ darkness, from Thomas’ infamous skepticism to Philip’s surprise at what Jesus’ mouth had just uttered.

Leonardo was interested in one thing: the psychological depiction of a night of betrayal. John 14:8 records Philip asking a question which reverberates throughout the painting:

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14: 8, 12)

Philip asks for evidence, a question that must have also filled Leonardo’s mind. Philip’s comment is one of near frustration, an insider’s exasperation, and therefore even the nature of his request assumes a close, trusting relationship. Jesus responds to the basis of Philip’s question by saying, “Don’t you know me, Philip?” In doing so, Jesus makes one of the most remarkable promises ever made to his followers (more on this later.)

It makes sense, then, that when Jesus reveals that he is to be betrayed by a close friend, Philip leaps out of his chair in disbelief. A pronouncement of a betrayal shocks the trusted the most. To this innocence Leonardo gives the most weight, initiating a shock wave that reverberates throughout the painting, and the corridors of time.

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Betrayal has always defined our lives, and since ancient times artists have given ample attention to this common human experience, in forms like Greek tragedies and Shakespearian plays. But today, we live in the expectation of one betrayal after another, of relationships breaking up, or of another political or religious leader found in scandal. Tabloid accounts of celebrities’ comings and goings amuse us, as we simultaneously bemoan and are entertained by their depth of woes.

Our culture of betrayal goes way beyond individual failures: it is a culture that has lost the belief in the good, true and beautiful. Without the a priori conscience that believes in civilization’s own integrity – that wrong can be righted, and that creativity is a gift to society – no art, and no work of our hands, can be infused with a transcendent vision. The culture of betrayal denies the potential to hope, and is determined to quickly self-destruct.

Our galleries and contemporary museums are full of such vacuous images (not to mention movie theatres and bookstores). But blaming artists is not helpful: no, rather it is more accurate to say that artists are simply reacting to, and honestly recording, the conditions of culture. They are, as Marshal McLuhan would have it, “a canary in the cultural mines.”

Artists smell the poisoned air and sing.

But Leonardo was born in a different time. He was given the legacy of Giotto and Fra Angelico. He had patronage that he could count on from the church and from powerful individuals who also assumed a certain world-view. He had geniuses as contemporaries, including Michelangelo and Botticelli, who also worked from a convention that assumed a direct connection between culture and beauty, goodness and truth.

In a sense, there was an innocence from which the artists of the time could work, but it was not naïveté. Leonardo certainly was not naïve, and he was certainly a religious skeptic. But this commission, only one of two wall commissions he had received, gave him an opportunity to work out of the meta-narrative (the Gospel story) with conviction and force. He could trust that his paintings were meant to last and speak to the generations to come. Because of corruption within the church, of which Leonardo was certainly aware and decried in his notes, and because of the loss of patronage about to ensue, this assumption saw its zenith in “The Last Supper”.

We may never recover that innocence again. In our current culture of betrayal we need evermore to see and stand-under The Last Supper. We need to seriously consider “receiving” the message, as C.S. Lewis suggests, and allowing the work to speak into our lives.

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In the DaVinci Code, the character Robert Langdon, a professor of “symbology,” finds it significant that Jesus and the effeminate figure seated on his right form the letter “M.” Moreover, Langdon believes this second figure is not St. John, but Mary Magdalene, the “bride of Christ,” dressed as a man.

Yes, there is an “M” imbedded in the painting, but Dan Brown does not go far enough in tracing its mystery.

The real “M” or a series of “M”s starting from Philip’s stretched out hand, do not end with John, but with Judas. More specifically, the shock wave ends in Judas’ right hand, which holds the money-bag, symbolically depicting the very coins that Judas would receive to betray Jesus.

Is the figure of John effeminate? Yes. But every male figure that Leonardo painted bordered on androgyny. Leonardo’s depiction of the sexual genre has never been a secret, and even a critique of such in open forums would not have surprised Leonardo. What would be shocking to Leonardo would be if the viewer did not somehow recognize the greatest message imbedded in the painting – that Judas, the seed of betrayal, is in all of us.

Most of the paintings of The Last Supper from the painter’s era depict Judas leaving the room. Yet Leonardo made a radical decision to have Judas to be part of the “inner circle,” placing him, and, by association, us, at the Table. Judas is depicted explicitly as part of the inside circle of the disciples sitting directly in front of Peter, who Christ identified as the “rock” of the early church.

Like Philip, Leonardo, wanted to point to a deeper journey. And when we stand-under this genius work, we too take part in that journey.

The Code phenomenon is not about conspiracy theories, but is rather a symptom of our cultural ills, of how easily we accept distortion and betrayal as normative and necessary. We are trained to cheapen our dialogue to fit our darkened realities.

Today our moneybags are full of flashy, counterfeit sound bites.

Christians must understand that this can easily happen in our worship as well as in popular culture. We want God to be palatable and to fit our needs and realities, instead of practicing a daily discipline. I venture to say that what goes on inside our worship may have a greater impact even upon the larger cultural condition.

Could it be that the reason why we have such a divided nation, insistent on quick judgment, is because the Church does not fully know how to live and exercise grace? Could it be that the reason why we do not have a culture full of beauty is because our worship is not beautiful? Could it be that the cause of our shortened attention span in contemporary society is because the Church has not trained us to listen well?

In our culture of betrayal, we are quick to impose our own views on layers of established systems. Thus, even a work of art is to be distrusted. Rather than trying to “under-stand” the work, we stand over it and dismiss it as unreadable or worse yet, impose a critical ideology upon it without first allowing the work to affect us.

In doing so we miss out on experiencing what the work of art can offer, and consequently we do not journey into the power of genuine art. This lack of authentic encounters leads only to a vortex of distrust, fueled by the media, whose capital is fear. We are drowning in a deluge of despair, and our memories of the good, the true and the beautiful have nearly faded completely.

Sadly, today no one has Leonardo’s ability or skill to ask that complex and deeply layered question in his/her art, even with the advent of moving images. It may be argued that Leonardo was the last painter to have the ability to integrate history, theology, science and art with such mastery. Consider this: can we think of any other artist after Leonardo whose work would be a target for an intriguing conspiracy tale? No one has had the genius, the psychological complexity, nor the level of skill and patronage, not even Picasso, van Gogh or Warhol. Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly notable contributors, such as Grunewald (a topic for future Refractions), Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Gorky and Kandinsky, but none of these artists has the enormous social influence, not just in the arts, but in all human endeavors, that Leonardo has had.

Our wresting against an established system demands that the system has strength enough to withstand the challenge, and at the very least serve as a dialectical opponent. The center must hold in order for the surface tension to break. Thus even in facile intrigue there is always substance underneath. Our critique of contemporary culture must begin with that assumption. And then we must not just engage and critique from that conviction, we must create out of that center.

To da Vinci, such a foundation was immediately accessible. For him to have painted as he did, he had to be convinced of a center that holds.

So who is at the center? Where does the “vanishing point” end?

It ends on the forehead of the Savior.

And that foundation will hold, no matter how full our moneybags get, nor how little it takes for us to engage in betrayal. To Leonardo, the triangular shape of Jesus literally holds the painting in its visual movement. To Leonardo, that foundation was never in question: the question to him was the question of “evidence.”

Jesus exhorted Phillip to “believe” on the basis of the evidence of miracles. Leonardo, of all people, wanted evidence. He looked for it in the stars and sketched it in the sinews of cadavers. He sought resolution in the core of his creativity, and asked deeply phenomenological and existential questions. In other words, Leonardo saw himself at the Table, too, and, like Philip, leaping up at the comment of Jesus. Leonardo, even as a skeptic, was at once in a deep creative engagement with the Savior, and approached God with intellectual rigor and dialogue.

--------------------

In this remarkable passage of John 14, Jesus, the miracle worker, tells his disciples, in direct answer to Philip’s comments, that they shall do the “greater work.”

I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14: 8, 12)

What were the “greater things” to which Jesus referred? What could be greater than raising Lazarus from the dead, an event recorded in Chapter 11?

Leonardo framed the answer implicitly in The Last Supper with Philip’s earlier words:

“Come and see.”

The greater things were in telling the world to “come and see.” Come and see a masterpiece to consider these eternal questions. And that is what Leonardo determined to undertake in The Last Supper.

The Last Supper may even miraculously outlast celluloid (or even digital) and our 15-minutes-of-fame mindset, as the world deteriorates in front of our eyes. The Last Supper, in that sense, is a perfect complement, or even an antidote, for the twenty-first century cultural landscape, exposing us for who we truly are. Even in a mere fifteen-minute encounter, the work leaves us spell bound for a moment of wonderment.

This is why we all need to travel to Milan, just for a momentary decompression, to stand-under Christ who is about to reach for that bread of communion. Like Leonardo, we may even desire to participate in that evening, in the suffering of the one and only true Artist, and follow him to the vanishing point, the source of our bright countenance.

There, witnessing the earthy vermillion glow of the Milan rooftops, we may find ourselves deeply reflecting on the Gospel of John, Chapter 14, where the Savior’s still voice continues to expose the depth of our woes and the secrets of our depravity. In Christ’s outstretched arms, we may yet find our malaise lifted, our imaginations sparked to do “greater things.”


A special thanks to Dr. John E. Walford of Wheaton College and Dr. William A. Dyrness of Fuller Seminary for their insights to prepare for this Refractions.

Next month...a meeting with Yoko Ono in London!

Water Flames and Zero Summer Exhibit at the Katzen

Zero Summer (above image, 66x88", gold and silver on Kumohada) and several of Water Flames paintings will be traveling to Washington D.C. this summer, and the opening is May 20th, from 6-9pm. The Katzen Center is a spectacular new museum inside American University arts center, and is located at 4400 Massachusetts Ave, NW (203-885-1300) www.american.edu/museum

The exhibit will continue until August 20th. I hope to see you at the opening!

For a review of Water Flames series, go to http://nyartsmagazine.com/pages/nyam_document.php?nid=1279&did=3021

Makoto Fujimura

Refractions Vol. 20: The Housewife that Could

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 20
“The Housewife that Could: Jane Jacobs of 555 Hudson Street, Greenwich Village”
May, 2006



"Designing a dream city is easy," she concluded. "Rebuilding a living one takes imagination." Jane Jacobs, (New York Times, April 26th 2006)


Jane Jacobs passed away a few days ago at the age of 89 in a Toronto Hospital. A day later, there were several flowers placed in front of 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, New York City, with a note, "From this house, in 1961, a housewife changed the world."


I had lunch with sociologist Tony Carnes across from 555 Hudson Street last February, after a worship service at my church The Village Church on 11th Street. We were in a Chinese Restaurant across from this very site, looking across to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street. “You know Jane Jacobs lived here, right?” If there’s anything I have learned here in New York City is that you want to listen to an urban sociologist. What is so significant about Jane Jacobs? Well, according to Tony, and many others, she is the mother of a movement called New Urbanism, and yes, she happened to save Greenwich Village and changed the world, standing up against behemoth of highway construction, and against one of the most powerful men to control the destiny of New York, Robert Moses. Moses, who began his illustrious career by designing the Worlds Fair of 1939, is attributed with single handedly creating the suburbia of Long Island (and the development of suburbia in general) and the birth of car culture. He was so successful that it seemed no one stood against him in power and influence.


In 1961, Robert Moses met his match. During a hearing at which he announced his plans to open a highway into Washington Square and through Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs and several housewives stormed the hearing. Moses was irate, saying, "There is nobody against this—NOBODY, NOBODY, NOBODY, but a bunch of, a bunch of MOTHERS!” (http://www.kunstler.com/mags_jacobs.htm)

Today, many attribute Jacobs with having defeated Moses, in this modern version of David and Goliath. New Urbanist James Howard Kunstler writes:

One can say pretty definitively that she won the battle and the war, though the enormous inertia of American culture still acts as a drag on a genuine civic revival here. By the mid 1960s, her interests and writings broadened to take in the wider issues of economics and social relations, and by force of intellect she compelled the cultural elite to take seriously this untrained female generalist -- and wonderful prose stylist -- who had the nerve to work out large ideas on her own. Naturally, her books are now part of the curriculum.

http://www.kunstler.com/mags_jacobs.htm

Jane Jacobs wrote a book called 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' as she and her housewife friends battled Robert Moses. The book became a foundational text for those who challenged the conventional notion of urban growth and progress. She argued for diversity of close-knit streets and buildings, and for dense populations to increase commerce and community at the same time, an urban concoction that even provides safety. Suburbia, a legacy of Moses, would, by contrast, pretend to provide safety and protection, but, according to Jacobs, ultimately isolate and dehumanize. She is often asked if her ideas came about by hanging out with intellectuals at White Horse Tavern. No, she would answer, I could not afford to go there. She merely could observe, with her curious eyes roaming the streets of Greenwich Village from her window, the intricacies of street life, both ugly and beautiful. What she saw there, though, was not a scene of destruction filled with gangs and prostitutes. What she saw was a city life teeming with dialogue, neighborly attention and fermenting vibrant cultural mix that would fight the dehumanizing elements of our increasingly segmented modern culture. More importantly, she imagined a better city, as her motherly gaze looked over her streets as she wrote, and as she raised her children.

You might question…Safety? How could the chaos and brokenness of city life provide safety? Jacobs’ answer would be something like this: it would be difficult for a Columbine High School-type incident to break out in one of NYC’s schools today, however dangerous and tenuous the dilapidated schools can be. City life limits crime simply because there are more eyes to keep watch. And besides, it would be very, very difficult for my teenage boys to hide a cache of automatic weapons in their 100 square foot bedroom. Urbanity forces us to be dependent on each other and deal with our neighbors. Urbanity forces us out of our comfort zones and may even expose our dark, sinister plans.

Besides, do we not question today Moses’ insistent vision for “progress” and the expansion of highways, as we max out our credit cards purchasing gasoline in our four-dollar-a-gallon culture? Should we not pause to listen to a housewife named Jane Jacobs?

I became involved in this dialogue over the legacy of Robert Moses verses Jane Jacobs when IAM invited Jonathan Bradford of Grand Rapids, Michigan to speak here in New York City a year ago (hear free podcast on IAMNY.org in a week or so) As I volunteer on the National Council on the Arts, and get to know the NEA design director Jeff Speck, who is, as an urban design expert, overseeing the Mayor’s Institute, I am constantly reminded of the power of design to directly affect our quality of life. In this arena of New Urbanism, arts do overlap, literally, with our lives. Our cities are our artwork, and her designs can either make us more human or less human. Whether one agrees with the pro-growth model of Moses or the organic vision of Jacobs, this imaginative battle of how we are to see our cities continues today.

As I walked with my soon-to-be teenage daughter on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village recently, I had to give a nod to Jane Jacobs’ instincts. Bleecker Street is today the most sought after cultural nexus and originator of new commerce, far more influential, in my view, than the hyper commerce sites like Columbus Circle mall. Why would fashion designers like Marc Jacobs seek out tiny spaces on Bleecker St? Why would Saturday Night Live comedians celebrate Magnolia Bakery, also on Bleecker St., with their ode to the Chronicles of Narnia (one of the most sought after pod-cast videos on I-Tunes)? Why would Japanese magazines feature stores on Bleecker St. to the extent that if you walk on Bleecker in early May, Japan’s Golden Week holidays, you would think it’s a street in Shibuya, Tokyo, filled with so many Japanese? Where would my creative second son, C.J., go to get his left handed acoustic guitar? (Matt Umanov on Bleecker…because “they have guitars that really sing.”) And where can you run into, seemingly every time I walk on Bleecker, a friendly pastor of a storefront church, appropriately named the Neighborhood Church (next to Matt Umanov)? And most importantly for that beautiful spring day, where do you find gifts for a friend’s birthday, especially for a twelve year-old Lydia that cannot be bought anywhere else? Bleecker St.

Jane Jacobs was right. The city is best when buildings are diverse and small, where we can enjoy diversity of class, backgrounds and ages, mingling together in compressed streets. Today, such an environment is so needed, and endangered; it is fast becoming a destination site for tourism, as well as a place of commerce and a family friendly despite the high rent. Whether one agrees with Jacobs’ many irascible perspectives (and she was prolific in that, as well), she did forge a context for how a creative city can be imagined. Today, whatever is done around America in favor of creative neighborhoods, we all owe a nod of thanks to Jacobs.


It is noted that when Jane Jacobs would do her dishes or walked about the local streets one would hear her audibly debate with Thomas Jefferson, and, as a second alternative, Ben Franklin. This exercise was not a joke to her, but a serious interplay among generalists of equal statures across the schism of centuries, navigating the complex pluralism of our time. Similarly, anyone today walking about New York City, or any other urban mazes of the day, would need to, and want to, hold debates (and perhaps wash dishes, too) with Jane Jacobs, a determined housewife imagining a better city with her Remington typewriter. Feisty and irreplaceable, the sound of her typing echoes in our neighborly streets, refracting the dense, fiery heart of our humanity.

I am glad Jane Jacobs won the battle to save Greenwich Village.

Refractions Volume 19: Fra Angelico and the Five Hundred Year Question

It all started again when I visited the Fra Angelico (1395-1455) exhibit at the Met last December*.

Behind the splendor of the Christmas cresche, I entered the back hall of the Met. Surprisingly, there was no line (as opposed to the van Gogh drawing exhibit – 45 minutes). But there was a hushed gathering of many, moving about in the darkly lit halls.

I entered the halls and the golden aura of a diminutive Virgin Mary painting greeted me, with her azurite robe, and the Christ child’s supple body, reflecting her humanity -- a simple work full of weighty colors. Then I had to close my eyes, after a few seconds of pondering the saturated surface. I realized this was too much to behold, all at once. As I staggered about looking for a blank wall to stare at, almost feeling ashamed to be in the presence of such greatness, I had a “500 year” question pop up in my mind.

What is the five hundred year question? Well, it’s a historical look at the reality of our cultures, and asking what ideas, what art, what vision affects humanity for over five hundred years. It’s the opposite of the Warholian “15 seconds of fame.”

Contemporary art does not encourage such thoughts. Except for a few notable exceptions, like video guru Bill Viola or the minimal zen of Agnes Martin, contemporary artists want to compress time, rather than stretch time. We are immersed in a visual culture that squeezes life into 15 second commercials with instant gains. Chelsea galleries are full of art that screams for attention, as if to say they are the twenty first century version of Willy Loman. “Attention, Attention must be paid to such an art,” gallerists dressed in their designer fashion calls out. Rather than profundity, they pine after instant recognition and fame. Just like Willy, we peddle our goods to find significance and survival, all the more as the grey world all around us passes by.

Meanwhile, artists who labor to develop their craft, artists who are committed to a longer view of their art, suffer. I can name many mid-career artists, in their 50’s who deserve much attention, but galleries do not pay attention to them, and give fresh-out-of-art-school artists solo exhibits. But of course, they are replaced the next year by the next round of twenty year olds.

Nothing wrong with twenty year olds, by the way: Fra Angelico was one, but that’s the year he entered the Dominican order. That’s where his gift was discovered, in the long lasting tradition of art. He was trained as an apprentice, and his first notable piece was a visual echo of Lorenzo Monaco, which suggests that he studied under him.

If Fra Angelico was born today, he would have a hard time finding anyone to teach him their craft, to be apprenticed, let alone to join an Order. The church would not be the first place a creative genius would look for to be trained in art. That statement alone reveals how much Christians have abdicated our responsibility to steward culture.

If you spoke with people staggering about in the Met with me, having a similar reaction to looking at the glory of Fra Angelico’s paintings, you may find them to be Enlightened secularists who also grieve today over the fragmentation, the loss of a spiritual anchor in the contemporary art scene. They may be even atheists who by the very essence of their denial may have to appreciate the sheer weighty anchor of Fra Angelico paintings. Atheism demands a language of belief to wrestle against. Fra Angelico’s paintings are undeniably Christian to the core. Enlightened secularists would be staggering because the spirit has left them. Atheists stagger because they have lost the defining opposition. I stagger and grieve because, as a Christian, I realize I do not see anyone on the horizon who could create and paint today who would rival Fra Angelico’s angelic weight.

In short, we are all staggering about, or should be…those who have eyes to see. That is precisely how we should react to Fra Angelico and the five hundred year question. We stagger because we have lost even our ability to ask that question.

-----------------------------------------



So I took the subway home and I Googled “1500” :

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001221.html

The Tudors ruled the early Renaissance, having ended the War of the Roses in 1484. In 1503, da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, and Michelangelo created David. Not a bad start. The Sistine Chapel, and The Last Supper, of course, would follow.

Christopher Columbus was sailing to sites unknown, trying again to get to Asia. Magellan noted the global shape of the earth. Martin Luther posted his 95 thesis on the Wittenberg door (1517). And very significant for me, Tohaku Hasegawa, the Michelangelo of Japan, was born (1537).

I closed my eyes again, and the angels of Fra Angelico re-invited themselves in.

Would we see another Renaissance in the days to come? Would we have another chance to steward our culture, without losing our identity and faith in the process?

You might be saying “gee, how can we think about 500 years from now if we have the capacity to blow ourselves up a thousand time over…aren’t you being a bit optimistic?”

Recently, I had a conversation with a Japanese art student. She asked me “How can you paint if you know that you may not be around ten years from now?” The look on her face told me that she was deadly serious. Japanese youth grow up, apparently, with the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after all these years.

So I guided her to the ages that led up to 1500’s, and I shared with her about the period of world history in which Fra Angelico painted.

It was not a cozy time in history. The stenches of Black Death hovered all over Europe and Asia. Remember that the plague killed a half, yes a half, of the population in Europe. The swords of assassination were drawn (striking the Dukes of Surrey and Exeter, and then the Earls of Kent, Huntington and Salisbury for Richard II ), the church was in turmoil (two Popes resigning, and one being excommunicated in the span of four years). The Ottoman Empire invaded Constantinople, ending the Byzantine age, through Muslim invasion. No, it was not an age to have hope, or to think of the next five hundred years. In fact, the list of events seems to have remarkable echoes of our times (the first entry of the following web site is Baghdad being “sacked” -- http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?method=4&dsid=2222&dekey=15th+century&gwp=8&curtab=2222_1&linktext=15th%20century)

So how did Fra Anglico manage to paint these indelible images? Perhaps the more pertinent question is: “To what hope did he cling to in such a dark time?”

After my third visit to the Fra Angelico exhibit, I allowed myself to drink deeply of that hope. It is not only the hope of an individual genius, but also of patronage, of society and the church. Then I realized, in order to create today, in fact, in order to live today, I desperately needed Fra Angelico in my imagination: when the Angelic faces would fill my heart as I pondered Aquinas in my mind. I would consider the life of St. Francis (who appears over and over in the Met exhibit), the saint/artist of two centuries past who ushered in the resplendence of the Renaissance via his humanity, re-gifting creativity and theatre back into theology. I wondered if, had I painted with Fra Angelico, I would hear about the dangerous teenage heretic in France named Joan of Arc (executed 1436). Perhaps then, I would turn to the last panel of my own “The Last Judgment”, and paint her face (secretly) as she danced up the stairs of heaven, her rich cinnabar robe with golden calligraphy, a design fit for a Queen. (http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Fra_Angelico/images.asp)

Can such Eternity refract through our earthly visions? Can my children’s world birth generations of geniuses, as did Fra Angelico’s heirs, whose splendors would fill the Earth, as well as Heaven?


Makoto Fujimura

Other links:

http://www.mercatornet.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=220




*Actually, the seed of the 500-year idea was planted deeply in my heart when James Romaine, an art historian, and I were speaking soon after 9/11. “This is a once in a life time moment in our history: it could even be once in a five hundred year moment.”



Image: Azurite Light, 2006, 30x30"

A.R.T. Introduction

Image by Pamela Moore, "128 Cooper B"


Dear Refraction Readers:

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) via www.iamny.org (go to the conference section).

I will continue with my Refraction essays, free for all, again in March.

Makoto Fujimura


What is A.R.T.?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

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 Please go to www.fujimuracontemporary.com for more information on this painting

Refractions Volume 18: How the Beast Stole Christmas

How the Beast Stole Christmas
Could King Kong be a better film than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?


It is said that J.R.R. Tolkien disliked the Narnia stories, written by his closest literary comrade, C.S. Lewis. He found them to be a "a hodgepodge of myths.” This December, two films vie for a permanent place in our imaginative landscapes, offering two distinct visions for moviemaking. We should not be surprised that Lewis’ Narnia story, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so faithfully translated by a Disney team, is pitted against King Kong, a passionate offering by a director who so triumphantly translated, and transformed, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Narnia was a good film: but not a great film. King Kong is the better film -- And quite possibly a great film.


Don’t get me wrong. Georgie Henley, whose debut makes an indelible mark in the Narnia movie, playing Lucy, deserves much praise and recognition (the Academy Awards should create a new category – call it, let’s say, the Drew Barrymore E.T. Phone Home Award for the most iconic child actor of the year). Narnia should be seen by all of us if only to witness the light of Narnia wonderment refracted in Lucy’s face, and truly magical wardrobe scenes. The movie came out, to the relief of many Narnia fanatics, very much faithful to the text and imagery of C.S. Lewis. The depiction of the White Witch captured the intensity of conflicts, both spiritual and physical, and her cold stealthy fingers of evil were felt reaching into our hearts. And the twist in the end can unlock a mystery of redemption that we long to understand and describe as Christians.

But it’s the depiction of the beast that gave pause.

Can you really compare Aslan the lion, the Christ figure of Narnia with King Kong? You might ask. Isn’t Narnia the most redemptive, Christ-focused work on the screen today? And don’t you want any ventures related to the writings of C.S. Lewis (a writer I deeply love) to succeed?

Yes, no, and definitely yes.

We can, and need to, compare the two beasts, because the movies beckon us to do so. While the original text of Narnia is most redemptive, the movie pales in comparison: and I venture to say that Kong somehow manages to create a need for redemption better than Narnia as a film. Yes, I do want anything associated with our beloved don of Oxford to succeed. But, I came away convinced that Peter Jackson’s King Kong delivers the beastly quality best, while Disney’s Aslan felt tame and not the fierce Lion/King of Lewis’ original Aslan. Therefore Narnia’s redemptive quality suffered. I wonder if Lewis himself would have agreed: after all Lewis was "absolutely opposed" to a live-action version of "Narnia." (“according to an unpublished 1959 letter he wrote to a BBC producer. ‘Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare,’” (http://www.classical1035.com/index.php?sid=324631&nid=65&template=story_print))


In King Kong, we witness the transformation of the Beast to glimpse love and to experience beauty. We see the Beast be destroyed because of, and in spite of, that response. This transaction is deeply truthful, and even Biblical. He convinces us of the lack of a way out of that beastly existence. Romans chapter eight of the New Testament tells us “the creation was subjected to frustration…in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:20,21). Kong exactly captures this frustration. And in that gap between what may be possible and what is actually not, Christians can see our need to appear on the scene as children of God: we are to be Princes and Princesses of the great King. Narnia could have told this royal appearance most powerfully in the cinema, not just as a mandatory Star Wars like last scene, but as a layered character development that evolves over the course of the film. It is after all, a story of children who are literally destined for thrones. Psychological elements, the inner tension between the weight of the call and the actualization of that call, could have been explored much deeply.

Kong became truly dangerous and remained untamed even until the end. Andy Serkis, who “played” Kong deserves an Oscar (again, let’s create a new category – maybe name it after him, the Serkis Award for the best acting-via-CG. There are sure to be many more given in the future.) His depiction, his movement breathes life into a previously undeveloped beast as a tragic hero. After initiating us in incomparable Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy to how technology can morph the art of acting as we know it, he follows the same uncharted beastly path in Kong. His depiction of emotional depth and range of a wild monster turned to sacrificial protector is utterly unrivaled in modern cinema, excepting, possibly in a much smaller way this year, Gromit the claymation dog by Nick Park in Wallace and Gromit: the Curse of the Were Rabbit.

And then there’s the Empire State Building. I may love King Kong simply because New York City, wearing her 1932 Art Deco gown in the midst of The Depression, appears in the film as a central character, as important as any other actors, with the freshly built Empire State as her crown. From the misty East River to Times Square’s snowy theatre district, King Kong shows the city as wild as Skull Island, but also romantic and dreamy, and certainly much more dangerous than dinosaurs and poisonous spiders. The movie captures the monstrous power and sophistication of the City to make a plaything, a mere spectacle, out of a pure beauty called Ann Darrow, who is just as much of a misfit in NYC as a savage 50 foot beast.

Just as in this year’s Pride and Prejudice (another highly recommended film to see) a pure range of emotions of romance is explored without pandering to cheap, sensationalistic sex scenes. Compassion, to see beyond the veneer of our beastly existence, defines Naomi Watts’ performance. And Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) is seen mirroring his complex emotional connection in his act of creativity as a playwrite. In Skull Island, he is a “dare- to–save the girl” triathlon hero and not very credible (I certainly do not know many playwrites who can move that fast). But back in the NYC theatre, revelation he has, echoed in his own play, was one of the most important moments of the film. There is a great overlap between the dashed hopes of an imaginative, creative soul and the falling Ape. Both face an incomparable Empire State building and must climb to the top. And romance has everything to do with it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1939:

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood—everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora’s box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits – from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.


A year before his death, the beast of the literary world stood on top of the Empire State building and saw his own limitations. He saw the world crumble down, including his love for his beloved wife Zelda. Kong, in the same way, represents not just a beast, but a “Heart of Darkness,” (Joseph Conrad’s novel of African journey is often quoted both explicitly and implicitly in the film). And the tale is about our darkened hearts, and our Pandora’s box opened. We struggle to retain the wilderness, or fail to tame it. That’s why romances in our lives either destroy us or ultimately fail to satisfy us. Therefore, Kong was seen as a necessary villain residing deep within our hearts, a victim of our dark presumption. In the climactic scene of the movie, in a “Christina’s World” like stretch, the body of Naomi Watts reaches into the beast’s eyes of surrender. On top of the world, the beauty is held together still, for but one single moment, with the beast.

This beast truly proved dangerous, and beautiful at the same time: the way Aslan should have been. Kong stood on top of the Empire State and roared against the incoming fighter planes and even against his own death: Aslan’s willingness to suffer and be sacrificed for the betrayal of Edmund could have been equally as compelling visually, but it was not.

Lewis stated in Mere Christianity about Beauty and the Beast “The girl, you remember, had to marry a monster for some reason. And she did. She kissed it as if it were a man. And then, much to her relief, it really turned into a man and all went well…” He continues in the essay to woo us to realize that these stories of old are really a means for us to tap into the great, deep longing of our hearts, and our need for the gospel, the Good News of Christ. It is that suspense we wish for, what we deeply desire that is captured in Kong: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe needed to capture that better than it did.

It may be that Narnia was so wedded to the original text that it lost some of its mythic power. The Chronicles of Narnia is indeed a great story (and especially to read aloud to our children): and it does not need to be a film to add to its integrity. If the film makes us re-read these great stories, to appreciate Lewis’ myth-filled imagination, so be it. They may have seemed a “hodgepodge” to Tolkien, but to us in this age of uncertain fears, they are more like color-filled lights refracted in Lewis’ multi-faceted prism, filling our hearts with secure hope.

On the other hand, King Kong has to be a film. There’s no other way to communicate this beauty and beast visual drama. It’s a film that needs to be a film: that’s why it can be a great film.

Finally, it’s Peter Jackson’s love for movie making that prevails. He clearly believes in the art form called film: And he loves it deeply as a myth-making medium. It is that love for the medium that convinces us of a movie as not a mere translation, but as a transformational piece. Narnia is a faithful translation with a few magical moments. But it did not, ultimately, transform the text (that would require much more freedom to the movie makers). Kong transformed the tradition of movie making as an art form. He thoroughly explores that potential to the extent that some have complained on the time length of the Kong movie: to that I say… Narnia should have been at least three hours as well! See, Peter Jackson knew that the story was worth our time – such great stories of transformation take time to steep in our hearts.


Image: Scott Kolbo, "Faster Couple," Intaglio print, 20"x8", used by permission

World Magazine

I came home from Japan with my email box full of congratulations on my being selected as World Magazine's "Daniel of the Year". Since I was quite unaware of this (they told me only that they had been working on a story on me...), it came as quite a surprise, and made me think of the real Daniel that they named the honor after. Daniel is the biblical hero who interpreted dreams for the King of Babylon, was interrogated and thrown into the lion's den but not harmed. He was full of faith, a young man "without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king’s palace." (Daniel 1:4) He could interpret dreams. I am not so sure if I am worthy of such a comparison, but if this honor means that our friends in Christian circles are more and more aware of the vast importance of the arts in our lives and faith, I do accept, humbly knowing that there are many (some of whom I have spent time with in Japan and Washington D.C. in this trip) who labor for Christ without any fanfare or a deserved applause.

Here's the article...

http://worldmag.com/subscriber/default.cfm?issue_id=5085

I have always written Refractions knowing that many of the readers live outside of the cultural range of a Christian church. I hope you will continue to find this to be a listening post for my musings on travels, art and faith.

Daniel proclaimed to the King:

“Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever; wisdom and power are his. He changes times and seasons; he sets up kings and deposes them. He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning. He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him."

May your holiday season be full of refractions of this light.

Thanks

Makoto Fujimura

Image: from a Collaborative performance in Tokyo

Refractions 17: Walking Backwards into the Future

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 17
“Walking Backwards into the Future”
November, 2005




We have been taking my eldest son, Ty (17), on college tours of late, traveling mostly up and down the East Coast. Having been raised in New York City, he’s been curiously interested in only city schools. “An enclave of pseudo-community,” is the expression he’s used to describe some of the schools. Perhaps so, but I’ve been reminding him that some of the best education can be had in such enclaves (like Bucknell University, where my wife and I went). Perhaps being able to focus in a quiet bubble does have some merit? I asked. So far, he is not buying it.

I realized how much the climate of college selection has changed since I went through it in the Seventies. At Cornell University, a tour I also took with my father 25 years ago, I realized how much things have evolved since then. Colleges are big businesses, and self-assured marketing machines. Their successes are made visible in so many new building constructions. NYU and Columbia are buying up New York City, and practically every college we visited is expanding. But, as we journey the Hampton Inns (filled with seniors and their parents, all with the same looks of inevitability) and well marked admission buildings, we also discovered a new art form: student tour guides are now trained to walk backwards, and project their voices at the same time.

Not so, when I toured colleges as a teenager way back when, as we meekly followed the guides around the campus. We walked the grounds, without really looking for any amenities. When did a college education begin to involve new sports complex that combines a Crunch-like gym, with accompanying trainers, with rock climbing walls? Back then, we toured the libraries and soaked it all in very seriously, but somewhat casually. College tours today have evolved now into individual performances worthy of rating and timing, much like a skating competition. I suppose in a competitive business of education, and how much is at stake, it pays to train students to walk backwards to save time. Perhaps it speaks of the confidence that colleges place in their own students, to equip them with such indispensable training for life.

Aside from the technical requirements of such a performance -- such as their projection of voice, not falling into the cracks in the sidewalks, getting you back in time for their “informational meeting” (i.e., to answer how we can possibly afford this education), or not getting run over by a car (although they assured us that cars in the campuses, always stop for pedestrians) -- there’s the human, artistic element that needs to be cultivated for an excellent college tour guides. Humor, ability to pull out questions from prospective students, handling of anxious parents to make them feel at ease, all combine to make college tours (if you are privileged to take one from a good guide) rather an intriguing affair. I found, over time, I became an expert with my son at rating the tours. If they give you cookies in the middle of the tour in one of their many neon lit cafeterias, my rating seems to go up. If the student tour guide is too nervous, we try to bear with that, but the worst is usually not the student’s fault, but weather related (a blizzard in Syracuse! Minus ten points) or colleges too calculated with excessive marketing (i.e., a video piece showing many athletes and “diverse” body life of the students all smiling in their successes. A huge deduction in Ty’s mind).

So as we toured campuses, naturally I began to ponder not just what makes a good tour guide, but a good education in general. After having a discussion of this issue with my son at one school’s “Asian” cafeteria in Baltimore (yes, having good sushi in the cafeteria earns a few points), we decided that a good education is learning to walk backwards in to the future. Perhaps these college tour guides do have something to teach us, after all.

We raised our three children to, indeed, look back, to respect the tradition and history that they have come from. Rather than promising them an unlimited future, I found myself teaching them to steward carefully the gift mix they have. I wanted them to know the best of our traditions, from Shakespeare and Bach to Hemingway. I want them to also know how much their own time echoes in the various chambers of history, and are relevant in their post-9/11 experience. I want them to understand that in our mixed race-and-culture marriage between Judy (Irish/English/Scottish) and I (Japanese and God knows what else*), they represent in their mixed blood the very promise of reconciliation of nations that once were at war. But we also do not want them to dwell there, but to walk confidently towards a goal of their own path. We have tried to teach them that success is not worldly success of money and fame, but being faithful to the unique journey God has called them to. Education must be past-focused and future-focused at the same time. Our job is to help a child discover the uniqueness of their calling that only they can walk in.

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Paul Elie, in a recent book “The Life You Save May Be of Your Own: An American Pilgrimage” poignantly looks back to portray the journey of Flannery O’Connor, Doris Day, Walker Percey and Thomas Merton. As he recounts the life and art of Flannery O’Connor, arguably the most influential writer of the mid-Twentieth Century, he notes that at age five, O’Connor trained one of her chickens to walk backwards. A reporter from New York City somehow found out, and took a newsreel, with the title UNIQUE CHICKEN GOES IN REVERSE:

Elie writes: “The episode lasts less than a minute. Yet Mary Flannery O’Connor had been changed by it. She perceived that she had an unusual gift, even if it was just a gift for getting a certain kind of chicken to walk a certain way; and she saw that her challenge in life would be to make the nature of her gift clear to people who wouldn’t understand it otherwise…The chicken was a freak, a grotesque, and when a cameraman came all the way from New York to Savannah to photograph her just because she had trained it, she was suddenly a kind of freak, too” Pg. 13-14

O’Connor’s early experience shaped the vocabulary of her fiction. It seems that she not only trained her chicken to walk backwards, she trained herself to write and see in a kind of a backward manner. She reverses the conventionalities of a southern world-view, with a wry critical stance, exposing the superficial evils of a “Christ haunted south.” Her characters, like the Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or Hazel Mote in “Wise Blood,” speak out of the violent cores of our existence, so explosive and obsessive, and yet devastatingly precise in their actions. They will not be comfortably shaped into the future, but they resolutely and awkwardly remain in their pasts, walking reverse in a kind of self-tormenting labyrinth.

But in doing so, she gently lights the grace journey that lies deep beneath our feet. She walks backwards into a unique world, projecting her voice in an anguished, compressed scream, but what she actually describes is a transformative, rather hopeful series of epiphanies, intentionally cast into our own evil filled darkness and desires. What she accomplished in her short stories and one novel (she died very young) is noteworthy exactly because these stories arise from an unexpected place of exile, a voice of a Catholic in the Protestant south. They look backwards, having eyes upon Dante and Shakespeare in influence, but they also map a new territory of contemporary fiction. O’Connor’s stories seem fantastic and freakish at first, but we do grow into them, as we are so much in need of their vigor today, her dark vision so filled with faith.**

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As I negotiated the I-95 to get us home, and as Ty recited Hamlet in the passenger seat for his senior literature class, I pondered how much of our education is about the past, and how much is about the future. Of course, it is about both. I then realized that he has been walking backwards already without much fanfare. Whenever a student decides to stay true to his faith as a Christian in a public school in New York City as he has, he/she is walking backwards. When a student today is committed to keeping himself sexually pure, as he has endeavored to do with his girlfriend, he is walking backwards into the currents of cultural norms. When a student decides, on his own, to start a conservative club in his liberal Quaker school (with his Jewish buddy), he is definitely walking backwards. His teachers and fellow students may not agree with him, but he, with humor, manages. No matter where he ends up, or what he chooses to do in the future, he knows what it means to negotiate the labyrinth of complex pluralism of our day. The key, I realized for him as for me, is walking backwards and paying attention to what comes ahead, at the same time. That takes a kind of zany, awkward commitment not normally encouraged in schools nor in the world. More importantly, such a stance forces him to lead others, projecting his voice, and assuring them that their decision matters, too.

So, as we anxiously await his decision on his future (he decided to apply early decision to NYU), wondering how we ourselves ever got accepted by any college -- it seems we are to feel rather inferior about not measuring up, so when they do let him in, we can simply be grateful for the opportunity to send him with much enthusiasm -- I have learned much from these tour guides. Art today, too, suffers from certain amnesia (“post-modernism is xenophobic to the past” as Tom Oden states). Perhaps the best of art, too, is made via a backwards glance, and not simply blindly forging ahead, or we may end up, like O’Connor’s characters, trapped in futility? Perhaps by paying careful attention to the historical landmarks around us, and by artfully describing the milieu via naming the new experiences, we will stumble onto a vision that maps a new territory for art? Whether we buy into the hype of college admissions or not, one thing is for sure: The Twenty-First Century will be lead by creative children who boldly dare to lead, backwards. Their voices, like Flannery O’Connor’s, will project into the future corridors of their making, and we shall indeed be glad for that. To have such guides is worth any price, any sacrifice.



Makoto Fujimura

P.S. our Cornell guide did receive the highest points of all the guides so far.



*Most people assume that Japanese people are homogeneous. But the early history of Japan tells us that Nara, then the capital of Japan, was the end point of the Silk Road, and was as diverse as Queens is today.

** I am deeply grateful for Professor Robert Love Taylor who introduced Flannery O’Connor to me, a student who could barely write English at the time I arrived at Bucknell. Bubble or not, this starting point of my journey into the world of literature and art has let me to a deep well of creativity and expression.

Image: A Valentine’s Day Card from 1987. The year before we had Ty. This card proved prophetic…we ended up with the same number of children as the heart-shaped eggs!

Water Flames Review

Water Flames Exhibit has been selected on Terry Teachout's top five list.

http://www.terryteachout.com/aboutlastnight/sidestuff/topfive.shtml

GALLERY: Makoto Fujimura, Water Flames (Sara Tecchia Roma New York, 529 W. 20, up through Oct. 23). An exceptionally handsome new Chelsea gallery opens its doors with a show of large-scale paintings on paper inspired by a line borrowed by T.S. Eliot from Dante’s Divine Comedy: “The fire and the rose are one.” In these spacious, intensely colored visualizations of the essence of fire, Makoto Fujimura fuses Pollock-like pigment-dripping with medieval Japanese painting techniques. The results are at once spectacular in their immediate effect and unexpectedly intimate in the spell they cast on the attentive viewer. Be sure to take a look at the short documentary film in which Fujimura demonstrates how these works were created—and don’t overlook the smaller paintings hanging in the offices just off the main gallery (TT).

Exhibit continues until 10/22...

Water Flames Artist's Talk

Thank you for coming to this artist-talk event and the exhibit Water Flames. I am grateful for this dialogue, and to be on this journey together. I want to thank Sara and Benjamin for their support, as well as allowing me to speak tonight.



And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.



So wrote T.S. Eliot in “Four Quartets.”

In 2002, mere months after September 11th, I began a series of paintings based on T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”. The Four Quartets reveal a poet who struggled to understand the darkness of a war-torn world, and yet became a resolute voice of hope despite the darkness around him. His personal journey was one of being “disastrously married, accidentally expatriated, emotionally dependent… “ (Dana Gioia). And yet he reached that place of stillness. I needed to journey with the poet through “The Waste Land” into that “still point of the turning world” in my poet 9/11 experience.

I asked my writer friend who first introduced me to the “Four Quartets,” where the expression “the fire and the rose are one” originated and he kindly directed me to Dante. Apparently, Dante informed Eliot’s imaginative landscape, and Dante was to Eliot what Virgil was to Dante, a poetic and even spiritual guide and a mentor.

I thus began the “Water Flames” paintings wanting to further explore the “knot of fire”. It was an intense, intimidating battle at first, as I began to experience the enormity and weight that this theme brings into my art. It is a fearsome task to deal with fire.


I could find very few paintings of fire in modern times, which depict fire as a source of mystery and life, rather than a source of destruction. There are a few fire images by Ernst, Kiefer or Viola, and yet as a whole modern artists have not been very explicit. And yet, flames, particularly the flames of life, play a central role from Egyptian times to Giotto, with many examples up to medieval times. In Japan, fire images are very present and alive from “Zigoku Zoshi (Stories of Hell for Buddhist Priests)” to Gyoshu Hayami’s “Flame Dance.” Iri and Toshi Maruki’s Nihonga paintings of Hiroshima captured the sinister power of that living hell. After that, I dare say very few, except for the possible exception of my mentor Matazo Kayama, have painted fire as a life force. In 20th Century western works, one can surmise that Rothko’s and Richter’s are all paintings of fire, echoing the reality of an atomic age. In that sense, Eliot’s words “the Fire and the Rose are One” reverberate throughout the metaphysical art of modern times, and I am only starting to grasp the potential of such an expression.

Dorothy Sayers, in her exquisite commentaries of on Dante’s Inferno, states: “it is the weakness of Humanism to fall short in the imagination of ecstasy.” Dante’s works that begin in the perilous seas and a dark wood where “the right road was wholly lost and gone”, ends in “The love that moves the sun and the other stars.” I am aiming for this integration of elements, spiritual and physical, in these works that somehow capture the “imagination of ecstasy.” It is a journey that is driven upward. It is a journey of hope in a midst of darkness.




I use ground minerals and basic earth materials. I mix the pigments with Nikawa hide glue, and paint with water onto Kumohada hand lifted Japanese paper. I realized that, during the process of painting these images, that I had been painting fire all the time, but did not know that. For instance, even if I were to paint a flower, or a bird, or a landscape I was painting a burning rose, burning wings and burning mountains. I want to get at the mystery of what is behind an object or a landscape. And I have increasingly become more and more monochromatic in doing so. But the materials I use will refract, catching the most delicate, complex light, so they are multi-chromatic paintings that look monochromatic.

In the Water Flames, I am focused more intently on the process of creating. I speak about this in the mini-documentary shown here, but there are two sides of experiencing a work of art: process and product. It is interesting to ponder whether Dante’s work is more about the process of that journey, or the final destination. Dante never finished the work (as Sayers never finished the translation), and therefore one might argue that it was process driven – that it was experiential work. But throughout the journey, there is a pointed teleological directive, a type of conviction about the direction of the journey. L’Inferno begins:

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

But even there, lost in darkness,

Then I looked up, and saw the morning rays
Mantle its shoulder from that planet bright
Which guides men’s feel aright on all their ways:

In order to appreciate the experience of the journey, then, we must be convinced, also of the end point. This is what I experienced, as an artist, working on these paintings. There’s a certain way that process driven art relies on the end vision, and without such conviction in resolution, we can’t trust the process of creativity. A creative journey must be both the recognition of what is “lost and gone” in that dark wood, and at the same time be guided by a creative force that transcends our own capacities. We must see the morning rays
Mantle its shoulder from that planet bright, and that requires a kind of faith.


Dorothy Sayers seems to write her commentaries defending Dante from modernist critics who seem to relate to Inferno, and less so with Purgatorio and reject Paradiso all together. But Paradiso imagery is not an afterthought, but an end point of the journey that is necessary to see “the morning rays”. This is one of the keys to understanding Dante:

T.S. Eliot wrote:

.…because he could do everything else, is for that reason the greatest 'religious' poet, though to call him [merely] a 'religious poet' would be to abate his universality. The Divine Comedy expresses everything in the way of emotion, between depravity's despair and the beatific vision, that man is capable of experiencing. (T.S. Eliot on Dante)

Dante wants us to dive deeper into “depravity's despair” by and through the “the beatific vision.” So in that sense, it does not make sense to read L’Inferno without knowing Il Paradiso. There is a good reason why Dante titled this The Divine Comedy, and not The Divine Tragedy. It is from the first page to the last, a teleological journey upward.

This quote by Eliot actually prompts a few questions for me: questions that I have asked myself as I prepared the Water Flames paintings:


Dante is framing our question for both art and life, and that is why we must see Dante as a universal poet: Eliot unpacks this question to helps us to ask what is our expression of “depravity’s despair and the beatific vision” today? How does our contemporary expression compare to the emotional range of Dante?

Eric Fischl recently noted:

Artists connected with the church were asked to imagine four things; what heaven was like, what hell was like and what the Garden was like before and after the Fall. Those are four profound archetypes, and they're part of many cultures. What has happened over the centuries is the artists in the West have become specialized. You still find heaven painters, hell painters and Garden painters, but you rarely find them in the same person. In a way, that denies the full scope of the imaginative world.

Eric Fischl Art in America

We need to recover the “full scope of the imaginative world.” I believe it is possible to develop future art that has the range of Dante. But we must understand, that a different type of journey is required.





Soon after 9/11, I found myself needing to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I suppose being a “ground zero” resident now, I wanted to understand the real Ground Zero. When I was in Hiroshima, I took video footage of the memorial flames there. I used the footage in a post-9/11 installation called “Two-T” exhibit, a collaboration with Albert Pedulla.

Then I had another opportunity to collaborate in a production called Shangri-La, a modern opera composed by Susie Ibarra and written by Yusef Kumunyakaa. For the Kitchen production, Susie asked me to consider doing the visuals. We decided to use in the background images, frozen stills, of the flames of Hiroshima. As I was looking at them from the back of the stage, I realized that the images resonated so much with the direction I was moving towards, and Dante’s universe. So I appropriated these images of flames, and began the last few images of Water Flames.

Fire can be illustrated easily, and the abbreviated forms can be found everywhere, from “explosive content” labels to the Methodist Church’s logo. But how is fire’s essence to be captured? What is its shape? How do you describe its energy? Capture its heat? When fire becomes more than merely a symbol, but a phenomenon, then the depiction of flames become a difficult, if not an impossible, task. The attempt is to capture the essence of something you think you see, but in reality is elusive to capture. Fire is at once recognizable and yet mysteriously abstract at the same time.

The materials I use, mostly derived from the medieval methods of Japan, lend themselves to a subtle intersection between abstraction and representation hidden behind the four basic elements: Water, Earth, Air and Fire. Pulverized precious minerals, gifts from the earth, are layered with water onto Japanese mulberry and hemp fibers, creating a semi-permanent surface. The prismatic semi-opaque layers trap light, creating refraction of light for the eyes to delight in. Paper breathes, accommodating itself to the environment, and thus continues to mold itself to the surroundings, and that process is captured by the watermarks on the surface. Gold powder, mixed with animal hide glue, is the ideal color to be placed on top of Japanese vermillion and cochineal (derived from a tiny insect in India). The surface itself is an ecosystem of colors combining earth with air, and water with, in this new series, fire.

Of course, my paintings of flames could be read as “religious.” I am certainly risking that as I paint these images of Flames of Life. To me, to paint is to reveal the inner most chambers of my existence. Therefore, my work has a specific, transcendent purpose for me. Yes, I do want my art to be the “burning bush” that emits fiery power and yet exudes life. As I stated, I am convinced that our contemporary expressions need to recapture “depravity’s despair and the beatific vision” once again. If not, we incapacitate ourselves to a certain resignation: how would we understand our world of Hiroshima and 9/11 otherwise? How do we express the depth and breath of both our dark realities and resolute hope at the same time?




I find the most intriguing of the three books of The Divine Comedy to be Purgatorio. Why? Well, it is exactly because it is sandwiched between “depravity’s despair” and “the beatific vision.” Any utopian or dystopian vision can lose sight of the significance of suffering: the utopian vision tends to assume that suffering is illusionary, and the the dystopian vision might consider suffering to be the only reality. But Purgatorio assumes that suffering of the journey is very necessary to purify as gold, the divine grace that resides within.



Currently, at Luhring Augustine Gallery, Joel Sternfeld’s “Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America.” His photographs capture the enormous varieties of utopian communities in America, ranging from early Mormonism, Mayor Daley’s attempt to create green rooftops in Chicago to cultish visionaries. What you see in these depictions is the struggle and fascination we have toward our common search for the ideal. But as diverse as they are when you see them, I think you will note how similar they are. They all have common Edenic desires to get back to the Garden of Eden. But we also see that idealism is often met with disappointments. I wonder if in some profound way Sternfeld has captured a part of America that we all struggle with. We are suspicious of anyone who claims to have found the answer. And we are suspicious of Dante exactly for this reason.



But Dante, is not utopian or dystopian. Purgatorio is necessary exactly as a bridge between dystopia of Inferno and what we might see as the “utopia” of Paradiso.




Note that, for Protestant Christians, we need to know that what happens in Dante’s purgatory is not what we often misunderstand it to be: it is not a place for lost souls, or souls that do not know where they will end up. If you read Dante (and Catholic theology), you know that every cornice of the purgatory represents steps of sanctification. Purgatory is a place for those who know their final destination is heaven, and those who know that their earthly journey did not allow, for whatever the reason, the purification from what corrupts a person. I find, as a Christian, these verses of Purgatorio enormously helpful. As I struggle to understand my place in God’s graced Kingdom, I know that my journey needs to be challenged by fire, my inner corruptions exposed, and my convictions tested and purified. Further, I know, as an artist, that this is exactly what is needed in the process of art. There is no easy path. My creative process is filled with encounters with the “heavy cairn of stones.” And I must deal with them, one mineral at a time.

Where he and I burned in one furnace-blast;
The visionary fire so seared me through,
It broke my sleep perforce, and the dream passed.

This dream parallels the journey of a creative artist, who sees the need for “visionary fire” to sear us through. We know that in order to create, we must destroy something. In order for the minerals to refract beautifully, they must be pulverized. So Dante’s dream of purgatory seems apt in light of the process of creativity. It is a journey of beauty that the Japanese of old understood: ultimate beauty is necessarily tied with death, and sacrifice.

T.S. Eliot writes in Four Quartets:


The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—

To be redeemed from fire by fire



How can one be redeemed from fire by fire? Well, Eliot suggests that the fire of despair can turn into the fire of sanctification. This is the transition from the fire of the Inferno to the fire of Purgatorio. And as Eliot suggests here, it does lie in our “choice of pyre to pyre.” What exactly is this choice?

In Inferno and Purgatorio, Dante is guided by Virgil, and is devastated to find that Virgil disappears. And yet, at this turning point, is where he realizes that Beatrice (with her eyes and her mouth expressing the beatific vision) is her guide. She represents the vision of sacrificial love (a presence of Christ) that will ultimately guide him to Paradiso. And this transition of vision is given to us as a choice:


The angels cry out:

Do us more grace, and of thy grace reveal
Thy mouth to him, so that he may discern
The second beauty which thou dost conceal.

And Dante:

O splendour of the living light eterne,
What man that e’er beneath Parnassus’ shade
Grew pale, or from its fountain filled his urn…

There where all heaven harmonious shadows thee

Purgatorio, Canto XXXI, 136-141,145

Parnassus’s shade is referring to Apollo, the god of music, poetry and reason. Dante’s encounter with the “second beauty” accompanies the loss of Virgil, and it represents his inner death. Dante is dying to his need for his beloved guide, and his dependence on even Apollo, the god of poetry and reason. All things, even his art, and his own reason, is to be shadowed by this second beauty. Art as a guide can only go so far. My writer friend who guided me to read Dante tells me in our recent email correspondence: “that in the end, whatever our religious beliefs, we're hoping for something like grace to help our work go further than we can intend or achieve on our own” Our art must die to itself, in other words, in order that the fire of destruction can become the fire of life everlasting. And for that, a certain sacrifice is needed, a divine sacrifice of cosmic proportions that pours into us grace.



The upward journey, then, is fueled by this grace alone. These Water Flames paintings trace that journey of discovery, of dying to myself, and even to art. It is an invitation to the viewer to journey with me, with your creative offerings, to encounter this “second beauty” as well. Like Dante, we may need to descend, before we can be brought upward: certainly, we need to recover the language of heaven in our times, in order to understand the dark realm of our own nightmares. We may even be dismayed to find that the guide that we so idealized was inadequate. But if we can journey from “pyre to pyre”, we will recover the redemptive, imaginative landscape. We have to consider the alternative. Do we not have but a limited window of time today to infuse hope in the global dialogue? This is the work of imagination as much as it is a “flesh and blood” struggle. The journey of humility must take place for all of us, or the consequences will be dire. The stewardship of our creative journey, the development of that “full scope of the imaginative world” is needed, or we will succumb to the hopeless futility of the ideological and fear driven terrors of our day. Terror does take away imaginative hope. So the battle does rage in the creative realms dominated by vengeance, fear and despair verses the realms of humility, of “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

I hope these images point to the ultimate flames of life, flames that burn and yet do not consume us; and as we find our own dross being purged, and golden fire burn brightly within, may we, with Dante, find the “splendour of the living light” smiling upon us.

Water Flames Exhibit

In a beautiful new gallery, I am pleased to install these new works, loosely based on Dante's The Divine Comedy. Please note the artist talk event on Oct. 7th will also feature Susie Ibarra. Her music is dubbed with a documentary style video in the video created by Joey Tomassoni's team in the video room.

Check out the photos from the opening!

Makoto Fujimura Opening at Sara Tecchia Roma

And a blog interview at http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt/ Click on where it says "mp3" and you can hear my conversation with digital artist G.H. Hovagimyan.

Why Art?

I am down in Leesburg, Florida visiting my parents in law. My father in law, Terry Beebe, is on the board of Leesburg Center for the Arts, and invited me to speak to supporters of the arts. It was my delight to do so.

Here's what I spoke on:

Why Art?

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. Aristotle




As an artist, I often find myself trying to answer “Why Art?” Why is art necessary in our lives and in our education? How can I justify spending so much of my time and expenses invested in being an artist, and helping others by advocating for their artistic expressions? Why do we need the arts here in Leesburg? We have now much research pointing to the economic benefit of bringing art into communities. We have efforts to scientifically prove that the arts help us directly in education, in improving children’s school grades, and helping them to engage better with their worlds. I can give you evidence of how the arts help slow down dementia and reduce stress. (see Gifts of the Muse, by Rand Corporation)

But usually, in these gatherings, I end up listening to people, by finding out what deeply matters to them. And I often find that in the areas that they are most engaged in, and most passionate about, art is already present in that conversation. The person I may be speaking with may not know anything about art in New York, but he/she may talk about their children’s dream to become a dancer or an actor. They may talk about a movie they just saw that affected them deeply. They may speak of their business enterprises and find out that now businesses are starting to realize that the “bottom line” is not really sufficient; but there is a “second bottom line,” or a third. Business schools are now inviting designers to discuss creativity and design, to apply these principles into business practices because worker are no longer content to work in “bottom line” driven companies, but they want their whole person affirmed, and they want community. What I hear these workers stating, is that they want their humanity back. And in that conversation, art always presents itself as an expression of that humanity.

I was recently speaking at a church in NYC, and asked the people what they enjoy doing on Sundays apart from going to church. And everything they listed had something to do with the arts and entertainment. Art is everywhere, from the food we order in restaurants, to clothes we purchase, to paintings hanging on museums. Aristotle defined the arts as “our capacity to make.” So we could broaden our discussion into medicine and sciences. Even if we do not include these sister disciplines in our discussions, one thing is for sure: Our cultural productions and our art will defines us, whether we like it or not. Art expresses who we are.

One of the most frustrating moments in recent memory, for myself as an arts advocate, was to see the Super Bowl half time show knowing, that for the first time, that Janet Jackson fiasco was being broadcast in China. What do the Chinese think of us now? We have come to define ourselves by how we degrade ourselves, and we have exported that vision to the world.

When I traveled with The First Lady to represent the USA at the UNESCO general assembly several years ago (http://www.amb-usa.fr/usunesco/DELEG.HTM), one of the the UNESCO officials told us of her fears in America’s reengagement with UNESCO: “We are struggling to believe that the US can bring more than McDonalds, Coca Cola or Hollywood movies (I might add pornography to that list, but she was too polite).” We tried to convince her and other UNESCO leaders that we have a very unique patronage system that encourages our democratic patronage of the arts like the NEA and NEH. But it was when she connected with our projects with Shakespeare and Jazz Masters programs and touring of Martha Graham dance troops that convinced her that we were committed to a higher vision. These distinctively American forms of art, I would argue, are the greatest fruits of our democracy. And we have every reason to celebrate and broadcast with pride what freedom has brought us.


Tolstoy stated “Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man's reasonable perception into feeling”.


Art is a building block of civilization. A civilization that does not value its artistic expressions is a civilization that does not value itself. These tangible artistic expressions help us to understand ourselves. The arts teach us to respect both the diversity of our communities and the strength of our traditions. I encourage people not to segment art into an “extra” sphere of life and decorations. Why? Because art is everywhere, and has already taken root in our lives.

Therefore, the questions is not so much “why art?” but “which art?” We are presented with a choice. And this choice is a responsibility of cultural stewardship. Just as we have responsibility for natural resources, so do we have to take stewardship care of our culture.

What, then, does the current cultural ecosystem look like? NEA Research such as Reading at Risk, is pointing to a cultural epidemic of disengagement. The studies point to how we are reading less and less, but even more pronounced, in my mind, is how we are less engaged with civic activities, with nature (and even sports!).


The Columbine High School incident and 9/11 taught us that we can either use our imagination for destroy lives or to save lives. We have on the one hand a girl reading Macbeth (she wanted to be an actor) in the library, and on the other a teen pointing a gun at her head and asking her “do you still believe in God?” And she said “yes” and was shot. Her words affirmed the source of her life and salvation, and inspired countless others to express that belief: His actions prompted others to copy the destructive acts of horrors. On 9/11 we had, on the one hand, militant hijackers who took their imaginative vengeance into determined evil acts. On the other hand were firefighters who climbed the falling towers. We have to realize that before any of these acts were committed, they were imagined. We swim in the ecosystem of imagined actions. We do have a responsibility to that power. We do have a choice between saving lives, or destroying lives.

If we do not teach our children, and ourselves, that what we imagine, and how we design the world, can make a difference, the culture of cynicism will do that for us. If we do not take the initiative to love our neighbors by imagining better neighborhoods and cities, despair will take the imaginations of their children and turn them into destructive forces.

A few hopeful examples in the ecosystem of culture today:

1) Rafe Esquith, a National Medal of Arts recipient two years ago for his efforts
among the Hobart Elementary School children of inner city Los Angeles,
challenges immigrant children, many of whom do not speak English, to
memorize and perform Shakespeare. In the recent ceremony announcing
"American Masterpieces," a new N.E.A. initiative to bring masterpieces of visual art, dance and music to American cities, regional museums and
schools, the First Lady and other guests sat in awe as two of Mr. Esquith's students performed Henry the Fifth. Beyond knowing their demanding lines, they gave life to the words and elevated us all in the audience. Their childlike but confident orations had a beauty and a deeper resonance, something that this nation desperately needs to hear and understand today when these sounds are too often drowned out by crass commercial noise. Our children's voices can be elevated, drawing the world's attention to excellence, and the nobility of civilization.



2) About 20 years ago, Mayor Joseph Riley of Charleston, South Carolina woke up one day and realized that being a mayor means that you are the chief architect and designer of your city. He came to the NEA and asked for help because he knew nothing about design. What a humble man. He states: “We mayors exhaust ourselves with lots of decisions – political, personnel, budget. But 100 years from now, there will be no real evidence of how we made those decisions. In contrast, a decision about the physical design of a city will influence the city and its people for generations.” Now the Mayors Institute has helped over 625 mayors become the chief urban designers of their cities. 8 mayors are locked up in a room with 8 designers without the media or their aids. They share solutions, and dreams. Then they go home to their towns to see how the real life solutions can also benefit the environment and the general quality of life. This effort was so successful that it has grown to affect leadership at the state level. I just attended a press conference with NEA chairman Dana Gioa and Former Governors Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and Parris N. Glendening of Maryland to begin a Governor’s Institute on Community Design that brings this transformation into the state level.

The Governor’s Institute is co-sponsored by the NEA and the EPA. Strange bedfellows? No, it’s smart to connect the two -- again, it’s the issue of stewardship. The best design is most efficient, and friendly to the environment. The best design considers what the community needs first, and even her voiceless inhabitants. The best design brings beauty into our lives.


A journey of an artist in the ecosystem of culture:


I get to spend my days, thinking and imagining, painting and writing. I think about a journey that started as a child, simply wanting to draw and express, having encouraging parents, and being blessed with a wife who suffers alongside with me. The life of an artist is never easy, but I take it seriously because I know that imagination has consequences.

But I do, on occasion, go back to that question Why Art? Because it was a question I addressed to myself in a diary for a creative writing class in college, many years ago. My professor, wrote back in his comments: “your questions are valuable, and I encourage you to push that question further, as many of the writers and artists have done in the past: Why Live?”

Perhaps that’s why we need the arts in Leesburg. By continuing to create and imagine a better world, we live .

Zero Summer: for the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima

Zero Summer

Zero Summer imagines the unimaginable horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yet points to epiphanic awakening that transcend human imagination at the same time. T.S. Eliot, who coined this term in his “Four Quartets,” longed for that eternal summer, birthed out of the "still point," where imagination is met with grace and truth.

Image: Makoto Fujimura, Zero Summer, 89"x69" Mineral Pigments and Gold on Kumohada Paper

Refractions 16: Optimal Foraging Theory

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 16
Optimal Foraging Theory: Can you have your birds and eat them, too?



On the day that the Arkansas Democrat reported the sighting of thought-to-be-extinct ivory-billed woodpeckers, I toured the Tyson kill factory in Springdale, Arkansas where two hundred thousand Cornish hens are eviscerated each day. The director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture’s Faith as a Way of Life Project, David Miller, had invited us, as members of the project (see Refractions Volume 1 for more details of the Faith as a Way of Life project) to experience the inner workings of a Fortune 500 Company whose C.E.O. is now a committed Christian. Tyson, the largest producer of protein products in the world, has indeed been going through a major change in recent years, and is now known to be a faith-friendly company. The tension of living out one’s faith in the workplace seemed to swirl within the greater tension that exists between stewardship of natural resources and capitalistic interests. It seemed rather an ironic coincidence, that on the same day, the newspapers reported this remarkable sighting of woodpeckers that many still believe today to be extinct.

Upon entering the factory, with my hair net, smock and fluorescent earplugs, we saw small hens hung by their legs on a silver conveyer harness, parading in front of us with mind-numbing efficiency. The steamy, yellow odor enveloped us, mixed with bleach, and drips (we were warned) were felt keenly on our smocks as we toured.

Every thirty minutes, the tour guide told us, the workers rotate positions. They told us that this was one way to keep the workers engaged in their tasks, and a result of recent changes. The turnover rate for the workers was close to 100 % annually a decade ago, but after their reforms, now the rate is close to 30%. The workers, apparently, are finding the changes amenable and finding opportunities within the company to advance.

There was one room, though, where only a few workers were spotted. It was the “zero” point of where the birds are killed with laser beams slicing their throats. The birds are captured, hung and plucked, with increasing automation with each step. The hardest manual task, as it turns out, is actually catching the birds, several of them at once, and then hooking them onto the conveyer belt. But everything else is automated, including the actual point of life and death. As I watched the birds one by one approach the “zero point” of a laser beam aimed at their necks, there was an eerie silence about, the weight of life hung heavily in the dark room. The whole scene reminded me of Sue Coe’s drawings (http://www.graphicwitness.org/coe/meatpack.htm).

Then they brought in the workers so that the people on our tour could meet and interview them. Half were migrant workers (legal, they assured us), and others were local folks. They introduced themselves one by one, some with translators, and spoke of their experiences. They spoke humbly but rather confidently of their company experiences, and they seemed open to our questions, acting more like giddy school friends talking to outsiders than assembly line workers.

Many of them do start at a low wage, hard manual labor, and they spoke of having to build up much physical stamina to work there. But they each insisted on emphasizing how caring this company was for them. The workers were replete with testimonials of how much they found the company to affirm their individual value. Of course, these were selected workers who have succeeded in the company. But the sheer contrast between what many consider to be visual cruelty behind the curtains and the relaxed smiles of the workers, who found much dignity here, surprised us. Something is going on here that is unexpected, and even graceful. One of the managers told us, before the workers arrived, that they had for a long time struggled to integrate racial and cultural barriers, but once the rotations began and they implemented work reform, they began to interact, and some formed very close relationships.

One of the workers, Della, told us that she had a special project to benefit the needs of a local community. The cookbook was called “Randall Road Cooking: Sharing and Caring for the Future of the Babies” to benefit the March of Dimes. In the cookbook were recipes contributed by the workers: Aunt Carries’ Potato Salad, Pollo al Vapor, Tamale Pie… and, of course, a recipe for Cornish Game Hens by the Plant Manager.




The ivory-billed woodpecker has not been sighted for 60 years. But a group of Cornell ornithologists did spot one in the Cache River in Arkansas recently (see http://www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory/#). Larger than a crow, with distinctive plumage these handsome woodpeckers “need dead trees for nesting, and logging squeezed out the ivory bill, turning it into an accusatory ghost.” (James Gorman, NYT, Thursday, May 3rd)

When I was a student at Bucknell University, I studied Ornithology as part of a double major in art and animal behavior. I even spent cold, January days in a shack by the Susquehanna River taking data for “optimal foraging theory patterns of Chickadees.” Chickadees kept rather regular hours, as it turned out, coming in each day at similar times to forage, and this pattern could be interpreted with ecological significance. They, too, were efficient, saving their precious energies in a winter river-scape. It is a curious overlap, to see the vulnerable birds and their necessary efficiency, and the capitalistic efficiencies of our factories today. Both scenes mirror each other, overlapping in the needs of survival. Of course, we would be right to argue that our culture is a culture of wasteful efficiency. We have the capacity to alter and create the environment in ways that seem in some cases ridiculously destructive. In the wanton free-for-all drive to succeed, any capitalistic system craves for more and more. And in that kind of abundance, we are clearly in danger of damaging the delicate ecosystem, and losing our humanity in the process.

Does the spotting of the ivory-billed woodpecker represent part of the humanity we lost? And what did we really see at the kill factory in Springdale, Arkansas? Can we really eat our birds and save them, too?

Of course, as we toured Tyson, many of us might have pondered another obvious question related to this: Is it possible to be the CEO of a company and be a Christian? If the answer is yes, you might argue that finding one with much integrity is as difficult as spotting an ivory woodpecker (by the way, none has been spotted since the last reporting and the ornithologists are bickering over whether the proof of the last sighting is substantiated enough.) As skeptical as our group was when visiting the place, we had to admit that it took enormous courage for John Tyson to make his faith public did by weaving it into the core values of the company (see his core values statements: http://www.tysonfoodsinc.com/corporate/info/mission.asp). He was very honest with us about the tensions that he has to negotiate, the struggles he has gone through as the CEO and as a person. Questions filled our minds. Is it then possible to operate a faith-based company in which some million animals are killed each week? Are they “feeding the country” or simply being part of a consumer driven, capitalistic orgy?

Answers to such questions are never black and white. For instance, if these clean, efficient systems did not exist, avian SARS would have destroyed all of us by now. When Tsunami relief was given as an opportunity, this company filled the order, also with remarkable efficiency. They have the system in place to respond. And they are also able to export this system, whereby Cornish hens only require a month or so from hatching to the table. They are also providing much needed work to these local soils, creating a little city and culture, along with WalMart, in Bentonville, Arkansas.

And, perhaps most importantly, if the likes of the Tyson Company did not exist, I am not so sure that I could successfully chase a free-range chicken and catch it if I am hungry, let alone kill it and prepare it for the table. I would be the first to go extinct, in other words.

Perhaps we are just like the chickadees after all, saving their energies optimally so that we, too, can survive our winters. We are simply trying to do our best to survive in the competition of the marketplace, finding the most efficient means to eat. But there’s cost to this efficiency. All of the middle managers expressed how difficult it was to balance their family and church commitments with the stress of their jobs. These workers are enduring stress so that we can all celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. These holidays have, ironically, become the high noon of stress and death for many creatures.

Their company chaplaincy program, one of the largest in the country, addresses the various needs of the workers, including stress management. But there’s an inherent tension, and stress, in their own roles as well. The minister we spoke with told of a time when the workers went on a strike. He had to choose whether to march with the union or not (he did). After feeling the effects of intensity of the job, from low wage workers, to chaplains, to the C.E.O., I realized that those laser beams of consumerism were not just directed at the birds, but at all of us, and we are all being asked “what is our life about?”





We do long for a day, when ivory-billed woodpeckers will roam the dark shadows of Arkansas rivers, eating grubs and worms to their hearts’ content. Somehow, though, the ideals of that vision seem dream-like in the weight of the world’s conditions today. In the fiendish and ironic drama of survival and abundance, only the bottom line seems to matter. But what we need to think about is not just competitive drive of a successful American Company, but the issue of stewardship of our abundance. It is not the question of kill or not kill, but the issue of how much sacrifice, and for what purpose. The Bible points us to a place of abundance called the Shalom of God. The Bible does not prohibit the killing of animals. But it does deal harshly with our greed, our materialism, and the exploitation of those who are also made in the image of God. Instead, the scriptures point to a time when all things will be made beautiful, and every sacrifice is seen as the entry point of beauty. We need the ivory-billed woodpeckers in our lives, because we need appreciation of that fleeting vision of the beautiful, and what was lost. Their mysterious dark wings reveal part of what was sacrificed for our material abundance today. Further, the greater challenge may be to see that even a Tyson Cornish hen can point to that sacrificial need in our everyday lives. Can we, with grateful hearts, give thanks to the giver of life, not just for our capacity to survive, but to be given a vision of abundant grace, to thrive in God’s Shalom?

A youth pastor/writer member of the group commented: “Maybe we should consider sending our kids to observe this kill factory rather than some summer mission trip?” I nodded, and reached for my wallet to purchase one of Della’s cookbooks. I did want to, after all, participate in the communion of people of dignity, shared through their meals. They are the survivors of the ecosystem of consumerism. And I did want to know what Tamale Pie could taste like in Arkansas.

I do dream of seeing these woodpeckers someday, too. My search for them would be a fabulous way to honor Audubon, one of my favorite artists. These rare creatures are but a ghost of a time past, when survival of the fittest was the only reality, back when the harsh ecosystem might have killed more humans in winter than woodpeckers. Now, that reality is replaced by convenience and our comfort. Perhaps they were to be spotted only once, but in a fleeting moment. Perhaps they saw us, and understood what we have become, and they turned their backs on the world of Wal Marts and Burger Kings, spreading their wings to fly back in the hot, dark mysterious swamps of Arkansas, never to be seen again.

Makoto Fujimura


p.s. NPR recently commissioned a friend and a fellow collaborator in our journey of grace, Sufjan Stevens, to write a song on the ivory billed woodpecker, which he titled, “The Lord God Bird.” Check it out at:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4721675

Image: Makoto Fujimura, Aijo, Collection of Tamaya Corporation, Japan, 1989

Refractions 15: Gretchen's Butterflies

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 15
Gretchen’s Butterflies




Bill T. Jones started to sing, as he stepped out from the audience. He sang an old spiritual, and he slowly stepped down the stairs moving into the main stage, and his body swayed, his feet began to tap. The Kitchen, a black-box theatre located in Chelsea, Manhattan, a catalyst for much of experimental art and music on recent times, was his stage, his artistic home. And yet, he was not here to perform, he was not here to start a new program, he was here for a memorial service.

Gretchen Bender had passed away at the age of 53, to the shock of her friends and colleagues who came to honor her on that cold January day. Many influential figures of the art world, like Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Elizabeth Streb were present. Her sister Valerie Godwin, whose husband Clyde pastored my home church, The Village Church, introduced us in 1999. Gretchen then graciously took part in my TriBeCa Temporary project, which I curated after September 11th, 2001.

Gretchen, as many participants in the service recalled, remained in the background of the emerging media art phenomena in the eighties. She was a pioneer in this new form as New York Times’ critic Roberta Smith wrote in her obituary. She was part of “the generation of early 1980’s Pictures Artists…Combining aspects of Conceptual Art and Pop Art, these artists used the images of popular culture to dissect its powerful codes, especially regarding gender and sexuality. “ Many credit her today with pioneering “the rapid-fire hyperediting now pervasive in film, television and video art.”

Her accomplishments range from PBS documentary to museum retrospectives. But to me, her public work of 1990’s collaboration with Miran Fukuda, in the Tameike-Sanno station in Tokyo continue to be etched in my mind.

Tameike-Sanno Collaboration appropriated, ironically, the images of the World Trade Towers. When I visited her studio, located in Southstreet Seaport near Ground Zero, she told me of her experience after 9/11: “I was sitting on the steps in front of my studio, reading an article in a newspaper about the ‘butterflies’ the Russians had dropped all over Afghanistan in the last war and I looked up from the paper and stared blankly as I tried to comprehend the meaning of the article: what kind of cruelty was it that children picked up these ‘butterflies’ floating down and were blown apart... A sense of general despair for the world began to creep into my whole being when, suddenly, two feet in front of me, a REAL butterfly floated by my face. I couldn’t move in astonishment. I had never seen a butterfly in all my years on South Street and it was November and it was ground zero air quality and where did this fragile emanation appear from? All those souls lifting out of the white dust, off the collapsed shards – a sacrifice, a gift, a hope, for a spiritual shift in the world.”

She then created an installation for TriBeCa Temporary project that became a highlight of our six months effort to “create an oasis of collaboration for Ground Zero artists.” She folded hundreds of white origami butterflies, and carefully arranged them on the floor, re-presenting her experience that, she repeatedly told me, was her “resurrection moment”.
Then she told me something remarkable: “I could never do this in Chelsea galleries or museums.” I asked her “why?” She answered “well, it’s too tender, and beautiful.”

One of her friends reminded me, at the memorial, this was the last work that she ever exhibited.

It was evident to those who attended the memorial service how much she struggled with the hype, the greed and the back-stabbing that characterized the art world. She was too sensitive, too vulnerable, and too unguarded. Her long time partner Mitchell Wagenberg, shared how he wrote down pages and pages of how the art world had destroyed her, but then felt to restrain his comments. He nevertheless wanted to convey how she was victimized and swallowed up by the vicious realities of the art world, and felt betrayed. But perhaps Mitchell did not have to share the details his notes. The service started to take on a confessional tone, where one after another, emotive expressions by artists recalled her delicate nature, giving account of their personal struggles in their relationships with her, and with each other. Perhaps the language used in describing the scene was too brutally honest for some. One of my friends commented afterwards: “I’ve never heard so many four-letter words at a memorial service!”

After Bill T Jones spoke and sang, one of Gretchen’s assistants stood to share a song. It was a song that Gretchen listened to in her studio on her tape player. The worn-out tape is by an underground artist I’ve never heard before called Daniel Johnston*, but the assistant said, “it’s from First Corinthians 13 in the Bible.” I was surprised, as I knew how much Gretchen struggled with the church and Christianity. And yet when he started to sing, almost everyone in the room knew the tune, except, ironically, those of us who were Christians. We knew the words well, but not the tune. “Love is patient and kind, love is not jealous or boastful. It is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way…Love never ends.”

Perhaps Gretchen herself was “too tender and beautiful” for the art world after all. Perhaps she saw herself in that butterfly, a lone specter of a strange mystery in terrible dark days. Where would a creative butterfly like Gretchen migrate to? Would the art world continue to alienate and divide in our Darwinian grasp for a flash of spotlight? Would we then miss the small “resurrection moments” of our ordinary days? Gretchen, at last, saw the butterfly. Perhaps we would miss it or ignore it even if it flew in front of our eyes. Perhaps what we wanted to acknowledge on that cold day in January was the reality of how far we have fallen short of our own expectations and, even, our desires.

If Elaine Scarry (Beauty and Being Just, Princeton Press) is correct, true beauty forces us to admit our errors. Perhaps, in missing Gretchen, would we admit the vulnerability, and unguarded innocence of a true artistic experience? Would a community of broken, brutally honest, creative people lead the way for admission of our errors? The small, avant-garde theatre in Chelsea, for but a fleeting moment, became one communal confessional box, filling it with hymns and spiritual songs.

As I left The Kitchen (only to return in a few months later to do a collaboration called, ironically, Shangri-La), I felt certain of Jesus’ presence in that room. As the author and fulfillment of that song by Daniel Johnston, He would have invited himself there, as the manifestation of the “unknown, rejected” singer of a worn out tape of old. And there, his “dancing has turned into mourning” (Lamentations 5:15). At that moment, he would certainly have been unguarded, and perhaps as vulnerable as a single monarch flying in the ashes of Sept. 11th.

Makoto Fujimura

*Daniel Johnston was recently featured in a Sundance Film winning documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig (www.thedevilanddanieljohnston.com)