The recent series of BBC television programs titled ‘The Planets’, revealed a rich harvest of human knowledge on nearby planets, especially since space exploration craft have visited some of these over the last thirty years. Evidence of the existence of hospitable environments and life within our own solar system has been far more difficult to find than was first thought. What was shown in these programs is that life is far richer and more virulent than was first thought and that interplanetary space ships carrying ‘lifeforms’ are far more likely to have be meteorites blasted free from planets carrying bacteria and simple celled creatures able to survive within extremely hostile environments.
The conclusion that I was left with after seeing these programs and being shown the difficult environments on other planets, is that our planet’s benign environment and rich explosion of life, including our own intelligent life, is a rare and beautiful gift of immense proportions. Our search for other intelligent life forms is, I suspect, on one level, a sad attempt to deflect the enormity of the planetary responsibility we have inherited from our ancestors by finding other fellow travellers in the universe to show that our planet is not rare, but commonplace. Perhaps this search for other life-forms may somehow ease our sense of ultimate responsibility for the precious gift of this ‘garden floating in space’ that we have been given.
Our history is filled with evidence of our constant craving for ‘the beyond’, for something out there to help us deal with the enormity of our human predicament. But while we can plot the movement of the ‘heavens’ at the same time we seem powerless to stop the petty bickering of neighbour against neighbour, country against country, race against race. As our western culture has embraced the sciences and the ‘cerebral’ and loosened its grip on the spiritual, the need for physical evidence of ‘space visitors’ seems to have intensified. Paradoxically our expanding knowledge of our universe, supplied by the sciences, has made this possibility look more and more remote as the distances involved in deep space exploration are measured and understood. For me I would prefer to think that this constant craving for the ‘beyond’, in all its guises, is clear evidence both of our spiritual nature and of our neglect of it at present.
OUR SPIRITUAL NATURE
Like the Holy Trinity of our Christian faith, the human being is a collection of three separate but connected parts which can be loosely described as mind, body and spirit. As a single individual it is difficult enough to attempt to hold these elements of our humanity in balance, as a nation or a culture, how much harder again. But yet on many occasions humanity has found this point of balance and, I believe, expressed this in the great cultures and civilizations which have highlighting our habitation of this planet. For me the hallmark of these civilizations has been their capacity to balance off the necessities and mundane realities of our human existence, with a sense of the beyond. The dominant culture of any society a bridge between our human existence and the ideals of a world of the ‘Gods’. It would appear that our humanity may be like the string on a kite, stretched tight as it connects the earth with the heavens; our feet planted in the mud, our heads looking skywards our gaze fixed on the stars.
As much as our studio (O•R•C•H•A•R•D studio run by Anthony Russo and Mark Weichard) has a strong interest in our cultural history, our main interest lies in our cultural future. At present I do not think that our western culture is holding the essential human elements of mind, body and spirit in balance and because of this, our cultural future is not assured. If the Roman, Egyptian and South American Inca civilizations can disappear, then the future of the ‘McDonalds’ corporation (and our own) is not necessarily ‘set in concrete’. I would like to take a moment to discuss this issue.
OUR HUMANITY EXPRESSED THROUGH THE SENSUAL AND THE SPIRITUAL
Tribal societies, (which current inhabitants of Australia have the privilege of witnessing and experiencing both within our own shores and within many of the Pacific rim countries) rested on a clear understanding of their relationship with the earth and the dominant position this held within both their lives and their culture. Aboriginal ‘dreamtime’ mythology is majestic in it’s portrayal of the many sacred relationships which connected tribal and totemic clans to the earth and the heavens, becoming part of a larger meaning system which gave their lives form, purpose and direction.
A subtle but overwhelming change has, I believe, overtaken our way of dealing with the world in recent centuries. The industrial revolution and the ‘age of reason’ which birthed this series of developments, has brought about profound changes in our approach to both ourselves and the world we live in.
With nature at the helm of our destinies we were always the respectful passenger, but through industrialization and mechanization of primary industry and manufacturing in the twentieth century, we have had the capacity to produce consistent surpluses of stable goods and foods and in doing so, we appeared to have wrestled control of the steering wheel from the powers of nature which had always seemed greater than ourselves. With the balance tilted towards the mind, the spiritual (our connection to the profound, to powers larger than ourselves) and the sensual (our connection to our physical being and the earth) have lost out in this race. My reason for giving my impressions of Aboriginal culture is that for me Tribal Society has a poise, balance and eloquence in its relationship with it’s environment which our present culture seems to have lost touch with. You can see the results of this in their use of the creative process and the visual mediums tribal societies employ to talk about and explore their worlds, both real and imagined. I am suggesting then that, from my perspective, the further we have drifted away from the natural world and a culture which knows it and respects it, the further we have removed ourselves from the sensual and the spiritual which are essential ingredients in the creative process - the sensual as the basis of a visual language and the spiritual as our way of dealing with a vision of the things beyond ourselves.
THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST
In recent times, the artist as supreme individualist, has become a contemporary cultural ‘icon’ for a culture fascinated by what separates us and makes us unique individuals within an ocean of humanity, rather than what connects us. The artists’ isolation from the mundane and everyday aspects of life has been seen as a conduit to a higher order of human life, very much like the life of religious contemplatives from ages past. But in our age of the mind, we have distorted that idea by suggesting that perhaps absolute isolation from life will somehow deliver absolute strength and clarity, unfortunately I fear the opposite may be the case.
As exploration of the human condition during the twentieth century through psychology has shown, cut loose from it’s moorings, the human mind has a tendency to wander aimlessly and ineffectively, it is a prisoner of the bodies sensual and corporal needs, especially it’s need for community, companionship and co-dependence. No individual, it would appear, can be an island for any sustained period of time; we are culturally, gender, family and experience specific, paradoxically needing all these things to plot the course of our own individuality and uniqueness. Despite propaganda within the arts, we exist within and, most importantly, cannot exist without human society; but yet despite our recently won individual freedoms and a contemporary culture predicated on this fact, our own individuality and particularity is still and always will be informed by and reflected back by the generalities of our society and our culture.
The art and design studio that Anthony Russo and I run and which has created the art work outside on the wall of the new A.C.U Campus in Melbourne, was founded on the simple premise that art is not created in isolation. Our attempts within contemporary culture to remove the art process from the public arena and cloister it within the public and private gallery systems, has, we believe, weakened it not strengthened it. In fact, our individual art, to be art at all, must among other things, run the gauntlet of the general, of the ‘public’ because it is in sharing it that it is made art, it is in placing it before others and co-opting them into the creative process that the art making process is completed and consummated. Nothing in life is a closed system, in our experience art in isolation is not art at all, but simply individual human expression, therefore art to be art at all must live equally within our own individuality and our community and must, in the end, balance on the knife-edge of expressing both fully.
In the past much of the best church art was associated with and sponsored by the Catholic Church. In recent centuries this has not been the case. Prominent artists have completed church commissions, but these have appeared as isolated events rather than a consistent body of work. Two camps of opinion seem to have developed within the church to deal with this situation, neither of which Anthony and I agree with. The first is the camp of ‘traditionalists’ who ‘pine’ for the glories of the past and think that the connection to great art from the past lies in repeating it. But unfortunately this process is like doing editions of an image on a photocopier; each subsequent edition distorts the last, taking you further and further away from the original, until what you have and what you started with are incompatible. In just simply repeating art from the past, I believe, you eventually loose touch with the process and the shared vision which created the original. Much of what has filled the void of church art in the past century (despite brilliant individual efforts by some) has lost touch with great church art from previous ages and, most sadly, what inspired it in the first place.
The second camp is the camp of the ‘contemporaries’, unlike the traditionalists who think that by pretending that the contemporary world doesn’t exist, it will eventually, like a petulant child, go away; the contemporaries are sensitive to today’s culture and smart enough to understand it’s subtleties and nuances. They feel that it is possible to enlist ‘cutting edge’ developments in contemporary ‘avant-garde’ culture to carry the church’s message to an indifferent modern audience. (However I fear they have underestimated the difficult task involved in convincing an audience armed with remote controls, large screen televisions and ‘Cable T.V.’ that they do not have the ‘world on a string’).
This approach has spawned many events, including showing contemporary exhibition art within a Cathedral, (this has happened on several occasions both in Europe and here in Melbourne). Unfortunately they have overlooked the unfortunate fact that artists brought up within the contemporary art culture have no need of either ‘God’ or Church. They have both already within themselves and within the cloistered art world. Their understanding of life has been trained to have no regard for the shared vision and communal outpouring of generosity and connectedness which funded and built the great Cathedrals and worship spaces of the world. In fact the works I have seen displayed showed a callous disregard for the ‘sacred’ space they had the privilege of being a guest in. They were not quite holding a gun at the head of religion, but their indifference to their surroundings was for me palpable (a bit like people who scrawl their initials on a cave wall filled with aboriginal paintings.)
The second strain of the contemporaries understands today’s society, but is so overwhelmed by it’s scale and power it feels compelled to remain silent about the things that they believe matter most. For me this is like the people with the large screen television, they are dazzled by the mirage of the present, not realizing that they have an equal voice in all community debates. No longer being the overriding cultural influence that the church once was, does not signal your irrelevance, just the need to act decisively, consistently and thoughtfully in community debates. I suspect you need a ‘scalpel’ rather than a ‘mallet’ and I believe you have commissioned one for the outside of your building.
Both Anthony and I, faced with this landscape of options, have chosen to take a different path and the attitude we have adopted within the studio was captured beautifully within the Gospel reading from the dedication mass for the University in July this year:
“ A city built on a hilltop cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp to put it under a tub; they put it on the lamp-stand where it shines for everyone in the house. In the same way your light must shine in the sight of others, so that, seeing your good works, they may give praise to your Father in Heaven.” (Matthew - 5:13 -16)
In practice this shared ideal has manifested itself over the last fifteen years in a body of work from the studio which, the commissioned art work outside, although a pinnacle, represents only a portion. Although the artistic spotlight in our culture has, in recent times, been squarely on exhibition art in general and painting in particular, both Anthony and I were to learn early on whilst exhibiting within galleries, that sculpture did not do well within the gallery walls. We, like many sculptors, in order to succeed had to become masters of our own destiny.
The studio has now expanded it’s professional life to include large scale public art projects, acting as 3-D urban design consultants (this has included work for the Docklands Authority) and Liturgical art and design which now includes taking on the upgrading of whole church interiors; standard fare for 3-D artists since the times of the Italian Renaissance. We have in this time consciously pursued liturgical art, especially within schools, who have become for the studio the most fertile of grounds. The young people are a fascinating target audience who are open and alive to the use of complex visual language as a means of communication. It has been interesting to see the growing levels of concern within schools over the need for liturgical art which is both contemporary and Australian. The staff know that for many students this may be their only formal experience of church and maybe the last chance to win their hearts and minds before they are cast adrift in the world.
Both Anthony and I see the artwork you have commissioned as not only fitting within the studio’s body of work, but also within the tradition of western church art. We have never shared the opinion of our friends, who work professionally as artists or designers, who worry that by undertaking liturgical art work we have ‘trashed’ our secular art careers. Neither Anthony nor I have any problems with undertaking quality artwork wherever that may be. Others may feel the need to be disconnected from the past, only living within the ‘sliver’ of reality that surrounds them now, we however, prefer to have a more open mind about these things and believe that our artistic challenge is to pursue that most precious of commodities, the next elusive grain of truth which will fuel the turbine at the centre of the creative process. The challenge for the church is to continue to find ways to co-opt this passion into their world.
Mark Weichard August 2000