Art that Makes You Feel Something

What is the purpose of art? It’s a question that has been asked often, but is very hard to answer. For determining the purpose of art is like determining the purpose of furniture. It depends. Different art forms are created for different reasons. Art can be created to impress art critics. It can be created to entertain people. It’s purpose might be to spread a message or say something important.

There is one thing, though, that I believe a lot of art tries to do. It tries to make people feel something.

One way of doing this is by shocking people. There are those who say that it is getting more and more difficult to shock people these days. To a certain extent, this is true. A woman’s bare ankles used to shock people. Nowadays, we can be confronted with full frontal nudity without even blinking. But at the same time, shocking people is really very easy. Just ask the group that did the Jackson Five skit with blackened faces on Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday. Or the people in charge of KFC’s advertisement, where someone gives West Indian supporters fried chicken. They managed to shock a whole lot of people without even trying to.

Another way to make people feel something is to make them happy. Entertain them. Get them to enjoy themselves. Make ‘em laugh. Most of the art that tries to make people feel happy falls into the category of popular culture. It’s entertainment of the masses. It’s not really taken too seriously. As a side note, I find it quite strange that art that shocks is often considered more highly than art that makes people happy. Because I think it is easier to shock people than get them to smile. If I wanted to shock a room full of people, I could simply walk in there with bags full of rubbish and empty them on the floor. And to really increase the shock value, I could even mix the recycling rubbish with the general waste. But if I wanted to entertain them, if I wanted to make them smile, if I wanted them to enjoy themselves, I have to put a bit more effort in.

There are many different ways that art can make people feel something and these are just two examples. But they are also instances of where the feelings often are only skin-deep. Joy and anger can be something completely different. But shock and happiness tend to be surface feelings. Easily felt and easily forgotten.

And there’s nothing really wrong with this. Sometimes we just want to be entertained, without having to think or feel too much.

But in my opinion, good art makes you feel things a bit more deeply. It doesn’t just make you feel things on the surface. It seems to dig deep and touch your soul. It can make you feel alone or sad or uplifted or amazed or all of these things at once. And no matter what words you use to describe it, they never seem enough.

This is going to seem a strange story to tell. Because I am going to describe a situation that may have involved a movie, but isn’t really what I would consider great art. But even though it’s not great art, it’s the best way I can find to explain what art can do. One day, I was watching Bruce Almighty with my son – see I told you it wasn’t great art. But at the end of it, my son just started crying and crying. He couldn’t stop. The tears were just pouring down his face. So I’m kept asking him ‘What’s wrong? Why are you crying?’ And the only answer he could give me was, ‘I don’t know.’

And that’s what art can sometimes do to you. You can have such deep feelings and you don’t even know why. Not only is it difficult to describe what you are feeling, it can be difficult to even describe why you are feeling it.

I’m not sure what any of this has to do with faith or Christianity. Maybe it has nothing to do with faith. Maybe it’s just something interesting, but relatively unimportant, about human emotions.

A line came to me as I was writing that. ‘Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.’ I didn’t know who wrote it or even why it would suddenly come to me. But I did a search on Google and found out that it was a quote by St Augustine. I’m still not entirely sure why that quote would suddenly come to my mind. But maybe, just maybe, it’s because art sometimes reminds us that we are restless. When we feel something deep inside, we are forced to confront the fact that, deep inside, we need God.

The idea for this post came when I was listening to an old podcast, from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. A panel was discussing whether art should be dangerous. That wasn’t what got me writing though. Instead, it was the discussion about whether art should be shocking.

But in a way, it’s kind of appropriate. Because I think art should be dangerous. It should make us feel alone and frightened and uplifted and amazed. And those are all dangerous feelings. It should be dangerous because it reminds us that we are restless. It should be dangerous because it shows us how empty we are without God.

Art that is shocking is not dangerous. Art that makes you happy is not dangerous. Art like that is easily forgotten. But having to face your need for God. That can change your life. And what could be more dangerous than that?

(Image details: Michelangelo Buonarroti's The Creation of Adam. From the Sistine Chapel. Image is in the public domain.)

Reproductions

The Starry Night - Vincent Van Gogh

Last weekend, I went to the Masterpieces of Paris exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. I think I was only going there for the buzz of having seen these paintings ‘in the flesh’. I certainly didn’t expect to see anything new. Many of the paintings, I had already seen. Well, I hadn’t seen the real paintings, but I had seen reproductions – on posters, calendars, mugs, umbrellas and paint by numbers kits. I knew what they looked like. Or at least, I thought I did.

I’m sure it won’t come as any surprise to learn that the real paintings did not look like the reproductions. Well they did. But they didn’t. They were more vivid, more textured, more real. I was seeing the same images I had seen dozens of times, but in a way I had never seen them before.

One painting that I particularly enjoyed was The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh. I had seen this painting – or least reproductions of this paintings – many, many times. And I had never been that impressed with it. But when I saw the real thing, I finally understand what the big deal about it was. I loved that painting. And I decided, as I was standing in front of it, that I would buy a bookmark or poster or something of it when I left the art exhibition. But when I got to the gift store and looked at the reproductions, I realised I would not be buying anything. The reproductions just didn’t do it justice. Even now, in looking at the image on the internet, I am thinking why exactly did I like it so much? Because I really can’t see anything that amazing about it.

After I looked at the Masterpieces of Paris exhibition, we looked at the other exhibitions in the National Gallery. One painting I always like to have a good look at is Bourke Street by Tom Roberts. I love that painting. I have a picture of it in my lounge room. But the reproduction I have up in my house looks so different to the original. My reproduction is faded and bits are torn and it’s really gives no idea of what the original is like. I still love it, because I love the picture. But it’s not the real thing.

It’s the same with music. Anybody who has ever gone to a concert knows that listening to a CD is not the same as hearing the same music live. It may sound exactly the same. But yet it is different. A real life experience is so much more intense than listening to a copy. I have a friend who can’t stand opera. I once played him a piece of music that I thought was beautiful and he thought it was boring. (Some people have no taste.) But once, his mother wanted to go and see Pavarotti in concert. So he took her. And he says that he will never forget that experience. He didn’t even like Pavarotti. But hearing him live was something very special.

In Colossians 2:17, Paul speaks of ‘the shadow of things to come’. It’s a bit of a hard phrase to understand and I certainly can’t claim to know exactly what Paul meant. But when I was thinking of the art exhibition, this phrase immediately came to mind.

I think that this earth and the Church we have here on earth (in all its forms) are just reproductions. Some of them may be good reproductions. Some of them are quite bad reproductions, a bit like my picture of Bourke Street in my lounge room. But they’re still reproductions. They can only show us what the heavenly Church looks like. But they still fall short of the reality of that Church. And if we actually saw the original, we would be amazed and astounded at how beautiful it really is.

Bourke Street by Tom Roberts

Allowing people to write themselves into the bible was never going to work

Recently, a bible was put on display at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art and people were invited to write themselves back into its pages. However, within a short period of time, there were so many obscene messages, that the artist, Jane Clarke, a Christian minister who has an outreach to gay, lesbian and transgendered people, was forced to place it under a glass case. People were still invited to write comments into it, but they had to do so on loose leaf pages, which were then inserted inside the bible.

At first glance, it sounds like a good idea. The kind of feel-good act, that leaves everybody feeling better. So why did it fail? Perhaps it was because there were too many flaws in the idea from the start.

The major problem in the whole set-up is that it presumed that people would respect the bible. They just want a chance to write themselves back into it. It’s easy for Christians to make assumptions about people’s attitudes towards the bible, that simply aren’t there in the wider community. In a church setting, most people either consider the bible as the sacred word of God or are at least willing to engage it. When we look beyond the church, however, that respect and willing to engage is not always there.

In fact, sometimes people can have very negative attitudes and even hostility towards the bible. I have had someone stand in front of me and swear at God for half an hour. And I don’t think the feelings expressed then were that uncommon.

In all fairness, inviting people to write in the bible may have been a way to address that hostility. If people could simply write what they wanted to in the bible, then they would no longer be angry.

And perhaps it might have worked if the only reason people feel anger or hostility towards God is because they feel excluded. But that’s simply not the case. Yes, there are many Christians who feel rejected by the church. But it should be noted that being rejected by the church is not the same as being excluded from the bible. Also, there are people who are angry with God for what Christians have done, or how they feel God has treated them, or because they think God’s angry with them or doesn’t accept them as they are or is trying to impose a whole lot of rules that they simply cannot keep.

Despite the fact that writing our own messages in the bible does not really address this at any deep level, it’s also not the full story. Some people are angry with God because they want to be. The problem is not so much that the church has rejected them, it’s that they have rejected God. They’re not looking for someone to welcome them back into God’s family. They want no part of it. If Jesus came down from Heaven himself and rolled out the red carpet, they would walk away. For such people, an open bible and a pen is not a chance to re-include themselves, but simply a chance for them to express their anger.

The other problem with the open bible approach is that it’s not really being excluded from the bible that is the problem. Many people feel rejected (or sadly are rejected) by Christians, not because the bible fails to mention them, but because it does. It mentions their sins. Now we are all sinners and there is not a single person alive who does not have at least one of their sins mentioned in the bible. But it’s often the sins that are mentioned in the bible that make people feel excluded. To feel accepted again would not be a matter of writing themselves back in, but of writing their sins out.

And another problem with this whole episode is that it panders to the desire that most (if not all of us) have to simply write our own bibles. I don’t like this, so let’s cross it out. That needs to be changed, let’s edit it. Perhaps we don’t take a pen and physically do this. But whenever we read a bible, we have a tendency to read ourselves into it. We don’t need an invitation. It’s human nature. I heard one (rich) pastor say that Jesus must have been rich, because God would not have wanted his son to be poor. That’s writing himself into the bible. Just add a few words and feel good about all the money you have.

Yes, there are people out there who feel rejected by God and rejected by the church. And I do commend Jane Clarke for trying to do something to make people feel accepted. But the type of exclusion that many people face is not going to be solved by writing a few words next to Leviticus 18:22.

Perhaps instead of writing ourselves into the bible, we should start writing the bible into our hearts.