The Fatherless Artist

In a previous post, Faith, concerning the man in Spain who has been building a cathedral (not to any planned design, code, and without real structural integrity) for the past fifty years on his own, a reader - Catawissa Gazatteer - made the remark that "there's an analogy to our modern world in there someplace" - in regards to the haphazardness of the structure.

There could not be a closer metaphor - it's my contention - for the predicament of today's artist than this man who clearly has some particular undying faith; something inside him that God planted there, who at the same time, resorting to junk material and lacking foundational craftsmanship, must come to the sad realization of the extent of his limits - indeed, outright fallacy - when his art is given form without the objectivity that the Father gives.

Upon first viewing the video, it immediately brought to mind the Bell-maker at the end of Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev: some emissaries of the prince ride by a small town that has been ravaged by plague looking for a bell-maker who will make a great bell for the prince's new church. A young, waif-like man, little more than a boy, reclining against a low building tells them his father was the bell-maker but he's now dead from the plague, as is just about everyone else in the town, and that they should take him on as bell-maker, for he knows how to make bells.

The emissaries pass him off, and are riding away to another town, when the young man shouts after them insistently that he is the only one to whom his father passed on the secret of making bells. The emissaries ride back and take the young man. He's under commission now and if the bell he makes (requiring, among other things, expensive material from the prince) does not in the end ring it will cost his head.

Who is this boy? Does he know the secrets to making bells? What causes him to suddenly stand up and determine that the emissaries take him on as the bell-maker, his very life being at stake? Is he even the son of this now-dead bell-maker? Why does Andrei Rublev, under a self-imposed vow of silence and not having painted an icon in years, hover around the boy's bell-making operation, watching on? If the bell does not ring, does that necessarily mean that his father never passed on the secret? If the bell does ring, does that necessarily mean that his father did pass on the secret?

(You have to turn up the volume on these ones to hear them at all)





We are fatherless today, but we have the privilege of finding the father through faith - and that faith not only informing our work, but ushering in an entirely genuine Cultural Renewal. As I said in my comment to the previous post, our cultural heritage has a value of Zero if we do not have the faith which that man in Spain has - or greater than he has. See how he's given himself, his being, over to this folly completely?

Though, our cultural heritage having a value of Zero without faith does not mean the objective reality of symbols, which do not depend on our faith to be imparted, or indeed, to be real - are somehow dead without our faith giving them efficaciousness.

I'm simply talking about Catholic artists engaged in their work: we tend to take our faith for granted, Catholic artists not excepted. This is partly because faith has largely come to mean, as with conscience, a personalized, wholly subjective experience: it's my faith - as in my inherent powers. With this kind of nonsense that's been floating around for decades, it's no wonder any notion of faith is left on the back-burner.

But by leaving it on the back-burner we submit to that false idea of faith. So it is that we regard faith as a tool which we use to attain the object of our art. This is a kind of gnosticism. We seem to think it's enough that our faith is there while we speak in the language of art history - or that it must be there because we are speaking in the language of art history. We are a race of applicators - a race of gnostic applicators.

The faith of the artist is to expand as he plies his work; faith becomes of the essence, and that expansive faith is to be enfleshed as somehow the pinnacle end of that's artist's work - like a prayer that he has left behind for the uptake of others who come along and view the work: it's to break through the work.

It's not a very good way of putting it - mainly because it makes it sound somewhat melodramatic But it sounds that way because we have the wrong image and idea of faith.