In my most recent post I discussed my brief stint as a Culture Warrior during the Battle of Making The Omega Code a Hit. Really, I spent more time in the trenches than that, and I now consider those skirmishes a scar. My approach to arts and culture is different now, and I’d like to explain why.
To do so, I’ll begin by discussing the two most successful artists of outspoken faith during my lifetime: Thomas Kinkade and Makoto Fujimura.
Through the ‘90s, Thomas Kinkade, aka “the Painter of Light” was everywhere. Especially in church life. While no Kinkades hung in our house, I spent a good portion of my childhood assuming his ubiquitous style—cozy yet cloying tableaus of bustling small-town main streets and cottages sitting by streams—were the entirety of Christian art. This did not bode well for Christian art.
Through mass marketing and endless licensing agreements, Kinkade became insanely successful. His website claims 1 in 20 American households own a copy of one of his paintings, and that he’s the most collected artist in Asia. Kinkade’s work is also polarizing. In a 2001 interview, he referred to himself as “the most controversial artist in the world,” and he had a point. Here’s the writer Joan Didion in a particularly scathing analysis:
A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.
Dunking on Thomas Kinkade is a tired pastime, and in writing this I wonder if perspective on his work will shift over time. His artistic vision was widespread, sure, but also undeniably unique. Maybe he’ll one day be embraced alongside Lisa Frank or Jeff Koons as Captains of American Kitsch. Maybe someday every painting will be plastered with Disney characters. Kinkade was a rebel, after all, even if mainly against other artists, and if the goal of art is to make cash, Kinkade was a demi-god.
Still, it seems notable to me that so little of Thomas Kinkade’s omnipresence trickled down to younger Christian creatives, even if his thirst for cash did. I’d estimate Kinkade’s prolific body of work triggered an exodus. Creative types who grew up in church have abandoned Evangelicalism in droves, aghast at a religious movement increasingly bereft of cultural savvy and taste. From a long career of selling to his overdose death from alcohol and diazepam in 2012, Thomas Kinkade’s career is more a cautionary tale on the corrosive effects of fame and fortune than an inspiration to a new generation of makers.
On the other hand, there’s Makoto Fujimura.
To provide some context here, the list of actively working Christian creatives I genuinely admire is depressingly short. Like, I’d be surprised if it’s more than ten names long. At or near the top is Mako.
I’ve never met Makoto Fujimura in person, but some of my admiration is due to personal interactions. Fujimura championed the Burnside Writers Collective in early days, and we published at least one of his essays (which I unfortunately am unable to link to because it’s no longer on the internet). When his Four Holy Gospels book was published, I received an early copy which still holds a prominent place in our home. Fujimura started the International Arts Movement, served as a talking head on my favorite Mark Rothko documentary, and as a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s Silence.
In recent years, Fujimura has directed his considerable skills toward writing. In 2014, he published Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life, and Art + Faith: A Theology of Making was released in January of this year. I’m enamored of both these books even as I read them slowly. A single chapter will have me considering an idea for months.
“Culture Care” is the phrase Mako coined for how artists can serve as an antidote to the poisonous Culture Wars sweeping the US closer and closer to actual violence. It’s in these fraught times, where our society is fragmented and polarized, that artists are most necessary, even as they are ignored. Culture, as Fujimura sees it, is not territory to battle over, but a garden meant for cultivation, as vital to thriving society as any other facet.
One of Mako’s concepts I’m considering is mearcstapa, a word to describe the role artists embody. I’ll let him explain via an excerpt from chapter 7 of Culture Care:
Earlier I noted that artists have been pushed to the margins. Recently I was speaking with my colleague and collaborator Bruce Herman. He introduced me to an Old English word used in Beowulf: mearcstapa, translated “border-walkers” or “border-stalkers.” In the tribal realities of earlier times, these were individuals who lived on the edges of their groups, going in and out of them, sometimes bringing back news to the tribe.
Artists are instinctively uncomfortable in homogenous groups, and in “border-stalking” we have a role that both addresses the reality of fragmentation and offers a fitting means to help people from all our many and divided cultural tribes learn to appreciate the margins, lower barriers to understanding, and defuse the culture wars.
This phrase explains what I’ve felt for much of my life, and is another reason we need artists to articulate our existence in novel (or in this case very old) ways. Later in the chapter, Mako uses a literary example of mearcstapa—Strider the Ranger from Lord of the Rings—to describe the marginalization border-walkers face.
Often artists are branded as “difficult people” in society, hard to pin down and notorious for being independent. In Tolkein’s story, the travelers accept Strider as a guide only when they receive a letter that vouches for him. But Strider might speak for many artists in his comment to his reluctant new friends: “‘But I must admit,’ he added with a queer laugh, ‘that I hoped you would take me for my own sake. A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship.’”
The role and loneliness described here feels God-printed within me. Mearcstapa is also an ethos Mindy (a minor in Art History at UCSB) and I shared. This role was foundational to our marriage, that we were ambassadors with open hearts for people across disparate cultures, ethnicities, and factions and that we were made—partly through our talents but mostly as followers of Christ—to travel across the divides drawn between tribes. If you’ve ever expressed a partisan perspective and been surprised at how vociferously I argue back, this is one reason why.
“Difficult people,” sure, but also absolutely vital to a thriving culture. When the mearstapa are ignored and art becomes homogenous—think the films of Leni Riefenstahl or Soviet-era iconography—cultural death is hot on its heals.
Makoto Fujimura writes more about the divine importance of creative vocation in Art + Faith (bold emphasis added):
In order to be effective messengers of hope, we must begin by trusting our inner voice, an inner intuition that speaks into the vast wastelands of our time. This process requires training our imagination to see beyond tribal norms, to see the vista of the wider pastures of culture. Therefore, it is part of our theological journey to see the importance of our creative intuition and trust that the Spirit is already at work there. Our creative intuition, fused with the work of the Spirit of God, can become the deepest seat of knowledge, out of which the theology of New Creation can flow.
Seeing my calling as a border-walker, or a gardener in the wastelands, is a key reason I started the Green Room. I mean, yes, I’d like acknowledgement and attention and readership, but what I’d also like to impart, on behalf of my artistic compatriots, is We have knowledge you need and you’d best listen.
The role of tending to culture is not only for those of us willing to pour ourselves out for starvation and tips and dreams of Kinkadian riches. This vocation is for all of us. We are each creators with gifts imprinted by the Creator. We can all access that “deepest seat of knowledge” through co-creation. Artists can help point the way, but it’s gonna take more than a handful of broke-ass makers to get free of this tribalized division and nearer to the New Creation we’re hoping to build alongside the Holy Spirit.
So if you feel an inkling to write or draw or sing a song, do it. Cultivate that aspect of yourself. The practice may not seem practical or efficient or useful at first, but those are not virtues in and of themselves. The generosity of art is vital to everyone.
I appreciate you reading today. Here’s some Jenny Lewis to fit this theme and close us out.