IN THE SANCTUARY
For the Healing of the World:
A Collaborative, Interactive Installation
by Deborah Sokolove and Amy E. Gray
Deborah Sokolove is Professor of Art and Worship and Director of the Luce Center for the Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.
Amy E. Gray is Assistant Professor of Art and Religion and is the Associate Director of the Luce Center for the Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.
Deborah Sokolove is Professor of Art and Worship and Director of the Luce Center for the Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.
Amy E. Gray is Assistant Professor of Art and Religion and is the Associate Director of the Luce Center for the Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.
The authors of this paper are both artists who frequently create visual installations for worship environments as well as maintaining studio practices in which each of us works in solitude to explore the possibilities of ideas and materials. The invitation to submit a proposal for a collaborative artwork to be exhibited at a conference titled “Making Justice: Practical Theology, the Arts, and Transformation” came as both an honor and a challenge, since we had not previously worked on an art project together, and the Call for Papers seemed to limit the choices to a formal, academic paper, poster, or performance. Since we had been invited to make an artwork, it was not clear how to make a proposal that would fit both the conference theme and our current scholarly and artistic interests.
While it could legitimately be argued that the arts are the most practical of all the theological disciplines, the contemplative art making that is a primary spiritual practice for both of us is not specifically about justice making. Privileging process over product, both of us are interested in the temporary, the contextual, and the experiential rather than the fixed, the permanent, or the easily explained. However, as artist/scholars working in a theological school, we are used to cross-disciplinary conversations. Collaboration is integral to our approach as liturgical artists. Therefore, we proposed creating an installation that would invite conference participants into a contemplative space in which they could find healing from the wounds they have received in the battle against injustice and space to pray for the healing of the world.
The idea was to create a forest of trees as a quiet, mysterious space that would be at once private, with room for only one or two people; and public, open on all sides and located in the chapel where many other activities would take place. We intentionally left ample evidence of our own struggle with our chosen materials and processes in the overcut marks, smudges, and other imperfections that mirror the imperfections of natural trees without attempting to replicate any particular kind or instance. Such traces of the artists’ hands suggest the repetition over time, the sensitivity to the demands and opportunities of each present moment, and the irreducible materiality of embodiment that is the hallmark of contemplative making, as well as being an emphatic reminder of our humanity in an increasingly mechanistic world. This ongoing attention is an embodied spiritual practice. Like other kinds of meditation or prayer, it can reveal the way the mind wanders and the tendency to judgmental thoughts, or it can open the mind to new possibilities, allowing God to speak into the inner silence of the heart. In a collaborative project such as this, it is also an opportunity for mutual hospitality in the give-and-take of ideas in the presence of the Spirit.
Into a relatively small, 10’ x 10’ space on one side of the chapel, we placed three abstractions of trees, the smallest possible grove. A sacred grove is a place where people can go to connect with their deepest selves, finding strength and courage for the outward journey towards justice and peace. Trees are essential to the health of the earth, breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen, as well as providing shade, timber, and shelter for countless creatures. Trees are symbols of transformation in many spiritual traditions. For Christians, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil stands at the center of the garden in the creation story. In Revelation 22, there is a tree that stands on both sides of the river, providing healing for the nations in its leaves and nourishing fruit in every season.
Unlike real trees that grow in soil and reach for the sky, the trees in this installation were made primarily of cardboard, Chinese joss paper, and paint. Meant to provide a place to rest and breathe in the midst of a busy conference, they were lightweight, reasonably sturdy, and mostly recyclable. Some of the materials, such as cardboard boxes, are common, everyday objects which were chosen with sensitivity to their environmental impact and the expectation that they would be recycled when the trees were dismantled. Others, like the joss paper “leaves,” are meant to be used up, turned into ash, and dispersed like the sand of a Tibetan Buddhist mandala.
A particular danger among Protestants is to insist on reducing artworks to a single, simplistic message rather than multivalent invitations to engage with mystery. Since too much insistence on the artists’ intentions can usurp the agency of others who come with their own thoughts, experiences, and interpretations to any work of art, we chose to give only minimal explanation in the original paper. On the other hand, since different communities of expression and interpretation seem to mean different things when they say art, it is often helpful for artists to offer a few clues about how a work came to exist.
This installation, like most artworks, did not spring fully formed from initial idea to final manifestation. While the initial idea of three trees remained constant, the specifics continued to change in response to experiments, tests, and random inspirations. When designing the tree trunks and overarching canopy, we wanted something that would be self-supporting, so fabric and paper (both of which are common in the liturgical art that both of us have made for other venues) were rejected. One idea that was consistent with the justice theme was to use salvaged shipping boxes, turning them inside out and painting over the printing so that viewers would get occasional glimpses of the painted inner surfaces. Although these thoughts of recycling salvaged materials were satisfying, there was a challenge in quickly gathering sufficient used boxes of an appropriate size. Finally, we bought clean, unused, uniformly-sized boxes and stenciled the outside with branch-like shapes, inviting the viewer’s eye to explore the undulating surface as if it were actually bark.
Another set of decisions had to do with the paper leaves on which participants would be invited to write their prayers. At first, we thought they would be shaped like ema, the small, wooden votive plaques on which prayers are written at Shinto shrines in Japan. Another idea was to cut paper into a more leaf-like shape. Eventually, folded strips of the colorful, shiny joss paper that is used in Chinese funerals seemed to evoke both flowers and leaves, as well as being easy for participants to write on and attach.
As a practical matter, it was necessary to provide a way to attach the written prayers to the trees. Our initial thought was to hang threads or strings from the higher branches, leaving paper clips at the ends to hold the paper. This, however, seemed impractical, as there was a not insignificant danger that someone could tug too hard and pull the entire upper portion of the installation down on their heads. Almost accidentally, one of us discovered battery-powered Christmas tree lights that were shaped like clothes pins. This strange combination of fairy lights and practicality added a dimension of whimsy to an installation that threatened to become overly heavy and somber.
As we were working out these issues, we also were thinking about a bowl or other receptacle for holding blank paper. In our initial proposal, we suggested that it might be a pit-fired clay vessel. After struggling with a variety of other options and rejecting all of them as not quite right, an appropriate vessel regularly used for the burning of palm fronds and prayers written on joss paper on Ash Wednesday every year was borrowed from a nearby church. Making this kind of space for the movement of the Holy Spirit is an important part of studio practice for both of us. When unexpected things are not simply allowed to happen but are actively encouraged, the result is a work that is different than what was originally envisioned yet true to the initial impulse.
Along with the practical decisions of material, color, shape, and size, we continued to struggle with the perennial question of justifying all the hours spent in the studio when there are so many pressing problems in the world. This is a particular problem for artists in the church, who are often pressured into projects that are at odds with their particular gifts and callings. Sometimes, this takes the form of being asked to volunteer in soup kitchens, visit prisoners, or attend protest rallies for one or another good cause in addition to serving on church committees, teaching Sunday school, and participating in all the other opportunities that a congregation offers. Other times, it is making art projects that take them away from their primary vision and self-understanding as artists. In this situation, especially, we continued to return to the question of how this meditative process, resulting in an installation that invited participants into contemplation, was connected to the justice theme of the conference.
This existential struggle between action and contemplation is reflected in The Work of Art: Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, a recent volume by Michael Jackson, Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. In it, Jackson considers the work that art does and how that relates to justice. Struggling to understand how art that bears little resemblance to everyday reality can nonetheless lead to an enhanced or novel understanding of the overly-familiar world, he writes,
While it could legitimately be argued that the arts are the most practical of all the theological disciplines, the contemplative art making that is a primary spiritual practice for both of us is not specifically about justice making. Privileging process over product, both of us are interested in the temporary, the contextual, and the experiential rather than the fixed, the permanent, or the easily explained. However, as artist/scholars working in a theological school, we are used to cross-disciplinary conversations. Collaboration is integral to our approach as liturgical artists. Therefore, we proposed creating an installation that would invite conference participants into a contemplative space in which they could find healing from the wounds they have received in the battle against injustice and space to pray for the healing of the world.
The idea was to create a forest of trees as a quiet, mysterious space that would be at once private, with room for only one or two people; and public, open on all sides and located in the chapel where many other activities would take place. We intentionally left ample evidence of our own struggle with our chosen materials and processes in the overcut marks, smudges, and other imperfections that mirror the imperfections of natural trees without attempting to replicate any particular kind or instance. Such traces of the artists’ hands suggest the repetition over time, the sensitivity to the demands and opportunities of each present moment, and the irreducible materiality of embodiment that is the hallmark of contemplative making, as well as being an emphatic reminder of our humanity in an increasingly mechanistic world. This ongoing attention is an embodied spiritual practice. Like other kinds of meditation or prayer, it can reveal the way the mind wanders and the tendency to judgmental thoughts, or it can open the mind to new possibilities, allowing God to speak into the inner silence of the heart. In a collaborative project such as this, it is also an opportunity for mutual hospitality in the give-and-take of ideas in the presence of the Spirit.
Into a relatively small, 10’ x 10’ space on one side of the chapel, we placed three abstractions of trees, the smallest possible grove. A sacred grove is a place where people can go to connect with their deepest selves, finding strength and courage for the outward journey towards justice and peace. Trees are essential to the health of the earth, breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen, as well as providing shade, timber, and shelter for countless creatures. Trees are symbols of transformation in many spiritual traditions. For Christians, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil stands at the center of the garden in the creation story. In Revelation 22, there is a tree that stands on both sides of the river, providing healing for the nations in its leaves and nourishing fruit in every season.
Unlike real trees that grow in soil and reach for the sky, the trees in this installation were made primarily of cardboard, Chinese joss paper, and paint. Meant to provide a place to rest and breathe in the midst of a busy conference, they were lightweight, reasonably sturdy, and mostly recyclable. Some of the materials, such as cardboard boxes, are common, everyday objects which were chosen with sensitivity to their environmental impact and the expectation that they would be recycled when the trees were dismantled. Others, like the joss paper “leaves,” are meant to be used up, turned into ash, and dispersed like the sand of a Tibetan Buddhist mandala.
A particular danger among Protestants is to insist on reducing artworks to a single, simplistic message rather than multivalent invitations to engage with mystery. Since too much insistence on the artists’ intentions can usurp the agency of others who come with their own thoughts, experiences, and interpretations to any work of art, we chose to give only minimal explanation in the original paper. On the other hand, since different communities of expression and interpretation seem to mean different things when they say art, it is often helpful for artists to offer a few clues about how a work came to exist.
This installation, like most artworks, did not spring fully formed from initial idea to final manifestation. While the initial idea of three trees remained constant, the specifics continued to change in response to experiments, tests, and random inspirations. When designing the tree trunks and overarching canopy, we wanted something that would be self-supporting, so fabric and paper (both of which are common in the liturgical art that both of us have made for other venues) were rejected. One idea that was consistent with the justice theme was to use salvaged shipping boxes, turning them inside out and painting over the printing so that viewers would get occasional glimpses of the painted inner surfaces. Although these thoughts of recycling salvaged materials were satisfying, there was a challenge in quickly gathering sufficient used boxes of an appropriate size. Finally, we bought clean, unused, uniformly-sized boxes and stenciled the outside with branch-like shapes, inviting the viewer’s eye to explore the undulating surface as if it were actually bark.
Another set of decisions had to do with the paper leaves on which participants would be invited to write their prayers. At first, we thought they would be shaped like ema, the small, wooden votive plaques on which prayers are written at Shinto shrines in Japan. Another idea was to cut paper into a more leaf-like shape. Eventually, folded strips of the colorful, shiny joss paper that is used in Chinese funerals seemed to evoke both flowers and leaves, as well as being easy for participants to write on and attach.
As a practical matter, it was necessary to provide a way to attach the written prayers to the trees. Our initial thought was to hang threads or strings from the higher branches, leaving paper clips at the ends to hold the paper. This, however, seemed impractical, as there was a not insignificant danger that someone could tug too hard and pull the entire upper portion of the installation down on their heads. Almost accidentally, one of us discovered battery-powered Christmas tree lights that were shaped like clothes pins. This strange combination of fairy lights and practicality added a dimension of whimsy to an installation that threatened to become overly heavy and somber.
As we were working out these issues, we also were thinking about a bowl or other receptacle for holding blank paper. In our initial proposal, we suggested that it might be a pit-fired clay vessel. After struggling with a variety of other options and rejecting all of them as not quite right, an appropriate vessel regularly used for the burning of palm fronds and prayers written on joss paper on Ash Wednesday every year was borrowed from a nearby church. Making this kind of space for the movement of the Holy Spirit is an important part of studio practice for both of us. When unexpected things are not simply allowed to happen but are actively encouraged, the result is a work that is different than what was originally envisioned yet true to the initial impulse.
Along with the practical decisions of material, color, shape, and size, we continued to struggle with the perennial question of justifying all the hours spent in the studio when there are so many pressing problems in the world. This is a particular problem for artists in the church, who are often pressured into projects that are at odds with their particular gifts and callings. Sometimes, this takes the form of being asked to volunteer in soup kitchens, visit prisoners, or attend protest rallies for one or another good cause in addition to serving on church committees, teaching Sunday school, and participating in all the other opportunities that a congregation offers. Other times, it is making art projects that take them away from their primary vision and self-understanding as artists. In this situation, especially, we continued to return to the question of how this meditative process, resulting in an installation that invited participants into contemplation, was connected to the justice theme of the conference.
This existential struggle between action and contemplation is reflected in The Work of Art: Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, a recent volume by Michael Jackson, Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. In it, Jackson considers the work that art does and how that relates to justice. Struggling to understand how art that bears little resemblance to everyday reality can nonetheless lead to an enhanced or novel understanding of the overly-familiar world, he writes,
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I wanted art to do justice to the world—not by mirroring it but by entering deeply into it—and I wondered whether this could be achieved through solitary meditation as much as through social engagement.1
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Jackson notes that intellectual life, like art-making, tends to distance the practitioner from the day-to-day. Both necessarily make use of artifice, abstraction, and the arcane in order to render the familiar new again. There is, however, an inherent danger in such distancing. As Jackson puts it,
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For we who spend so many hours writing, thinking, painting, sculpting, weaving, or practicing music in solitude, setting worldly concerns aside in order to conjure the voices, images, and forms that come unbidden only when we open our minds to them—do we not risk falling into fantasy and losing touch with the world in our haste to praise the ineffable, in our attachment to contemplation, in our search for the secret, the esoteric, and occult?2
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Part of Jackson’s problem is that he is mostly thinking about art that is made for the purpose of disinterested, aesthetic contemplation, which does not necessarily lend itself to matters of justice. However, many artworks are made for other purposes. As Nicholas Wolterstorff points out in Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art, disinterested aesthetic contemplation has become the primary way that educated people think that they are supposed to engage the arts, and that only art that is made for that purpose is worthy of attention. Wolterstorff argues that the social practice of dismissing art made for other purposes as unworthy of consideration is unjust, writing,
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To put down some social practice is to put down the human beings who engage in that practice. To put down the social practice of singing while working is to put down those who sing while working. To put down the social practice of hymn singing is to put down those who sing hymns. To put down as propaganda the practice of creating social protest art is to put down those who create such art.3
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Insisting that putting the social practices of art, rather than works of high art, at the center of our attention will foreground the ethical dimension, he continues,
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The practices of art are like social practices in general in that they perforce have an impact on the flourishing of human beings and perforce do or do not treat those human beings as befits their worth or dignity. It is these dimensions of the social practices of art that should engage us when we reflect on the relation of art to the ethical dimension of life.4
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For Wolterstorff, art that is made for the purpose of helping people work, play, worship, or remember those who have gone before are all attempts to do justice by treating the people who do these activities with the worth and dignity they have as human beings. As he points out regarding work songs,
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Singing while working is an affirmation by the singers of their dignity. They are not just laborers: cotton pickers, stone splitters, wood choppers. They are persons capable of rising above their labor to add to it the gratuitous creative addition of song; in singing while working they give voice to their dignity. They are treating themselves as they have a right to be treated, namely, as bearing the dignity of being human persons.5
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In addition to these ideas, we were also influenced by one of the world’s largest gatherings of artists and makers who are interested in the spirituality of the ephemeral and its relationship to justice, the Burning Man festival that takes place every summer in the Nevada desert. In order to ensure that the thousands who gather for Burning Man can co-exist peacefully with one another and the environment, the organizers have articulated ten principles that reflect the community’s ethos and culture, which has developed organically over the years since the first such event. As the Burning Man website lists them, these principles are radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy.6 While the APT conference clearly is not the Burning Man festival, these principles can easily be translated to the ethos of the Beloved Community, in which both peace and justice are indicators of the presence of the realm of God.
The installation titled “For the Healing of the World” was not made for the purpose of disinterested aesthetic contemplation, but rather as an invitation to the same kind of engagement and prayer that we find in our individual studio practices. It began as a collaboration between the two artist/scholars. In bringing it to the conference unfinished, we invited the other conference participants to enter into a spirit of collaboration and discovery. Once assembled on site, the grove awaited the joss paper leaves on which other participants wrote their prayers which they then placed among the branches, using the clip lights hanging there. As is the case in so many places around the world where people leave tokens of their pain at holy sites, the act of writing and placing is an opportunity to offer up the pain of injustice, release it, and allow space for transformation.
One unexpected result of our bringing cardboard trees to the conference involved widening the collaborative nature of the installation. As we were installing the cardboard trees in the chapel, one of the Yale Divinity students mentioned that the following weekend was Earth Day and asked if we could leave the installation for the following week, when the chapel services would be devoted to environmental issues. Of course, we were happy to do so, trusting that the students would recycle the cardboard when they were finished with it.
In designing this project, we had hoped that, at the end of the conference, the written prayers would be burnt in the presence of other participants, in an echo of the practices of many Christian and other traditions in which smoke and fire are used to signify a holy offering. Unfortunately, this was not possible due to a combination of logistics and weather, so the prayers returned with us to Washington, D.C. A few days later, we added our own prayers, lit a match, and released them to rise like incense on the wind.
NOTES
The installation titled “For the Healing of the World” was not made for the purpose of disinterested aesthetic contemplation, but rather as an invitation to the same kind of engagement and prayer that we find in our individual studio practices. It began as a collaboration between the two artist/scholars. In bringing it to the conference unfinished, we invited the other conference participants to enter into a spirit of collaboration and discovery. Once assembled on site, the grove awaited the joss paper leaves on which other participants wrote their prayers which they then placed among the branches, using the clip lights hanging there. As is the case in so many places around the world where people leave tokens of their pain at holy sites, the act of writing and placing is an opportunity to offer up the pain of injustice, release it, and allow space for transformation.
One unexpected result of our bringing cardboard trees to the conference involved widening the collaborative nature of the installation. As we were installing the cardboard trees in the chapel, one of the Yale Divinity students mentioned that the following weekend was Earth Day and asked if we could leave the installation for the following week, when the chapel services would be devoted to environmental issues. Of course, we were happy to do so, trusting that the students would recycle the cardboard when they were finished with it.
In designing this project, we had hoped that, at the end of the conference, the written prayers would be burnt in the presence of other participants, in an echo of the practices of many Christian and other traditions in which smoke and fire are used to signify a holy offering. Unfortunately, this was not possible due to a combination of logistics and weather, so the prayers returned with us to Washington, D.C. A few days later, we added our own prayers, lit a match, and released them to rise like incense on the wind.
NOTES
- Michael Jackson, The Work of Art: Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 70.
- Ibid., 72.
- Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 323.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 325.
- Burning Man, “The 10 Principles of Burning Man,” in The Culture: Philosophical Center, https://burningman.org/culture/philosophical-center/10-principles, accessed June 6, 2018.
Amy E. Gray and Deborah Sokolove, For the Healing of the World: on site during the conference, 2018, mixed media (cardboard, acrylic paint, joss paper, lights), temporary installation at Yale Divinity School chapel. Photos courtesy of the artists.