It doesn’t take you long to figure out that art in Kosovo is
a big deal. As you walk down the main
streets of Prishtina, you encounter restaurants, music stores, coffee shops and
apparel outlets. The call to prayer is
sung from multiple Imam towers just as the sun is rising and dance beats pump
out of club speakers as it sets. Statues
stand in public squares as timeless reminders of those whose hands formed the
foundations of the country. The national
library, various church cathedrals and mosques were erected as pathways to
enlightenment.
Art is everywhere.
It is inescapable. It
is bound to culture as much as language is.
However, what is perhaps most surprising is that art defies
definition. Something that is so
widespread and obvious escapes all attempts to box it in and give it an
identity. Many different people have
attempted to define art. Leo Tolstoy was
quite possibly the first man to question what art is. He tore down his society’s view of art as a
way to acquire pleasure and urged people to consider it as a condition of life,
namely the interaction between man and man.
He described art as a process where one man, who desires to “join others
to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain
external indications” (by picture, story, song, etc.). By Tolstoy’s definition, art is a way of
relating to others through artistic communication. In fact, relationship is the initiator of the
desire to create art.
Other philosophers have taken this thought further by describing
art as simply (or not so simply) form
and content. The forms
of art are the elements, the principles, and the materials used to make
art. The content of art is trickier to pin down as it encapsulates the
underlying message, emotion or idea that the piece of art was created to
communicate.
An example of form and
content could be drawn from Van
Gogh’s “The Church in Auvers”. The form
would be the use of the elements (texture,
space, shape, colour, etc.) and principles (movement, unity, harmony, etc.).
The content would be the
message of the painting: noticing that the light of the sun brightens the
foreground yet the church is in shadow and holds no light of its own. John van
Sloten noted that Van Gogh’s conflicted feelings about the Church were represented
in his view of the Church’s shortcomings, which is why the church stands in
darkness.
Art, then, is something that expresses human life to bring
union between all people. It is like a
voice to culture, describing it and enriching it. It is the vision of the human soul’s passion
and yearning.
During my trip to Kosovo, I was privileged enough to meet
many different types of artists. Music
is a very large part of the culture, whether it is in the secular city circles
or the traditional village circles. I
played with emerging guitar students, met beatboxers and dancers, and was blown
away by the beauty of some people’s voices as they sang with passion and sincerity.
One of the towns we played in organized a cultural exchange
of arts as a tribute for unity and peace.
We watched as young Kosovar artists displayed their craft in traditional
dancing and in music. In return, we
exchanged our music and had many conversations afterward about music, arts and
the meaning of these in our lives. It
was as if, by viewing each others' artistic expressions, we began to understand
the other people. The walls that had displayed
how we were different from each other didn’t seem as high or as thick anymore.
How could art work in this way? What is in the purpose of art that makes it
function in this capacity?
History traces art back through the evolution of human cultures
and the need for people’s expression of life (marriage, war, death, etc.). Indeed,
music did come out of culture and out of the need to express the events in our
lives; however, something that I have found lingering around the concept of culture
and what it means to be human is a connection between our desire to create, our
desire for relationship, and our ability to perceive beauty.
While Tolstoy was eager to reject metaphysical
philosophy, many others have raised questions as to how art even exists. For art to speak, beauty must be present in it.
For art to be meaningful, desire for relationship
must move the artist to express themselves.
For art to exist at all, it needs to have a conscious intelligent being
with an aesthetic vision to create.
So the question becomes more complicated. The question “Where does art come from?”
becomes “Where does creativity, beauty and our desire for relationship come from?”
Whether you read it literally or figuratively, scripture
paints us a vivid picture of our original nature, before sin and before the
fall. We see God as the Creator of creation. We see the relationship between the Father, Son and Spirit united in one
being. We see the quintessence of beauty portrayed in the goodness of
creation being ruled by its Creator.
And we see humanity, created,
stamped with the image of the One who created it. To be human was to be in relationship with God, to enjoy beauty
in its fullness, and to express the creativity
given to us by our Creator.
What has changed? We
have fallen, yet we remain in our humanity with God’s image stamped into the
fabric of our souls.
Art points to who we were created to be, to reflect our Creator. We were made to be creative, relational, and able to distinguish beauty. In art, we find part of our original natures...and also the connection we have with our Creator.
And more...
Art comes not from ourselves, but from the highest forms and content. Life, we realize,
is the artwork of the Creator. It is the
canvas that the divine Artist applies paint to.
It is the drama that slowly unfolds, ever nearing to its conclusion...
~~~~~
Around the time that he finished his painting of “The Church in Auvers”, Vincent van Gogh
wrote to his friend Bernard:
“[Christ] lived serenely, as a greater
artist than all other artists, despising marble and clay as well as colour,
working in living flesh. That is to say,
this matchless artist, hardly to be conceived of by the obtuse instrument of
our modern, nervous, stupified brains, made neither statues nor pictures nor
books; he loudly proclaimed that he made…living men, immortals.
…Though this great
artist—Christ—disdained writing books on ideas (sensations), he surely
disdained the spoken word much less—particularly the parable. (What a sower, what a harvest, what a fig
tree!)
…These considerations, my dear
Bernard, lead us very far, very far afield; they raise us above art itself. They make us see the art of creating life,
the art of being immortal and alive at the same time.”
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