Art For Its Own Sake

Mitchell, Brody, Shannon, and Shelby,

And Anne, for taking the time to proofread this,

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (Genesis 1:28)

Later, in Genesis 2:15, God placed man in the Garden of Eden and gave him the responsibility of taking care of it.

This provides what we know of mankind, that he is to take care of a garden, and to have a certain degree of dominion and ownership over it.  As a child, I interpreted this merely as a maintenance position, but after taking some biblical foundations classes in college, I learned to call this the "cultural mandate."  God commanded mankind to become many nations, and even scattered mankind out intentionally after the flood when they tried building the tower of Babel, giving them many languages, many cultures.

This should have been evident from the beginning.  God didn't plant Adam on a farm.  He planted Adam in a garden.  A garden is more than a utilitarian means of growing food.  It's a work of art.  It's sometimes functional, but its primary purpose is to be beautiful.  Gardens have a variety of plants, and can be planned in a plurality of ways.  There's no such thing as one definitive garden; each is unique in its own way.  Some have flowers arranged in every color of the rainbow (although no such thing existed before the flood).  Some branch out to include every genus of tree.  Some only have a few select flora, but arrange them in artistic ways, and perhaps trim their hedges to form living sculptures.  Some even make gardens out of rocks.

A garden is a holistic concept.  It includes not only static objects, but a climate, and sometimes all breeds of fauna.  Most of all, gardens cannot exist without gardeners.  It's interactive; we not only tend to the garden, but we shape ourselves in the process.  We decide how we are to walk through the garden, the character we are to cultivate in ourselves as gardeners.  We do whatever we want in the garden, choosing whether we simply admire it and walk among it, or dress ourselves in its goods, or we can immerse ourselves in it by making sure to touch everything, or we can put use to it thoroughly and invent games to be played among its landscapes.  We can be minimalists and tend the garden by keeping our patch of it consistent, or we can try doing every last possible thing that we could think of.

All of the things that we can do!  If we can make gardens out of stone, then surely we can make gardens out of clay, and bricks, and metals.  We can take these elements and out of them forge gardens that we call "towns."  We can take ink from coal and pulp from wood and write handwritten letters and roll out books on the Gutenberg Printing Press.  We can derive fabrics from plants and worms to create cloths, and we can make clothes according to whatever we deem beautiful and seemly.  We can fashion out of wood and metal and ivory tools devoted to music, which we can play in this garden if gives a good atmosphere.

We can create gardens with unending creativity and novelty, or we can pause to recreate what has already been created. We can cause some aspects of our gardens to imitate what's already there.  We are made in the image of God, and the garden is shaped into the image of our passions, and we can make art to reflect on our work.  Using substances from too many sources to pick from, we can cover canvases with pictures of things that were or are or will be in the garden.  We can paint the insides of cathedrals, the domes of capital buildings, the tops of sidewalks, the glass fragments of windows, and even our own faces.  Some use dyes.  Others use knives or glowing metal to change the skin itself.

We can breed the beasts of the earth.  We are given ultimate freedom to even choose what sorts of parents we wish to be.

What do we do with all of this freedom?  What does it all mean?  Why have a garden?

Because we're precious to God, and He wants us to experience something of what He experiences.

What I find fascinating is that art can mean something, or absolutely nothing at all.  Take, for example, this piece of art, called "Sinful Man" by artist Kyla Nicole Wiebe:

Sinful Man
Kyla Wiebe

It has a deeper meaning.  It was intended to have a deeper meaning, and intended to communicate an idea.  Kyla is a passionate Christian artist determined to use art as a means of serving God and bring His Spirit to those who have never experienced it.  Art like this gives people a glimpse of God's revelation, a foretaste of scripture, so that they may understand the language of Grace in a familiar, non-liturgical context.  It's meant to illustrate the Message, and to get people to think about it.  Unreached people might discover a goodness they've never known before, and Christians can deepen their faith by incorporating the beautiful metaphors that she illustrates into their internal spiritual language.

It's interesting, because when I showed this picture to my father, his only reaction was, "It's nice to look at."  That's more or less his reaction to all art.  None of it really means anything, and it's just there.  How good are the technical details?  Is the style okay?  Does the person understand light, proportions, and most important of all, geometry?

Speaking of geometry —  and I know that this is a tangent —  circles are incredibly useful symbols in art.

Now, is it a terrible thing if Kyla Wiebe designed art to teach people and provoke them to think and feel, and my father thinks and feels nothing when looking at it?  Not necessarily.  She tries to succeed in all areas, and doesn't want to merely create crude drawings that get her point across.  If you look at her website art page, kylart, you will see that she puts 100% into everything that she creates.  Even if it doesn't affect everyone the way that it's meant to, no one is going to deny that the world is artsier and somehow better for her art for having been in it.

Because art doesn't have to serve a utilitarian function.  It very well can exist simply because we'd like to have something to hang up on our wall.  It can exist purely because we desire to appreciate someone's skill.  Take, for example, one of my drawings.

Do you see that picture of a hand?  It serves no purpose other than to exist for its own sake.  It doesn't represent anything.  It isn't the hand of a person that I know.  It holds no sentimental value to me.  I don't feel any emotions when I look at it.  Do you want to know why I have this?  I had an art class in high school and wanted to create something fancy.  I saw Michelangelo's David and appreciated the attention to detail.  I decided that I wanted to look at a photo of the carving and notice every single subtle shade of gray, and on a pure kinesthetic level, I enjoyed the experience of being this meticulous.

Similarly, I have created portraits of family members using pencil that have no real function other than to be slightly cooler than the old photographs that I based them off of.  I felt like the pencil portraits had more value simply because they took more time and intention to create.  The art didn't create anything new, other than a statement to anyone looking at them that someone cared enough to spend hours looking at every details of his family members' faces, and knowing them intimately.

Another piece of art that exists for its own sake is Toccata and Fuge in D Minor, by Johann Sebastian Bach.  Kicking off the first Fantasia movie, with the image of a seemingly all-powerful conductor standing before nothing and creating light with the wave of his hands, I can't help but be reminded of God, with His divine sovereignty and His Graceful will to initiate Creation and fill it with all sorts of technical details for no reason other than it should bring Him pleasure to do so.  The music doesn't seem to follow a narrative.  It's just there.  It represents a style, and it's memorable.  It's filled with complexity and challenging details that are hard for amateur musicians to think up.  It has a mathematical precision, and many people have said that this piece exists purely to for organists to demonstrate their mastery over their instrument.

To quote the the film on the matter:

Now there are three kinds of music on this "Fantasia" program. First, there's the kind that tells a definite story. Then there's the kind that, while it has no specific plot, does paint a series of more or less definite pictures. And then there's a third kind, music that exists simply for its own sake. Now, the number that opens our "Fantasia" program, the "Toccata and Fugue", is music of this third kind, what we call "absolute music." Even the title has no meaning beyond a description of the form of the music. What you will see on the screen is a picture of the various abstract images that might pass through your mind, if you sat in a concert hall listening to this music.

 The way that he phrases that, "absolute music," suggests positive connotations, as if this music is "truer" than other forms of music.  I wouldn't make that claim, but certainly wouldn't say that it's less true than other forms of art.  Some people might use less flattering words of absolute music, choosing to equate its meaninglessness as shallowness.  If it exists only for no sake, then it has no purpose.

The First Day
Kyla Wiebe

Yet, when God sat on his thrown and conducted light into existence, he didn't give a specific reason for its existence.  He didn't have to justify it.  He called it good, even though at that point in time it fulfilled no utilitarian purpose and didn't yet contribute to any human narrative.  The Divine Conductor loved it simply for existing, for being His.

This is how it was in the beginning.  This was good.  One day, when Christ returns, He promises to restore the universe to a state where once again it can be good, no asterisks.  Things can exist once more simply for their own sake.  No pragmatist will have any reason to denounce art as a waste of time.

Today, we must obey the laws of life, where we must work to earn bread.  We must divide up our time between the ones that we love because time is limited.  We must make haste as well, because the Kingdom of God is at hand.  We must use our stewardship to bring God to those who haven't heard.  But one day all will have heard.  All will have been said and done.  What do we do when all of this is over?  What lives to we live after the war?  What do we do in a world where our purpose in life has been fulfilled?  Consider a career in piracy?  Make Princess Bride references?

We will all be together.  It will be like Christmas, when you have your family, and you can enjoy the small things.  Everyone has each other.  Everyone is happy.  Everything is right.  And God is right there.

Imagine creating art on Christmas.  It doesn't have to be a painting.  It could be garden work, or making a homemade film, or building houses, or inventing recipes.  Why would someone create art on Christmas?  Do we do it because we need to work?  No.  I'd imagine that we do the things that we do on Christmas because we enjoy doing them, because they make the moment more special and enhance the time that we have with our families, because we realize that we have an abundance and choose to exercise that abundance.  They are outward reflections of how an unassuming Jewish baby proved that our lives are under the spotlight of love.  We make a work of art out of our lives because in the eternal day of Christ to come, everything will exist for its own sake.  We will be like our Lord who wants us to understand what He feels when He looks at His work and says, "It is good."

We even have that now, because faith in Christ's promise makes this future as good as the present.  There's a school, called the School of Cartooning and Animation for Missions.  It does exactly what its name suggests.  That artist that I mentioned earlier, Kyla Wiebe, leads this school, and her view of her work is very straightforward.  "Lives are at stake.  When you introduce people to Christ, you are saving lives."  Her view on the urgency of this is uncompromising.  With that in mind, you might imagine that the School of Cartooning and Animations for Missions, or SoCAM for short, only cares about results.  They might treat their art in the same way that Michael Bay treats a cash cow 80's franchise — it has to be just good enough in order to get the numbers rolling in.

Yet, that isn't their mentality.  They want people working with them who are not only passionate about missions, but passionate about art.  They don't only want the art to be effective, but good all on its own.  Why?  Because the beauty of God demands nothing less.  Kyla consistently says that she wishes to pursue excellence, and never settle for art that doesn't satisfy her.  She doesn't only create art because it's the right thing to do, but because it's a pleasure and she enjoys it.

This is the attitude of SoCAM.  They spread the Gospel not only because it's urgent, but because they've been touched with Love, and art the language through which they express their joy at being loved.  They create not out of fear and duty, but out of  joy and relationship.  Art reveals who they truly are under God.  Therefore, even though this art serves a purpose, in its own way, it exists for its own sake.  It exists because of the urgency to reap the harvest, but also in confidence of what has already been completed and what has been promised to us so as to be as good as completed.  They don't wait until the mission is over before they delight in the gifts that God has given them, since art is indeed a gift.  These are expressions of these artists' truest selves, the selves that we will see in the coming age.

It we all treat our lives like this, and everything that we set out to do like this, imagine the joy that we will know when we can rest on the Sabbath and say, "It is very, very good."

Soli Deo Gloria,
John