It's been an intellectually exciting couple of days. Frustrating in its own ways, between an adventure stranded in Forest Park on an evening buses inside the park were canceled for another event and getting buried under Senior Class Project Homework.
For those of you who don't know me, I'm on what I hope to be my very last school year as an undergraduate student, the degree finally being a BA in Art History. It's been a long road from freshman Graphic Design and Drawing Studio student at even another institute. I'm finally making the much needed leap from someone who struggled with grandiose abstract ideas to actually finding a concrete version of my message and putting it to the pen of scholasticism. Can I make the leap? *gulp*
My thesis idea rolls concepts of Spirituality and Religion, especially as pertaining to my Christian faith, with my passion for the Arts and Art History. A year ago, I had little awareness of other contemporary work under this combined umbrella, save for the rich tradition of Roman Catholic Art during the Renaissance. Who nowadays actually explores their Christian Faith in the context of art without getting tacky and kitsch or limiting themselves solely to a single sub-culture to the exclusion of those who could actually learn from them? But at the same time and on the other end of the spectrum, how do we actually gain the courage enough to begin to tell the story of faith in a depressed anti-religious (yet still spiritual) art world?
It's a thin line.
Theological Aesthetics seems a recently begun conversation, but luckily there are resources in the area, and books, after several searched on Amazon.com, I found out, do exist in the field and authors have indeed attempted to engage our postmodern culture with the hope it has so recently been lacking. And some have even maintained a quiet integrity while doing so. For a world which has been in the past not afraid of its Christian past, suddenly the fact that I have chosen this as my field of study in my last year at a public University has made me So, how does one push forward in the topic in an acceptable way at this kind of environment. Do I paint a solely Christian message then get in trouble later on for "closed mindedness" as I am sure I may someday be accused, or do I engage the whole of the human desire for spirit through the voice of all religions and hope someone catches an under laying glimpse of my own Christian sense of Hope? How do I embark and keep my integrity as a scholar-in-training in a postmodern American landscape that doesn't want to be told how to act and whom to worship, God-forbid?
Just some thoughts. Really.
I used to get frustrated for a specific local art gallery for not being upfront with its own Christian link, and hesitancy to deal with the Gospel directly in art, and yet, there they were, finding subtle ways to speak of the message of seeking God. Working in the secular gallery setting, then, when we know the audience wants nothing of God. I can think of a handful of artists who have successfully broken into the secular world and maintained their integrity as both Christians and Modern Artists, a fact which I am in total awe of.....they answered these problems for themselves.
Yesterday.
Wow.
After a very full morning, I partook in my weekly Friday evening trip to the Saint Louis Art Museum......well, what I hope to be a regular weekly Friday evening trip to the museum.
My boss, the Director of Gallery 210 gave quite the delightful talk in the history of modern manufacturing design in relation to the Museum's collection of chair, which sit not far from the mummies in the basement level. Honestly, so many times I have walked past those chairs, partaking in the laughter of my friends who little understood their significance in the time line of art, wondering why the heck would a CHAIR be considered art? Well, they are significant after all, in the realm of how to approach new technologies and materials in present societies, how to break the traditions of the time. And something as simply and quintessential as a chair, and elaborate elevated board in which to place your bottom, has provided an evolution from and back from and toward elaborate decoration or simply utility, or as we see the result thereof in the Target franchise, how to elevate life by making utility and usefulness assessable to amazing design. More amazing, the technology used in the Museum's most recent acquisitions is also used in making prosthetic limbs for veterans of the most recent wars who have sacrificed their own body for the military cause. It's an amazing connection of aerospace and digital engineering with art, and well worth the second glance.
Granted, the experience also led to some decent insights about the nature of any future in Grad school. Getting enough sleep translates into not working hard enough, or so the saying goes? What's a girl with sensitive sleep patterns to do in light of that insight?
Well, the whole point of my excursion, besides listening to Terry speak about that class of his I was curious about but never took, was to work on a paper involving two of the John Singelton Copley's hanging in the Portrait Gallery. Fat Chance of that after my curiosity took over. I wound up following what I thought was just another Gallery talk on account of not actually knowing that much about the art of the Enlightenment and Romanticism periods of Art History, but it was delightfully not what met the ear at first, when the lecturer boldly announced and discussed his own Christian faith. He raised some very important questions, and in his play out of modern history managed to put the utter despair postmodernism into its historical perspective as the result of hundreds of years of doubt in the the European, and also American, heart and mind. I'm sure I will be thinking of, dwelling on and considering his points for months, if not years to come! I am in luck to have found out later on, that I do indeed have a contact with this fascinating speaker via facebook and some good friends who I miss dearly but have touched me much.
I'm still in the middle of a contact high off of life. I am more motivated toward scholarship and study in my chosen topic in hope of making at least some kind of impact, and I understand the balance of walking the thin line between secular and sacred even moreso now than before Friday night.
Optimistically, for once, I look forward with hope.
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