What Makes An Artist, An Artist?

 

It's a hard-knocks lesson in juxtaposition being a Catholic artist.

Orthodox Catholicism, by definition and nature, is "conservative" in that it seeks to conserve the depositum fidei in its original form, and preserve it for generations to come. Change is often made slowly, thoughtfully, deliberately; "a U-boat doesn't turn on a dime," as they say. Creative license is somewhat frowned upon, and often for good reason. Order, syntax, tradition--these are the qualities that make for predictability and creating an establishment to last. And the Catholic Church is very much establishment.

But there is also in the life of faith the unpredictable "wild goose" of the Holy Spirit and His work of grace. The Holy Spirit is the mystical, the wind [which] blows wherever it pleases. "You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." (Jn 3:8). There are also the diverse body of the saints, who have perfected the art of being. They are always depicted with a halo, because they know who they are, and from whom they come. They see with eyes that see; that is, they see reality for what it is, where others would rather not go. Their lives are not formulaic quid-pro-quo arrangements with the Divine, but the creative living out of their vocations as they are particularly called to do. They constrain themselves--by mortification, doctrine, and material reductionism, so that they might be truly free. And if "conservatism" has one great core value, it is freedom.

Conservatives, in general, though, tend to be suspicious and reticent about art. When I use the word 'artist' I mean it in the big-bucket sense to encompass all those who seek to create: musicians, writers, visual artists, film makers, poets, etc. The difficult thing about creating anything is that it tends not to want to be constrained. "Life finds a way" as Dr. Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park. In the novel, the good doctor elaborates,

"Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft going to the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing. The regular movement of objects. These are described by what are called linear equations, and mathematicians can solve those equations easily. We've been doing it for hundreds of years.

But there is another kind of behavior, which physics handles badly. For example, anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described by nonlinear equations. They're hard to solve-in fact, they're usually impossible to solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory.

Chaos theory originally grew out of attempts to make computer models of weather in the 1960s. Weather is a big complicated system, namely the earth's atmosphere as it interacts with the land and the sun. The behavior of this big complicated system always defied understanding. So naturally we couldn't predict weather. But what the early researchers learned from computer models was that, even if you could understand it, you still couldn't predict it. Weather prediction is absolutely impossible. The reason is that the behavior of the system is sensitively dependent on initial conditions.

Use a cannon to fire a shell of a certain weight, at a certain speed, and a certain angle of inclination-and if I then fire a second shell with almost the same weight, speed, and angle-what will happen? The two shells will land at almost the same spot - That's linear dynamics. But if I have a weather system that I start up with a certain temperature and a certain wind speed and a certain humidity-and if I then repeat it with almost the same temperature, wind, and humidity-the second system will not behave almost the same. It'll wander off and rapidly will become very different from the first. Thunderstorms instead of sunshine. That's nonlinear dynamics. They are sensitive to initial conditions: tiny differences become amplified.

The shorthand is the "butterfly effect." A butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing, and weather in New York is different.

Chaos is not just random and unpredictable. We actually find hidden regularities within the complex variety of a system's behavior. That's why chaos has now become a very broad theory that's used to study everything from the stock market, to rioting crowds, to brain waves during epilepsy. Any sort of complex system where there is confusion and unpredictability. We can find an underlying order. An underlying order is essentially characterized by the movement of the system within phase space.

Chaos theory says two things. First, that complex systems like weather have an underlying order. Second, the reverse of that-that simple systems can produce complex behavior. For example, pool balls. You hit a pool ball, and it starts to carom off the sides of the table. In theory, that's a fairly simple system, almost a Newtonian system. Since you can know the force imparted to the ball, and the mass of the ball, and you can calculate the angles at which it will strike the walls, you can predict the future behavior of the ball. In theory, you could predict the behavior of the ball far into the future, as it keeps bouncing from side to side. You could predict where it will end up three hours from now, in theory.

But in fact, it turns out you can't predict more than a few seconds into the future. Because almost immediately very small effects-imperfections in the surface of the ball, tiny indentations in the wood of the table-start to make a difference. And it doesn't take long before they overpower your careful calculations. So it turns out that this simple system of a pool ball on a table has unpredictable behavior."

Is there a place for so-called "conservative" artists? Well, if you're talking about the kitschy paintings of Thomas Kinkade or the juvenile political functionalism of Jon McNaughton's "Liberalism Is A Disease", I'd take a hard pass. 

There are the curious (and somewhat meticulously obsessive) conservative religious artists such as the obscure American James Hampton's religiously themed The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, which took him 14 laborious years to create. He lived, worked, and died in obscurity as a janitor. His piece was discovered in a D.C. storage unit posthumously and transferred to the Smithsonian. 

But maybe the time is ripe for conservative artists to find their place. After all, decades of modernist chaos, destruction, revolution, and perversion ad nauseum has created a dearth of order, goodness, and beauty in the world. Isn't it perhaps time to re-introduce it in a way that touches the soul and infuses grace and hope? 

I remember when The Passion of the Christ came out in theaters--it was not a film, but a work of art. And yet, it was thoroughly "traditional" through-and-through. Mel Gibson, of course, had taken some creative license, drawing on the visions of Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich. The cinematography was beautiful, the acting impeccable, and the ability to conjure not only the emotions but the spirit of those who watched it was, quite simply, what good art sets out to do.  

I watched an interesting interview with music producer Rick Rubin (founder of Def Jam records) who can't play any instruments and doesn't know how to use a mixing board. Self-admittedly, his "only real talent is listening." His Malibu recording studio Shangi-La is completely minimalist and painted all white, "Generally speaking, the creative process is subtractive. You have to remove as many distractions as possible. There's not a television, there's not a clock...it's like a blank canvas." Rubin notes,

"The goal is to create a setting where an artist can be completely vulnerable and feel completely free to be themselves one hundred percent. No shame or feeling of needing to perform a certain way, and no expectation...really, a safe place...to be naked, basically." 

The "bearded super-producer" Rick Rubin takes the opposite approach of most record producers in that he doesn't try to interject himself into the albums, but take himself out of it. The more invisible, the better. So, really, his only role (and the secret to his creative success) is being a kind of guide to accompany others into themselves. 

"If you really listen to what people say, usually....they tell you everything. I just really pay attention to what people say and through that I can then reflect back thoughts that they've told me about themselves that they don't know about themselves....and allow them to unlock those doors to get to the places they want to go artistically."

It's like fishing. You can go out fishing, but you can't say 'I'm going to catch three fish today.' You have very little control over this process. It's magic, really."

The "lack of control" can be scary for conservative-minded people sometimes. But interjecting such control into art is akin to trying to catch and cage a dove. The creative infusion of the Holy Spirit in the life of grace lends itself to a lack of control, in which you are following the wind where it leads, which is where creativity in art comes from. 

A man must be free to choose sin for his love to be authentic. An artist, likewise, must be free to explore the depths of his soul in order to bring it to the surface. Removing judgement and condemnation (which comes from the Enemy, the Great Accuser) may do wonders for any person of faith seeking to touch the Spirit of God which is within them. We all have that place within us. God sets the fence around the edge of the mountain so the children can play free from fear. The Devil, by contrast, cannot create, and so he resorts to legalism. Legalism is boring, predictable--the opposite of what makes for good art. 

Chesterton said, "The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age." An artist is one who has learned to bring to the surface for the world to see and enjoy, free of charge, the beauty of God within. Not only that, but also what it means to be truly human. This is the great mystery of the Christian faith--how the Eternal, Omnipotent, and Omnipresent Eternal God of the Universe also stooped to enter into the fray of time and space, and human existence as a man. There must, also then, be a place for Christians to be great artists in post-modern society. Barbara Nicolosi, a Catholic filmmaker I greatly admirer, said it well,

"People are thirsty for story, because, as Aristotle noted, human nature is driven to it and they are going to the movies to find something to feed them. But most of the time, when we go to the movies hungry, we come away still hungry and also disgusted. So why doesn’t the church step in and fill the vacuum? Why don’t we teach people how to make story? That’s what we should be doing. The Church should serve the culture." 

Amen.