A Surreal Challenge
Posted on September 18 2009. Comments: 4
Posted by:
Andrew Bowles
We went to see the Salvador Dali exhibition and the gallery a few weeks ago. He was a very strange man, incredibly gifted and seemed to take on everything he read and heard and express that in his art. A big part of his work was 'surrealism', using shocking, unusual, and disturbing images to unsettle people from their ordinary way of looking at the world. If people are offended by a surreal work, then it has done its job, getting past usual ways of thinking and acting and saying 'Why?' to our social and cultural expectations.
I'm not naturally impressed by people who want to shock for the sake of it, it usually seems a bit childish and pretentious. But Christ himself was a very shocking person, and the cross is the ultimate work of surrealism, turning the values and expectations of the world upside-down and offending our tender religious sensibilities. But it comes through on the other side to true beauty and the transfigured world of the resurrection. Dali himself moved away in his later life from pure surrealism into explorations of beauty and the presence of God in the world. But he never accepted the world as it was given to him.
Is there room in the church for a genuine surrealist spirit?
Comments
Saturday, 19 September 2009
Justin Denholm says:
Yes, while being shocking simply for its own sake may be ‘childish and pretentious’, when you have an important message it becomes worth shocking people with. I think our challenge today as largely “respectable” Christians is to be prepared to be more shocking with Christ’s message - maybe sometimes this does need a ‘surrealist spirit’!
I was recently reflecting along similar lines in regards to political satire and the church (“What the Church and the Chaser can learn from each other”, link below for anyone interested) http://www.melbourne.anglican.com.au/main.php?pg=news&news_id=21878&s=886
Monday, 21 September 2009
Tim Foster says:
Arthur, you make me laugh! I look forward to reading your book review.
I think Christians need to recover our prophetic voice, and utilise creative arts and media to do so. So many of cultural critiques come from the secular left. Pity we don’t have the creativity.
Perhaps we (Evangelical Christians) are too much a product of our culture to engage with it prophetically?
Monday, 21 September 2009
Luke Isham says:
Perhaps we (Evangelical Christians) are too much a product of our culture to engage with it prophetically?
On the contrary I think there’s been great Evangelical Christian engagement with culture, particularly in the arts.
For example: Francis Schaeffer, Calvin Seerveld and our own local Warren Breninger.
(Here’s a radical yet interesting suggest, make Warren Breninger our artist-in-residence at Ridley College!)
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Friday, 18 September 2009
Arthur Davis says:
I’ve just reviewed William Willimon’s “Calling and Character: Virtues of the Ordained Life” for Ministry Formation. Willimon spends a fair bit of time making similar points: that God’s way is always subversive, upending the world’s ways, which must make the church inherently cruciform. For example, his final chapter, ‘New Creation’, has a section on humour and gospel living. I found it so refreshing to read all this in a book about ordination!