Garbage as Art

“The moment when one thing turns into another is the most beautiful moment.”

Thus superstar Brazilian artist Vik Muniz expresses something of his motivation in using unconventional, found materials to create surprising photographic portraits of marginalized people. He once used the sugar from their crops to portray the deprived children of Caribbean plantation workers.

As he was working to create a project using garbage, searching for the subject of the portraits, filmmaker Lucy Walker chronicled the discussions and the process. The journey led Muniz to the catadores who pick through Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The resulting film, Waste Land, (I watched it on Netflix) shows that after meeting the catadores, Muniz decided to turn the project into a collaboration with them. (Read and see more here.)

Essentially self-designated pickers of recyclable materials, it is difficult to imagine a more marginalized population than the catadores. They pick through the garbage discarded by other Brazilians to find valuable recyclables.

Waste Land portrays the dignity and suffering of these workers. Muniz decides to give the proceeds from the photographs he creates of the finished pieces to the catadores. The funds, which were significant, were used to improve their lives: the building of a community center, a library, an education center, and to maintain trucks for the pickers union that one of the catadores founded.

Jardim Gramacho is scheduled to be closed this year, and the association of pickers is joining efforts to provide job training so that the catadores can find other employment and betters lives.

The Sundance Film Festival said that Walker’s film offers “stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the dignity that can be found in personal determination.” But it is Muniz himself who shows us how art can elevate materials and how it can elevate humanity. This is art, and artistic process which produces real change in the world. Transformative. Generative.

There is something amazing about the miracle of one thing becoming another. It is the creative moment. The pickers look at garbage and see things of value. Muniz takes recyclables and makes art.

What are you transforming? What are you generating?

Art as voice

In the rear-view mirror my youngest son’s face was only an outline. But I could make out the shape of his cool new glasses, and see that he was looking out the window as we drove through a Tennessee thunderstorm last night. I wondered what he was thinking about.

I have been reading and thinking about disability a good bit in the last several months, and I ask your indulgence as this entry may veer off the road of art, theology, and culture. Or maybe not.

About two and half years ago, my son, then fifteen years old, was transitioning off of the serotonin reuptake inhibitor that helped him sit in his schoolroom and control his impulses (which others, including me, found disruptive), in preparation for a change of prescription.

It was as if he came briefly out of a fog. The evidence of this was a week during which he began to draw colorful images. They were clearly inspired by a trip to the grocery store and a close encounter with an aquarium of live lobsters and crabs.

Amazing. Detailed. Dynamic. Colorful. No staying inside the lines, because there were no lines. These were original and creative.

Then, as the new medicines had their effect, that creative expression disappeared again.

We have struggled to help him find his voice, and release his expression. His thoughts. His needs. His questions. His opinions. His way of seeing the world.

What he finds happy or sad, beautiful or terrible, just or unjust, tasty or awful. What he imagines and dreams.

Then, yesterday, neither coached nor encouraged to do so, he picked up his colored markers and drew.

An artistic impulse. A creative initiative.


This little drawing is a reminder that he is there.

Perhaps waiting for us to help him out of his box, filled with fog.

Riding in the car, maybe he was thinking about bugs and other crawling creatures. Or about drawing something. Or maybe he was finding the power of the thunderstorm amazing. Or wondering if the wind was cold.

Or maybe he was imagining what it would like to dance with a beautiful girl in the rain.

A kind of Emptying

The other day some friends were at our house and wanted to see the backyard. So we took a moment away from the grill ("If you're looking it ain't cookin'"). In the back corner, hidden behind some fencing, we discovered what happens to a project left half-finished.

The work that I had done in preparation for a small shed, a place for our bikes and my mower, seemed to have vanished. The hard rains, the fertile soil and persistent weeds and scrub trees had conspired to undo what I had begun.

That image came to my mind today as I was reading about the middle ages. Not the European ones. If I find myself confronted with certain boundaries, certain limits or lines inside of which I live, it is because I realize that there are not just a few projects that have gone a bit wild, reclaimed while I was busy doing other things.
There is something worrisome about that.

Humility is tough to talk about. Don't worry, I don't think I have got it figured out. I may not even be more humble than I was. But I am learning something.

It is hard not to agree with Dave Goetz when he suggests that “self-knowledge and its visible corollary, humility, seem not to be a one-time acquisition like conversion or an urgent sense of call that often marks the beginner years of faith. It’s a slow, agonizing progression as the soul makes it way toward God.” (CT Dec. 2010, p.53) But that does not it make it pleasant.

My eyes are always on the horizon and my heart imagines what is possible and moves me forward to create what should be. I love to catalyze and encourage. I love to dream, and listen to dreams. And then to take action.

The weeds that follow me around are annoying, but I am inspired by T. S. Elliot who wrote: “old men should be explorers, ” and by these words from Isaiah: “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” I am not old yet.

The coolest thing

I just returned from a week in Paris visiting La Fonderie. Seeing friends and co-workers, meeting new artists in the space we opened, hearing about their dreams and projects, their successes and challenges. It is always inspiring to be with creative people.

Speaking about new technology that promises to erase the line between television and computer, Google is quoted in Newsweek (Oct 17 2010) as saying: “The coolest thing about Google TV is that we don’t even know what the coolest thing about it will be.”

No matter what one might think about Google, a corporation like others financially motivated to get people to use their services, that statement expresses a kind of vision that leaves the horizon open for those who would like to explore it and even move it.

It is a vision that invites people in, and challenges them to innovate and create. To imagine.

It is the kind of invitation that I try to give to those around me. Because there are endless possibilities for those who are open to the idea that we don’t yet know what the defining moment or body of work or mark of our lives will be.

That describes, at least in part, an artistic journey and a creative life.

What will you create today?

Nonprofit art galleries

The relationship between money and art can be an ugly one, and the realities of how tough it is to make a living as an artist is never so obvious as during economic periods like the one we find ourselves in right now. But it is never easy to make one's living through art, whether in visual or performing arts, on the stage or behind the camera. When things get tight financially, it is even more difficult for artists to do their art...and pay the bills.

In an interview by Zoe Feigenbaum, Daniel Joseph Martinez said that commercial galleries and museums are mechanisms in a system that is "well fortified and very difficult (for artists) to penetrate. Yet it seems to be in full control of what we think of as taste. This suggests that there is a relationship between sales and the actual meaning of art, which, of course, there isn't."

Martinez, a controversial L.A. artist, suggests that the end of the nonprofit art movement in the 90's limits the potential of the distribution of ideas and the dissemination of art through exhibitions. I don't agree with his politics, but here he and I are on the same page. Because I, too, am interested in the distribution of ideas and the dissemination of art.

One of the reasons la fonderie opened an arts gallery/cultural space in Paris was to provide a platform for artists and musicians and playwrights. It is not a commercial gallery or concert venue, but it gives artists a chance to have their work seen and heard. And it is a very busy place.

Some have rightly thought that it was a unique space because of the values and spiritual commitments of the team of volunteers who run it. But at the deepest level, it is a space that is committed to unleashing the voice of the artist in whatever art form he or she might work. It is about entering into the conversations that are happening in culture, and about starting a few new ones.

And although that does not make what we do unique, it makes it the kind of place we hope will increasingly be found in our towns and cities. What is going on where you live?

Just the art, please

Maybe it is only an over-reaction to a presumably redundant discussion on a subject in which many artists are not at all interested, but upon reading a post on a blog that has some very interesting things to say about art and creativity, I found myself formulating some responses to several points.

The blog started: “Good Christian art is not an oxymoron, although anecdotal evidence and a survey of the statistics might make it seem that way. The fact is that there are good Christian artists making good art, but they are the exception rather than the rule, and the leaders in the fields of art seem to be non-Christians. Why? There is no single explanation, but rather many forces that have contributed to the present situation.”

What follows are some thoughts on the explanations listed in the blog.

If we start with the possibility of christian as an adjective applied to art, it is difficult to imagine being able to converse with the arts community. It may be more helpful to acknowledge that much of what is created as art is actually bad in a qualitative sense. It is not only Christians who make bad art. The discussion might be better framed in response to the question of why there are so few Christians who excel as innovators and leaders in the world of art, media and entertainment.

The church has cultivated a culture that largely does not value art as a part of who we are, and thus the subject of redemption. Not in the sense that we need to “redeem Hollywood” (read: get rid of all those people) or “restore the arts” (read: make it all nice and insist that it have a clear message with familiar symbols and images), but in the sense that redeemed humanity is one that is dancing and singing and writing and painting and making films…. An unleashing of creativity coming from those being transformed by God in Christ.

In addition to a continuing renewal of the arts in the life of the church, the need for an articulate Christian voice in secondary art education is critical. It is also important both that theological education include courses in the arts and that arts education include interaction with Biblical studies and theology.

As the founder of an arts group in Paris, my experience and reflection lead me to believe that it is always to the “masters” that students should go to learn and develop their craft. Our goal is to spiritually nurture those emerging creatives who will become the masters of tomorrow. To disciple those artists, to give Biblical and intellectual training so that they will have sure foundations is a great task with potential as endless as the pool of creative visions.

Perhaps there are those who think that being a Christian diminishes a person’s creativity, but in this discussion the more important falsehood is the idea that the Christian taps into a creative source that allows them to bypass the hard work, discipline, vulnerability, failure, commitment and patience that are necessarily a part of the artistic process. Our relationship with God, and our maturity in Christ, should impact our generosity and ability to share mercy, to recognize the grace of God at work in the lives of people around us, including those artists who do not recognize that grace or name the Name.

Inspiration can suffer under the executing hand of the artist. It is the human dilemma.

That a person who is listening to the wind of the spirit of God would be inspired is no surprise. But they still have to put the paint on the canvas or write the choreography.

Art that is motivated by some idea of “what the people need to see” or hear is more propaganda than art, and no less than “commercial art” (we all want to make a living) is often identifiable by its lack of dimension and depth. The greatest works seem to instead have been motivated by something deeply inside the artist, something that had to be painted or written or built. These are the voices that we long to hear.

The voice of the Old Testament prophet was directed towards the people who imagined themselves, and in fact were, the people of God. To use the image of the artist as prophet without welcoming the hard “truths” into our faith communities is to misinterpret the role of the prophet and the artist, as if they were commissioned to confront the world as evangelists.

Perhaps the artist has been gifted in order to “glorify God and enjoy Him”, and help us, too, enjoy God and all that He has made, and have greater compassion by allowing us to “see” what they see, sometimes with dancing, sometimes with mourning, in the world as it is, and what they imagine about how things could be.

And that could be great art.