Friends,
Some of my favorite classes in seminary were the ones where we did deep dives on art and culture. In one class, we spent weeks analyzing Marvin' Gaye’s What’s Going On. In another, we spent the whole semester wandering through Dante’s Inferno. In one mind-bending class, we watched biopics on Van Gogh and other artists to try to understand society’s changing views on art and the people who made it. They were great classes—we went deep, did close readings of art in the same way you might handle scripture.
Still, over time I started to realize a growing distance between art and artist and interpreter. As sincere as we were, the artist themselves were often missing from the conversation. We discussed ideas from books, which were written by authors discussing ideas from books, and we wrote our own ideas in response. Ideas about ideas about ideas.
Sure, we engaged artifacts, but over time I got more interested in the people making the thing. In one class, I took this on as a literal project. After being deeply affected by seeing Margaret Edson’s Wit—a play where a cancer diagnosis forces an English professor to reckon with the limits of her intellectual life—I decided to write a final paper not by reading more books but by interviewing the actors and playwright herself. I wanted to get closer to the source, to find a way of engaging art that took the humans who made it seriously.
After graduating I kept going: I introduced myself to museum curators, met artists in their studio spaces, even worked at a gallery for a time. Along the way, I stopped trying to fit cultural artifacts into a theological grid and instead just listened. I asked questions. I followed art back to the artists and found so many insights waiting for me there. Things I never would’ve discovered by only reading in the library stacks. One artist I befriended—atheist, Jewish, obsessively curious—told me about one who inspired him: the Los Angeles artist Charles Ray, a sculptor who occasionally explored spirituality in his museum talks. In one lecture, Ray explored the relationship between sculpture and pneuma—the Greek word for spirit, breath.
When this artist says pneuma, he's bringing attention not to the physical sculptural object but the space around it. He especially uses the word to talk about “Hinoki,” his massive sculpture of a fallen tree made out of cypress wood. In one interview, he said that after discovering the tree, he decided to make “a great pneumatic sculpture,” an artwork that somehow contains a spiritual trace of what it depicts. Here he is describing his process at the Art Institute of Chicago:
Ten years ago, while driving up the central coast of California, I spotted a fallen tree in a meadow just off the highway. I was instantly drawn to it. It was not only a beautiful log, but to my eyes, it was perfectly embedded in the meadow where it had fallen decades earlier. Pressure from the weather, insects, ultraviolet radiation, and gravity were evident. Total collapse appeared to be no more than a handful of years away. I was inspired to make a sculpture and studied many other logs, but I realized that I was only interested in this particular one.
At one point, I determined that its armature could be its pneuma, the Greek word for breath, wind, or life. Later, I considered making an inflatable sculpture but realized that the tailoring of the form would bring an unwanted complexity to the surface. It then struck me that the breath or life of the sculpture could be manifested in the very act of sculpting. Making a wood carving of the log by starting from the inside and working my way out would bring a trajectory of life and intentionality to this great fallen tree. With several friends, I transported the tree, cut apart by a chainsaw, back to my Los Angeles studio. Silicone molds were taken and a fiberglass version of the log was reconstructed.
This was sent to Osaka, Japan, where master woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his apprentices carved my vision into reality using Japanese cypress (hinoki). I was drawn to the woodworkers because of their tradition of copying work that is beyond restoration. In Japan, when an old temple or Buddha can no longer be maintained, it is remade. I visited Japan often and had a difficult time bringing this work to completion and allowing it to go out into the world. When I asked Mr. Mukoyoshi about the wood and how it would behave over time, he told me that the wood would be fine for 400 years and then it would go into a crisis; after two hundred years of splitting and cracking, it would go into slow decline for another 400 years. I realized then that the wood, like the original log, had a life of its own, and I was finally able to let my project go and hopefully breathe life into the world that surrounds it.
Isn't that lovely? Sculpting a fallen tree resonates with larger issues of what art can be, the history of Buddhist temples, impermanence and ecology, spirituality…It’s all there in this creative process. This isn’t just a cool sculpture in a museum; the artist has creative and spiritual questions as he makes the work. It's like he's searching for a way to talk about spiritual concerns through his artmaking. He’s not far away from mystics and saints who’ve explored the same thing over the centuries.
I guess I share this example of Charles Ray’s sculpture because on the surface, the artwork might not seem that interested in spirituality. It just a decaying log, right? But then, the more we learn about the artist’s own life and obsessions, we inevitably get back to those deep fundamental questions art and religion have been asking from the first handprints in cave walls: Who are we? Where do we go when we die? Does life matter? What can art help us do? What resources do we have to reckon with pain and change and death and suffering?
If you saw Ray’s sculpture in a museum, you might first feel intimidated or even bored (“I don’t get it….am I supposed to get it?…I feel like I should get it, therefore I’m outside of an imagined club of people who do get it…”). But the point of a good painting or song or sculpture is to wrestle with its meaning. And for me, that interpretive struggle sends me right back to the people who made the thing.
So when an LA artist talks about spirituality and sculpture I recognize the same kinds of conversations I had with friends in seminary. He probably hasn’t heard of the whole field of study called pneumatology, and I don’t know how often theologians think much about sculpture. And yet: we humans live in the same world, no matter how far apart the traditions that shape us might seem. So call it “pneuma” or “spirit,” it doesn’t matter. But know this: every single day we’re breathing (in, out, in, out, in, out) in the same world. And it doesn’t just surround this sculpture—it surrounds us, too.
Take care,
Michael
“In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being” by Denise Levertov Birds afloat in air’s current, sacred breath? No, not breath of God, it seems, but God the air enveloping the whole globe of being. It’s we who breathe, in, out, in, the sacred, leaves astir, our wings rising, ruffled—but only saints take flight. We cower in cliff-crevice or edge out gingerly on branches close to the nest. The wind marks the passage of holy ones riding that ocean of air. Slowly their wake reaches us, rocks us. But storm or still, numb or poised in attention, we inhale, exhale, inhale, encompassed, encompassed. * * * * * * "What It Looks Like to Us and the Words We Use" by Ada Limón All these great barns out here in the outskirts, black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass. They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use. You say they look like arks after the sea’s dried up, I say they look like pirate ships, and I think of that walk in the valley where J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said, No. I believe in this connection we all have to nature, to each other, to the universe. And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there, low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss, and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets, woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so. So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky, its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name though we knew they were really just clouds— disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.
This 12th century wooden Buddha sculpture wears centuries of change
Spiritual poetry: poems on enlightenment selected by Jane Hirshfield
The New York Choral Society performs new renditions of Shaker songs