Nathan Vonnahme

Regent College

3 April, 1999

          What makes something art? Of course, this question has confounded philosophers for ages. But as we think about how to make, use and evaluate art, the difference between "craft" and "art," and all manner of other questions about art, it is necessary that we have a good definition of what is and is not art.

          Nicholas Wolterstorff sums up three of the classical definitions of art and the difficulties with all of them:

Over and over one comes across claims to the effect that such-and-such is "the essential function of art." "Art is mimesis." "Art is self-expression." "Art is significant form." All such formulae fall prey to the same dilemma. Either what is said to be characteristic of art is true of more than art. Or, if true only of art, it is not true of all art.
          The universality of art corresponds only to a diversity and flux of purposes, not to some pervasive and unique purpose (Wolterstorff 8).

These three concepts attempt to define the essence and purpose of making art. Because of this they also imply aesthetic goals about artwork, which are all valid sometimes: some art is successful--or not--because of its success at mimesis (representation); other art is judged successful based on how fully it expresses what its maker intended. Many of my visual art teachers have valued the property of significant form--a piece succeeds or fails based on its formal qualities alone. Yet it is easy to come up with exceptions to each rule merely by looking at art designed for one of the other rules.

          Recent Christian thinking about art has proceeded in at least three different streams, not necessarily related to any of the classical approaches: "Art as Sacrament," "Art as Creation," and "Art as Stewardship" (Wilkinson 289; Wolterstorff, "Evangelicalism" 451).          The main proponent of the first is David Jones, in his article "Art and Sacrament." Jones' approach has some good points but also considerable problems. His assumption that art is essentially gratuitous and non-functional betrays Romantic influences (Wolterstorff, "Evangelicalism" 455), and raises many difficulties for describing most of the human experience of art, which is often very functional--Wolterstorff's examples of work songs and religious art are especially hard to describe as non-functional. Sign and sacrament are important, of course, and the capability of art to signify is one of its most powerful characteristics, but not all art is signification just as not all signification is art. And the implied aesthetic goal--that the more an artwork signifies something, the better it is--fails to describe a lot of art. Jones is postulating a new definition, "Art is sacrament," but like the classical definitions it does not apply to all art, even though it may be an aesthetic goal for some art.

          Sayers' approach to art is based on reflection on the Trinity, and I found her observations illuminating of the process of making art and even more of the Trinity. Yet, I found it hard to pinpoint what she thought art was. Her model of creation is based on the Trinity: the Idea in the artist's head finds its "express image" in the work (Energy or Activity), and the work moves others with Power, which is another way of saying it successfully expresses what its maker intends. So, while Sayers appears to be saying, "Art is Trinitarian creation," when we look deeper, she is saying with the Romantics that "Art is self-expression" and is vulnerable to the same critique--not all art is made primarily for self-expression, and not all self-expression is art.

          Another dubious element of Sayers' description of the creative process is that the Idea is "beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning" (37). Wolterstorff criticizes this for not taking into account the serendipity inhering the process of making: "To begin a work of art--to begin any significant human endeavor--is to set out on an adventure, a risky adventure, in which one does not know the outcome" ("Evangelicalism" 467). Sayers herself anticipates this, though, in saying that "The writer cannot even be conscious of his Idea except by the working of the Energy which formulates it to himself" (39). Still, the idea that there is an immutable Idea behind each artwork does not fit with my experience--with any project I feel like I could take a different turn at many points and still end up with a good result.

          The emphasis by Jones and Sayers on human creation as an image of divine creation is, for all its insight, theologically dangerous, and this is why the third stream has been in conscious opposition to it. This stream, which Wolterstorff characterizes as "Art as Stewardship," sees art as "not so much a new creation as it is an elevation of unformed Creation into a higher possibility: a kind of gardening of Creation, till it blossoms into what that Creation can most fully be" (Wilkinson 296). This view puts art in its proper place of service to humanity and God in an effort to evade the temptation to idolize artwork or art making. Harold Best describes the correct place of art well:

. . . Just as God's creation or handiwork--in all of its stunning variety--is less than God and in submission to God's purposes, so human creativity, of which music is but one part, is in submission both to God and to its human makers. This approach allows for music both to be celebrated and kept in its place (8).

The image of the artist as steward and gardener is humbler than that of the artist as creator, and it has more potential for providing an adequate definition of art: "Art is good stewardship of Creation." Yet, immediately we find that there are difficulties here too: is all good stewardship art? How are non-material arts like music, dance and poetry stewardship of Creation? Is irresponsible art aesthetically worse than stewardly art?

          Loren Wilkinson sees clearly that there are in fact no fundamental incompatibilities between the three streams, and attempts to describe a synthesis:

          The idea that man is, actually or potentially, a creature called to creativity is a very dangerous one, as the Reformed thinkers have pointed out. It is particularly prone to the Promethean heresy of the Romantics. That heresy grasps something enormously important about the potential stature of man in the image of God. Nevertheless, this understanding of man as "sub-creator" can only be held along with a continual recognition that we are called by God, both in Creation, and in our redemption, to sacrificial, obedient service. We are given enormous powers--powers appropriate to the delegated representatives, in his Creation, of the Creator Lord of the Universe. But every power is to be used for the sake of others: other persons, certainly, but also the mute "other" of primary Creation, which the human arts can so eloquently selve (to use a phrase of Gerard Manley Hopkins). Our human gifts, creative or not, are to be crucified, laid aside, not grasped at (299).

This approach preserves the good insights all three streams have about art making, but it does not further clarify what the nature of art is--it primarily agrees with Wolterstorff that "Art is stewardship." It is important to recognize that all of these possible conceptions of art provide useful insight for the artist and describe some of the goals that different artists bring to their work. The Christian perspectives, especially, help explain the theology of why humans make art and give some moral direction to our making. But none of the approaches succeed in giving us a convincing method for determining whether a made thing is art or not or adequate principles for evaluating good and bad art.

          Wolterstorff, in response to Wilkinson's attempt at synthesis, tries a slightly different angle:

          I suggest that we think of art as fundamentally a mode of stewardship, capable of contributing to our shalom; and that in working out this perspective, we take as our fundamental emphasis the social practices of art. More specifically, I suggest that we think of art as involving the interplay among three sorts of such practices: the social practice of composing works of art, the social practice of performing (or displaying) works of art, and the social practice of using (appropriating) works of art ("Evangelicalism" 468).

Though seeing art in terms of its social practice is safe (it makes no claims about purpose or aesthetics), it is reduced to being just something that people do and it is hard to see how it can be differentiated from any other social practice. By this definition, something is art if it is a product of the social practices of making, displaying and using art. So is anything composed by an artist thereby art? Anything hung in a gallery or performed in a concert hall? Anything used "as art" by any society (advertisers, church people, the avant garde) ? The definition may work well, but it seems circular and cheap. "Art is art."

          Art seems very hard to define. Is there really any such thing? Perhaps the one thing that all these approaches agree on is that art is made by human beings. But non-humans make too--beavers, dams; birds, songs; bees, hives. The sea mammals at the Vancouver Aquarium dance, gratuitously and expressively. I have seen good paintings by cats and elephants. I would hesitate to say any of these things are not art. The problem is just as sticky in the other direction: is everything made by a human art? What about pie? Are a house, car, sound effect, lawn ornament, or chair art? Is bureaucracy art? Is painting art, including sign painting? Is photography art? Square dancing? Choreography for a car factory assembly line?

          There is no discernible line between making art and making anything else. In a way there is no such thing as Art--it is all ordinary making, artifice. Whether we feel something is or is not art has more to do with the way we see it, with our imaginations. Eugene Peterson writes:

          Imagination is the capacity to make connections between the visible and the invisible, between heaven and earth, between present and past, between present and future. For Christians, whose largest investment is in the invisible, the imagination is indispensable, for it is only by means of the imagination that we can see reality whole, in context. . . .
          When I look at a tree, most of what I 'see' I do not see at all. I see a root system beneath the surface, sending tendrils through the soil, sucking up nutrients out of the loam. I see the light pouring energy into the leaves. I see the fruit that will appear in a few months. I stare and stare and see the bare branches austere in next winter's snow and wind. I see all that, I really do--I am not making it up. But I could not photograph it. I see it by means of imagination. If my imagination is stunted or inactive, I will only see what I can use, or something that is in my way (132-133).

          My own experience of learning to draw and paint resonates with this. My seventh grade art teacher told me that learning to draw is really learning to see carefully, to notice the things that the eye normally skips over, and to draw while looking at the object instead of drawing only what my mind remembered. Drawing from life is always revelatory. The painter and calligrapher Fred Peters tells of how the habit of seeing invades the rest of life--one day he noticed the electric wires across the sky in the city and instead of ignoring them because, as usual, he didn't want to see them there, he became captivated by the shapes in between and around them. We see art in things when we recognize something true. The dramatist Ron Reed echoes this feeling of recognition--after a really good drama, you have to remember who you are because you've forgotten for a while. You are awakened from habit and you notice everything new and fresh. A chain-link fence doesn't seem like art, but a photographer can be engrossed in one for hours, and his photos of the shapes around and in the fence, if they are good, can help others see also.

          In representational art we see something true about the object, personality, or emotion that is depicted--not mimesis, self-expression or significant form as ends in themselves, but as means of showing what the artist has seen, heard, felt or experienced. Cezánne, for example, sought to paint the massive volumes of earth and sky he saw in the landscape around him. The Impressionists wanted to show the reflection and dazzle of light playing against forms. A lyric poem tries to convey something the poet has sensed. Non-representational art is the same--it seeks to show us something the maker has perceived: a possibility, a pattern, a tune, a series. A quilt is a declaration of patterns; a fugue a proclamation of melodies and harmonies; a Rothko color field painting a diatribe of colors; a ballet a declaration of movement. The poet Michael O'Siadhail sees a similar gamut of roles in the poet:

I am fond of pointing out that all those various roles of the poet are reflected in the different traditions with their name for the task: Greek poet "the one who makes," Irish file "the one who sees," Icelandic skáld "the one who narrates," Welsh bard "the one who praises." The poet Richard Murphy once told me that in Sri Lanka the word for poet meant "seer of the connections between things" (9-10).

          We see art in things when they help us perceive truth. Sometimes that truth is an idea that can be put into words, but more often than not it is a visual, aural, kinesthetic, emotional, relational or existential truth that can not be described. Art is something that witnesses to a truth.

          Frederick Buechner, in Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale, a book which is really about preaching but turns out to really be about art too, speaks of the preacher's obligation to first let truth be itself, to communicate the brute realness of life, the television news with the sound turned off. He then shows how the literary genres of tragedy, comedy and fairy tale picture the gospel in different ways. In art we see glimmers of truth, and it is the preacher's--and the artist's--job to keep showing us truth.

          The poet W. H. Auden maintains that art is made when someone is inspired by the "awe provoked by sacred beings or events" to make something in order to worship or pay homage to the sacred thing (57). The truth, when we recognize it, provokes awe, and if we make something fitting to the truth we see, it can bear witness to that truth to others.

          Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct--it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening (Auden 60).

          A few Wolterstorffian caveats, though: by saying that art is witness to truth, I do not mean that truth is beauty, for some truth is ugly, and art that fittingly witnesses to it may be ugly too. Nor do I mean that art is a sign of truth, for not all art signifies in the sense of being a symbol or metaphor of something else. Instead, art shows, points to, preaches, witnesses to a truth that may not be discernible apart from the artwork. Heidegger's concept of aletheia, uncovering of truth, is perfect.

          By defining art as something that witnesses to truth, we can escape many of the problems of the other approaches, because we are starting with a description of the result of making rather than with the process of making. The chair, the lawn ornament, and the dance of the beluga are all art insofar as we allow them to witness to truth--in fact all of Creation is deeply art if we have eyes to see it. In defining art as witness, we also find a suitable aesthetic goal for making art and therefore a means of judging it: our intention as artists is to make things that witness to a truth, so bad art witnesses to little or nothing--it does not help us recognize, comprehend or understand truth but bores us with clichés. And we can also better understand the apparent difference between art and craft--the quilt or square dance or restored automobile is not primarily intended to witness to truth, though at moments and in places it may do so quite profoundly. As with good and bad art, or art and non-art, the difference between art and craft is not sharply delineated but spectral, and it has more to do with the perceiver than the maker.

          By seeing art as witness to truth we can have a better basis for talking about what is and is not art, and for judging between successful and unsuccessful art. We can also clarify the relationship between the making of art and the imaginative seeing of it. And by making things that witness to the truth, we can explore and fill our roles as imitator, expressor, former, sign-maker, sub-creator and steward of Creation with integrity.

Works Cited

Auden, W. H.. The Dyer's Hand. New York: Random House 1962.

Best, Harold M.. Music Through the Eyes of Faith. San Francisco: HarperCollins 1993.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. San Francisco: HarperCollins 1954.

Buechner, Frederick. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. San Francisco: HarperCollins 1977.

Caussade, Jean-Pierre de. The Sacrament of the Present Moment. San Francisco: Harper & Row 1982.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Hopkins: Poems and Prose. New York: Knopf 1995.

O'Siadhail, Michael. "Wise in Words: Art and Spirituality." Crux December 1997 pp. 2-15.

Peterson, Eugene. Subversive Spirituality. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing 1997.

Sayers, Dorothy. The Mind of the Maker. San Francisco: HarperCollins 1941.

Wilkinson, Loren. "'Art as Creation' or 'Art as Work'?" Crux March 1983 pp. 23-28.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Art in Action. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1980.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. "Evangelicalism and the Arts." Christian Scholar's Review XVII:4, pp. 449-473.