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If things hadn't been so busy, some thoughts right after (or possibly before) the Q & A session (Palm Sunday) and on Easter would have been appropriate. But, things are busy (always?).
Anyway, it felt wrong to leave the site without some final words. (I have a meeting this week with Wendy, and that may result in more final thoughts, but...)
The Q & A Session
The Q & A session went wonderfully. Many people attended, asked and answered questions. Answering the questions Mary Martin gave me as preparation, I learned a bunch about me and art. At the Q & A session, I learned about other people and art.
First, it was obvious from the comments (and the attendance) that the art had engaged people. They were moved by it and interested in it. It had enriched their Lenten experience. They wanted to see what each week would bring. They wondered about its meaning to me.
A couple people commented (in response to my question about how I could have involved them more) that they saw "being the audience" as involvement. That was a new thought for me. Appreciating and thinking about art is certainly a valid part of the creation process. (Perhaps it's my early days in drama that makes me want a more interactive [or maybe just "bigger"] experience. After all, at a play you can hear/see the audience laugh and cry. Their emotional responses are more open. With visual art, their response is more internal.)
I had been thinking that I had not accomplished my goal of involving people in the process. That's probably not quite true. Their involvement was not as blatant as I vaguely envisioned, but they were involved. (I still find myself strategizing about how to have at least some members of the audience become co-creators.)
Several people made comments about the risk and vulnerability involved in making art. Perhaps because of that tendency towards exhibitionism, I find it very easy. In fact, it's clear that the opportunity to reveal myself and my life is one of the reasons I make art.
We "hung" Easter the day before (with some drama, since the logic board in the computer driving the printer went on the fritz two banners before printing was completed. Ralph saved the day, as usual.)
I got many compliments about the Easter designs that day, along with some "What's the meaning?" questions about the jellyfish. Once I reassured people that I'd just wanted to do something pretty from those hooks, they happily admitted that they liked them. (I think people often want art to be very deep and are not sure whether it's OK to like it if it looks frivolous.)
My Evaluation
The project was a success:
- working with the large-format printer went well
- integrating stock photos into my "fine art" worked. (I feel
myself mentally devaluing it because I didn't illustrate everything, but using
photography added power to the work, especially because it is unusually
contemporary for church art.)
- combining the visual art and poetry was effective
- I brought art into people's daily lives
- I got to see (and learn about) their response to the art
- I enjoyed being "pulled out of bed" by this project
- it was a good idea to make a printed record of the project (which I did for
the Q & A session). It put things in a portable, familiar format.
Things to do differently:
- I'd like to put less stress on Ralph. The hanging wasn't really a
problem, but needing prints was. That will be effortlessly
"fixed" when we can rearrange things so I have physical access to the
printer.
- It'd be better to have the design done more ahead of time.
- I'm still hanging on to that co-creators thing...
When I advertised the site address via e-mail on Monday, I did have some qualms. Interestingly, they were not about the art. I figure people either respond to the art or not--that's something I can let go of fairly easily. (Although if nobody responded, I'd be worried.)
My qualms were about my comments on this site and about the project in general. Religion is, after all, one of the things people fight wars about. Religion engenders strong feelings.
I did a Bible study written by a Quaker theologian (whose name I don't remember) who re-told the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel as a way of explaining the process. He saw study as wrestling with God. Not that you would necessarily understand or enjoy the meaning of what you were reading, but that you would be engaged with God and with meaning while you were studying.
I resist people who tell me I have to believe certain truths about God and Jesus. I think recognizing and engaging in the sacred is enough. I can question (and be wrong, if there is a wrong) but, as long as I'm involved, there's hope. It's when I ignore or refuse to see the presence of the holy in my life that I'm in danger...that I need to "be saved."
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Wendy and I have both been concerned about including people of color in the images. At the same time, I'm a bit angry about it. As a woman with a disability, I know about not being represented--or being misrepresented--in cultural images.
Still, the limitations of the media (using stock photos) make it hard to represent everybody. I did another search yesterday. Interestingly enough, some of the same images are filed under "african american" and "asian." I guess a brown knee is a brown knee--it's hard to tell ethnic extraction.
Which is the point, really. Which of the hands in the (probably soon to be replaced) latest Palm Sunday graphic are people of color? Can't really be sure, can you? Because we are all people of color and skin shades on a continuum, not by category.
Most of the audience of this work (being in Minnesota) is white. All the participants in the historical events were brown. For a thousand years, many religious artists have represented Christ as white to a white audience. Theologically, that seems appropriate to me--they were saying "Jesus was like you. You can be Christ-like, too."
Until fairly recently there weren't representations of Christ as brown and that probably sent an exclusionary message to brown people. That's not good.
But I resist the idea that this work must represent people in all colors. I have to give the audience credit for some intelligence and imagination. I've never seen Christ represented as a woman in a wheelchair. (Nor, I think, should I have--he wasn't, I'm sure.) But I know that much of what he said applies to me. I am God-in-action-on-earth (and sometimes I'm not). So God is, in fact, a woman in a wheelchair. Don't need no artist to tell me that.
Note: Hey, I remembered some of what Dick and I talked about last week: That Lent is, in fact, not about the last days of Jesus. It's about the new covenant that Jesus created between humans and God. So the text is a lot of review of the "old covenant" and promise of the new. Lent, then, is a season of re-connecting with God. (Traditionally done through repentant acts like alms giving, fasting, praying...see the Ash Wednesday texts.) Because of this, I've renamed these pages (and the project, in my head) "The Lenten Series," rather than the Easter Project.
I've been doing major image searching for two days. If you want a glimpse into our world mind, spend hours at the PhotoDisc site. Hard to find hands feeding another human being...easy to find hands holding drugs, cigarettes, dice, money, calculators, phones, remote controls. My search for "hand and closeup" netted more than 1600 images. About three-fourths of the way through, I realized that today's servants-of-God are holding calculators and phones as often as clothes for the naked. My sense of ministry is too small--too archaic. Do I change the poem?
February is Black History Month. When I turned on the TV last night, ABC was running an "Our Century" program about the last days of Martin Luther King, Jr. I thought: "here, in my time, is a guy who lived Lent." He knew there was a good chance he would be executed. He talked to someone about the ending of the story being that he would be shot. He continued anyway. Ralph Abernathy said that, on the "I've been to the mountaintop" speech he made the night before he was assassinated, King "preached the fear out of himself." I can imagine that Jesus was trying to do that in Gethsemene--pray the fear out of himself.
I don't think MLK and the "Poor People's
Movement" was an Easter story, though. We're not in the promised land
when it comes to race relations or social justice in this world. If I had said: "I'll do an art piece for
Easter," I would have had easier going. I could have said to
myself: "Easter is about life after death; hope after hopelessness;
Spirit being stronger than body." I can handle those things. But I wanted to do a series and it made sense
for that to be across Lent. Unfortunately, that plunges me into a series
of questions I didn't expect: The gospel readings in the lectionary seem to jump all over the place.
They're not about chronology, they're not about One theme (unless I'm missing
it). I loved the service of Tenebrae when I was a kid. (My mother often
despaired at my attraction to the drama of, for instance, the Catholic
Church. She is a puritan.) I loved seeing the influential
men in the church sitting at the table in the chancel, reading their
parts. "The light of the world was being snuffed out," they
would say and snuff the candle in front of them. The church got darker
and darker. The air in the big soaring spaces seemed to disappear as
the light dimmed. Then, in darkness, we all filed out, waiting. Where I grew up we had a large, multi-church good Friday service.
So that felt unusual and impersonal. We were still waiting. One
year we did a prayer vigil--Someone was at the church, praying, the whole
time between the Good Friday service and the Easter Sunday service. Then, finally, Easter! An exhaled shout and the world started
moving again. As though, on Good Friday, God got mad and wouldn't
speak to us any more. Then, finally, on Easter, he turns to face us
and says, "Let's party!" So I thought: "Maybe the readings are about all the elements in
our world which try to snuff out our light." A good, psychobablical
interpretation, but I couldn't make it work. Maybe the readings are about temptation and surrender. Jesus keeps
trying to get out of it, is tempted to get out of it but, in the end, goes
through with it anyway. Well, there's a little of that there, but it
sounds much more like someone who, aware of the dangers, moved forward with
what he thought he needed to do. Maybe the readings are about light. Is there light imagery in each of
them? No. I re-read parts of "The First Coming," by Thomas Sheehan.
He suggests that "Jesus preached the joy of God's immediate and
liberating presence." (p.57) I tried to make all the readings be recap's of Jesus' message (as
understood by Sheehan). That didn't work either. But, I've found a path (pretty much what we used to call "a deer path
at this point). I've adjusted my chosen texts
to get a better dramatic arc (it seemed too much like we were starting at the
end with that other verse) and have an idea for some imagery. I'd be happier if this were cleaner, clearer... January 18, 2000--Looking
for a theme..
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