Gestation

Over coffee at Muggswigz, Michele and I talked about how we could work together to have our two liturgical seasons connect to one another.

She described the centerpiece of the advent art as including a descending globe made out of glass, with the burning Christcandle inside. The globe would descend throughout the season of Advent, until, at Christmas it would be at eye level -- God With Us.

My idea had been that the Epiphany video installation would center on an image that in some way signified Christ -- that would very slowly, very gradually become clearer throughout the course of the service.

I had been inspired by her description of the germ of her advent idea on Sunday when we chatted, and so had tried to combine the two ideas:

What if the image that gradually became clear was the candle descending in the globe.

As our coffee time progressed, we added the possibility of having the globe actually descend from the sky so that the blurry image would be beautiful even while it was blurry (a value that I always had about the idea was that the congregation would be looking at the screen for the first half of the service BOTH puzzled by it's hazy indistinctness AND quietly happy about how the indiscernible light looked beautiful).

Another idea that emerged during coffee came wholly out of our conversation, and since I had NONE of it going it, I suspect that Michele contributed more on this one, but... it was:

I had a concern that the video would be too front focused -- and not as inclusive or dialogical as much of the art in our church is.

So the idea emerged of having three banners hanging near the perimeters of where the congregation sits, all of which would be covered in mirror fragments.

During the scripture reading, we would invite a member of the congregation to go to these banners, which would be shrouded up to this point, and, while gazing at the clarifying screen image, remove the shroud.

In this version of our plan, the congregants would try to bring to mind an EPIPHANY that they had experienced in their lives as they removed the shrouds.

Influenced by Jonny...

Just after I discovered the blogosphere, I happened upon JonnyBaker's blog.

I was intrigued because the Ph.D. he was just finishing (had just finished) dovetailed with my own in several interesting ways:

we were both interested in popular culture performances,

we were both interested in the rhetorical dimension of these performances,

we were both making connections between ritual theory, performance theory and (me more than him) rhetorical theory.

Jonny was also clearly someone devoted to Christianity, keenly committed to the arts, and very interested in building genuine community in cutting edge ways. All these factors made me really interested in his blog.

I had done a gig as a "worship pastor" (many years ago) but was completely turned off by the formal disconnect between the artistic ghetto that my particular branch of Christianity had become. I spent a while at two conservative evangelical churches, trying to translate some cultural forms into the worship, but the interest level was nominal -- certainly not a priority, so I decided to focus my life energy and artistic interests elsewhere. (Obviously that story could be written in a much longer way, but it's a bit off track for this blog.)

It was, though, this vested interested in the the forms of church worship and their (dis/)connect to/from cultural forms in the cultural spheres that surround churches that really generated a lot of interest in reading Jonny's Tricks section.

He's been chronicling for years the formal devices used by artists and worship leaders to articulate meaningful and fresh expressions of worship.

Viewing Viola's art through this context, encouraged me to think about how something LIKE this might be used in a liturgical art setting.

The Seed of Video Art...

While visiting L.A., I checked out the Getty Museum for the first time.

The video installations of Bill Viola were just as breath-taking as the devastatingly beautiful architecture and vistas of the and Grounds.

In Passions, Viola constructed painterly scenes of actors experiencing the passions that medieval painters, artists and philosophers wrote so vigorouslyhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif about. These scenes were shot in beautiful, dramatic light against severe dark backgrounds and then slowed down so completely that one had to stand and wait for what seemed like an eternity of patience before they would change.



The most jarring and exciting part of the exhibition, though was walking into a huge space where his installation called 5 Angels for the Millenium played: 5 cinema size screens simultaneously played images of a human diving into water (but filmed from inside the water, so...emerging into...?...the water), slowed down to a speed to make them look unrecognizable and otherworldly.



It was an unforgettable aesthetic experience: unmatched by any I had experienced before.

My interest in video art was piqued on that day. The most natural context for expressing it was, for me at that moment, shaped by some of the reading I had been doing, and the new church in which my family was becoming involved.



*

Here's a documentary about Bill Viola's work