Regional Synod of Canada - Reformed Church in America

Pioneer Christian Monthly

Date - Oct/75

Contributor - Dick Vermeulen

Title - "Mind if I walk with you, Mem?"

Topic - Modern Art

"Mind if I walk with you, Mem?"

And of the head signalled the O.K. and Henk quickened his pace to catch his wife. The earliness of the Sunday morning showed in its quietness, no one else on the sun sprinkled sidewalk. The maples had not yet started to drop their mid-day dew and the seed clusters were still waiting to De used for helicopters by the neighbourhood kids.

"Have you given any thought to Sal lately?" Henk suddenly spoke out. He did not look up as he spoke, but stopped to pick at a group of cupped lichen growing onto the sidewalk the soft pastel greens of its young shoots fading into beige. It was strange that his mind could concentrate on the tiny plants and even notice that the beige became a vivid brown at the cups edges. He carried the plant and peered at it to evade Mem's look he know would. be there. Her eyes would be saying, "What are you after, what's the problem?" She smartly returned him a simple "No" and so left him to explain his question. He passed the lichen to Mem.

"Well, I mean her coming home this week with that artist fellow. I just don't like it. Shiftly and undependable. Besides his weird looks he's probably not even Christian nor likely thinks about his future and I just know we should never have let her follow that art program at university. That's what you get with all that culture bit. Charlatan's Capers this modern art and Charlatans the artists!"

Mem still did not answer. Her mind was going at breakneck speed. She was prepared t.o meet her husband on any topic, but this was unexpected. Never had the topic been raised, never issue. The situation must nave grown slowly to the point where Henk had suddenly wakened to the fact and panicked. Such a long speech for Henk.

"What you are saying Henk, is that your daughter is going a different direction from us and you are not sure that it's a good one?"

"I know it's not a good one," Henk replied even before she had finished her sentence.

She thought how threatened he must feel to answer so strongly and unnaturally fast.

"Let's start at the beginning," she quietly said. "If she did choose the artistic way of life, in which way would that upset you? Have you looked at what that millieu has to offer? You called it Charlatanism, what else bothers you about it?"

The series of questions started the conversation in earnest.

"I'm afraid all the values we have taught Sal will go down the drain, such things as her Christianity, her concern for others, the traditional elements of the upbringing." Henk's voice quivered slightly as the natural resonance or timbre of his speech returned. He always did sing really well, Mem unconnectedly reflected.

"Let's take them one at the time, maybe we'll get a better grip on the problem. You mentioned her Christianity. Once we have given her the basis. God will determine whether or not it bears fruit. If she is a spiritually oriented person it will enrich whatever she does, modern artist or not. Just recall that exhibition of the literary or representational sculptures by George Wallace, her instructor, a re-interpretation of the Christian theme. It was not unlike those thirteenth century cathedral sculptures we used to gawk at when we were children, remember? Illustrative perhaps, but still an excitingly modern view of man versus his Christian faith.

"But how many are there today like that?" Henk interjected softly.

"Do all artists have to be illustrators? Perhaps we can see some artists making visible the invisible by way of their art."

"Hmph, maybe you mean the paint throwers and canvas rollers like that Pollock fellow. Drips and drools, spits and splatters, a waste of good paint and canvas if you ask me."

"Hold on now, you like Glen Gould, the way he plays piano. I listened to an interview once where he spoke of his compositions. He stated that he was experimenting with different levels -of music which related to different levels of reality. His musical levels of reality are exactly the same as the paintings by Pollock, physical searching for other and new levels of awareness. Spiritual perhaps but not mystical. For those we need to look to that man from Winterswijk, Piet Mondriaan His mystical view has affected our lives to the n'th degree, not in the way he had forseen but his work has filtered its way down until we are physically and maybe even spiritually involved by his sensitive colour block arranging. Just notice how his ideas have been used by architects and decorators alike. This belief in the purity of ultimate is not strange to true Christians. It is interesting how serious and effective the Dutch artists of this century have been. I was thinking of those large cubic stainless steel sculptures, super simple yet with erie connections with the earth and our solar system and at the same moment illusionistic with their reflective surfaces. That thought brought to mind an other great Dutch artist - Escher, his drawings and lithographs playing with optical illusions. They are a really masterful metaphor for the different view points towards our problem, or again, the interplay of different realities. For instance look at his metamorphosis series. Here he interchanges the positives for the negatives, the animate into the inanimate, the real into, the possibly unreal. Did you know this Groninder even visited his children in Canada once?"

The conversation stopped as they turned left into the cemetery entrance. The gravestones made a checkerboard pattern reducing in size as they receded. Not unlike Escher"s perspectives thought Mem. The small cedars and the juniper bushes becoming chessmen on a giant board bound by the fence of the graveyard. She was unable to pursue the idea for Henk would not be sidetracked. Picasso for instance and his playmate Slavador Dali with his limp watches, what was it they called this work, Surrealism?,

"How can a person condense a man's lifetime into two minutes?" asked Mem testily. "Yet if you want to, you can visualize this art style as the probing of our dreams and subconscious, you know, psychology. They are bringing or trying to bring those fearful depths of the human mind to the foreground and the awareness and understanding. If we refuse to understand or become involved, you cannot blame the artist, but don't misunderstand for lack of effort, that's not fair."

"Don't be defensive Mem. If they are really good, time will tell. Now you are the one who seems threatened."

"You would be too if pushed to rationalize and explain such broad s areas some of which I know little of or even dislike!"

"Ahah, see you're just like me. The need to like is there."

"Sure but that doesn't make the art work right or wrong, valid or invalid. It exists as a statement, a point of view, sometimes personal, sometimes public."

"Nonsense you can't call all that abstract stuff statements Mem!"

"Do you remember how during the Golden age of Holland great strides forward occurred in optical 'equipment, telescopes, microscopes and so on?"

"Sure."

"Look at the art of that period, interest in still life, church interiors, landscape, in fact everything with objective or visual truth."

"Are you trying to say that abstract art is like that?"

"Sometimes, yes. Our technological age has opened worlds unknown. The electron microscope, space probing, magnification of geological samples, colour photography of microbes all show that man's knowledge is moving into two directions. The artist's intuitive probings are likewise, both descriptions of the very large and the very small, the macro and the microcosms."

'Big words for such a tiny woman," grumbled Henk frustrated at being unable to answer. "Anymore you want I to throw at me?"

"No Henk except that we should not discount the prophetic revelation in the serious artist. Just as Saint John's visions are recorded in the book of Revelation, so may many modern artists record their visions. Time will sort -out the true from the false, yet we must not ignore them for the sake of time. We are part of the sorting procedures. You and I must test their works. Works like those of printmaker Don Carr, whose concern for humanity during our technological age make him a modern saint. Or Jan De Kooning whose destruction of the female human figure fits within the same framework. You see Henk, it is not the work of one artist ' but of a whole group, a whole generation whose work becomes a prophesy and the revelation of our time."

Mem you make the artist al most seem holy. That I cannot accept."

"You don't need to accept that, since they are not; but neither are they unconcerned charlatans. The modern artist is as concerned with values as you and I. He is staking his life on working out a section of the eternal questions in man's mind, where did I come from? who am I? and where am I going? The only changing factor is the complexity of today's world and situations and therefore the complexity of the artist's statement."

"I have never thought of the artist as a philosopher, only as a producer of articles to set in your garden or hang on the wall," replied Henk firmly.

"Of course, that is also part of the creative process, making things to be enjoyed, things of beauty, and that is great. But remember that the modern artist just as the artist of the past cannot be fitted into a neat and simple cubbyhole, packaged and shipped, neatly labeled 'Art, Relaxation and Enjoyment only'. Art is equally often exploration, or description. It can be a parable with a message or it ,can be prophetic. But above all it is serious. A generation without humour, what else can we expect from a century as ours?

She put the lichen near a gravestone, a stranger's, aged and grey with the consciousness that this tiny world she had just placed there was unusually beautiful and worthy of giving. Huskily she said, "Let's go and have breakfast Henk."

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