Bridge to Wonder: Art as a Gospel of Beauty

7. The Impossible Definition

101 To define art seems impossible because “art” is a quintessentially contested statement and it is art’s nature to be thus.1 Definitions become static, creating sets of criteria that are then used to judge something as or as not something else. Because everything about the process of defining is conditioned by context and circumstance we need to be suspicious of it. However, if the very ambiguity of art is allowed to stand in for complete relativism and meaninglessness, a project such as this cannot proceed. As a precondition to the development of a bridge built by interlacing the arts and the religious in the work of theological aesthetics, the very difficulty of “art” as a category must first be tackled, even if briefly. Perhaps the best way to do this is to address some of the difficult questions that the idea of “art” brings up. In our contemporary and postcolonial world consciousness we have come to realize that “the practices and roles of artists are amazingly multiple and elusive.”2 Yet, allowing for this multiplicity we notice broadly recognizable markers of what constitutes human artfulness . For instance, artists do something, and we can inquire about what it is that they do and how it is that a given society understands what they do in relation to that society’s norm. Beyond this, to inquire what art is as it relates to questions of ultimate reality and revelation, necessitates an expansion of the idea of art to an unbounded panoply of forms, including myths, symbols, images, 7 The Impossible Definition 102 Bridge to Wonder songs, and rituals. If we include all of these ways of being creative, then we are asking fundamental questions about who may be called artists and also questioning exclusivist claims as to what may be called art. As we consider the work of artists in society and the multiple forms in which art may be found, we can also factor in the question posed by the two extremes of fundamentalism and relativism. This question centers on meaning and the mutually exclusive positions that works of art must be about one single message, about nothing or about everything. The current debate centers on determining if there is such a thing as meaning in art.3 As we will see when we explore one of the major clashes between art and religion of the twentieth century, the issue of how art is understood as either meaningful or meaningless , and how it functions through univocity, multivocity, ambiguity, or shock, is intimately connected to the question of just who determines what such meaning or lack of meaning might be. Keeping all of these tensions in mind provides a way to sketch an outline of what may be a helpful method for understanding art in the work of theological aesthetics. I propose to do this by setting out some possible responses to the issues raised above. The Task of the Artist One initial way to explore what it is that artists do is to note that they routinely take the commonplace and defamiliarize it.4 Artists “estrange” objects and complicate forms, making “perception long and laborious.”5 By taking what is familiar and complicating it, the artist returns life to the everyday; artists “make a stone feel stony” and arrest the fading of life into “nothingness.”6 We have been referring to this process as “seeing.” In this practice artists thematize the experience of reawakened creativity within themselves, while also drawing others into an awareness of how art renews their world. As the great Marc Chagall (Russian French, 1887–1985) recounts, addressing his father, “You remember I made a study of you. Your portrait was to have had the effect of a candle that bursts into flame and goes out at the same moment. Its aroma—that of sleep.”7 Chagall was seeing, truly seeing, his father in ways much beyond the commonplace, and the complication, we can surmise, was transformative to their relationship. According to Aristotle, part of what an artist does is to deal with possibility , not with “what has happened, but what may happen.”8 The The Impossible Definition 103 artist presents an imaginative vision in a universal way, and while in some ways “imitating” life, goes beyond what may have actually happened “to the law of the probable and the possible.”9 Artists also build political force, ways for us to engage the constant...