About this Blog

I'm writing this blog as a kind of an artists journal to chronicle the process of developing liturgical art for the season of epiphany in the context of my home church, Akron Christian Reformed Church.

I'm not a seasoned artist: apart from being a writer and amateur filmmaker, I may not even have any credentials for even trying to make art for a community. On the other hand, the people at Akrac (as it sometimes called) are a generous supportive bunch, and it was at several members prompting that I took up this project.

I'm also really unqualified to write about the experience with an authoritative tone, so if you're looking for a guide to making liturgical art or a primer in developing liturgical art, you should stop reading right away. Family members and a few friends expressed some interest in knowing more about this project, so I write partly for them.

I also write, because I tend to think about things better as I express them. I'm partly writing this record so I have a more fully formed memory of what happened.

The third reason I write is because, as a part-time scholar (it's my day job), I've been convinced by Ernest Boyer (one of the freshest voices to talk about the work of being a university professor in the last century) that scholarship should not be constituted by the field it is written into, but should be constituted by a set of shared processes and assumptions that are applied in a variety of different situations toward a variety of different types of audiences. He pioneered notions like "the scholarship of teaching," the "scholarship of service-learning," and the "scholarship of translation" to try to move away from the hegemony of the more traditional "scholarship of discovery."

(I realize that a few of you readers are about to check out...WAIT! Come Back! I promise not to say "hegemony" again.)

So I'm attempting to transform this artistic experience into something that might be participate in a larger community talking about liturgical art and all different kinds of art-that-functions-for-community. I honestly don't know who those readers might be yet. I will tell you about some of the writers and artists who started to develop my thinking about liturgical art, but in the meanwhile the internet seems like a good place to start this yammering. The likelihood that the googlebots will find my voice and direct me toward likeminded souls -- seems stronger here than in any other medium or forum...

Are you still reading? In that case you must be related to me. Because this is inappropriately long-winded and maybe more than a little narcissistic. I'll try to curb that in the future.

One more caveat? I want to be forthright about the fact that THIS is the first post I'm writing, but I am going to exploit bloggers time-machine capability to develop this blog in a way that reads more chronologically than it's actually been written.

Bits of the Video

A Video Montage from the Service

Render, Wait, Wait, Compress, Wait, Action, Cut, Wait, Wait, Bur...no Wait, Okay, Now, (Wait), Burn.

Here's a compressed version of how I spent almost my entire day (from my two sentences a day blog):

My day alternated between coaxing my epiphany video to render, compress & burn (16 hours from when I first stepped into the room until when I finally left with a DVD), and hanging around waiting at the TV studio, trying to keep the kids both calm and happy as we waited for Addison's shooting.

The actual edits I made, a few more fades between jarring transitions, and then extending the still image for an hour and twenty minutes at the end of the presentation, these edits were simple and NOT time consuming. I had completed the edits themselves in less than half an hour. The waiting afterwards was more than a little frustrating.

Oh and did I mention that after waking at 5, arriving by 5:30, working for three hours and leaving it rendering, and checking in at ten, I checked in at two and found that a student had shut it down, with an apologetic "oops" because they thought someone had just left it since Friday. WHAA?!?!!

After the First Run

Throughout the service, I was timing everything. I wrote down the time at the end of each line in the liturgy, and after every song.

By the time we were halfway through the first hymn, I could tell that we were going to end early.

I had already decided to, since I had so much ambivalence about how the images would play in concert with the service, have the projection end before the sermon, and then maybe do something different later.

Halfway through the first hymn, I realized that my timing guesses hadn't been great: I had read the liturgy aloud and sung a hymn by myself in the lonely little editing room beforehand, but hymns vary so much and the tempo of any given piano player could make them vary even more.

After conversations with Harry, Marcia & Michele, I decided that I would definitely end with a still that would remain projected throughout the service.

I didn't really hear much feedback from anyone, afterwards, partly because I didn't want to: I hid in the basement where Lynn was in charge of three year olds. I kind of didn't want anyone to have the pressure to say anything to me, and I just wanted to be able to fix it before anyone felt that pressure.

The only feedback I did get was from Phil, who commented that the first sequence made him think about the fact that in all these years of working at a hospital, he's always wondered what it would look like to be wheeled down the halls on a gurney: now he knew.

Photos of the Sanctuary

Here's the mirror at the back of the sanctuary. The mirror faces the screen like most of the congregation, so the idea that it is a symbol of our perception, hopefully occurs to congregants as they all file past the mirrors on the way out.



This view allows you to see the relative distance from the mirror to the front (where I was standing when I took the picture).



Here's the image I created by exporting a still from the film, before it achieved clarity (or before we have an epiphany) and then composited a shot of the mirror on it's side.



Here's how it looked on the liturgy covers.



And here's liturgy books spread across a pew.



Michele created the fabric transfer and sewed it to the altar cloth (two photos, here, one that contextualizes the altar with the baptismal font and the Christcandle):




I loved the slight modification Michele made to create the stohl Harry wears. You can see that she centered the flame and then extended the shattered lines in a way that emphasizes the arrival of light...

My Artist's Statement

(cross post from my inbetween blog)

Today marks the beginning of what some parts of the Christian church celebrate as the season of epiphany. I've been creating a video art installation for my church's celebration of epiphany (I'll blog about the process and include a video clip later), but here's the image on the cover of our liturgy books and my statement.



As I developed this epiphany installation, I tried to focus on two tensions/relationships.

The first tension is the relationship between Christmas and Epiphany. I’ve always been intrigued by the dialogue between these two church seasons which alternately focus upon:

the ARRIVAL of the Incarnation -- and -- the RECOGNITION of the Incarnation.

~both essential elements of our Christian Faith.


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The second tension is the disparity / relationship between:

seeing things -- and -- the emergence of Sight or Vision.

Cinema has always thrilled me because of its ability to provide Sight and Vision. The stories, the scale, the color, the projection, the mise en scene. Since the earliest movies I remember, cinema has always baptized my imagination and provided me with new eyes: a fresh VISION, a second SIGHT of my world.

Watching a movie includes all kinds of unconscious physiological and psychological labor. Our eyes need to limit their focus to a screen. Our brains must link disparate images together into a seamless flow. Our eyes and brains must together sort through a mish-mash of colors, tones, highlights and shadows, and distinguish between a constantly shifting figure and ground.


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I strain so hard to achieve Vision. I use my seeing to look up, but too often encounter the limits and fragmentation that prohibit me from catching Sight or Vision of the Hope I long for.


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For me, Epiphany occurs at the moment when Sight and Vision transcend all the limited and broken realities of seeing. Epiphany celebrates how even my broken perceptions of Incarnation can receive healing Light and reflect Hope-filled Vision.


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The Minute Before the Last Minute

cross post from my two sentence a day blog


I can only barely remember the jarring holy experience of standing in the Getty watching Bill Viola's Five Angels for the Millenium, as I race around two towns all day today doing small things like: trying to balance a massive 20 x 10 screen and extend it into the air in a sanctuary not built for such things, wiring a small fiber board to a wire grate, watching a spinning rainbow wheel spin as the "Time Until Rendered" icon remains frozen at "1 more minute" for more than twenty, slicing giant plywood sheets with a circular saw in the 20 degree weather, pasting 70 small shardlike photos to liturgy covers, standing in Kinkos waiting. Two Days Til Epiphany.

Epiphany Editing...

Here's what I wrote in my Two Sentence A Day Blog.

Spent most of the day editing the epiphany video, after a melt-down call to Michele, I decided to attack it again, so the kids (still enmeshed in Harry Potter) and I went back to Malone where they listened to the final battle between Harry and Voldemort and Dumbledore (not FINAL final -- remember, we're only in book five) and I continued to craft the "epiphany" moment in the video sequence.

By this time, I'm feeling okay about the actual images. I don't love them, and I wish I had invented another way to shoot the candle, but I also have started to like how the two seperate images interact with each other.

At this point, my panic is starting to focus on the difficulty of timing the whole thing to correspond with the service. How could I not have thought about the awkwardness of having ceilings scroll by during prayer and hymns? And those things are so improvisational!

After a long phone call with my brother in which I eliminate the possibility of mixing the two images live (like a DJ, cueing one than the other and fading it live), I decide that I'll try to make the best of having the images unfold in concert with the liturgy.

Advent Art

This wide shot shows a bit of how dramatic the scope of Michele's Advent vision was. These swaths of fabric eminated from the balcony, the windows and the front of the auditorium:



The place where the fabric came together opened almost like the inverted petals of a huge flower -- or the place where the sky opened to allow something to descend.



If you sat near the middle and front, you could see the glass globe and with the candle inside more clearly, and some felt a little trepidation that it could arrive with a vengeance and come crashing down on their heads.



Later in the advent season, the globe emerged from the fabric and hovered in mid air, just above the altar:

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.



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Here's a documentary about Bill Viola's work