Practice, Practice, Practice., by Daniel A. Siedell

                        “[F]aith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”

                                    James 2: 17

Practices have become a more visible presence in academic discourse.  Much recent theological and philosophical reflection has taken as its point of departure the importance of practices, habits, rituals, liturgies, and other forms—both formal and informal—of non-propositional embodiment of faith and knowledge as necessary components in shaping a coherent and richly textured theological and philosophical worldview.  And this has in turn found its way in discourses associated with the Emergent conversation as well as the Missional church movement.  My own work in the artistic and aesthetic realms is no different.  This focus on practices and processes provides an important opportunity to explore how a critical approach to contemporary art, shaped and nourished by a robust Nicene Christianity, can contribute to a richer and more textured understanding of artistic practice.

I returned yesterday from a week in the Los Angeles area participating in two projects that underscored and challenged my own thinking about practices.  The first was a series of workshops I offered to graduate studio art students at Azusa Pacific University’s MFA program, the only such program currently offered by a school in the Consortium of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU).  It is a low-residency program, which means that students do their work throughout the year but come to campus only for a brief time in January and the entire month of July.  Because of this many of the students are teachers—both at the middle and high school level as well as the college level who use their summers to continue their education.  This means that for a number of them, they are leaving family, including spouses and young children, to spend the entire month of July in an intense period of work.  This is the second year I’ve participated in the summer program.  My topic was “The Value of Research for the Studio Artist” and it served as an extension of my thinking about art as a specific kind of practice, an approach that has been shaping my pedagogical work with undergraduate studio art students.  However, it also enabled me to be much more direct about the relationship between Christian and artistic practices, especially as it related to the practice of “research.”  And what it means is of primary importance because of the common assumption that “research” is something that only academics do, while studio artists do something else.  My task was to define research as itself a practice, a discipline that is not added onto artistic practice, which helps “position” or “promote” an artist’s work, but which is a means by which artistic practice itself is enhanced.  In other words, the goal is to produce better art not more sophisticated “talk” about art.  For example, as an art historian, I am especially committed to the importance of artists understanding and assimilating the history of art.  But that does not mean that an artist must do research like an art historian—reading complicated art historical research with the goal of writing art history—but that the history of art becomes a living presence for the artist’s studio practice.  The goal is that through cultivating art historical research as a virtue of receptivity and humility to previous artist’s works and ideas, their studio, rather than being empty, filled only with their own isolated self becomes a crowded studio packed with the work and ideas of artists, who, perhaps dead for centuries, are alive and nourish contemporary studio practice.  One’s one individuality, which is necessary for artistic practice, only emerges in and through the interaction with others, not in isolation from them or their ideas.  The goal of research, then, is to produce a “living tradition” of ideas and a “cloud of witnesses” of artists and thinkers to facilitate the production of deeper and deeper art.  This approach is the same for philosophy and theology.  Too often, particularly in academic contexts, the talk about art becomes either separated from artistic practice or becomes an end in itself.  This is precisely where artistic practice is best understood within the context of Christian ascetic practices and disciplines:  a Christian does not merely practice prayer, the reading of the Scriptures, fasting, and the like simply for their own sake, but as means by which she becomes a better Christian, which means, becomes more Christ-like.  Communion with God is the goal, not increasing in fasting and prayer.  In the same way, “research” must be understood as transcending the framework of “academic research” to include an expansive way of cultivating the virtue of clear thinking through reading and writing that establishes and grows a deep individual manifestation of experiences embodied in aesthetic form.  Artistic practice is not merely about using techniques to making stuff for people to look at, it’s about making certain kinds of decisions in the studio and it relates not merely to the kind of stuff produced but the development of the individual self that produces them.  And so clear but deeply informed thinking is a necessity for mature artistic practice.  In the end, I don’t care if an art student ever reads Levinas, Derrida, Kant, or Hegel. But she should read and read deeply.  I don’t want to look at the work in her studio and see visual “references” from Derrida.  I want to be in the presence of work that is distilled from the breadth and depth of the artist’s own experience, which can only be achieved through the practice of disciplines, including the discipline of research.  An artist cannot work in the studio without weapons and tools.  And research is one of those important weapons and tools.  But it has to be understood as research for the purpose of the development of the individual doing the research.  It must be the product of the artist’s desire for understanding.      

My thoughts on research and its relevance for studio practice were confirmed and expanded during the second part of my trip, a two-day research visit to the studio of the artist Enrique Martínez Celaya, with whom I have worked on several projects in the past and whose work serves as the lens through which I see artistic practice.  (See www.martinezcelaya.com for more information on the artist’s work.)  His artistic project, which consists of painting, sculpture, photography, and prose is the very embodiment of research as a necessary artistic virtue.  Although he is not a Christian, his work comes from a profound depth of thought and experience that has challenged and nourished my work as a Christian who studies art.  And it was indeed interesting to learn that while I was presenting my workshop at Azusa Pacific University, Martínez Celaya was delivering his own lectures on artistic practice at Anderson Ranch Arts Center near Aspen, Colorado in which he drew his own parallels between artistic and religious practice.  Art is a means by which Martínez Celaya searches for truth.  Research is a means by which that search for truth through art is deepened.  It is remarkable that work produced by an artist who does not profess the Christian faith can produce works of art that nonetheless testify aesthetically to how wide and long and deep is the love of Christ (Eph 3: 18).   

My involvement with the graduate students and faculty at Azusa Pacific University, which also included a wonderful dinner with Biola faculty and friends and my work with Martínez Celaya revealed to me again the importance of seeing artistic practice as a metaphor for spiritual practice.  It is no wonder that the ancient Christian traditions regarded the Christian life as a work of art.  Research—the in depth practice of reading and writing—is one of the practices that facilitates this ultimately aesthetic process.  However, we academics tend too easily to see research as its own reward, for we can build an entire academic career on it speaking to others—publishing, teaching, speaking, blogging—without the slightest thought about how it should first and foremost speak to us, shape and mold us. What would happen if we academics considered our work in ways that approach artistic practice, in which all our activities, practices, and disciplines, including research, were motivated first and foremost to our own transformation?  As Evagrius said, “the theologian is one who prays truly, and one who prays truly is a theologian.”  As academics, let’s produce work that is result of our practices, our disciplines that come out of our own desire to be icons of Christ. 

Comments

[Greg Garrett]

Jason--

I enjoyed reading this. As someone who does faith and art, I find the biggest thing is that I do both better when I do them regularly. I tell my writing students you have to show up to do the work, not wait for inspiration or miraculous intervention, and a spiritual director once told a good friend, "You have to show up for God."

All best--

Greg

[James K.A. Smith]

Thanks for this, Dan. The Martinez Celeya example is really helpful (I would have loved to hear that Aspen talk). I do think "practice" can be a way for us to get beyond clunky, reified talk of "integration." In integration-talk, artists are always trying to figure out how to integrate a Christian "message" into their work; the result is only propoganda (and usually very bad art). You're pointing to a different paradigm, I think. It reminds me a bit of Richard Blake's book, _Afterimage_ where he looks at how Catholic formative practices (even in youth) formed the imagination of filmmakers like Scorcese, Coppola, and Ford, leaving the indelible mark of an "afterimage" on their creative imagination.

As an aside: your book should be out any day now, right?

[Jason Hesiak]

speaking of art...not in terms of having "references" to derrida", but has being full of a certain depth and breadth of personal experience...which is connected to the idea of seeking through "research" not more sophisticated talk ABOUT art but better art...and also speaking of Scorcesee...I was just saying elsewhere that i think that "The Departed" is FAR SUPERIOR to "Batman: Dark Night" (although both carry a similar message, in a way). for reasons that i would say are very much connected to the point being made here.
:)

[Kevin Hamilton]

Funny, I've just returned from Anderson Ranch myself, though I missed Enrique, unfortunately. I agree with all of Dan's words here, and I also suggest that they are a good foundation for preparing against the poorer manifestations of a practice that's gaining ground - that of the Studio Art PhD, or of accepting non-textual practices as part of traditional PhD work. "Practice-based research" is the phrase I typically hear used to describe this new mode of institutional validation, in which one's "becoming" is peer-reviewed. It's a real mixed bag; on the one hand, one sees recognition by universities that traditional professional practices imit what can be said, seen, made. On the other hand, such an expanded view of scholarship is typically offered those who are deemed to be more "expert" on the body - queer theorists, dancers, visual artists - without inviting traditional scholars to examine the effects of canonical methods on their own bodies. (As Jamie has.) The results are, so far, pretty poor. Artists gain the economic validation that comes with being branded "researchers," yet without the accountability that typically comes with professionalization, for better or for worse. Their well-funded work as researchers often escapes the scrutiny of even humanist standards of ethics toward audience or subject, since modern art has no rules. Meanwhile, host institutions gain points for having supported more "creative labor" in an educational market increasingly driven by class and debt. Led by their upper-level peers in "practice-based research," tomorrow's college-educated laborers will be "flexible," able to shape themselves according to any employer's demand. Now if only those granting loans for tuition were as willing to re-tool and adapt over time.

[daniel a. siedell]

Thanks for the comments on my piece. My approach walks a very thin and risky line. The precariousness of the line has much to do with the abuses of "practice" in cultural production, including and especially in the academy, in which "practice" is an alternative to "research." For example, at some research institutions, a 'professor of practice' line has emerged as a means to 'recognize' (re: marginalize) teaching and performance 'legitimate' practices in an environment that idolizes scientific-style research. This attention to 'practice' further separates it from 'research.' Therefore, my focus on 'practices,' which catches the ear of the academic bureaucracies, risks being coopted by such a framework, which, in trying to legitimize 'practices' such as art (and religion), end up, making it an inferior endeavor by giving it a place (albeit a tiny one) in the academy. My use of practice in this context must result in a nearly complete overhaul of what it means to do research and its relationship to the aesthetics and ethics of truth.

Another problem that such attention to practice attracts is the common view in the arts that "practice" is identical to "process" and so my focus on practice is, in the end, an exclusive focus on 'artistic process.' I heard this a lot at Azusa Pacific and at my own home institution, in which 'effort' and 'feelings' and the artist's ability to describe 'their process' trumps the aesthetic quality of their work. The danger in the Ph.D. in studio art, in addition to further anchoring it (literally) to the sinking epistemological ship of the academy, is that it can tend to train good "researchers," that is, tellers of good stories about their processes and practices that are easily understandable by 'fellow scholars' while also leaving art's mystification intact.

My view of practice is that such practice should be the means not the end. The end is the production of quality art, literature, music, philosophy, etc.

Finally, the notion of 'practices' gets picked up in the managerial world as a set of techniques to be used (read these books, meditate here, talk a walk there) that become a set of 'how to's' for 'successful' creative work.

This is where the liturgy, as the source of all practice, must play a mediating, defining, and forming role in preventing practice from such easy abuses.

In a memorable line from a poem by Rilke as he meditates on a classical Greek torso, the poet suggests that the great work of art takes you by the throat and tells you that you must change your life. The only way that such an experience can happen is if the artist produces and the viewer experiences art as part of the practice of a spiritual life.

Jamie, i just read through the table of contents of your new book at your website and it seems that it will contribute mightily to reformation of practice.

And yes, Jamie, my book, God in the Gallery, published by Baker Academic, comes out in a few weeks!

[James K.A. Smith]

I share your concerns, Dan, about the risks associated with "practice"-talk, which is becoming more and more ubiquitous. (An article a few years ago talked about "covenant overload" in Reformed theology; we might equally worry about "practice overload"!) For instance, many use the term almost flippantly, to simply describe "what people do," or, as you note, reduce practices to processes or techniques. Or worse, people adopt "practices" all the while still assuming a theory/practice dichotomy (as if theorizing wasn't a practice!)

I think some serious engagement with MacIntyre, Bourdieu, and Rouse can be an antidote to this, emphasizing the social complexity and teleology of practices.

[daniel a. siedell]

Exactly, Jamie. This course i teach at my home institution on 'theory and practice' is precisely a product of such a dichotomy but within which i labor not merely to undermine such binaries but to expand, enlargen, and make more robust theory and practice.

Gadamer's notion of "Bildung," of discipline and learning and the Greek notion of "paideia," of educationing, becoming initiated into a culture also seem apt as well.