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Listening to the Voices of Today
A series of presentations, Lent 2006
Art - Norman Parker
Return to Lent talks index page.
Many people know Norman Parker's distinctive art, meticulously drawn or painted, inspired by the Surrealists and delighting in visual humour and optical tricks. His recent exhibition at the Rural Life Museum introduced his art to more people, and Street Bookshop tells me that reproductions of the Tor series sell well as greetings cards.
Many of us know Norman also as a thoughtful, modest and witty conversationalist, as well as a strong Christian believer, so we had high expectations of his illustrated talk on visual art and the Christian response to it. He gave us a wonderful evening.
After telling of his first seeing, as a schoolboy, coloured reproductions of Salvador Dali and other Surrealists, and of the great effect they had on him, he made a distinction between those artists' great skill and imagination on the one hand, and the nastiness of the Surrealist movement, anti-God, anti most good things. The movement, Norman said, has blown itself out, the philosophy is largely forgotten, and only the clever art works survive.
Norman went on to pose, and discuss, three questions: Is a painting a thing, or a view? What does 'good' art mean? How has art changed in the last 50 years?
By asking whether a painting is a thing or a view, he meant that some paintings act like windows onto a scene, drawing our attention to the people or scene depicted, while others, including all abstract paintings, present themselves as objects to be contemplated for themselves. Much art is between the two. A Winston Churchill painting of a house in snow was both a recognisable scene and an object insofar as the brush strokes were large and bold, and tended to draw attention to themselves as well as contributing to the scene.
The question of 'good' art was complicated. One could have a good painting of a good subject - Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring was an example; or a bad painting of a good subject - Lucien Freud's portrait of the Queen could be considered an example; a good painting of an ugly subject - Ghirlandaio's portrait of a child with its grandfather turned the old man's ugly face into a beautiful thing by the artist's sensitivity; paintings of the Crucifixion came under this heading, like Gruenewald's altarpiece showing the tortured body of Christ. Norman contrasted with this Dali's famous Crucifixion of St John of the Cross in Glasgow. The skill shown is stunning and the painting in its gallery has a powerful presence, even though the theology implied is suspect at the least.
In an interesting aside, Norman shared his discovery that what the artist puts into a picture is often not the same as what the viewer takes from it. He cited a painting which he had done to disprove a statement that a particular optical illusion could work only in black and white. His answer was to paint a version of Stonehenge, in which the upright stones were in groups of two at the top, but in threes at the bottom. He chose Stonehenge as a good visual form with which to illustrate the illusion. He was surprised to hear that people at a Christian event had criticised the painting as anti-christian because of the associations of Stonehenge with the druids. Another example was the painting of a armadillo and chicken wire, where the wire mesh patterns merged into the patterning of the armadillo's scales. A Christian writer used the image in a book to raise the question whether some of the things that imprison us in fact come from within ourselves.
Art has changed greatly in the past 50 years, particularly with the coming of conceptual art. 20 years ago a survey of public and critics to discover the best picture ever painted revealed that the public favoured Boticelli's Birth of Venus, while the critics chose Velasquez's The Servant Girls. A poll last year asked what the most significant art work of the 20th century was, and the answer was the urinal submitted by Marcel Duchamp as an art work. Now conceptual art has taken over. Famous examples are the Tate bricks, and Tracey Emin's unmade bed. Norman advised that when we feel annoyed or frustrated by this, we remind ourselves of Tom Uttley's statement in the Daily Telegraph:
Conceptual art is interesting for four minutes.
Turning to Christian perspectives on art, Norman suggested negatives first, grouped under the traditional three evils, the world, the flesh and the devil.
The world is represented by money and the treatment of art works as a commodity for investment. In the week when Street Mission Church sent £1,000 to Send a Cow, a minor and not very good work by Gaugin went at auction for £14 million, a dollar sign drawn by Andy Warhol fetched £2.6 million. Money spent in a year at the auction houses is £2 billion. Many of the works bought would spend years hidden in bank vaults.
Under the heading of the flesh, Norman discussed the modern obsession with self-expression and novelty. Gaugin rejected any moral purpose in art, or anything beyond the artist being himself. The Christian writer Francis Shaeffer commented:
Much of contemporary art, as a self-expression of what man is, is ugly. He does not know it, but he is expressing the nature of fallen man.
Turning to the devil, Norman quoted Oscar Wilde to the effect that there was no such thing as moral or an immoral book, only one which was well or badly written. George Orwell criticised those who were afraid to comment on Dali's obscenity, because they seemed to accept that an artist was exempt from moral laws. Francis Bacon's paintings are much admired by critics, but are nihilistic; the artist is against - and what he is against is irrelevent. It is enough to be negative. The Royal Academy exhibition "Sensation" included a great many obscene and evil works, but the only one which was criticised was the portrait of Myra Hindley made with children's handprints. Norman told us that just because an artist is desperate, it does not follow that we have to go along with him. He quoted Philippians 4.8:
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.
Artists and critics imply:
Whatever is false, whatever is mean, whatever is wrong, whatever is dirty, whatever is ugly, whatever is contemptible, portray these things.
But the world is full of beauty, although it contains evil and ugliness.
Norman closed the survey of negatives with two quotations. The first, from C.S. Lewis:
The great serious irreligious art - art for art's sake - is all balderdash.
The second is from George Orwell, saying that Dali is
a genius from the elbows downwards.
In other words, admire his skill and reject his philosophy.
Turning to the positives, Norman pointed out that the Bible gives its full approval to art and creativity. Genesis 1.1 tells us that God is a Creator. Genesis 1.26 tells us that God made man in his own image, i.e. as a creator. The Holy Spirit inspired Bezalel in craftsmanship.
On 'Christian art' Norman said that pre-renaissance art was almost all on Christian subjects. He showed slides of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, of Blake's Ancient of Days, of Icons, of Graham Sutherland's tapestry in Coventry Cathedral and of the baptistry window there ('The most perfect piece of abstract art I have ever seen').
It is debatable whether there is such a thing as specifically Christian art.
In our churches there is much music, some drama, little art. The Christian artists' group Veritas are some people producing fine Christian art. Malcolm Ferguson in North Petherton is making Stations of the Cross for his local church. Our own Rector's wife Phyll has made beautiful banners for the Parish Church.
Real art has not disappeared, but it has left the metropolis and gone local.
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Thursday 28th of August 2008
