Refractions 28: The Island of the Misfit Toys Part 1

Refractions 28: The Island of the Misfit Toys: New York's Avant-Garde Artists of the late 20th Century

Part 1: Robert Rauschenberg

Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. Gaston Bachelard

I had been working on a Refractions entry on the works of American contemporary artist Jasper Johns, when the news of Robert Rauschenberg passing away hit the news wires. Rauschenberg was Johns' comrade in the frontlines of the avant-garde art world. Both artists are now considered seminal and central to twentieth century American art. Along with other notable figures such as John Cage (composer), Merce Cunningham (dancer/choreographer) and avant-garde painters such as Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock, Rauschenberg redefined the landscape of contemporary art. The radical nature of their art challenged and shaped the new capital of art, continuing a century of dominance of American art, and of the New York art scene.

These artists left a left an indelible mark in my artistic vision during my undergraduate years, as I visited New York museums and galleries, having several notable "epiphany" experiences there (Gorky's retrospective at Guggenheim Museum in the early 80's being most potent). I wrestled with their art, often with the question of "what is art?" or even "is this art?" These questions continued during my stay in Tokyo as a National Scholar graduate student in the Nihonga department. As I learned the revered tradition of Japan, these artists, like characters in a theatre of the absurd, kept creeping into my consciousness, dancing in and out of the process of my works.

They were misfits, but the island of Manhattan did serve as a perfect backdrop to these artists' existential dramas. Surely, there was to be a unique destiny for those willing to eek out a meager living in their illegal lofts, without having to sell a single painting for many years, receiving ridicule after ridicule if they were fortunate enough to have their works shown. These vanguard creators always lived in tension, both in their art and in life, often juxtaposing contradictions together in a patchwork. No simple or singular definition of their art, or their lives, would suffice: they were surprisingly varied in their personalities, political persuasions, and aesthetic dispositions, but found a common ground in their ambitions and in their brokenness. They were quite like the toys on the Island of the Misfit Toys: and in Rauschenberg's world, Charley in the Box, the pink spotted elephant, and the red-nosed reindeer would all find a place in a single canvas.

In writing Rauschenberg's New York Times obituary, Michael Kimmelman states that Rauschenberg's work "helped obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life..." He made art with an extraordinary sense of design, appropriating media imagery, inventing with any found materials he saw fit to use. Beds, broom sticks, stuffed birds and animals, quilts, bicycles, cardboard, newspaper..., it seemed there were no materials forbidden in his art. His greatest contribution, though, may not be in bringing ordinary objects into museums; instead, he brought Art into life's ordinary objects. He, along with another seminal twentieth century figure, Joseph Beuys, desired to liberate art to the everyday person. His visual language of combining text, newspaper images, advertisements and objects, often in a contradictory manner, seemed eclectic and electric at the same time. He was never a profound artist: but every object was, to him, indeed profound. His art teaches us to consider every moment, every material as potential material for art. "You begin with the possibilities of the material," he has stated, "I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made of the real world."

Calvin Tomkins' book Off the Wall, one of the most interesting book on Rauschenberg's art and his contemporaries, notes that Rauschenberg as a child, as with Cage, had desired to be a preacher;

"Our church was so strict that it was a full-time job for any Christians just to search for evils," according to Rauschenberg. "Even so, I was going to be a preacher until I was about thirteen. I was really serious about it. Finally I decided I couldn't spend the rest of my life thinking everyone else was going to hell, but I kept on going to church - I still went when I was in the Navy and for some time afterward. Giving that up was a major change in my life." (Pg. 15, Off the Wall, Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, Calvin Tomkins, 1980 Penguin Books)

Indeed I find it remarkable that these avant-garde artists, while denying and often decrying the institution of Christianity, and living transgressive lifestyles, delved deeply into theosophy (Mondrian), Zen (Cage, Johns) and Jewish mysticism (Rothko, Kline), often blending these religious traditions, almost like Rauschenberg paintings. Mark Rothko equated the process of painting to a religious experience. Many of them, like Cage, Rauschenberg, and Johns were brought up in Protestant church. Often these influences are treated as footnotes in the accounts of the art and life of these artists. But when you consider their artistic trajectories, especially in what they chose to work against, and how they saw their commitment to art as "religious," then clearly their early development figures quite significantly.(1) Barnett Newman, the high priest of the religion on avant-gardes explicitly stated, "instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man or life, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings."(2) In discussion of contemporary art, such crucial details of counter-spirituality are often left out. In understanding culture and her spiritual journey, what the artists were wrestling against is just as noteworthy as what they embraced.

John Cage, in developing his compositions, or, perhaps it is more accurate to say, reducing things to non-compositions, worked squarely against the classical tradition. His 4'33", 1952 work is performed without a single note being played. Why 4'33"? Artist David O'Connell, a colleague of both Cage and Rauschenberg, states: "He did a survey and came up with the average time spent getting comfortable in their seats coughing, opening gum and candy wrapper etc... Both he and Bob had the ability to turn the camera around and point it at the spectator." The pianist, thus, simply sat in his chair, and the listeners were to hear the environmental sound as "music". He boldly asserted that "Beethoven was in error, and his influence, which has been extensive as it has been lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music" (Tomkins, Pg. 70). Not only was he working against the classical tradition, he wrestled against the conservative, controlling environment of the church he grew up in. He saw art as a way to explore his spirituality, seeking answers in Zen Buddhism and incorporating elements of I Ching (ancient Chinese cosmology.)


Cage often spearheaded other avant-garde artists' experiments, generating a new creative language of openness, freedom and transcendence. Though they did not intentionally intend to do so starting out, they created a new religion of the avant-garde, preaching their virtues eloquently, persuading countless numbers of artists to join in. The world they depicted anticipated the spiritual climate of post-modernity, and the multi-media culture to come. Avant-garde expressions and artifacts echo Hazel Mote's "Church without Christ" in Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood." If to O'Connor the south was "Christ haunted," then so was the avant-gardes scene in lower Manhattan. What is in the negative can be revelatory.

Negative spaces are just as important as positive shapes, so we learn in a drawing class. If a chair is to be drawn, a good instructor will help the student pay attention to the shapes in between the legs of the chairs, or the back rests, as much in the "positive shapes" of the chair itself. In the same way, these artists depicted the spiritual climate by negative shapes, but by doing so they effectively described the shape and influence of the churches they rejected. Their observations serve as an invaluable service for the church, as they gave shape to the spiritual vacuum that pervades our culture today. They are important precisely because they depict an honest spiritual wrestling within empty spaces.(3) In that sense, art can always point to the profound, and, even in perverse disagreements, artists accurately reveal the spiritual vacuum. But, while they rejected the church, I contend that they did not throw out Jesus altogether. Many of these artists, Worhol, Beuys, Newman...perhaps, do I dare say, all of these artists would be interested in Jesus of Nazareth simply because of the extraordinary means through which Jesus communicated to the world. Jesus often confounded his disciples, using unconventional terminologies. Jesus spoke in negative shapes, too, upsetting the authorities. Jesus transgressed -- but he transgressed in love. An artist is always interested in an Artist. For me, even to reflect on the work of a contemporary artist is to wrestle deeply with questions of faith. For me, the role of an artist and a follower of Christ in contemporary culture is to transgress in love, learning from Jesus.

In Rauschenberg's key work Monogram, an installation/combine piece with a stuffed Angora goat placed upon a collaged canvas. This important work reveal an artist surveying images from all around him (literally) walking about in his South Street seaport blocks, and salvaging objects being thrown out, appropriating all influences, but especially and notably specific Christian iconography. There's a clear overlap between Monogram and 19th century British artist Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat. Rauschenberg took Hunt's image of the goat as Christ, and re appropriated it. Rauschenberg may have walked away from the church, but spirituality, and even the tenets of the gospel, were never far from his creative core. Art to Rauschenberg was like a truth serum, and all of what he saw, experienced, and even rejected, was blurted out on canvas. Undeniably, he wrestled with the reality of Christ throughout his career. But the way Rauschenberg wrestled was unlike the way of a traditional artist such as Holman Hunt. No, Rauschenberg's process of creativity worked like a powerfully intuitive search engine that explored the deep recesses of cultural realities. A traditional artist like Hunt focused on communicating already accepted spirituality. Rauschenberg probed deeper. And in doing so Rauschenberg's vast speculative purveyance actually anticipated how we are to experience the world in the years to come.

Consider this: if my thoughts were to be projected onto a screen, even in the process of writing this, I am sure it would look a bit like a Rauschenberg painting. Part of this essay was completed while riding a transatlantic airplane 892 kilometers per hour, at 34,000 feet, assimilating various thoughts; I watched a Japanese movie (Yama san, a "salary-man" goes fishing, and ends up fighting against the company he works for. The company wanted to destroy the beautiful coastal town known for fishing with their real estate venture), I pondered the shapes of the terrains of Alaskan territories on a video map in front of me (thinking of Andy Goldsworthy's terrain drawings in the documentary Rivers and Tides), while listening to Alison Krauss on my iPod... these thoughts, and other random thoughts, are like elements of a collage, interdependent, but often competing. Our lives are "combines" being simultaneously worked on.


Of course, such thinking could become a self-fulfilling prophesy of an artistic kind. It could be that I see the world through Rauschenberg's eyes because I am trained to see the world through an artist's lens. But even so, to be given such an inclination is the mark and influence of a significant artist, one who facilitates the viewers' imaginative journeys. As Time magazine critic Robert Hughes has noted in Shock of the New, we will never see a cypress tree in the same way after seeing a van Gogh painting. Likewise, we may never see a worn out quilt, or the collage of competing neon signs called Times Square, in the same way after Rauschenberg.

***

In 1951, it was John Cage who became Rauschenberg's first collector (Tomkins, pg. 65). Although Cage could not pay the price being asked which was less than $100 then, he convinced dealer Betty Parsons to allow him to take a pink work home. But one day, Rauschenberg snuck into Cage's loft, and repainted it completely in black with enamel.


That painting would be worth tens of millions of dollars today. A Rauschenberg just recently sold for $14.6 million. Of course, the fact that their works now sell in the upper echelons of an auction market (often without the artists getting a single penny from the auction transaction) made these avant-garde artists newsworthy for the first time. But our interest here goes beyond the auction prices, to Rauschenberg's true cultural value as a pioneer. We must not forget that Rauschenberg was the first living contemporary American artist to be recognized and honored overseas. Others like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko who died too early to allow for such a retrospective. Rauschenberg's notoriety, after winning the coveted Venice Biennial in 1964, extended far beyond the reach of any other American artist. I remember the exhibit at Setagaya Museum in Japan in 1986, when he exhibited, among other pieces, the biggest print ever made (it was still in progress). His prodigious output took over the vast halls of the museum, and in Japan where small and compact things are the norm, Rauschenberg's works seemed delightfully outlandish and raw. By going to a Rauschenberg exhibit, the viewers were baptized into contemporary American art. By the time the viewers walked out of a Rauschenberg exhibit, the fresh "melting pot" called America had become a delectable collage, so democratically arranged, blatantly and confidently imprinted in their visual memory.





True artists swim upstream of culture, and their work will eventually affect the entire river. What seemed once peripheral, inconsequential gestures, their experiments and thoughts, now takes up center stage of a global popular culture. What was upstream a decade ago is now downstream. The jarring array of competing, but uniform patterns of the YouTube culture, ambitious collage of time events over vast geography in movies like Babel, the blurring of high and low art in Takashi Murakami's orgiastic world at his recent Brooklyn Museum exhibit, all can be traced to Rauschenberg's canvas (although, one can rightly argue that Warhol was ahead of both.) Takashi was my classmate in Nihonga department, so he must have seen the Rauschenberg exhibit of 1986. Our thoughts, our media and our conversations in general are filled with such Rauschenbergian incidental gestures, thinly spread smears of competing stimuli. Our lives, and perhaps even our identities, are collaged tapestry, sometimes neatly arranged, sometimes warring against another. What is now a ubiquitous hodgepodge of post-modern montage was not only anticipated in Rauschenberg's images, but they serve to warn us as an emblem of our overloaded, scattered lives. What Rauschenberg was appropriating was not just newspaper images, but actual experiences of our time: he froze the movements of contemporary moments that bombard us everyday, and he thereby mediated our fragmented realities. In that, he was exceedingly successful, often masterful. He breathed life into transient images, giving them reprieve from our disposable culture, literally rescuing our cultural memories from the dumpster. "Materials are never wrong," Rauschenberg said. "It's only me that can be wrong." (Off the Wall, pg. 213)


His materials may not be wrong, but they are not permanent. When I saw his last exhibit of his assemblages, including the famed "Bed" paintings, at the Metropolitan Museum, I noticed that the colors of these assemblages have already become pale, losing the zest and impact that I remember them to have when I saw them as a teenager. People passed by in a whisper in the hallowed halls, and Rauschenberg, according to a friend who went to pay homage to him at the opening, wept the whole time. He knew that the end was near for him. I wonder if the backdrop of the decaying assemblages spoke back to the creator of them, even more than the visitors' well wishes. Whether Rauschenberg's assemblages can be preserved remains to be seen. What we know for sure, though, is that contemporary art will not be the same again.


Rauschenberg's process-focused art refracts time, trapped in materials, in a generous spatial display. Did he generate more than that? We are not sure, yet. Kimmelman is right that Rauschenberg obscured the boundaries between genres of the arts: but it is also true that Rauschenberg obscured the notion of time itself. While his combines are decaying with time, his prints, including the largest print ever pulled, will outlast any of us, trapping time and sequence of historical events. Unlike other artists, he remained remarkably consistent in the signature style he developed, without the works becoming too staid and repetitive. The question that we must ask is whether he captured something deeper in the blurred lines of time and space.

The purpose of art is to mediate and steward Time. Artists do this via space and matter, being poets of materials. Writers can do this through words, dancers via movements of their bodies, architects via creation of space. Their work is to make Time freeze, and even "create" Time. When a gifted artist does this, the art creates, or taps into, Time-fulness. If the purpose of art is to mediate and steward Time, did Robert Rauschenberg not only capture time, but generate Time-fulness? That is the ultimate question he, or any artist, has to answer. Such deep quests need to be considered, and in order to do so, we must, for our next Refractions, turn our attention to his fellow journeyman, Jasper Johns, one of the few living artists from the heyday of the avant-garde movement of twentieth century. Johns delves into these deep philosophical, and metaphysical, questions. For if Rauschenberg danced with Time over his paintings in a blur, Johns imbeds Time right into his paintings.



Late in his life, Rauschenberg, influenced by the art and culture of India, stated; "everything is relative, that everything is acceptable, and that you don't have to be afraid of beauty, either." Of course, critics sneered, for the notion of beauty was taboo in late twentieth century art. When I began to show in SoHo in the 90's, it was still unfashionable to speak of beauty, or use beautiful materials of Nihonga. Perhaps the resurgence of material and beauty in the art world that we are experiencing today began with Rauschenberg's generous art. Quintessentially American, original and prolific, Rauschenberg's images do lead us, like a strange red nosed reindeer, right into the thick fogs of our post-modern night. His images, even in decay, would resonate to those who look for signs of good fortune from a strangely, but beautifully, collaged sky.



Makoto Fujimura


The author acknowledges and thanks artist David O'Connell, who knew "Bob," for invaluable assistance in preparing this essay.

Next Refractions: Part II Jasper Johns and "Life After Life After Death."


(1)"The development of abstract painting in the early 20th century was a religious as well as an aesthetic movement." (What Good are the Arts, pg 137, John Carey, Faber and Faber UK, 2005)
(2)Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, Knopf, New York, 1990, Pg. 173
(3)My wife, a psychotherapist, tells me that there is "negative space" in relationships as well. Children, for example, growing up in consistent parenting grows the ability to take the failures of a parent as "negative space" and infer, or learn, to take positive message out of a parent's failure. See www.judycares.com under "Judy cares about my parents."

Image:

Robert Rauschenberg
Retroactive I, 1964,
Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas,
84 x 60 in. (213.4 x 152.4 cm),
Wadsworth Athenuem,
Hartford, Connecticut

Refractions 27: A Wedding and the City

Refractions 27: A Wedding and the City

On a rainy Saturday morning in February, Judy and I attended a wedding in the city. The bride was a daughter of good friends involved with a mission organization that serves the poor in the city. The Kleinknechts became for us surrogate city parents when we moved back to the New York area in 1992, guiding us on school choices, shopping options and churches to check out. Their daughter, Morgen, and their son, David, both attended public schools. We did, after all, need much help navigating how to raise our kids in New York City. We have had many mentors in our lives, and we are grateful for them all.

The Kleinknechts were involved in a church planting project which became the Redeemer movement and invited us to their activities as well. We visited Redeemer and heard Dr. Tim Keller speak to a crowd of some two hundred folks (it attracts more than 5000 every Sunday now). Judy and I turned to each other after the sermon and said "That's like a humanities lecture at Bucknell, except it was about the (Christian) gospel."

Well, it turned out that Tim did attend our alma mater, Bucknell University, a few years ahead of us. We ended up "commuting" 40 minutes to the city from cozy suburbia each Sunday to worship with them. The Kleinknechts and the Kellers preached a new paradigm for Christians being involved in the cities. "We must love the city," Tim Keller would tell the leaders. "Many Christians are against the city, or become too much 'of' the city." In order to truly love the city, all leaders involved were challenged to consider moving into the city and raising our families here.

If their vision consisted of mere idealism, or mere passion, I am not sure that would have convinced both my wife and me to make the move. Every time doubts welled up and tempted us to move our family as far away from the city as humanly possible, we reminded ourselves that our friends had a deep theological grid to work from. They were not saying, "Be a hero, move into the heart of strife." They were communicating a gospel that we had never heard and understood fully before: If you want to affect the culture, you must plant yourself in the soil of that culture. If the early Christians were willing to move into a plague-infested city, we must be willing to move into a city dealing with the AIDs crisis and many other social ills. Of course, I knew that the city is one of the few places where I had a shot at making a living as an artist. But still, why move our family there?

"The city attracts the best," Tim told me one day as I drove him in our rusty Toyota station wagon, our last car before we gave up that mobility (renting our parking lot was costing us more than we paid for our first apartment after college) for city subways. "You have to seek the best if you want be the best, you need the city to shape you." Of course, he was not just speaking about being an artist. His theology would include the idea of shalom, the flourishing of humanity.

In short, he was saying, in order to be the best human you can be, we need the city. That idea of can be extended in a radical principle to raising your family in the city. As counter-intuitive, and most definitely counter-cultural, as it may sound, in order to raise our children well, we need the city. To be a church that desires to be a catalyst for the flourishing of humanity, we need to move in and begin the adventure of trusting God in the midst of strife, even if that means to "exile ourselves" from familiar comfort and conventionality. TriBeCa, in 1992, had few amenities, and local paper still reported occasional gang related murders in our streets.

Jeremiah 29:4-7 states: "This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper."

Planting trees and seeing our children wed in a city are not what many would consider "spiritual." But this wedding in midtown Manhattan was a manifestation of a spiritual principle bearing fruit. We were witness to a covenantal commitment between the bride and the bridegroom that transcends time and even the boundaries of this particular city. Glen and Carole, the bride's parents, have solely and faithfully served the inner city of New York driven by their spiritual principle of loving the city. Morgen and her new husband, a pastor, will carry out this same promise in Los Angeles.

Tim Keller's wedding message was, as usual, succinct and powerfully resonant. He began with Kierkegaard (1), who stated that at the end of history, we will have to take our masks off, as in the midnight hour of the masquerade, and reveal who we really are. "Marriage," Tim reminded us, "is a radical endeavor. It is radically discomforting and radically comforting at the same time. And the Christian gospel is the only paradigm that can bring these opposites together." Unlike the Kierkegaard metaphor, Tim continued, a marriage forces us to take our masks off; we are completely vulnerable. Marriage, therefore, can give us strength and confidence to move into the world, or it can devastate us from within.

In his new book, The Reason for God , Tim writes:

"God did not create us to get the cosmic, infinite joy of mutual love and glorification, but to share it. We were made to join in the dance. We were designed, then not just for belief in God in some general way, nor for a vague kind of inspiration or spirituality. We were made to center our lives upon him, to make the purpose and passion of our lives knowing, serving, delighting, and resembling him. This growth in happiness will go on eternally, increasing unimaginably. (1 Corinthians 2:7-10)"

(p. 219, The Reason for God , Dutton)

The cosmic dance is also a nuptial dance. The Church, as the Bride of Christ, is invited to a Feast. But in order to fully respond to this invitation, we have to get beyond the general sense of "faith" and move into God's banquet hall, a center room of his mansion. The Bible makes it abundantly clear that that mansion is in a city: The City of God. "The Bible begins at a Garden," Tim noted often, "and ends in a City."

After serving at Redeemer as an elder for two years with Glen, I jumped at the opportunity to plant their first daughter church, The Village Church. If this theology of the city was to work, I needed to put my efforts into the heart of culture, and create a church home for the creative. The Village Church, now in its 13th year, would become our family's exilic home. Our children know no other church; our son Ty, now at NYU, and his fiancée, who graduates from The King's College this June, both attend there.

Glen and I kept in touch, and I asked him to assist me in establishing the New York chapter of the International Arts Movement, an arts advocacy group to carry out this mission to see humanity flourish via the arts. Glen agreed to serve us as a founding board member from 1998 - 2003. He would often joke about the "farmer from Indiana" serving on the board of an arts organization. But I assured him that IAM needs to be able to speak to farmers as well as artists. The boundaries of art need to expand, to see all of life in the creative abundance of God. Besides, Glen was one of organizational gurus behind the Redeemer movement, and he knew instinctively what it meant to take risks that can impact the culture at large. If having him on the board only meant that I could glean from his wisdom on raising teens in the city, or receive occasional fatherly advice for my marriage, that alone would be worth it.

At a gathering soon after 9/11, Glen introduced himself as an "unwitting recruiter responsible for moving the Fujimuras into a loft three blocks from Ground Zero." I told him then, "If it was just you, then I don't think we would be here. It was Jeremiah 29. We just didn't know that we would be signing up to be Ground Zero residents."

Of course, I would think later, it WAS Glen and Tim who opened our hearts to the reality behind the scripture passages. They did recruit us, and it was a path that once chosen, we could not turn back from.

***

As we ate our splendid meal at the wedding banquet, I tried to convince Tim to have a jazz room in the new Redeemer building on the upper west side. Then, I shared my idea for a dedicated jazz space with Tom Jennings, Redeemer's music director, who was also at the wedding, hoping to enlist him. Tom quipped, "That's one sure way to make the building not succeed. " The fact that Tom is a noted jazz pianist makes this statement heartfelt and depressing at the same time. Tim sidestepped my ardent advocacy for jazz, and we began to discuss issues surrounding the New Atheism.

Tim has been on a book tour of sorts, speaking at various universities in Veritas Forums and debating atheist professors. I told him that I participated in one at Columbia University, being pitted against feminist artist Coco Fusco.

"So what was that like?" He asked.

"Well, it really never went anywhere," I said as I licked my sorbet, "because she kept on wanting to go back to the culture war days. I wanted to talk about being stewards of culture and creating a new language for culture, but she wanted to talk about governmental censoring of art. I told the organizers, that these debates may no longer serve us well anymore. We need a tri-alogue, not a dialogue, a mediated conversation that can create a third language to speak about an issue."

Tim asked me what I meant by a "third language." I explained that there is a huge gap in culture where the split between rational and emotive, between reason and the intuitive, has caused dialectical opposition. But now, because of the dehumanization this has caused, people are hungering for mediated conversation. "Obama is speaking that type of language, and that's why he is gaining ground," I pontificated.

Of course, it was only after I got home and began to read Tim's book that I saw his section on the "third way." In the introduction chapter, he notes that the entire book makes the case that authentic Christianity is "a spiritual third way" to mediate the current divides in culture. So at the wedding banquet table, a student was telling the master what the master already knows. I suppose the greatest reward of a teacher is when a student reshapes the thoughts being taught and thinks they are his own. Perhaps this embarrassing reality could be justified by the fact that I have listened to over 500 of Tim's sermons over the years. That has to somehow sneak into your subconscious.

***

The father was dancing with the bride now. Glen, my wife and I noted, is quite a dancer. As his feet glided across the floor, his flushed face and relaxed smile told a story: a story of a father truly willing to give away the bride and delighting in her at the same time.

He would understand that in this passage of time, a radical change is welcome, that a wedding in a city is a fulfillment of our exilic promise. Then the enchantment of folks beginning to join the dance made me realize that a wedding is indeed a dance, as the gospel of Christ is a dance, as Tim notes in his book. Jesus did start his ministry at a wedding at Cana. He would dance with those who follow him to the heart of strife. Refracting in the wedding banquet were the echoes of faithful promises kept, and love "increasing unimaginably." Christ himself did sup with us, filling our hearts with the golden light of promise, even in a dark February day in New York City.



Makoto Fujimura










(1) "Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all."

- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or II.146

Empathic Creativity: Generative Transformation

Delivered on March 1st, 2008, IAM Gathering at TriBeCa Performance Center



I begin with a photo of an installation at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (Credit: Melanie Einzig 2006
Courtesy: Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust), over looking the Hudson River, only a mile a way. Scottish artist, Andy Goldsworthy installed "Garden of Stones" as part of this museum's mission to create a "living memorial to the holocaust." As you can see these boulder rocks have been hollowed out and hold sapling Dward Oak trees. As the trees mature, each will grow to become fused to the base, and eventually, possibly, cracking the stone open.

Art, a sapling planted today in hope, can break open a boulder of cynicism, despair and corruption that pervades the art world. But we need to learn from someone who is not an artist, a sapling who did end up breaking open a huge boulder.

It was the early 1960's at Hudson on Hastings, NY about 30 miles north. Fred Danback began to work for Anaconda, a major factory where copper and wire cable were created. Fred Danback returned from World War II to come home, and to work for a now booming enterprise. But soon after, Fred found himself troubled by what he saw at the factory.

"I seen all kinds of oil and sulfuric acid, copper filings; my gosh, they were coming out of that company like it was going out of style..." He continues in his interview with Bill Moyers, "(shad fisherman started to lose) their business because there was oil in the water that would cause the fish to be contaminated with it and the Fulton market refused to take their weekly catch...(Anaconda) and other businesses were polluting a river and hurting a second business, the shad fisherman. I didn't think they had the right to do that. It used to really infuriate me. I became obsessed with fighting pollution..."

So Fred complained to the managers about his shad fisherman friends' plight. Each time he did, it seemed, he got demoted. He ended up pushing a broom for the company. But Fred never gave up. He worked in a custodian role, literally pushing his broom into every room of the company, and he also took copious notes and made maps of the company. What was deemed a punishment ended up to be the best possible opportunity to spy on the company inside and out (he had all the keys!).

We have to remember that there were no pollution laws. Fred and a few other pioneers of the environmental movement decided to sue Anaconda by citing an archaic law called the Refuse Act of 1899, which Fred found cleaning the local library. In 1972, when the US attorney's Office found a way to prosecute Anaconda, the attorney also used Fred's maps and notes as evidence.

"The company was fined $200,000 under the Refuse Act of 1899, you know... Even today for a polluter to be fined $200,000 is a big event. Back in the early 1970s, it was a huge event. It was like a thunderclap."(Fred Cronin)

Today, 3 million striped bass goes up and down the Hudson, because of Fred's efforts that lead to a series of changes in laws of the land.

Three lessons from the Fred Danback parable:

1)We need to be willing to be demoted
2)We need to remember our first love
3)We need to take notes

a)Become a custodian

To hold the "keys" of culture we may have to endure demotions.


By being demoted, we may gain a humble authority (keys) to unlock doors of cultural "factories".

Stewardship of culture and stewardship of nature go side by side. The activities of the arts are, in themselves, acts of stewardship. Many have seen the arts and entertainment as the enemy, or at least view them with healthy suspicion. The expression of the arts have twisted "the good, the true and the beautiful" in the same way that we have polluted our rivers. The arts are always upstream of culture, and artists are the creators of culture. The question is, how do we enact change?

Are we willing to be demoted to be custodians of culture? Cultural stewardship comes with needed sacrifice. Our "keys" are humility, integrity, determination and hope for things to come. In the art world in which ego, selfishness and self-destructiveness abound, don't you think you will stand out, eventually, is you have an ounce of human decency?

What if we are willing serve even one person, rather than do art for self-expression? What if we collaborated in humility and gave ourselves to serve, not expecting the world, or our audience, to agree with us, or applaud us?


b) We need to remember our first love

Fred Danback was asked by Bill Moyers, "What kept you going?"

FRED DANBACK: I love that river. It's a beautiful river. Look at it. It's your river, its my river, it belongs to everybody. Whose got a right to mess it up? That's the way I feel about it.

I still do, to this day.

It was his memory of the river, that beautiful river that kept him going. This beautiful painting by a Hudson River School master Jasper F. Cropsey (see below) keeps me going. What keeps us going?





Jasper F. Cropsey, Autumn on the Hudson, 1860 National Gallery of Art, Washington

We need to remember our first love. Our first love as an artist may have come when you drew something on paper that came alive to you. Or perhaps you were playing a character in a school play, and you realized you had entered another person's world, a world you never knew existed. Or perhaps as a dancer, you made that single leap that seemed to defy gravity.

By contrast, what is now causing you to lose hope now? Because artists are gifted receptors, sensitive to the world's woes, and we may be the first internalize, and be in despair.

It is this "first love" that can recognize a world that is "not supposed to be." It's important to remember our first love, or we will end up swimming in the river that is polluted, and we will lose the vision for why we live, and why we do art.

But, furthermore, it is this "first love" that allows you to empathize.

Fred empathized with the shad fishermen. He stepped into their shoes and walked around in them a while.

"You never really understand a person, "Atticus Finch tells us in To Kill a Mockingbird, "until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, around the same time that Fred worked for Anaconda. If Fred Danback remembered the beautiful river, Harper Lee remembered her country lawyer father, and via the character of Atticus Finch translated the principles of justice and equality in to a great art form.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, we see little Scout running around in the streets of Maycomb, Alabama chasing her brother, Jem, and her friend, Dill. "Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself," recalls Scout. There is an eye-of-the-storm stillness in the streets; slow, ambling folks who "shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer." The Great Depression has gripped the county, and our country had been deeply wounded by World War I. There were more conflicts to come. Harper Lee's classic work brings the reader into the heart of that American struggle via an inquisitive, feisty, creative girl. The former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor called the book an impetus for her desire to become a lawyer. In the days when the world was tainted by common bigotry, Harper Lee set out to tell a good story, a "simple love story" she called it, but it turned into a powerful catalyst for transforming the mindset toward human dignity and equality. The book precedes Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech by three years, and it foreshadows that speech, becoming one of the great catalysts for wrestling with issues of humanity in the twentieth century. This book serves as a model for us to speak of empathic creativity, that transforms the cultural river.

Atticus Finch, a country lawyer, defends Tom Robinson, a man falsely accused of rape, who is being held in jail. Knowing that the town is conspiring to lynch him, Atticus "sits guard" in front of the jailhouse, having set up a chair and reading light outside Mr. Robinson's window. Atticus creates incarnationally, using a theatrical prop to make his case, if you will, bringing his living room right into the heart of the conflict. A mob gathers. Scout, Jem and Dill walk right into that circle, making Atticus quite nervous. Scout then recognizes a face in the crowd:

"Don't you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I'm Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?... I go to school with Walter...he is your boy, ain't he? Ain't he, Sir?"

Scout remembered that: "Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in." Atticus taught her empathy.

So she speaks to Mr. Cunningham using a big word that Atticus taught her: "Entailment." Mr. Cunningham brought hickory nuts to Atticus in thanks for work Atticus performed in the Cunningham family in the beginning of the story. Now Scout reminds Mr. Cunningham about entailment, or a swap of one work for another, a sort of a code to unlock Mr. Cunningham's humanity. The code worked to not only help Mr. Cunningham remember, but she taps into a greater conscience of how a human being should treat each other, with dignity and respect. And she defuses the situation, in her determined innocence.

If we are faced with an angry mob, ready to do the unthinkable horror of our days, what would be our response? To fight back with fire against fire, respond in hatred against hatred? I suggest we follow Scout's lead in calling people to remember. Scout did not confront the bigotry by arguing for justice. What she accomplished in her naiveté was to step into the mob, to remind people that they were her neighbors. Within a culture that is full of cynicism, apathy and anger, we must remind one another to remember. Our task as artists is to remind people that they are our neighbors. Our arts should lead others to recall who they are. And by doing so, we may remind them, and ourselves, who we are. Our responsibility is to re-humanize the divide, to speak a "third language" of generative creativity that defuses the cultural war language.

Scout defused the situation by being fully human, fully a child.

The "third language" of culture speaks like a child, like Scout, innocent, and yet full of determined hope. The "third language" re-humanizes the mob and speaks in a generative way. The third language incorporates an attitude of cultural stewardship. That is how we can transform the world. The arts present the most powerful way of "nonviolent resistance." Scout's actions, in Harper Lee's lense of creativity, was to anticipate thousands of peaceful marches to come, by willingness to step into a conflict, and taking a risk (although she would fail the non-violent test, because, earlier, she kicks a man in his shin as he tried to physically remove Jem from the scene.)

Just like the mob in front of Tom Robinson's jail cell, the culture has blinded itself to the dehumanized forces of debased solutions. Debasement is a result bad stewardship, to allow for corruption to take over in desperation of fear.

"The third language" is a language of empathy, and empathy is a fruit of love.

c) Taking Notes:

Just like Fred Danback, we need to be custodians of culture, be given keys to the rooms of cultural production and "take notes."

How do we take notes?

Fred was not an artist: we are. Our notebooks should be filled with... drawings. We are gifted with creativity and expression. Our notes should be beautiful, good, and true.

Artists are leaders: they may never inspire with a speech, preach from a pulpit, or own a company, but they are leaders by the sheer fact of their awareness and observation. Artists are leaders because people see their work and can be influenced by it.

Dr. Howard Gardner of Harvard University, the author of "Multiple Intelligences," who has identified creativity as one of the many multiple types of intelligences, writes:

"Indeed, creators and leaders are remarkably similar. Both groups seek to influence the thoughts and behaviors of other people. Both are, accordingly, engaged in the enterprise of persuasion. Moreover, each leader or creator has a story to tell: A creator is contributing to the story of a chosen domain; a leader is creating a story about his group. Finally, embodiment is important for both groups: A leader must embody her stories in her daily life; a creator must embody his story by carrying out work in his domain. "

Artists are leaders simply because we are in the "enterprise of persuasion." If we are leaders in that sense, then, comes with that influence, great responsibility. We have responsibility to use that persuasive influence to create the "world that ought to be." Or, we can use that responsibility for self-destruction. One sure way to use our influence to transform the world is by leading in the path of empathy.

Harper Lee embodied the story of oppression and injustice she saw in her small town in Alabama. She created a story which generate empathy. Let's take Atticus' advise to be polite and "talk about what people are interested in" before we begin to think about self-expression. We might just have to step into someone else's shoes and walk around in them, and take notes.

And, we take notes with tears.

We must realize that that culture of the "world that ought to be," must arrive via understanding of the "world that was not supposed to be." Our task, in the day forward is to identify with, and empathize with, the brokenness of the world, as much as to give a vision of the world that is right and beautiful. Artists need to lead the way in taking notes of the polluted substance and lamenting.

The shortest, but one of the most potent, verses in the Bible is in John 11.

"Jesus Wept."

Before this passage, Jesus learned that his friend Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary has died. He goes to Bethany to resurrect him. And when he got there, he walked right into a Jewish funeral. Upon seeing his friends grieving, he wept. Why?

If he had the power to resurrect, why did he not wave the "magic wand" and solve the problem right away. Why did he "waste time" and weep?

Before this passage, John writes that Jesus was also "deeply troubled," which reminds me of Fred Danback's response to the polluted river - the death of his friend Lazarus infuriated Jesus. Was he infuriated by people not understanding him? No, Jesus was troubled by, and infuriated by, death itself.

"Jesus Wept"

Then his heart was again "deeply troubled". He took a deep breath and pronounced and commanded Lazarus to rise. And he did.

While I was preparing for this talk, I realized something for the first time:

The cultural river is made up of the "tears of God."

Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso, Max Beckman, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Yasunari Kawabata...etc. etc. Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Calcutta, Maycolm, Darfur. What Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail has called the "irreversable tragedies of our time." All of the 20th century was a century of lament, of angst, of anger. And Jesus wept. These expressions may look to some as if they are against God, but they are really not. They are not "pure" expressions of adoration, but they share in the same tears that Mother Teresa shed, and Martin Luther King Jr. shed.

Jesus wept, and he continues to weep today. Tears of God are powerful. They may evaporate, and soak the ground, but they never disappear. We breathe today Jesus' tears. And artists may be the first to recognize the invisible presence of divine tears. That's why the church needs artists. When we weep and join God, those are commingled with God's tears, and multiplied like fishes and the loaves that Jesus touched.

We take notes with our tears.

We also need to be moved, troubled deeply with the broken realities of the world around us. We need to stand in the pit of Ground Zero, and breathe in Jesus' tears. Then we can create. Do not let anger itself overtake you in despair. Let your tears lead to your small resurrections. If you find yourself perplexed, angry...take notes and imagine a polluting factory into an art factory of beauty, goodness and truth.




***

There's not a day that I do not think of Fred Danback. As I jog the promenade of the river, passing right by the Goldworthy installation, I thank God for him and pray that someday, the saplings will grow to crack open the rock, spilling dirt on to promenade. Fred's sacrifice was a sapling of sacrifice that cracked opened the rock of Anaconda. But there's more to the story.

On the day of 9/11, when the news began to unravel of the horrors of that day, the initial estimate of those who was thought to have perished was twelve to fifteen thousand. Then as the days went, the numbers kept on decreasing to, eventually, three thousand and some, still an unbearable amount, for sure.

I have a theory about why the initial estimate turned out to be so wrong.

9/11 was the first day of school. There are eight thousand students around the towers. The parents had just dropped off the kids, like my wife did that morning with my three children, and saw the sinister shadow of the first plane pass them in the schoolyard. Parents never made it to work. Or those who did, came down the steps right away, ignoring the famed announcement to "stay where you are."

You may not make the connection right away from Fred Danback to 9/11, but in my mind, there is a direct link. Here it is.

All of the schools around the towers were built after the late 1970's.

Because Fred Danback was willing to be demoted, the river became cleaner. Because the river became cleaner, the parks around the river became attractive. And the parents, instead of opting to escape to suburbia, decided to stay in their apartments in Battery Park designed for dual income no kid couples. Because there was tremendous increase in the population of children starting in the late 70's the city was to build all those schools, including P.S. 234, right here in front of us.

I am convinced Fred Danback made a difference on 9/11. One person's sacrifice, the ripple effects that caused because of that action, cannot be measured ultimately, but only be told in how we live our lives. Be a community of Fred Danbacks. Be willing to make your life count. And never forget the beauty of the river of your calling. One humble custodian changed the world. A sapling has cracked open a boulder, and the shalom dirt fills the empty spaces of our hearts. Psalm 46 is right, "there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God."

Makoto Fujimura

Refractions 26: The Epistle of van Gogh

Walking around the splendidly renovated Morgan Library in Holiday lit New York City, taking in the recent exhibit of van Gogh letters written to his younger contemporary, Emile Bernard, I had an epiphany. First, I was forced to admit the obvious: Vincent wrote and read in multiple languages. The letters were written in French, a foreign language for him. Then, I had to ponder the significance of a 19th Century "uneducated" artist, writing beautiful letters, full of drawings, in a foreign language.

The reputed image of van Gogh as an uneducated vagabond, threatening his society with unbalanced, rash acts of violence, and the real image of Vincent flowing out of these letters seem to conflict. Even knowing that he had series bouts with depression, and suffered from a rare form of schizophrenia, these words attest to his clear, analytical thinking. Troubled? Yes, but illiterate, no. Passionate? Yes, irrational, no. Vincent studied Thomas Kempis' "The Imitation of Christ" in Latin every day and spoke five languages.(1)

And yet Vincent would have been considered only partially educated in his time. To show how much things have changed in only a little over one century, the Dutch Reformed Church rejected Vincent in his request to be ordained as a minister, partly because he was not educated enough.(2) Education standards have eroded to such an extent that we would be astonished by the typical language capacity of 19th century "uneducated" artists.

The recent report on NEA's study on reading in America, "To Read or not to Read," depicts a dramatic erosion of America's reading habits (see http://www.nea.gov/research/Research_Brochures.php). Not only does the report give us hard data on the steep decline of reading at all levels and age groups (except the pre-teen years ... call it the "Harry Potter effect,") but it substantiates an alarming trend of communal disengagement. We are not only reading less, we are reading less well: we are not only reading less well, we are losing our capacity to focus and pay attention to the world around us with empathy. As I thought about this as I perused the exhibit, van Gogh letters began inject in my psyche an antidote to the problems laid out in "To Read or not to Read." Vincent communicated in a foreign tongue with his acute sensitivity, and to impress upon the reader what he felt as sacred. The key word is "communicate," and the report points out the severe consequences if we continue to lose our capacity to communicate. We may, if we go down this road, no longer have the capacity to be moved by van Gogh or any other artist: we would not have the patience and longing in our hearts to do so.

Take, for instance, the link that the study makes between civic engagement and reading: in short, folks who read are far more engaged in civic activities. They make better citizens. They are more likely to volunteer, more likely to go to a sports event, or to go hiking. Imagine that, people who you will find at local bookstores are ones you will see at a baseball field. They might have volunteered in a local charity event or have taken their kids on a hiking trail, or ... to a museum to see Starry Night.


"The data here demonstrate that reading is an irreplaceable activity in developing productive and active adults as well as healthy communities," Dana Gioia, the Chair of NEA writes, "Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media, they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading."

What was a shock to us at the National Council, the advisory board of the NEA, was that one of the new findings reports that college students read more coming into college than when they graduate. Every higher education institution should gather their board and consider what this simple data might mean to them. If we are not producing deeply engaged readers, and empowered citizens, then what is the purpose of education?

Businesses spend over 3.1 billion dollars annually retraining their entry workers to read, so they can process information given to them in business manuals. Learning to read translates into an immediate economic advantage, a fact that should make everyone pick up a book.

Vincent would stand out in the work force today for the simple reason that he could speak and write in multiple languages. Would he have been a ph. D candidate in theology if he lived today? Or a social worker? Perhaps he would be working for a major business firm, translating business manuals, working like Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener in some bureaucratic office building Paris, France. Oh no, likely not, you might say, for his impulsive, and destructive behavior would make him unfit; but, I would argue, modern medicine would have given him stability, and these opportunities. The point is, these van Gogh letters should compel us to ask deeper questions about the "progress" of our modern culture and education. They point, along with "To Read or not to Read" report, to a deeper malaise that is more troubling than the bi-polar disorder from which Vincent was suffering.


Some, I am sure, will point out that the mode of communication has shifted from the antiquated print culture to our current internet society; now we have a "visual culture," and are taking in information differently. But taking in mere information does not mean we are deeply engaged with the content. We may be able to scan for multifarious sensory input, and gather unreliable, but perhaps important, bits and pieces in our junkyard of amassed headlines. But the type of mental wrestling that reading a good book brings is irreplaceable. And walking about Morgan Library, I began to unravel a kind of visual code in van Gogh's letters that lead me to consider a deeper connection between reading and the visual arts. I began to speculate that the loss of reading could result in LESS images (at least meaningful, lasting images), and not more.

As I perused the exquisite drawings and letters done in brown ink, a deeper mystery began to unravel. An epistolary "code" opened up in my mind: a type of visual language that connected Vincent's language capacities and imagery. This link between images and words, could have led to Vincent's interests in foreign cultures, especially the Japanese. And I realized further, that all of the above were intricately tied in with his passion for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Vincent's visual language flows out of this cross-cultural curiosity and capacity. He began to draw and paint to communicate to the miners he ministered to in Borinage. He saw drawing as another "language," a visual language that connected heaven and earth. He writes to Bernard, a young artist he desired to mentor, of his intent on creating parables of color and lines. He speaks of his visual strategy to translate what he saw into a symbolic language akin to Japanese paintings and woodcuts. He saw his visual code the same level of synthesis that the pictograms of the Japanese art of the past exhibited. Significantly, he was writing and drawing these letters in reed pens, partly to imitate lines of Japanese woodcut prints.

Vincent adored Japan, considering Japan to be synonymous with paradise. In the fog of psychological confusion he was finding in Arles, he even claimed he was in Japan.(3)

Apparently the Japanese thought of woodblock prints in the 19th century in the same way that we consider yesterday's USA Today newspaper: useful wrapping to protect shipment. They never thought that such prints would end up being revered in museums around the world (a fact that should make us pause - would any newspaper design today be worth keeping?).

Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, and countless artists were influenced by woodblock prints. Vincent lived next to Samuel Bing's gallery in Montmartre, Paris, who exhibited thousands of woodblock prints. Van Gogh owned a few Hiroshige's. Vincent even copied one Japanese print in one of his paintings. He was translating visual reality into a type of calligraphy that created an alternative spiritual language.

The development of this heavenly language reached its culmination in twin paintings, always meant to be shown side by side: one of the Olive Trees, and the more famous Starry Night. (4) The Olive Trees were Vincent's symbol of Gethsemane, and Starry Night his version of the Resurrection. To understand the "codex" of color and forms that van Gogh desired to communicate, we must make an assumption we no longer make in today's cultural milieu.

In order to fully understand van Gogh, we need to assume the gospel of Jesus to be central to our creativity. That is what Vincent assumed. Thomas Kempis, who Vincent arduously studied, stated:

"He who follows Me, walks not in darkness," says the Lord. (John 8:12) By these words of Christ we are advised to imitate His life and habits, if we wish to be truly enlightened and free from all blindness of heart. Let our chief effort therefore be to study the life of Jesus Christ. (5)

Christ was the ultimate artist to him. This Renaissance idea of Christ-as-artist echoes throughout the letters at the Morgan Library exhibit. Theologically speaking, not only did Christ represent the Creator, Christ was the incarnate Creator of the universe (Colossians 1). Therefore, we are assuming the centrality of creativity in understanding Christ's centrality in history and culture.


The Epistle of van Gogh is a visual parable of what Vincent considered to be the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is what the Morgan Library exhibit (which runs though January 6, 2008) reveals. The curators note the importance of Letter number eight: what the curator considers central to the exhibit is Vincent's attempt to communicate gospel reality to Bernard. He writes:

You do very well to read the Bible - I start there because I've always refrained from recommending it to you ... Lived as serenely as an artist greater than all artists-disdaining marble and clay and paint-working in LIVING FLESH. I.e.-this extraordinary artist, hardly conceivable with the obtuse instrument of our nervous and stupefied modern brains, made neither statues nor paintings or even books ... he states it loud and clear ... he made ... LIVING men, immortals ... this great artist-Christ-although he disdained writing books on ideas & feelings - was certainly much less disdainful of the spoken word-THE PARABLE above all. (What a sower, what a harvest, what a fig-tree, etc.)


To van Gogh, such a quest for the living parable was no longer possible via the church. Growing up in a family of pastors, and once desiring to become ordained, Vincent's passion for the poor, and his desire to communicate the gospel via paint originated in the church. But while the church, especially the Dutch Reformed church, remained central in his life, he stood outside the tradition, alienated from her in experience and in theology.

Consider the Starry Night, the famed landscape he painted in Arles. Notice that at the very center of the painting is a white Dutch Reformed church, which did not exist in Arles. Vincent imported a church building of his childhood, pasting it into the landscape of Arles because he wanted to create a parable of his own life.


b. Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" without the church building. I used Photoshop to erase the church building. Visually, the painting loses its potency and dynamism.



If you are to take out the church (place a thumb over the church, or see my Photoshop version b) from the painting, the whole painting falls apart visually. It is the only vertical form, aside from the dominant cypress tree on the left, which juts out to break the horizontal planes. The cypress tree and the church are two forms that connect heaven and earth. Without the church, the cypress tree takes over the swirl of movement, and there's no visual center to hold the painting in tension between heaven and earth.

Notice, too, that homes surrounding the church are lit with warm light, but the church is dark. Van Gogh's message: the Spirit has left the church (at least the building), but is alive in Nature. If you follow the visual flow of the painting, your eye will cycle upward, but still anchored by the church building. Our gaze will end up on the right upper hand corner, at the Sun/Moon. Notice it is not just a moon, but a combination of the sun and the moon. Vincent wanted to show that the Spirit of God transcends even Nature herself, that in resurrection, in the New Earth and Heaven, a complete new order will shape things to come.


Vincent wrote to Bernard:

But seeing that nothing opposes it - supposing that there are also lines and forms as well as colors on the other innumerable planets and suns - it would remain praiseworthy of us to maintain a certain serenity with regard to the possibilities of painting under superior and changed conditions of existence, an existence changed by a phenomenon no queerer and no more surprising than the transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly, or of the white grub into a cockchafer. (B8, 23 June 1888, Letters 3:496.) (6)



The synthesis of sun/moon represented, for Vincent, this "superior and changed condition of existence," as he developed a visual diction of transformed experience. In other words, he "saw" the transformation before it happened, and by faith painted the world to come.

Again, Vincent was able to "translate" the "Word became Flesh" gospel into visual forms aided enormously by his cross-cultural and multi-lingual training (7). Wrestling with another language, or mastering writing makes one sensitive to the limitation of one's own language, and allows greater empathic capacity to relate to another of a different culture. I began to feel kinship in this experience with Vincent, as I myself wrestled with my bi-cultural upbringing, and with the lack of mastery of either language for a long period of time in my youth. I, too felt this longing for the universal language, and art provided a respite from my frustration in navigating between two cultures.

Vincent's alienation from church and society, his exilic and lonely existence only added to the urge to break through the cultural and linguistic barriers. But especially in his case, Art and language flow out of the same source, and complement each other. To be sure, he experienced the void within, but he also believed that the source of fulfillment was in the Creative God who delighted in his creation.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things ... one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper better and more. That leads to God, that leads to unwavering faith. (The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, To Theo, July 1880, Touchstone, pg. 124)

To him, there is a direct relationship between painting and loving God. The exhibit makes it clear, though, that he also loved to write letters, and to communicate the intent of the heart to others. This overwhelming desire to reveal his heart forced a unique synthesis. Every artist, too, wrestles with the limitation of one's existence: and attempts to unite fragmented pieces into something whole, as an offering to the world. Rather than narcissistically dwelling on ego, Vincent wanted to commune, and communicate with humanity.

If the report "To Read or Not to Read" is correct, then engagement with arts and civic activities is intricately tied with reading. But we need more than remedial reading classes to get to the heart of the matter. We need a creative milieu that would involve all of our senses, because deeply engaged reading leads to perceptual awakening, stimulation of the core of the intuitive and experiential . We need to teach that languages of any kind are limited in their ability to reach the true depth of our hearts, for the inherent limitation of a language echoes the divides of cultures. Creativity begins with our dialogue at that point of limitation, at that moment of frustration. We need then to help students to move toward a generative creativity, one that entrusts intuitive and perceptual intelligence to lead the way in creating a world that ought to be. The upcoming International Arts Movement's Gathering "Generative Creativity: Transforming the River of Culture" (you can register now at http://www.iamny.org) will explore that further. What reading and writing can teach us is a deeper empathy that leads us to desire the best for others who are entirely different from us, and to long to communicate with them.

"You never really understand a person, "Atticus Finch tells us in To Kill a Mockingbird (8), "until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Atticus Finch, and later Scout, are both able to rise above their worlds of injustice, and the hatred that surrounds them, because they had cultivated that capacity to leap into "another's skin." To be well read means not just to be able to score high on a reading score, but to develop an attuned empathy that allows us also to "walk around" in another's story. Love requires all of our senses.

Vincent loved and feared his world. Vincent heard in a contorted cypress tree the whispers of the Spirit: Vincent saw in a flight of crows in a Wheatfield a calligraphic trajectory toward his own mortality. And he saw in a family of poor potato farmers a sacred, warm light he never felt at home. His work embodied this kind of empathy, driven by his own limitations and brokenness. He therefore developed an empathetic language of hope, full of prismatic colors, that invites us to hope with him, and long for a renewed world.

This empathic language requires us to use all of our senses, Therefore perceptual education must be tied into our experience of learning at the highest level, one that makes visual education connect with intelligence. It is no surprise that Vincent sought inspiration from Japanese woodblocks. Japanese language fuses the visual ideograms of ancient Chinese with the phonetic lyricism of the Japanese Hiragana alphabet (9). In their art, especially in the Bun-jin ga tradition, merges various forms merge into one art expression, combining visual, poetic and descriptive.


Perception expert Rudolf Arnheim in "Visual Thinking," told us so a long time ago (1969) that such a multi-pronged approach should be the norm of education:

The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought. In fact, educators and administrators cannot justify giving the arts an important position in the curriculum unless they understand that the arts are the most powerful means of strengthening the perceptual component without which productive thinking is impossible in any field of endeavor. The neglect of the arts is only the most tangible symptom of the widespread unemployment of the senses in every field of academic study.

Visual Thinking, Rudolf Arnheim, University of California Press, 1969, pg. 3

Arnheim points out that there is an "unwholesome split" between reason and visual thinking today. The post-Enlightenment split between reason and intuition, or emotion, casts a shadow into our assumptions today. Theologically speaking, it is precisely this split that caused the gospel to be communicated as information only, a check list of do's and don'ts, and not as a cohesive life force full of mysteries and multi-sensory stories. Vincent brings them together. The Gospel as preached by St. Francis, would have meant full engagement of the senses, too. The Word becoming Flesh would not make sense otherwise.


If Vincent had not been such a deeply attuned and dedicated communicator, and a student of foreign languages and cultures, such power of synthesis would have been highly unlikely. He had, to borrow from Howard Gardner, "multiple intelligences." In his case, visual language developed because of his language interests, and not in lieu of reading and writing. He was painting not because he could not write: he painted these indelible images as part of the total communiqué package. He learned these mark making skills by studying pictograms, and was attuned to "walk around in another's skin," in all that he did.

If we desire to love the world, and communicate that love, we must use all of our senses, and our "multiple intelligences" to present the best case possible. Communicating in this visual age will require us to read more, and more deeply, than ever before. If Vincent serves us as a test case, his visual language developed as his curious mind and letters began to explore more depth and sophistication. Development of a visual language requires more than learning to depict what we see. We must thirst for deeper knowledge and probe the layers of mystery beneath what we see. Thus, education of any kind, whether theological or secular, must begin from the acknowledgement of deep connectedness between writing, reading and other forms of the arts. "To Read or not to Read," raises serious issues for education and reading: but after spending time with Vincent, I began to think that the report points to a demise of visual imagery as well, if we do not chart a new course of education.



My guess is that visual images pre-existed in Vincent's mind, a kind of supra-reality that his writings alluded to, but could not well explain. The potency of such a Reality resonates in all of this images and writings, to the extent that we must begin to admit a deeper connection and relevance, even if we do not believe in that world ourselves. In Vincent's letters we find a transfixed imagination, a window to see beyond the minds eye into the soul.


The art of the Creative or Aesthetic Age (10) must be able to provide similar window. Sciences, arts, philosophy and theology (and even business) must find a common tongue, a reconciled whole. At the same time, such a common tongue must honor and recognize the distinctive limitations of each language and each sphere. We need to see through the window of own brokenness to gaze into a salvific reality that graces our souls. In other words, we need to come up with a "third" language of synthesis that values the whole of humanity, both past and future, both in body and spirit. Just as the Spirit spoke via distinctive languages to bring reconciliation of nations at the Pentecost, Spirit continues to speak today, and is powerfully alive in the language of the arts. Vincent leads the way into this path of discovery. If not for this intervention of the Spirit, language of any kind, including the visual language, will continue to break up into debased fragments, unable to communicate the deepest conditions of our humanity.

Refracting in the beautiful halls of the renovated Morgan, are the letters and coded strokes of Vincent offering a profound mystery that probes the depth of our twenty first century condition. We need Vincent's beautiful, and sometimes awkward, meditations today because our current state of culture will not even come close to the level of articulation he mastered, even as alienated as he was from the church and society. In order to break the van Gogh code, we must first recognize that art and languages are intimately tied together in a Divine formula. The intuitive epiphany is at the core base of both, lighting the path of our creative journey. If we do not have a nation full of engaged readers and imaginators, we will also lack the creative mind that can mediate communication, or create new languages. We may have all the technology to communicate but have nothing to say to each other. More significantly, we will not feel for each other if we do not cultivate the inner lives of contemplation that reading and engagement with art brings. This exhibit highlights an artist writing and drawing to simply communicate with another artist of his time. And what he wrote tapped into a world that ought to be; a world where barriers of linguistic limitation are removed. Only painting full-time for three years, Vincent offered with such brevity and beauty meditations of such weighty substance. Would we, in a few decades, have the capacity to appreciate such offerings? And will we be able to create, above the clamor of fragmented splintered voices of the art/media world, and continue to trust that light can be resplendent with life, even in the gnarled twist of branches, like in van Gogh's olive trees?


Makoto Fujimura




(1)IAM lecture on van Gogh by Dr. James Romaine, November, 2007, Space 38|39, NYC
(2) See Kathleen Powers Erickson's At Eternity's Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent van Gogh, Eerdmans
(3)http://www.artelino.com/articles/van_gogh_japonisme.asp
(4) IAM lecture on van Gogh by Dr. James Romaine, October, 2007
(5) The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kempis, Pg. 3, Hendrickson Christian Classics
(6)Vincent van Gogh, Painted with Words, p. 190-192
(7) I realize that many theologians would disagree, at least in principle, with the idea that the gospel truth can be communicated via visual languages. What I am suggesting here depends on the assumption of what that language is, and ultimately what we consider to the truth communicated. I am not making an argument here that words are unnecessary to communicate the gospel, or any truth claims: I am suggesting the opposite, that Vincent's linguistic capacity allowed him a rare synthesis, and that words are central to his visual symbolism.
(8)Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Warner Books, Pg. 30
(9)One of two Japanese phonetically based alphabets
(10) I want to thank my son, Ty, for suggesting this term

Refractions 25: Traveling in China with Father Dowling

Traveling in China with Father Dowling


The road back from Xian airport felt dusty to my skin, even riding inside a comfortable bus for the US delegation. The pale sky seemed weighed down, thick with coal fumes from the nearby factories. Bicycles crisscrossed the road, even on the highways, farmers and workers somehow managing to swerve in and out, and from what we could see from the inside of the cool, air conditioned bus, their breathing seemed labored and resigned to the heat. We were on our way to Beijing, after an exhilarating day in Xian, visiting the terra-cotta warriors from the Qin Dynasty (211-206 B.C.).

Refreshing also were the conversations that I had on the bus, with fellow delegates from the President’s Committee on the Humanities and Arts (PCHA). I was there to represent the National Council, with Eileen Mason, the deputy director of the National Endowment for the Arts; Marc Pachter, the head of the Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian (expect our conversation will be a future Refractions piece); Irene Love, a world renowned archeologist; Henry Moran, the director of the PCHA; and Adair Margo, the head of the delegation and her husband Don. Bruce Cole, the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, with his wife Doreen, James Billington, from the Library of Congress, and his wife Marjorie accompanied us. And then there was Ralph.

Ralph McInerny has taught for over forty years at the University of Notre Dame, where he is the director of the Jacques Maritain Center. You might know his name, or know of his fictional character, as he has authored twenty-six Father Dowling mystery novels. I found out that Ralph even came to read and sign books at the local Mysterious Book Shop right near my loft in Tribeca. A Thomas Aquinas scholar, I began to grill him with questions after finding out about his connection with Jaques Maritain; and to my delight, he was also a scholar of Dante (see my “Water Flames” exhibit, based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, www.saratecchia.com.)

Maritain’s “Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry,” one of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, given in 1952 at the National Gallery of Art, has been a seminal work for my journey of creativity and faith. I have carried it around with me since college, and this French philosopher/theologian has sown seeds of faith and an integrated view of art and theology into my life and my work. It is not surprising that the Maritain center at Notre Dame chose someone like Ralph who is equally versed in Aquinas and Dante, as well as the genre of mystery novels. Maritain’s theology recovers art and poetry from being a specialized category exiled from the intellect, into an indispensable, central catalyst of the mind. Maritain, in doing so, to the chagrin of many academics then and now, validates “the Virtue of Art.”

"The activity of the practical intellect divides into human actions to be done…and the works to be made; in other words, it divides into moral activity and artistic activity…Art is a virtue – not a moral virtue…Art is a virtue in the larger and more philosophical sense the ancients gave to this word; a habitus or 'state of possession,' an inner strength developed in man…Art is a virtue of the practical intellect." (Jacues Maritain, Creative Intuition)

The "habitus" of an Aquinas scholar could include mystery novels, or to consider all creative activities to be a significant intellectual work. Whether art and poetry, a Sunday afternoon baseball game or gourmet cooking, we do not need to segregate art and creativity into a corner, an exiled “extra” of our lives.

Ralph confided to me, though, that he really began to write mystery novels as a side business; to put his kids through school. I told him that my wife is a mystery novel fanatic, and knew of his books. I, on the other hand, first “met” Father Dowling as Tom Bosley, in a TV mystery show in the Eighties. “They loosely based it on my novels,” he said in his jovial voice, “but paid me well.” Having a son at NYU, I nodded, knowing that a financial opportunity a purist may resist, a parent grabs onto for dear life. I began to even ponder what kind of a mystery novel I would write…"Murder at NYU" (a parent gets mysteriously murdered on his way to paying his son’s tuition)?


* * *

When we arrived in Beijing, it was Saturday. Ralph had asked one of our interpreters if there was a Catholic church nearby the hotel. They rushed about to find one, and they did, and found that they had a mass on Saturday evening. “If we rush, we can still make it.” Off they went, out of the VIP lounge at the airport, where we waited for our bags. He took one of our interpreters with him.

Later, I asked the interpreter, Jesse (a name given to her by her college English instructor), of her experience going to church with Ralph. She told me that she had a friend who got married there, so she recognized the place. She asked Ralph, though, what the difference between a Church and a Temple was. Not having gone outside of China, she really did not know the difference, she said.

How do you explain to a well educated Chinese, the difference between a church and a temple? Ralph told me that he began to explain, but the conversation soon turned to how she suddenly became a widow recently, losing her husband in a car accident. She had since become a Buddhist: “ I before believed in utopia, now I follow in Buddah’s ways to find peace.”

Father Dowling, Ralph’s fictional character, would have found himself drawn to this conversation. Instead of asking probing questions about someone’s present, though, he would have found something in common with someone’s past first, especially in someone’s loss and anguish.

As an “archdiocesan marriage tribunal, specializing in the misery of others,” Father Dowling spent much of his early career counseling broken marriages. But then he found himself carrying their anguish in his heart, silently. “He began to drink…A final binge, a cure, and then, as though into exile, he had been sent to St. Hilary’s in Fox River, a city west of Chicago. Fifty years of age, a failure in the eyes of many of his friends, he had come to see this parish as the sweetest consolation. God is merciful.”


Reading Ralph’s books now, (purchased at the Mysterious Bookshop with my wife’s help) I realize his books read as an interior journey of faith and brokenness—to capture the real mystery hidden within the very heart of a human being.

As we traveled about China, I began to see China as a mystery, a beautiful mystery.

Here’s a country that would spend a third of their GNP on preserving Xian and the thousands of terra-cotta warriors buried beneath the tomb mount, but at the same time creating a dam to wash away an ancient village. China is a country that would re-build the main road in Beijing to Beverly Hills glamour, providing thousands of workers with jobs, but would force people into retirement at 55, to make room for younger workers, and then displace these younger workers in order to make room for the tourists as the Olympics open. Their parks were filled with the over-55 group of ex-workers, kicking around a feathered version of a hackey sack, playing and singing all day to pass the time. Here’s a country that is investing toward a huge cultural infrastructure, supporting their own artists both at home and abroad, but at the same time carefully censoring the internet, the news and the media. A country that would print Bibles domestically (not many Americans know that for many years they printed their own Bibles for Catholic Churches, but forbade the foreigners to carry them in to China), and yet persecute and arrest Christian leaders in rural areas. They also highly value harmony between people and nature, and yet have one of the worst pollution problems in the world. We asked one of the officials, while riding through the glitzy Beijing streets full of smog, if a marathon can take place in the polluted air: “oh, they will shut the factories for two months before the Olympics.” No other country can be so confidently matter of fact about moving 500,000 workers out of the region to make room for tourists. Today’s China can afford to do so, and has the governmental control to carry that out.

We toured the “Egg,” the brand new Performance Center in Beijing, and one of the delegates who has been involved in building arts centers like this in the US commented to me: “There’s no way we could do this…we don’t have access to enough concrete!” Touring the center, which seemed overly extravagant, even at the half finished state, we were told that the center will be done this fall… which prompted another comment: “There’s no way our unions would allow us to build so fast!”

Each day, The China Daily was delivered to our hotel rooms. We noticed that there were front-page articles about the places we were to visit, often on a specific issue we were to discuss that day. At the end of our tour, when we saw the “Egg” was the subject of a top article with headliner indicating that the construction was on schedule, we realized we were in a bit of a Truman Show. The Chinese could re-create a city in several years, build the largest performance center in the world in a short time, and control everything about how it is reported to impress a small foreign delegation. Shaking our heads, we all had to admit, however, that we were still quite impressed.

From their perspective, to be fair, the US, too, must be a mystery. We speak of freedom of speech as our highest humanitarian virtue, and our internet pages are filled with pornography and other explicit forms of dehumanization. We are a nation swimming with individual wealth, and yet have no national insurance and a high percentage of homelessness. We are an advanced nation of educational opportunity, and yet have one of the highest illiteracy rates in the industrialized world. We are a country of innovation, in technology and the arts, and yet the first time we broadcasted the Superbowl live to China, Janet Jackson’s famed “malfunctioning bra” incident represented us instead. We bicker about the cultural budget for the National Endowment for the Arts, when the budget remains tiny compared to other nations, and a mere half of a baseball player’s (Alex Rodriguez, New York Yankees) salary.

And if you were to read China as a mystery novel, the opening chapter would be on the Cultural Revolution, exiling thousands of families into forced encampment. The trauma left deep wounds that still exist in the lives of people in China. The Cultural Revolution was their Ground Zero.

The vacuum that this Ground Zero has left in their culture, is now being filled by their fantastic drive to bring the world to the Olympics (’08) and then to the Expo (’10). The museums and arts districts are getting support and infrastructure, making even New York artists envious of China’s bourgeoning arts scene. On the way to Beijing, David Fraher of Arts Midwest, passed out a magazine article called “China’s New Creative Class,” highlighting “the next cultural revolution” from China’s creatives like Ou Ning (curator, designer), Lin Jing (furniture and ceramics maker) or Ji Ji (graphic designer). Apparently, the race is on for the creative domain as well, to see which culture can take the lead.

When we met and spent time with their Minister of Culture, Sun Jiazheng, we realized why they were making such a headway into a cultural development.

Minister Sun charmed us, a Renaissance man, who freely quotes philosophers and poets, and humanized every meeting by taking off his tie and his jacket, shaking every delegate’s hand personally. But it was his own poetry, shared at the banquet on the last day of our visit inside the Forbidden City, Jin an Fu Palace, that truly moved me. Our delegation head, Adair Margo, insisted that he share a poem he quoted at the table. He seemed reluctant, saying “such a sad poem should not be part of a grand celebration between two nations.” He explained that the poem was written after his friend, a Japanese author/composer and president of the Sino-Japanese Cultural Exchange Association, Ikuma Dan, suddenly passed away during his visit to China. He brought the poem to Sakuma’s gravesite in Japan, to read at the site.

April comes to Tokyo
The cherries should be at the height of their bloom
I’ve come to see the flowers
But spring came early and they faded too soon

April comes to Tokyo
This should be a glad reunion
Friends from afar once more together
Instead we stand bereft by your grave

Oh, honored colleague!
The blossoms have fallen, but spring still comes in all its splendor
You left with no warning; with whom can we share
The fathomless depths of our loss?

Graveside Reflections, April 2002, from "Dream and Pursuit" by Sun Jinzheng

It would have been a courageous enough act to reveal such a personal journey in public. But his offering was even more daring to me because of the current tense relationship between China and Japan. Even a few days before, the Japanese papers were full of questions regarding Prime Minister Abe’s response to Yasukuni Shrine, a Japanese holy site where many war criminals are buried and honored, including those invading China. Further, the Chinese have demanded an inquiry into the forced prostitution of Chinese women by the Japanese military in the 19th Century.

In that setting, Minister Sun’s poem was not just a balm to soothe such historical wounds, but a principled reconciling act based on common humanity, casting light into the divide.

Art moves into the chasms of past injuries, inspecting and noting each detail of a heart’s wounds. At the same time, Art and Poetry can feed us the manna of hope to malnourished, distrusting souls due to abuses of the past. In the age of terrorism and fear, that is why we need poets and artists. Artists have the potential of creating in love, providing an imaginative vision for their culture, a holistic language to deal with a fragmented, oppressed past. The result should be an even deeper longing.

Thus, Jaques Maritain wrote: “Poetry is spiritual nourishment. But it does not satiate, it only makes man more hungry, and that is its grandeur." That hunger cannot be filled by even the greatest of banquets in a Forbidden City. In Minister Sun’s poem for the Japanese composer, I felt a certain longing. There’s a mystery there, not a mystery of “who-done-it,” but a longing for a true Jin an Fu (a Place of Eternal Happiness), to finally resolve the irreconcilable brokenness within our hearts for eternity.

Mystery novels seek an answer for every wrongful death. But, really, every death demands an answer whether by murder or by accident. Jesse, our interpreter who met sorrow and death in her young marriage, began to search for peace in the midst of her tears. Father Dowling would always offer clues to such a journey, to re-discover the path home, not just to solve the crime, but for a spiritual home. For often, even in a mystery novel, the accidental turn of events can overwhelm the logic of the analysis of evidence. The Spirit of God, the true detective of our souls, searches via our creativity, a journeyer’s void within.

When Minister Sun read the lamentation poem, Jesse had to translate the poem impromptu. One of the assistants, rushed on stage with Minister Sun’s book in which the poem was translated to help Jesse. Jesse closed the book, gave it back politely to the assistant, and proceeded to begin to translate the poem with her eyes closed. Refracting in each word, carefully and tenderly given to us, both Ralph and I felt the weight of life and death. Father Dowling would have noticed that moment, too, as he, too, would peer deeply into the pain and sorrows of a poet grieving for a friend, and an interpreter grieving for a husband. That, more than even the splendid banquet, would reveal the mystery of our being, being transcribed and etched in our hearts, one word at a time.


Makoto Fujimura

Creating into the Void

Dear Refractions Readers:


This photo is from St. James Castle, Kinsale, Ireland.

My next Refractions essay on China trip will be uploaded soon (hopefully). I am pleased to announce that NavPress will be publishing past Refractions essays into a book, so I'll keep you updated on that.

I just spoke at my home church The Village Church. It is on Genesis 2, on a poet named Adam and why we need to be (even if you are not an artist) creating into the void...

William Blake wrote: "There is a Void, outside of Existence, which if enterd into 
 Englobes itself & becomes a Womb… " ( Introduction to Jerusalem)

Indeed, even in Eden there was a void...

Take a listen, if you are interested, at

http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/2007/09/creating-into-the-void/

Happy September!

Makoto Fujimura

Installation in Kansas City

Happy Fourth of July!

My recent installation photos in Kansas City are available at:
http://flickr.com/photos/jtoddm/sets/72157600258648228/

You will see a major installation for the brand new headquarters of DEMDACO.  The image moves from "Shalom Vision" (left) to "Golden Splendor,"(right)  taking the theme of "The world that ought to be,"  and our struggles to journey there.

DEMDACO is located at:

5000 West 134th Street
Leawood, KS 66209


Please make an appointment with Sharon (sharon.tompkins@demdaco.com) if you want to visit the painting.


I will be traveling to Kansas City later this month to spend time with a fellow National Council Member Joan Israelite and the the Chair of National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia.


Enjoy!

Refractions 24: The Resonance of Being

The Resonance of Being





In July, 1973, I landed in Newark Airport with my father, one of the leading phonetics research scientists in the world. Just before the airplane skidded onto the runway, feeling a bit queasy, I looked toward the east and saw the Twin Towers, freshly built.


My father was one of many pure research scientists recruited to work at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. He was to create their linguistics department, and ended up spending over 15 years there. The AT&T divesture would split the company in 1984, ending an era of the highest accomplishments in the areas of pure research in the modern times. He left then to head up the phonetics research department at Ohio State University.


Max Mathews, my father’s boss at Bell Labs, picked us up that hot day from the airport. Out of the window of their boxy sedan, my eyes were filled with green: the trees and grass seemed so sumptuous and luxurious to me. I saw an old man with a corduroy hat, mowing the lawn. I had never seen anyone mow a lawn in Japan. I stayed with the Matthews for the summer, while my parents got ready to move to New Providence, N.J. Though this land seemed so new, and the language seemed so foreign, I was merely reacquainting myself with the country of my birth.


When I was born in Boston, in 1960, my father was finishing up his post doctorate thesis at M.I.T. at the Research Laboratory of Electronics, where Noam Chomsky also had his office. Since then, he had always planned on coming back to the States. Even with his tenured position at Tokyo University, he knew he would not be able to quell his mission to pursue pure research. He would become the first tenured professor at the prestigious university to abandon his post, to the outrage of many of his fellow academics.


He had a humble beginning at Tokyo University, though. As an undergraduate student, in post-war Japan, he almost failed out as a physics major. His caught the attention of one professor who was creating a new area of information science research, and he began to do rudimentary studies with him. As it turned out, that was the best milieu for my father to exercise his enormous creative and linguistic gift.


He and my mother had another reason for coming to New Jersey. My brother and I were to be raised bilingually and biculturally. We were always told of this, even as small children. That eventually we would move back to the States, and my mother told us, though it would be a hard adjustment, would be better than staying in the regimented, exam-filled environment in Japan. My parents, it seemed, saw this as their primary mission for us.


* * * *


I ended up earning pocket money by mowing lawns on bright Saturday mornings in New Providence the first few years. I would soon find out that I was highly allergic to grass. That discomfort, of course, did not stop me from working around the yards of my father’s colleagues.


My father also hired me to create spectrographic prints as my summer job. I would put thermo-sensitive paper around the drum of the device. As the drum rotated, the voice data would translate itself into a visual dance in front of me, the needle jumping up and down like a seismic meter. The needle also made this faint scratching sound, and smelled like burning rubber. I made hundreds of these prints, so that my father could catalogue the patterns. He was working on a computer simulation of the tongue*.

Bell Labs was a bit like Starship Enterprise. The main building had gigantic wings spreading over the green hills. The copper roofs of the building seem to hover in the vast landscape, and they gleamed in the rain. When I went to help my father in the morning, I remember the hallway wings filled with conversation. Once, when I picked up my father at night, I was surprised how many scientists were there late at night. Bell Labs was the birthplace of many inventions, including the transistor, and laser technology, not to mention UNIX and C computer languages. When my father worked there, there had already been seven Nobel Prizes given t