When did art achieve this simplified state called “expression”? I think I have noticed this in different peoples’ art created for the explicit end of expression. To the contextually unconscious artist, the piece he sets forth flows with logic, aesthetic rhythm, and at the very least, purpose. Unfortunately, from the outside, said simply systematized “expression” is either hidden by the lines of my subjective eyes as it is reformatted into an alien system of interpretive imposition or is lost and seen as no more than a regurgitation of semiotic seeds onto rocky soil. For example, I recently jotted down some poems onto the back of a few returned quizzes from a class when drawing abstract shapes and dots and connecting them with lines became boring. From that experience grew a desire to read other poetry, but rather than stumbling upon meaning, there was only pictures and figures of speech that I could on the one hand understand, and on the other make no sense of. I saw the semantic meaning, but was blind to the existential purpose.
Expression alone is a selfish monologue. Expression as communication is conversation. Expression as one voice in a conversation is a communion. It’s community. What does community require? Contextual humility. Understood within the context of communication, my role as an artist is no longer simply to express myself, but to forge a lens through which a particular individual (or group of individuals) might see reality. Firstly, I must have an object in mind which I want to communicate. Secondly, I must understand the story and context which brought me to the object in such a way as to compel me to communicate it again. Thirdly, I must recapitulate that narrative in new categories, however familiar to the original story they may be, in order that I might invite a particular contextually dependent person to participate in a fresh perspective on life. A new worldview. This is true contextualization. An invitation, not to try to make sense of objective expression, but to become subject to a story which has a role for those to whom the story is told.
I am reading a book right now called The Triune God by William Placher. In it, he talks about the incarnation as the ultimate speech act by communicating the incommunicable to the perpetually perplexed. In his first chapter, he surveys a variety of philosophers and their proofs for the existence of God, including Aquinas’s five ways, Anselm’s ontological argument, Descartes’s Cartesian foundationalism, Kirkegaard’s argument from the contrary, and more, tearing them apart one at a time by showing them to be internally inconsistent. The union between God and man in Christ was not simply an expression of the love of God to man, but an invitation for those who would never in a million years rightly understand reality from any of their many perspectives to an eye in the midst of the communicative storm of the redemptive story of God. One could even make the case that the incarnation was the prototype for the very paradigm of communication itself. The very paradigm for art. For community. For love. And the apex of this communicative act is not simply for us to recognize his expression, but to accept his invitation to subject ourselves to the very story of Christ himself. I participate in the most expressive art that not only exists, but provides the possibility for existence, by one narrative aspect of my personhood. Namely, I am subject.
