Weekend essay

Art

Climate

Culture

13 October 2023

9 min read

Life Is more important than art

Recent art exhibitions tackle life’s big questions. Jonathan Evens reviews their themes and the roles creators take.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A photo-realistic work of art depicting a fiigure raised on fire wood wearing a colour of large metal rays, against a desertifying landscape of dead trees.

The Prophecy, Untitled No.9, Fabrice Monteiro.

The Sainsbury Centre.

Life Is More Important Than Art claimed the recent summer exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery. Taking inspiration from African-American writer and novelist James Baldwin, who proposed that life is more important than art which is why art is important, the exhibition explored the intersection of art and everyday life and the role of contemporary art institutions in a time of uncertainty and change. As Whitechapel Gallery Director Gilane Tawadros has explained, Baldwin “meant that we have the bare necessities of life - a roof over our head, food to eat and so on - but life should be more than the bare necessities” and that’s “where art comes in.”

The Whitechapel Gallery has not been alone at this time in exploring the place of art in relation to big issues and contemporary challenges. Recent exhibitions at the Gagosian, Hayward and Tate Galleries have each used specific philosophical theories to explore the legacy of colonialism and posit creative ways forward in the future, while Dear Earth, also at the Hayward Gallery, explored themes of care, hope, and emotional and spiritual connection with our environment.

Their approach understands art as alive and capable of engaging people with the fundamental questions of life.

Norwich’s Sainsbury Centre has perhaps been most systematic and ambitious in pursuing this particular trend in exhibition curation. In September, the Centre launched the first of its new Big Question seasons exploring the theme of Planet for our Future: How do we adapt to a Transforming World? The Centre is setting the exploration of big issues at the very heart of their exhibition programming, seeking to empower art to address fundamental societal challenges. Their approach understands art as alive and capable of engaging people with the fundamental questions of life and will see artworks from all over the world travelling to the Centre to pose urgent, global questions to visitors and help them find the answers. Future seasons will ask: What is truth? (Spring 2024); Why do people take drugs? (Autumn 2024); How do we resuscitate a dying sea? (Spring 2025); Can humans stop killing each other? (Autumn 2025); and What is the meaning of life? (Spring 2026).

Planet for our Future has an interconnected programme of exhibitions, interventions, collection displays, an artist residency, museum-late, artist-led workshops, and special projects, taking place across the whole art landscape and out into neighbouring communities. It aims to empower art to generate a living dialogue with visitors, inviting them to consider the global challenges of pollution, environmental destruction, and climate change. The wider aim is to mobilise the Sainsbury Centre as a space of hope through the transformative power of art: a space where we can imagine better futures in which collective human behaviour mitigates the effects of climate change.

Given the extent to which the exhibitions mentioned above include themes of spirituality, it would seem that Greenberg and his ilk were on the wrong side of history in this respect too.

These approaches represent a remarkable success for the arguments that artist and academic Suzi Gablik made in the 1980’s and 1990’s in books such as Has Modernism Failed? and The Reenchantment of Art. Gablik contrasted ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ with ‘Art for Society’s Sake’ whilst arguing for the latter, a prescient choice given the current approaches of curators. At the time, Gablik was challenging the received wisdom of art critics such as Clement Greenberg who “rejected the notion that there is any higher purpose to art, or any ‘spiritual’ point to its production.” Given the extent to which the exhibitions mentioned above include themes of spirituality, it would seem that Greenberg and his ilk were on the wrong side of history in this respect too.

I recently took part in The Art of Creation, a conference held at King's College London and organised through the National Gallery’s Interfaith Sacred Art Forum, which brought together speakers from a wide range of disciplines to explore the intersection of art, theology, and ecology. The conference was part of a year-long series of reflections on three paintings from the National Gallery’s Collection – Claude Monet’s Flood Waters, Vincent Van Gogh’s Long Grass with Butterflies, and Rachel Ruysch’s Flowers in a Vase - which raise ecological concerns. The papers exploring aspects of these paintings drew on an eclectic, yet fascinating, range of sources including: Maori beliefs; the Jewish and Christian scriptures; South African poetry; the Nouvelle Theologie; the theology of resonance; the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Marilynne Robinson; and a range of related artworks including the work of Barnett Newman and Regan O’Callaghan. The conference initiated a dialogue regarding ways in which art and faith together can help us make reparative connections in a fragile world and its approaches suggest ways of engaging with the big issues that artists and curators are exploring.

This relationship with creation mirrors that of artists (in the broadest sense), who are both sub-creators and co-creators.

In my paper, which brought verses from Chapter 38 of the Book of Job into dialogue with the three paintings, I argued that God is calling humanity into a relationship with creation in which we respond with humility, awe and wonder to its abundance and diversity, which always exceeds our grasp however much knowledge of it we gain. I suggested, too, that this relationship with creation mirrors that of artists (in the broadest sense), who are both sub-creators and co-creators. As sub-creators, artists recognise that we cannot create from nothing (‘ex nihilo’) and are, therefore, always in a humble, interdependent state where we are as aware of boundaries, edges and frames as we are of openings, doorways and possibilities. As co-creators, we are called to work with the grain or tend the essence of creation and its creatures, as in the approach of sculptors who seek to be true to the materials they use or in the ideas Gerard Manley Hopkins developed regarding inscape and instress.

This section of the poem concerning Job begins by initiating a dialogue as God challenges Job to stand up and answer the questions he poses about the created order; questions such as, do you know the measurements of the earth or the sources for oceans, light, snow and rain? At the time of writing Job, and the writer of this poem, could not answer those questions, so are left simply in a state of awe and wonder. We, however, are, often, able to answer such questions and are, as a result, able to discuss the meaning of such knowledge while also retaining an awareness of the vast dimensions of the abundance and diversity of creation within which our expanded and expanding knowledge remains infinitesimal compared with the whole. Interestingly, the novelist Marilynne Robinson suggests in an essay on ‘Psalm 8’ that,

“A question is more spacious than a statement, [being] far better suited to expressing wonder”.

Artists have regularly worked with just such a balance through an awareness of being sub-creators and co-creators with God. Artists, including those considered by The Art of Creation conference, have often had a different relationship with the divine and with creation. Whether figurative artists working from nature, as are the three principal artists considered by The Art of Creation conference, or symbolic artists creating secondary worlds, artists are often aware of themselves as co-creators or, in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, sub-creators. We are sub-creators or co-creators when we recognise that we create from creation, not ex nihilo, which involves humility in order that we tend, rather than dominate, creation.

Claude Monet’s Flood Waters, Vincent Van Gogh’s Long Grass with Butterflies, and Rachel Ruysch’s Flowers in a Vase.

A Monet painting of a flood with bare trees emerging from the grey water.

Claude Monet, Flood Waters.

A Van Gogh painting of grass tufts of green, yellow, lavender, grey and other colours.

Vincent Van Gogh: Long Grass with Butterflies.

A 17th century style painting of flowers in a vase against a dark background

Rachel Ruysch, Flowers in a Vase.

Van Gogh paints an expanse of grass extending beyond his canvas in Long Grass with Butterflies, while Rachel Ruysch’s Flowers in a Vase brings flowers that bloom at different times of year together in one image. Awareness of edges, frames, borders, boundaries and other constraints in regard to their canvasses are used by these artists as an element in contrasting the limits of human understanding and the fecundity of nature. Even when artificially exceeding these boundaries, as Ruysch does, this can be in order to highlight our inability to do so in our primary world.

Co-creation is a concept which takes us further in that it involves human creation which is in line with the essence of God’s creation. Another creation story, that of Adam naming the animals, this time from the Book of Genesis, is key to understanding this aspect of creativity. Names in ancient times described the essence of the creature or object so named. That is what is described in this story. In our naming of the animals together with God, we look for the essence of each creature and then name that essence. This suggests a path to exploring possibilities within creation in partnership with God by creating the new in harmony with the essence of the actual.

This process of paying attention to come to know the essence of a thing by imaginatively exploring its various possibilities in order to realise its distinctive essence is what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called instress. He also called the essence that we identify the inscape. Ultimately, he suggests, “the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it.” He wrote more about this understanding in the poem ‘Kingfishers catch fire’:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

In an essay entitled ‘Wonders Never Cease: Integrity & the Modern Intellectual Condition’, Marilynne Robinson suggests that a theistic vision of the world, like that of Hopkins, “is freer to see the world whole, as it is in itself, so to speak” and she quotes Hopkins who says, “The world is full of the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil”. She continues: “Within this great given, that Being is an astonishment, any aspect of being can be approached with an expectation of discovering wondrous things. The slime that comes up from the depths of the sea in fishermen’s nets is a ruined universe of bioluminescence. Microorganisms live in clouds, air moves in rivers, butterflies navigate the earth’s magnetic field. The matter cosmologists call “dark,” which makes up most of the mass of the universe, seems to be non-atomic. Wonders never cease.” As a result, in her essay on ‘Psalm 8’ she gives this credo,

“I have spent my life watching not to see beyond the world, [but] merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes … [as] With all due respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”

The approach that Robinson and Hopkins advocate as artists is one that could assist us more generally in relation to the climate emergency, while the sense of wonder found in their work is replicated in the images of Monet, Van Gogh and Ruysch and is, I suggest, what God looks for from us in the questions that are posed in the Book of Job. By responding to a wide range of ideas and sources, The Art of Creation conference demonstrated a similar balance to awe and knowledge, recognising that this attitude and approach opens up reflection on the abundance of the world and cultures that God created and also holds out the possibility that new inspirations will be sparked from the interplay of ideas that ensues. These ways of relating art, creation and faith suggest one approach to engaging with the big issues that artists and curators are exploring and which faith communities, including the Church, have explored throughout the history of humanity.

Article

Art

Culture

Film & TV

21 January 2025

5 min read

The constant pull of David Lynch’s direction

What made the director’s films so universally resonant?

Sonny Tindall

Sonny works creatively with videography, graphic design, fashion, and photography.

Lynch painting.

At the age of 16, initially wanting to experience the infamous performances of actors, John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins, I decided to watch The Elephant Man (1980). This was the film that opened up the weird and wonderful world of director, David Lynch, a world I immediately wanted to dive headfirst into.

I did so by watching the film that became the catalyst for world-renowned director and producer, Mel Brooks, offering Lynch the chance to direct The Elephant Man. The film in question? His very first, Eraserhead (1977).

It was, and remains to this day, the most singular cinematic experience of my life.

I’m of the opinion that almost all filmmakers fall in to one of two categories; those who become artists through the medium of filmmaking, and those who are already artists who choose the vehicle of filmmaking to create their art. David Lynch is, for me at least, the ultimate embodiment of the latter. Proof of such can be found in his status as a renaissance man.

Originally a painter, a practice he continued throughout his life, his desire to transition to making films was borne out of wanting to see his paintings move. He was also an actor, a musician, and sound designer. Not to mention, a furniture designer who regularly built props for his films, author of several books and designer of his very own comic book.

The television show, Twin Peaks, is perhaps the best example of just how impossible it was to bind Lynch to a single artistic form. The seminal TV show revolutionised what television could be, as it was the first show to stray from the episodic storytelling format, instead choosing to follow one continual storyline through an entire series.

David Lynch exists within an exclusive category of artists, those whose names have become an adjective. Lynchian, similar to Kafkaesque, Brechtian or Daliesque, is recognised as an official word in the Oxford dictionary. An eponymous adjective is an honour reserved for only the most unique and distinct of artists.

Although it could be argued that the term – Lynchian - is now too loosely applied to anything deemed to be somewhat counter-cultural within mainstream cinema, its true meaning relates to the often indefinable style and voice of the man himself.

He invoked the spiritual depths of us, the existential longings and cravings, the questions that seem intrinsic to the human condition, the wonderings that feel as though they originate from somewhere deep within us, our souls, perhaps.

I’ve come to think that it’s the ultimately the spiritual essence of Lynch’s films that make them truly unique, and him a worthy recipient of an eponymous adjective. Lynch’s films exist within their own world, frequently reminiscent of a dream.

Sometimes euphoric, often a nightmare.

He was an avid practitioner and advocate of transcendental meditation, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that when speaking on his creative process, Lynch attributed many of his creative ideas as emerging from his own subconscious through the practices of meditation and daydreaming. He’s often compared ideas to the act of fishing, they aren’t created, they already exist, you’ve just got to have the right bait to catch them.

I wonder if this process is what makes the worlds housed within Lynch’s films unlike any others. He invites us into his own subconscious, by allowing it to bleed out onto the screen.

Despite his allusivity in style and format, what I’ve always found most confounding about David Lynch’s work is its universality.

I feel as though the term ‘fringe artist’ has scarcely been better applied to anyone other than Lynch.

How has a man who’s created some of the boldest, most avant-garde and, at times, downright disturbing art of the last century picked up four Oscar nominations (and an honorary win), a Masterclass and a Disney movie (The Straight Story)?

Surely translating your own subconscious, something we view as idiomatic to each individual person, onto the screen is a guaranteed recipe for alienating your audience?

So why does Lynch’s work, instead of pushing us away, so consistently pull us in?

I could pontificate on the different potential techniques Lynch employed to keep his work just grounded enough to allow us to relate to it. His films being rooted in instantly recognisable symbols of Americana, for example. Or perhaps his deployment of easily digestible genres and conventions, Twin Peaks is a melodramatic murder mystery TV show, Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001) are, at their core, noir films and even Wild at Heart (1990) is a textbook road movie.

But Lynch’s work has taught me to dig far deeper than that.

He invoked spiritual depths of us, the existential longings and cravings, the questions that seem intrinsic to the human condition, the wonderings that feel as though they originate from somewhere deep within us, our souls, perhaps.

That, for me at least, is the answer to his universality.

But how did he do it?

As has already been mentioned, it’s by mining his own subconscious and the spiritual within himself, and allowing it to flow into the worlds he created. But, most importantly, he never definitively characterised these things, he simply let them exist, depicted them. His work doesn’t come to us with the answers, it comes to us with questions. David Lynch’s questions: questions about the world. Questions about himself.

The very same questions we all ask ourselves on a daily basis: is evil within us or is it the product of what is around us? How can we allow light to prevail over darkness?

His work allows us to sit, ruminate, and respond to those questions.

I didn’t anticipate how profound of an effect David Lynch’s passing would have on me. It’s undoubtedly the strongest feeling of loss and grief I’ve felt from the passing of someone in the public sphere.

So deep were my feelings that I felt I needed to process it through the writing of this piece.

And despite the myriad of feelings and thoughts that have been swirling around my head since originally reading the news headline, I find myself continually returning to the very first thought I had. It was a quote from American comedian, Theo Von. When mourning the death of fellow comedian, Norm Macdonald, Theo said,

‘It feels like you’re losing a book that nobody has copies of.’

I feel despair that I’ll never be able to see the world through David Lynch’s eyes again. But I find great comfort that he, through his art, has passed his vision onto us, ensuring that we’ll always be able to see the Lynchian in our world.