Makoto Fujimura Keynote: Notes

Transcription

I A M I N H A B I T | A R T I N S PAC E A N D T I M E | O C TO B E R 3 – 5 , 2 0 1 3 | N E W YO R K C I T Y
ART I N S PAC E AN D TI M E
OC TO B ER 3 –5 , 2013
N E W YO R K CIT Y
Makoto Fujimura
Keynote: Notes
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.”
— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
M A KOTO F U J I M U R A K E Y N OT E : N OT E S
1
“ TI M E PR E S E NT, TI M E PA ST. . .”
“Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time
future. And time future contained in time past”
Thus T.S. Eliot begins his masterpiece, his last
poem, “Four Quartets.”
“Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time
future.”
Eliot alludes to the possibility of poetry to capture
Time—past, present and future. Tim Keller, in a
lecture in the late ’90s for IAM, called this poetic
possibility “Time-Fulness.” Eliot reaches, in a
single stretch of his poetic line, a magisterial sweep
to define the Beginning, echoing John 1, “In the
Beginning was the Word, and Word was with God.” Eliot finds in his “Four Quartets” Time-Fulness.
I am going to open the conference by invoking
three twentieth-century masters: T.S. Eliot, the
Nobel laureate of “The Wasteland” and “Four
Quartets”; Isak Dinesen, who according to
Hemingway should have won the Nobel for her
magical stories including “Babette’s Feast”; and
Olivier Messiaen, whose composition “Quartet for
the End of Time” inspired Chris Theofanidis, our
featured composer tonight. M A KOTO F U J I M U R A K E Y N OT E : N OT E S
2
If Eliot found his Time-Fulness—a journey from “The Wasteland”
to “The Still Point” —in “Four Quartets,” Isak Dinesen finds her
magic in “Babette’s Feast.”
“In Norway there is a fjord, a long narrow arm of the sea between
tall mountains.”
She begins her story at the northern edge of the
European continent. It is to this edge that Babette
escapes, fleeing from the violent times in Paris. If Eliot finds his fulfillment at the edge of Time,
Dinesen finds hers at the edge of a continent. It is an
austere landscape, and the people on that edge are
equally austere, protecting their scarce resources in
a barren land. Babette enters, “haggard and wildeyed,” with a letter from Monsieur Papin saying that
“Babette can cook.” Babette is pushed to the edge
of her exile, escaping Paris in
the turmoil of its civil wars,
and becoming, unexpectedly,
the catalyst for a feast of
grace.
These are voices from the
edge, between time and
space. These artists wrote and
created toward the liminal. Great art invokes: it invites us
into the presence, for a feast
at the edge of time and space.
3
What if this place, in the upper west side of New
York—what if this time, October of 2013— what
if this moment is also on the edge, the edge of
Space and Time? What if artists who are intuiting
more than what we can rationally analyze, could
actually capture a grand story, sing a song, dance
a movement, capture the theater of that moment? What if our conference captures the edge of time
and space?
If we are on that edge, standing over the abyss,
looking into it, what shall we create? What painting
will you paint? What poem will you write? What
dance will you choreograph? What play will you
perform? What music will you offer?
It is said that as Franz Schubert, the composer
whose life spanned the18th and 19th centuries,
lay on his deathbed, his friends came to play
Beethoven’s late Quartet. Opus 131 is a score that
Eliot considered foundational in writing the “Four
Quartets.” M A KOTO F U J I M U R A K E Y N OT E : N OT E S
4
Watch this moment from the film A Late Quartet, in which
a character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, a second
violinist, struggles with his role, his marriage and his life. Yet, he tells his daughter, a budding musician, about this gift
of music that friends offered to Schubert as he lay dying. In
this film, the daughter is
also a violinist who has
great technical ability, but
her music seems to lack
resonance, about to quit.
What would art look like? How do you play that
score? What is Art, especially at the edge of Time
and Space? How do we define Art, as we face
traumas, disasters, our journeys into the dark—as
we look straight into the abyss?
What makes art endure is not the technical
mastery. Art must transcend the utility, the
machinery, the pragmatics of the moment. Art
may seem to be much like a “wild-eyed” woman
from Paris whose only purpose is to cook and serve
something ordinary using limited resources. And
yet, we know, as artists, that there is more to it;
“A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor, We have
something, Mesdames, of which other people know
nothing.”
So the artist keeps making art, and the band keeps
playing.
5
Why did the bandleader Wallace Hartley and
his band keep playing their music aboard the
sinking Titanic? What purpose did that serve?
Why sacrifice their lives just to play on? Our friend
Steve Turner researched this remarkable story and
wrote a book called The Band that Played On: The
Extraordinary Story of the Eight Musicians on the
Titanic. Steve writes this:
“Despite the awfulness of what was happening, the backdrop
was a scene of beauty: a clear sky, a bright moon, clearly
visible stars, flat undisturbed water, and an immense liner
blazing with pinholes of light. The music would have carried
farther than usual because for most of the time there were no
competing sounds from engines or waves. Passengers who left
from both port and starboard told similar stories of being able
to hear the band as they were quickly rowed away to avoid the
inevitable drag of the suction. Emily Rugg claimed she could
hear the band from a mile away.”
Music could be heard a mile away because of
the silence of a machine gone dead. The prideful
symbol of industrial prowess had been struck to
silence by an iceberg. In that silence, Music and Art
at the edge of Time and Space will have gratuitous
potency beyond the utility.
Human beings are not created to be machines, or
mere animals. Human beings need music and
art. I believe that is the message from that band
that kept on playing. Art is the remnant of that
indelible mark of our humanity. It is what makes us
mysterious, indefinable and glorious.
6
Human beings are not created to be machines, or
mere animals. Human beings need music and
art. I believe that is the message from that band
that kept on playing. Art is the remnant of that
indelible mark of our humanity. It is what makes us
mysterious, indefinable and glorious.
As the legendary clarinet player Charles Neidich
will share at the concert tonight, Oliver Messiaen,
a French composer, began to write “Quartet at
the End of Time” on “an arduous forty-three mile
march.” He and several of his musician friends had
been captured by the Germans in France in 1940. His wife wrote:
“They suffered for several days without
water or food until finally they arrived
at a place where water was distributed...
Thousands of soldiers literally fought
each other in order to get a drink of water. Messiaen was seated in a little courtyard
and he began to take out of his pocket
a score, some music, which he began to
read.”
7
This score was called “Abyss of the Birds,” and it
was written for Akoka, a clarinet player who was
by his side. Akoka would end up playing the score.
Instead of fighting for water and food, they created
music. Messiaen wrote:
“Conceived and composed during my captivity, the ‘Quartet
for the End of Time’ was premiered in Stalag VIII A, in January
1941. It took place in Gorlitz, in Silesia, in a dreadful cold. Stalag was buried in snow. We were 30,000 prisoners (French
for the most part, with a few Poles and Belgians). The four
musicians played on broken instruments: Etienne Pasquier’s
cello had only 3 strings; the key of my upright piano remained
lowered when depressed... It’s on this piano, with my three
fellow musicians, dressed in the oddest way...(our clothes were)
completely tattered, and wooden clogs large enough for the
blood to circulate despite the snow underfoot...(it was on this
piano) that I played my ‘Quartet for the End of Time,’ before
an audience of 5,000 people. The most diverse classes of
society were mingled: farmers, factory workers, intellectuals,
professional servicemen, doctors, (and) priests. Never before
have I been listened to with such attention and understanding.”
I suggest that tonight, when you hear the score
of the “Quartet for the End of Time,” and as you
listen to Theofanidis’ “At the Still Point,” try to place
yourself in that snow-filled barren Wasteland of a
P.O.W. camp—or on the rowboats a mile away from
the ill-fated Titanic. We may hear, truly hear, music
for the first time as it should be heard, at the edge of
Time and Space.
8
“Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now, Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate Chimera.”
— “Burnt Norton,” T.S. Eliot
9
Enduring art presents to us an inhabited space in
Time-fulness.
“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,”
…because today that inhabited space is being forced
out of our day-to-day lives, to surrender to the
ideological gridlocks of our time. We compose our
art in our P.O.W. camps of Culture Wars, a cultural
Wasteland created by the ideology of utility, and
our lust for control and certainty. Culture Wars
dehumanize, by creating ideological polarities.
They reduce human beings to practical labels. In this camp, art must be deemed useful to the
utility of a particular war, or an institution, or a
church. Art is easily dismissed in such Culture
Wars mindset, because a true artist insists on
writing songs that we can sing together. Because
art resides in the heart of humanity, and because
society has rejected the gratuitous nature of art, art
is exiled into the vacant lots of abandoned postindustrial cities. Useless. Abandoned at the edge of
Time and Space. But we must recall that even the
Nazis soldiers recognized Messiaen’s music, and
gave him a little space and time to create, and to
even to have a concert for 5,000, at the edge of Time
and Space. M A KOTO F U J I M U R A K E Y N OT E : N OT E S
10
Recently The Brooklyn Rail, one of the most
provocative art newspapers around, asked many
artists and critics to define art in some way. Here is
my answer to that question— “What is art?”
This definition may only apply at the edge of Time
and Space. Because in such a place, Art is an expression of our
faith. This perhaps-transgressive definition of Art holds
true in Eliot, in Dinesen and in Messiaen. I am going to push this further. What if Art = Faith?—and, therefore, Faith = Art?
Let’s dance with this a little bit, defining some
terms.
11
As Christian Wiman notes in his remarkable book
My Bright Abyss, there is a difference between faith
and belief. Belief is a check-list of what we assent
to—while faith is a journey of wrestling toward
the mystery of the Divine. It is faith that moves
mountains, not belief. Belief systems sometimes
will do the opposite of faith; belief system will make
us manageable, easy to control and manipulate, as
Hitler knew so well. It is faith that moves us toward
the edge of Time and Space, that cultivates in us the
daring to play music instead of fighting for water
and food, that draws us to insist that the Band play
on.
T.S. Eliot noted that we cannot define culture apart
from religion.
“No culture,” he said in his Notes Towards a Definition of
Culture, “can appear or develop except in relation to a religion”
Art is, and always has been, and always will be
intrinsically religious. Art is a religious expression. Art is all about our reason for existence, which I
define to be a religious journey. Now, I am using
the word “religious” rather broadly. I posit here that
everyone is “religious.” Atheists are just as faithful
to their convictions, their creed, as Christians
are—or perhaps even more so. Art has always been
about our faith, and even in the most atheistic and
“secular” of times, artists expressed what they saw
at the edge of Time and Space—what they valued,
what they longed for. They kept on playing.
The art world itself is undeniably religious. It has its
own high priests and shamans. We cannot escape
these inclinations, nor our liturgies, especially at
the edge of Time and Space. M A KOTO F U J I M U R A K E Y N OT E : N OT E S
12
T.S. Eliot also noted that culture can be defined
as “that which makes life worth living.” Art is
the evidence of that search for the elusive path
toward our thriving, toward “that which makes
life worth living.” Art can therefore be defined
as “the substance of things hoped for,” the visible
thread of that worthiness of life revealed in culture. Of course, this is the term the writer of the Book
of Hebrews used to describe faith: “Now faith is
the substance of things hoped for, the evidence
of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Art also is “the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of
things not seen.”
As I close, I want to suggest three perspectives and
outcomes that we can wrestle with as we create
toward our thriving. If art = faith, then three major
paradigms of our time that force us toward the edge
of Time and Space can create an opportunity, and
can trigger a culture that moves toward “that which
makes life worth living.” Those three paradigms are
9/11, 3/11 and 11/9. The question I’d like to pursue
is how might we respond to them. 9/11 represents a disaster paradigm that leads to
Ground Zero conditions. It represents a world of
ideological, territorial and religious wars, and the
hostile realities of terrorism at work. I have spent
the last decade exploring a recovery of imagination
in Ground Zero conditions. Messiaen wrote his
music in conditions like these. Eliot wrote his
poems, and Dinesen wrote her stories, under
Ground Zero conditions. They serve as our guides
toward the abyss.
13
3/11, the date of the cataclysmic tsunami that devastated
northern Japan, is also a disaster paradigm, but one
caused by nature, not by human beings. My recent works,
in a series called Walking on Water, have been a response
to the 3/11 disaster and its after-effects. While terrorism
is a failure of imagination to foster toward our thrivings,
natural disasters come as an inevitable intrusion into our
fallen world. Artistic response to an intrusion like this
may be simply an effort to build back to normality. But
there is lament in the process, and we have not explored
that well, as a culture. T.S. Eliot deals with this theme in
“The Dry Salvages” as he describes the fear of fisherman’s
wives as they wait for their husbands to get through the
“perfect storms” of New England. 11/9 refers to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was Thomas
Friedman who contrasted the type of political action that
led to 9/11, with the very different political action that
produced the events of 11/9. 11/9 represents liberation. It is a celebration of freed
people.
What if we created from the perspective of liberation—
of reunification, even beyond the abyss—from the
perspective of a feast?
14
What if there is a feast for the end of time and space?
Recent cleaning of “The Last Supper” revealed that
da Vinci painted a full Renaissance feast at the table
for the Last Supper.
Isak Dinesen wrote about a feast. A feast requires
a gratuitous, extravagant commitment. We are the
recipients of a feast to which we do not deserve to be
invited.
If we enter a feast to which we know we do not
deserve to be invited, what should our response be? Should we not go beyond the irony and cynicism
of our time? If culture is a Feast beyond the abyss,
should we not be expressing that reality? Christians
believe this, but they do not live it. We do not live
with the conviction of our faith. We do not proclaim
that the Feast has already begun, and the invitations
need to be sent out. We are still trapped in a P.O.W.
camp of utilitarian pragmatism, a grey world in
which beauty is easily dismissed as unnecessary. M A KOTO F U J I M U R A K E Y N OT E : N OT E S
15
Standing, or sitting, at the Feast, what would the abyss
look like?
That is what I will be painting for the next decade, I hope.
I call this approach Culture Care.
Instead of fighting for resources, instead of mindlessly
being caught up in a Culture Wars argument that
assumes limited resources define our times, I want to
cultivate a culture that is built on the unlimited resources
of the Feast to come. Instead of defining our times and
our vocations and our communities in utilitarian terms, I
want to have faith to claim art as a way to enact generosity,
as providing genesis moments for our creativity, as paving
the way for the next generations. I want to “know the place
for the first time.” I want to re-unify art and faith. I want to
witness “the children in the apple tree” leading us into the
mystery. Generative living does not begin with a Culture
Wars mindset by defining your opponents and enemies. A
generative journey begins at the Feast.
In the P.O.W. barracks of German-occupied France, music
rang out from a three-stringed cello with the aroma of
the Feast to come. Messiaen was Catholic; he believed in
such a paradigm. In a strange pitting of the sacred and
the profane, Messiaen’s notes opposed the forces of the evil
theatre of Hitler himself. Hitler’s “art,” his belief system,
forced many into the Abyss, but Messiaen’s music looks
beyond the Abyss and gives us a glimpse of our identities
as participants in the Feast.
Welcome to this Feast, at “The Still Point,” a homecoming
for artists and friends.
16

Makoto Fujimura Keynote: Notes

Transcription

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