I have been watching Art:21 documentaries with the wife & kids lately. If you are not familiar, Art:21 is a PBS documentary series which explores the works & artists of contemporary visual arts; they build each episode upon a theme and pick 4-5 artists to highlight.

It has been interesting looking at how these contemporary artists are dealing with the current state of art. In the last hundred years, art has attempted to push the boundaries of ‘what art is’, reaching the limits in the absurd & banale. I have a deep love & respect for art and the power which it has. That being said, I often wonder {especially married to an artist} where art is going, what power it still has in a world which has seemed to try to put the work of art into the personal experience much like religion has been regulated to personal spirituality.

I say all this as introduction to an observation about contemporary art. Through the handful of episodes we have watched, I don’t think one artist was portrayed who didn’t include installation work as part of their emphasis. I find this very interesting, as one artist very rightly described her work as drawing the viewer in, submersing them in the experience of the work, instead of simply letting them view it from afar.

I think this exactly what is needed to bring visual arts back towards the center of culture. The installation forces people to come together to experience it, one can not privately view the installation. The public-ness of the experience I think is wonderful in that it forces the patron out of the privatized experience and into a communal one, even with the multitude of interpretations.

With the advent of much of the technology associated with entertainment, the viewing of art—be it visual arts, or performance arts, music, or anything else—has become a private spectating thing rather than a communal participatory experience. Before the wide availability of musical recording & playback, one had to gather one’s local musicians to hear music. Before Hollywood, one had to go to the theatre to see acting; now a days we can simply go to our tv, computers, or even our phones for our private experience.

With the desire for community slowly creeping back into the desires of people, we are beginning to recreate the institutions which have transformed along with everything else in the last few centuries. We are rethinking what these institutions are purposely for and what they can do for us.

We see these sames ideas & desires being played out in the institution which is the church. Peter Rollins has famously created these installation type experiences with Ikon, that are very far from the traditional church experience. [There is a recent article in the Guardian about this change with church communities.]

If we think about the church world in large scale then we can see certain similarities with that of the arts > modern entertainment. Instead of local sages local teaching local forms of worship, we have exported its production to larger entities. We look to the CCM top 40 to get our latest worship song, instead of expecting original local community crafted material. Instead of having local teachers who do the hard work of crafting material, we instead buy a slick DVD of the latest guru to hit the Christianity Today cover. Instead of relying on the wisdom on the those within community, we purchase it from either a professional by the hour or the self-help rack at the ‘local’ chain bookstore.

We deny the locality of our lives; we think we can simply export whatever is ‘cool’ over there, box it up in slick packaging, & transport it to our native environment. We can experience the same worship as them by just playing their songs, reading their books. Through this process, the individual & also the community as a whole loses its sense of self-expression. The community is then relegated to reproduction rather than an original creational birth of expression.

What I like about the installation, is that it is unique to the locality, be it temporary or permanent the installation is unique to its location. Would the Statue of Liberty or the Arch of St. Louis mean anything if every large metropolitan had one? What is wonderful about what Ikon does is that it is unique, never repeated, yet communally experienced.

I have been thinking about church a lot lately, I’m torn between wanting it to mean much more than it does but also much less. I’m torn between respecting & desiring a liturgically ordered service, where  holiness is found in the repetition; but also finding myself being bored with the sameness of schedule. I am confused about my desires of wanting to meet less often for formal services but also equally desiring more formal events.

So I wonder, is church more like a canvas on the wall which you can purchase & take home with you; or is more like an installation which is fixed to a certain time-space. With either, the permanence of the piece causes it to be disappear. Only the tourist notices the permanent installation. For the local it has long disappeared into the background of the landscape, maybe never to have been seen in the first place.

I wonder how does one construct a church, a fellowship of believers, as to make it a submersing experience while not causing it to become so familiar as to disappear, while creating enough regularity & sameness that it becomes integrated into a holistic faith & way of living.