Charlotte Ostermann -- "The Glory of Form"
The Glory of Form, by Charlotte Ostermann for the Contemporary Religious Artists Association,
October 8, 2013
The artist has in common with his Creator a desire to realize ideas in form. Those ideas may be inspired by observation of nature, life experience, Liturgy, other works of art, pain and suffering, hopes and dreams, but ultimately spring from the touch of the Holy Spirit. What we observe about the process and results of our own attempts to create forms gives us new insight into the human person, as the highest of God’s creations.
The glory of form is that it communicates not only a message, but also the person of the artist. Through language, through an icon, through a symphony, art argues for Truth, for Beauty, for Goodness, if its message is rooted in the reality of Faith. The work of art, for those with eyes to see, is an encounter with the artist and a point of entrance into his own lived experience of the world. Like a person, an art-form is most fully realized when it is most deeply known, but it can be received even in a very limited way and still convey the seed of its message and the touch of its maker.
There are two opposite destructive tendencies operating in our rapidly dis-integrating culture that prevents art from being all that it might be. One is the focus only on forms as things to be grasped, things to be detached from historical roots and context, things to be used as vehicles for propaganda or worshipped as totems of artist-gods. The person of the artist, in genuine self-offering, is replaced by the persona to whom offerings are due. The argument for the Good, the Beautiful, and the True – as transcendent realities that lead outside temporal experience toward the fullness of Being – is not well-made through works that are consumer products, idols, projected egos, or ends-in-themselves.
The opposite tendency is toward anti-form. Operating right alongside the veneration of meaningless forms is an iconoclastic bent that despises form itself as base, insufficient for high ideals, or flawed by imperfections. Christians are, perhaps, more prone to this error, as they are acutely aware of the way art-forms can lie to and cheat an audience. The contempt for form shows itself in repudiation of the means of grace – Sacraments, sacramentals, church buildings, sacred art – and in acceptance of a flattened hierarchy of values within the arts. If one form is every bit as good as any other, then who can say which is more appropriate for worship, more worthy of admiration, more likely to convey the message of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.
It makes us nervous to imagine making a judgment about a work of art, and to place our works before those who might make such a judgment. But it is necessary to the development of our capacity as human beings to learn to handle that particular kind of tension. If I make a judgment – reasoning about the objective qualities and merits of an art-form, and taking into account my own subjective response to it – I do not claim that my word is law, or that my sense of the piece is the only ‘right’ one. If my judgment ‘has heart in it’ (as Fr. Giussani says), then I can own it without the demand that others make the same response. In this way, the work of art has challenged and developed my own freedom to respond and thus accomplished some small expansion of my capacity for freedom.
It is this capacity of art to be an invitation to freedom for whoever encounters it that I want to explore through examples from poetry, architecture and music so that we can extrapolate lessons for human personhood from what it means to be a fully realized work of art.
The artist’s vision is first subjected to constraints that both limit and enable its realization. For example, the poet may select a complex villanelle, the architect has a pages-long program of intended building uses, codes, zoning requirements, competing committee intentions and financial constraints to deal with, and the composer must consider the range of the human voice, or the instruments available to be used and the intended setting for the performance of his work. To be an artist is to be set free by these very constraints!
If the artist perceives himself as a god-like human genius who must break all formal conventions in order to prove he is not subject to the rules of mortal man, then he starts not with freedom, but in a vacuum he must then fill with himself alone. G.K. Chesterton said, “The essence of all art is the frame.” Only when he is well-formed in the skills and historical forms of his particular art can the artist use breaking-from-form as a design principle to good effect.
The artist is also affected by the reality of his subject. Though he may render it fantastically, any levels of meaning far-removed from the literal must have the literal as their basis. The apple can only mean ‘the world returned to God’ in the hand of a painting, or statue, of Mary if it first means ‘the actual, sinful, world-corrupting original sin’ first, and only then if it was ‘an actual, edible, attractive fruit on a tree’ in the first place. A poet can hardly liken a forest to a chapel if the audience can have had no literal experience of the reality of the forest in the first place. A composer cannot use cannons to good effect in an overture if the booming of guns is not part of the lived experience of war.
The greatest artist is most able to bear the tension of all the constraints imposed upon him to create a work of art that is his own response to the realities before him. The juxtaposition of his own vision with the demands made by ‘the frame’ challenges his skill in what can be a thrilling way. He must make a judgment – take into account the internal and external realities, his own heart’s desire and all that confounds or impedes the realization of that desire – and utter it. The judgment of the artist is rendered into the form he creates, and he is thus modeling for us the courage of acting in freedom to realize our own responses to reality.
The glory of form is that it is the perceptible memorial of an act (sometimes, of many acts) of freedom. Think how many acts of freedom it takes for all the members of a choir to bring forth into reality the polyphony of Palestrina – subjecting themselves in freedom to his composition, to their conductor’s instructions, to the demands of good vocal production. Shakespeare may have spent many hours writing a play, but his creative act has elicited even more free self-giving from actors and audiences who continue to realize his vision.
Form calls us to exercise our own freedom by responding to the artist’s use of his free will. The form can seem empty, dead, and useless to us if we do not appreciate this intrinsic value. A gesture of courtesy, the sign of the Cross, a formal prayer, a ritual, an icon can all be forms that are empty and dead unless a human person allows them to be quickened into life by the Spirit. The form becomes a frame through which we can see reality in a new way. Sacred space is generated for us through soaring Gothic arches. We are carried through music into deeper emotions, or into the Liturgy of the angels. A poem shows us a new way of seeing the ordinary, through the use of metaphor. We must be trained to look through art and not just at it. This training helps us to appreciate the mystery and hidden dimensions of persons, as well.
The forms we create – institutions, poems, languages, icons – both give entrance to others, and shut them out. A cathedral gives me a place in which to adore Christ, but also veils His presence within a Tabernacle. The stained glass and sculptured symbolism tells a story not everyone understands, and invites them to the work of discovery. A poem leaves me frustrated until someone helps me understand the metaphors and symbols. An icon looks strange and flat without instruction in ‘seeing through’ with the help of the Spirit. Remember the two opposite tendencies we spoke of: the one would value form precisely because it helps them create what C.S. Lewis has called an ‘inner ring’ of specialists, or elites who are ‘in the know,’ and the other would turn its back on form because it is not easily accessible and seems to reject, or shut out the casual observer.
The greater the capacity of the audience to receive the form, the more powerful this exchange will be. The artist lives in need of an audience that can truly receive his work – not just pat him on the back, but deeply understand the tensions he had to resolve, the skills he brought to bear, the self he unveiled through it. Very few people today have poetic formation. A few more have musical formation to some degree. We are lucky if our architectural sensibilities have been formed by exposure to truly great buildings. We are limited, then, in our capacity to receive – to have fully realized within us – the highest and best that is possible in art. Similarly, we are limited in our capacity to receive Christ.
The painting can be thrown in the trash, the building torn down, the poem ignored, and that does not prove it was meaningless to create, because these forms take their glory from the glory of the free human being who made them. They have meaning, just as he does, apart from the purpose they accomplish, the work they do, the money paid for them, or the scope of their influence. It is because we do not understand this about art, that we do not fully understand the human person, and vice versa. Our own work, effort, skill, and action are neither all-powerful, nor insignificant. We are both small, fragile, mortal beings and enormous, grace-filled, eternal beings! Finding our way prayerfully within this tension is the ‘working out’ of salvation by which we craft our lives and our works of art.
In a free act of gracious self-offering, our Creator responded to the reality of the fallen world by becoming a form through which man might once again encounter Him. When He gives Himself to us in the Eucharist, over and over again, He is uttering that Word within us so that it can resound into the world. Our lives become works of art (as Pope John Paul II has said) when we grow in freedom both to create and to respond to works of art. As artists, when we use our words, our paints, our building materials to re-sound what is true, what is beautiful, what is good, we create small vessels of encounter with God. As persons, we are, and our lives are, such forms. The glory of form is that it calls man to his own highest, most fully realized being – to freedom.
©2017 by Charlotte Ostermann
October 8, 2013
The artist has in common with his Creator a desire to realize ideas in form. Those ideas may be inspired by observation of nature, life experience, Liturgy, other works of art, pain and suffering, hopes and dreams, but ultimately spring from the touch of the Holy Spirit. What we observe about the process and results of our own attempts to create forms gives us new insight into the human person, as the highest of God’s creations.
The glory of form is that it communicates not only a message, but also the person of the artist. Through language, through an icon, through a symphony, art argues for Truth, for Beauty, for Goodness, if its message is rooted in the reality of Faith. The work of art, for those with eyes to see, is an encounter with the artist and a point of entrance into his own lived experience of the world. Like a person, an art-form is most fully realized when it is most deeply known, but it can be received even in a very limited way and still convey the seed of its message and the touch of its maker.
There are two opposite destructive tendencies operating in our rapidly dis-integrating culture that prevents art from being all that it might be. One is the focus only on forms as things to be grasped, things to be detached from historical roots and context, things to be used as vehicles for propaganda or worshipped as totems of artist-gods. The person of the artist, in genuine self-offering, is replaced by the persona to whom offerings are due. The argument for the Good, the Beautiful, and the True – as transcendent realities that lead outside temporal experience toward the fullness of Being – is not well-made through works that are consumer products, idols, projected egos, or ends-in-themselves.
The opposite tendency is toward anti-form. Operating right alongside the veneration of meaningless forms is an iconoclastic bent that despises form itself as base, insufficient for high ideals, or flawed by imperfections. Christians are, perhaps, more prone to this error, as they are acutely aware of the way art-forms can lie to and cheat an audience. The contempt for form shows itself in repudiation of the means of grace – Sacraments, sacramentals, church buildings, sacred art – and in acceptance of a flattened hierarchy of values within the arts. If one form is every bit as good as any other, then who can say which is more appropriate for worship, more worthy of admiration, more likely to convey the message of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.
It makes us nervous to imagine making a judgment about a work of art, and to place our works before those who might make such a judgment. But it is necessary to the development of our capacity as human beings to learn to handle that particular kind of tension. If I make a judgment – reasoning about the objective qualities and merits of an art-form, and taking into account my own subjective response to it – I do not claim that my word is law, or that my sense of the piece is the only ‘right’ one. If my judgment ‘has heart in it’ (as Fr. Giussani says), then I can own it without the demand that others make the same response. In this way, the work of art has challenged and developed my own freedom to respond and thus accomplished some small expansion of my capacity for freedom.
It is this capacity of art to be an invitation to freedom for whoever encounters it that I want to explore through examples from poetry, architecture and music so that we can extrapolate lessons for human personhood from what it means to be a fully realized work of art.
The artist’s vision is first subjected to constraints that both limit and enable its realization. For example, the poet may select a complex villanelle, the architect has a pages-long program of intended building uses, codes, zoning requirements, competing committee intentions and financial constraints to deal with, and the composer must consider the range of the human voice, or the instruments available to be used and the intended setting for the performance of his work. To be an artist is to be set free by these very constraints!
If the artist perceives himself as a god-like human genius who must break all formal conventions in order to prove he is not subject to the rules of mortal man, then he starts not with freedom, but in a vacuum he must then fill with himself alone. G.K. Chesterton said, “The essence of all art is the frame.” Only when he is well-formed in the skills and historical forms of his particular art can the artist use breaking-from-form as a design principle to good effect.
The artist is also affected by the reality of his subject. Though he may render it fantastically, any levels of meaning far-removed from the literal must have the literal as their basis. The apple can only mean ‘the world returned to God’ in the hand of a painting, or statue, of Mary if it first means ‘the actual, sinful, world-corrupting original sin’ first, and only then if it was ‘an actual, edible, attractive fruit on a tree’ in the first place. A poet can hardly liken a forest to a chapel if the audience can have had no literal experience of the reality of the forest in the first place. A composer cannot use cannons to good effect in an overture if the booming of guns is not part of the lived experience of war.
The greatest artist is most able to bear the tension of all the constraints imposed upon him to create a work of art that is his own response to the realities before him. The juxtaposition of his own vision with the demands made by ‘the frame’ challenges his skill in what can be a thrilling way. He must make a judgment – take into account the internal and external realities, his own heart’s desire and all that confounds or impedes the realization of that desire – and utter it. The judgment of the artist is rendered into the form he creates, and he is thus modeling for us the courage of acting in freedom to realize our own responses to reality.
The glory of form is that it is the perceptible memorial of an act (sometimes, of many acts) of freedom. Think how many acts of freedom it takes for all the members of a choir to bring forth into reality the polyphony of Palestrina – subjecting themselves in freedom to his composition, to their conductor’s instructions, to the demands of good vocal production. Shakespeare may have spent many hours writing a play, but his creative act has elicited even more free self-giving from actors and audiences who continue to realize his vision.
Form calls us to exercise our own freedom by responding to the artist’s use of his free will. The form can seem empty, dead, and useless to us if we do not appreciate this intrinsic value. A gesture of courtesy, the sign of the Cross, a formal prayer, a ritual, an icon can all be forms that are empty and dead unless a human person allows them to be quickened into life by the Spirit. The form becomes a frame through which we can see reality in a new way. Sacred space is generated for us through soaring Gothic arches. We are carried through music into deeper emotions, or into the Liturgy of the angels. A poem shows us a new way of seeing the ordinary, through the use of metaphor. We must be trained to look through art and not just at it. This training helps us to appreciate the mystery and hidden dimensions of persons, as well.
The forms we create – institutions, poems, languages, icons – both give entrance to others, and shut them out. A cathedral gives me a place in which to adore Christ, but also veils His presence within a Tabernacle. The stained glass and sculptured symbolism tells a story not everyone understands, and invites them to the work of discovery. A poem leaves me frustrated until someone helps me understand the metaphors and symbols. An icon looks strange and flat without instruction in ‘seeing through’ with the help of the Spirit. Remember the two opposite tendencies we spoke of: the one would value form precisely because it helps them create what C.S. Lewis has called an ‘inner ring’ of specialists, or elites who are ‘in the know,’ and the other would turn its back on form because it is not easily accessible and seems to reject, or shut out the casual observer.
The greater the capacity of the audience to receive the form, the more powerful this exchange will be. The artist lives in need of an audience that can truly receive his work – not just pat him on the back, but deeply understand the tensions he had to resolve, the skills he brought to bear, the self he unveiled through it. Very few people today have poetic formation. A few more have musical formation to some degree. We are lucky if our architectural sensibilities have been formed by exposure to truly great buildings. We are limited, then, in our capacity to receive – to have fully realized within us – the highest and best that is possible in art. Similarly, we are limited in our capacity to receive Christ.
The painting can be thrown in the trash, the building torn down, the poem ignored, and that does not prove it was meaningless to create, because these forms take their glory from the glory of the free human being who made them. They have meaning, just as he does, apart from the purpose they accomplish, the work they do, the money paid for them, or the scope of their influence. It is because we do not understand this about art, that we do not fully understand the human person, and vice versa. Our own work, effort, skill, and action are neither all-powerful, nor insignificant. We are both small, fragile, mortal beings and enormous, grace-filled, eternal beings! Finding our way prayerfully within this tension is the ‘working out’ of salvation by which we craft our lives and our works of art.
In a free act of gracious self-offering, our Creator responded to the reality of the fallen world by becoming a form through which man might once again encounter Him. When He gives Himself to us in the Eucharist, over and over again, He is uttering that Word within us so that it can resound into the world. Our lives become works of art (as Pope John Paul II has said) when we grow in freedom both to create and to respond to works of art. As artists, when we use our words, our paints, our building materials to re-sound what is true, what is beautiful, what is good, we create small vessels of encounter with God. As persons, we are, and our lives are, such forms. The glory of form is that it calls man to his own highest, most fully realized being – to freedom.
©2017 by Charlotte Ostermann