This past September, in response to Ken’s post about mashing up Mormon literature and the purposes behind the repurposing of language and literature, in general, Ardis asked a question that turned my wheels a-spinnin’. Asked she, “[W]hat’s the point of being deliberately, unrelentingly unoriginal” by taking others’ work, repurposing it, and sending it out into the world? “Why is suppressing the urge toward originality,” as she assumes mash-up arists do, “more conducive to self-expression than the effort to, you know, actually be self-expressive?”

Seuss-style, I respond to Ardis’ question with three things (I was going to add my comment to the post itself, but my response grew beyond comment-length; hence, this):

Thing One: I don’t think it’s productive to argue that all mash-ups or remixes suppress the urge toward originality and self-expression. I’m thinking here of seven instances—four specific and three more general, though even as I think I stir up more instances—in which artists/creators have, to various degrees, remixed different aspects of culture or other preexisting materials in order to create something new:

a. God, who didn’t create anything ex nihilo, but who remixed extant materials in order to build universes, galaxies, worlds, us. And who’s going to call God unoriginal?

b. Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (among other works) in which he’s “borrowed” compositional elements, plot lines, bits of dialogue, costumes, etc., from a range of films to “piece” together his own story. Here’s a video that details some of these “borrowings.” (Caution: contains some graphic scenes).

Everything Is A Remix: KILL BILL from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

c. Greg Michael Gillis (aka Girl Talk), a musician who specializes in mashups and digital sampling. Here’s a video that illustrates his creative process, wherein he “borrows” a small bit of music (in this case a second or so of an Elvis Costello song) and manipulates it in various ways in order to construct a new, shall we call it, original song:

Girl Talk Creates a Mashup from OpenSourceCinema on YouTube.

Girl Talk has a huge following and is the subject of a really interesting documentary called RiP: A Remix Manifesto. For anyone interested, the film’s available in parts on YouTube and in full on Hulu. It’s a really interesting exploration of the issues surrounding mashups, including copyright laws and creativity. I especially like its opening line: “Today we’re going to create a mashup, a fun and adventurous way to create something fresh out of something stale.”

d. Mister Tim, who in his live-looping act not only mashes himself up against himself, but who also “covers” and mashes up songs from other arists as well in order to entertain audiences. I’ve embedded an example below. Mister Tim has appeared on AMV before, courtesy of mash-up lover Laura.

Mister Tim Live-Looping SWEET DREAMS (medley): 2009 Las Vegas A Cappella Summit from MisterTimVids on YouTube.

e. Found poems, which “take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.” This poetic form became prominent in the twentieth-century, in the shadow of Pop Art (think Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp) (ref).

In 1995, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard published a collection of found poems called Mornings Like This. In the Author’s Note, she suggests, as I have here, that found poems are “the literary equivalents of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Duchamp’s bicycle,” then she offers up something about what a poet does when s/he remixes existing texts into poetry: “By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles,” between it’s non-remixed function and it’s remixed function, wherein “[t]he poet adds,” she continues, “or at any rate increases, the element of delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of poetry. It serves up whole texts [to readers], or uninterrupted fragments of texts,” in the form and language of poetry (ix). So found poetry is ironic poetry, poetry conceived of and meant to critique, even overturn, the ironies of an ironic age. Dillard’s conclusion to her Note is telling in this regard, “This [book] is [the result of] editing at its extreme: writing without composing. Half the poems seek to serve poetry’s oldest and most sincere aims”—to create an aesthetic experience of human life and to give readers pleasure in language being perhaps two of them—”with one of its newest and most ironic methods, to dig deep with a shallow tool. The other half” of the poems, she says, “are just jokes” (x).

One of Dillard’s poems, “The Sign of Your Father,” seems apropos to our current context: discussing the artistic uses, reuses, and recycling of religious texts; the religious uses of art and culture. Here’s the poem (the epigraph cites its original context):

(From Mornings Like This, p. 8-9.)

In her Author’s Note, Dillard comments briefly on one function of this remixed text (the religious nature and implications of which she seems especially critical):

The New Testament Apocrypha is a loose collection of written legends and, chiefly, torn and damaged fragments. Scholar-editors print such texts carefully to show—using ellipses and question marks—where fragments break off and which translations are guesses. An edition of the New Testament Apocrypha yields a poem ["The Sign of Your Father"] about the baffling quality of Christ’s utterances and the absurdly fragmentary nature of spiritual knowledge. Like many of these poems, it looks surprisingly sober on the page. (x)

f. The oral-formulaic composition of epic poetry, wherein (the theory goes) poets like Homer and contemporary Serbo-Croatian poets drew/draw from a stockpile of formulas (including phrases and symbols) as aids to help them compose (”mash-up”) poems “on-the-fly,” in the act of performance. This theory was first posited and explored in depth by Albert Lord in his book Singer of Tales (from which I’ve only read a page or two). It continues to be explored and developed by oral performance scholars, including John Miles Foley, who offers an excellent introduction to the topic in his book How To Read an Oral Poem.

g. Language itself, which thrives because humans continually mash-up “stale” letters and words in different combinations in order to create “fresh” and mind-expanding combinations.

Which leads me, somewhat indirectly, to

Thing Two: Everything is a remix. Languages, cultures, literatures (including scripture, as Ken suggests), music, films. Nothing can be created ex nihilo. No act of self-expression ever arises independently of other expressive acts and materials. The link in my first statement leads to an excellent series of videos produced and distributed by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson and titled, of course, “Everything is a Remix.” These videos explore the idea of mash-ups and remix culture in ways that question a) our general take on creativity as making something wholly original and b) a lot of the premises of copyright laws, which leads me, again, to

Thing Three: In light of the explosion of creativity, knowledge-sharing, and user-generated content made possible in the digital age, I wonder how we might reconsider our deep-seated and fundamental reliance on copyright and intellectual property laws as means to control access to and distribution of information. I’m not saying everything needs to be distributed free-of-charge or that creators should surrender all rights to their creations. Lawrence Lessig, a lawyer, professor, political activist, and authority on issues of copyright, speaks convincingly to the idea that many of our laws may just be choking creativity. Many others (including Lessig and, to make the connection to some aspect of Mormon culture, BYU professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology David Wiley) are building a Creative Commons and working to instill open values and to implement the open sharing of knowledge in culture and education, among other things.

With our current, perhaps overly-strict conception of intellectual property and the policing strategies that accompany this strictness—especially in academia, though academia’s concerns over plagiarism often make their way into the broader culture—the knee jerk reaction many people have to issues of plagiarism might just create more problems than it pretends to solve. I think, for instance, of one of my wife’s former professors who wanted her students to cite every claim they make in their papers—every claim. She wanted to know where all of their ideas originated. Not only does this approach to writing and scholarship create a very prohibitive reading experience—who wants to read something with a citation, or often, multiple citations, after every sentence?—it’s unrealistic, especially since (per Thing Two) every idea is derivative and who keeps track of the source behind every idea they’ve ever had? Wiley shares a similar experience in this video on open education and the future (at about the 11 minute mark). Again, I’m not arguing that we allow students, scholars, writers, artists, etc., to draw wholesale from others’ work without giving credit where credit should be given. But I am suggesting that it’s probably time to think about and approach our discussions regarding plagiarism differently, including by exploring the places where the assumptions of a wholly print culture stand in opposition to the radical openness made possible by the digital age. This openness mirrors in some fundamental ways the openness of primarily oral cultures (as suggested in 1f) where language and its public performance are viewed as aggregative and communal because they build quite explicitly and openly upon what’s come before. And, shocker: performers in these cultures don’t cite their predecessors’ work.

As regards the mashing of Mormon literature, I think Gideon Burton has done something interesting and important with his Open Source Sonnets project, which he’s published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. What that means is simply that others are free to copy, adapt, distribute, transmit, and make commercial use of Gideon’s work, as long as they give proper attribution. Many of his sonnets are imitations (of Shakespeare, Milton, traditional carols, hymns, etc.) and several remix elements of scripture, generally, and Mormon culture, specifically. These include, to name only several, “Shakespeares of Our Own”, “Seeking the Good”, “Thy Mind, Oh Man”, “We Will Cross the River” (which was further remixed by Kathy Cowley), “The Shining One”, “Kingdoms Many”, “The Lord’s Prayer”, “His Yoke is Easy”, and “Unto the Least”. I think the openness with which Gideon has offered these poems and the remix-methods by which he composed them and with which others have responded creates a precedent that other Mormon writers might follow, in one way or another. It further presents an interesting test case of what Ken points to in terms of the possibilities of Mormon literary mash-ups and Mormon remix culture in general. But I’m not prepared to fully explore that case today. However, it’s in the works.

So let’s ruminate away for a minute on the creative possibilities of repurposed culture. And if you have additional examples of mashed-up artistry, share away…

Entrance to the Gilgal Garden

Last week, I visited the Gilgal Garden (749 East 500 South, Salt Lake City) for the first time, and I came away impressed and surprised. I knew quite a bit about the garden before my visit, from articles online and the initial campaign to preserve the garden in 1997. Still, the garden far exceeded my expectations, leaving me awestruck by the audacity of Child’s attempt to literally imprint in stone a personal expression of faith and…

“create a sanctuary or atmosphere in my yard that will shut out fear and keep one’s mind young and alert to the last…”

Thomas Battersby Child, Jr. (1888-1963), the garden’s designer, was a masonry contractor and bishop of Salt Lake City’s Tenth Ward for 19 years (itself an impressive achievement—today bishops usually don’t serve longer than five years). In 1945 he began work on the garden in an attempt “to give physical form to his deep-felt beliefs.” Child put it this way:

If you want to be brought down to earth in your thinking and studying, try to make your thoughts express themselves with your hands.

Captain of the Lord's Host

In addition to working much of the stone himself, Child involved his son-in-law, Bryant Higgs, a skilled welder, and sculptor Maurice Brooks in the project; and along the way, he pioneered the use of the oxyacetylene torch for cutting stone. Child was proud of the fact that he had only brought raw materials to the garden. He scoured the state for stones weighing up to 62 tons, which were then brought to the garden and carved on site.

While this is quite impressive, none of this occurred to me when I walked into the garden — I didn’t read the brochure until after I had seen everything.

The Testimony of Job

Instead, I was first struck by how much of the garden is about text. More than 70 stones in the garden have been engraved with texts: scriptures, poems and hymn texts and other philosophical statements that reflect what Child felt. It seemed to me like the cards, stickers and post-it notes we today put up in offices and on the sides of computer screens—except that in this case the sayings are literally carved in stone.

The Scriptures on the Rock

Later, I was overwhelmed by the scale of the garden and the amount of effort Child put into his project—some 18 years of his life. In addition to the texts carved in stone, Child produced 13 sculptures, the last of which was incomplete, and is, I think, one of the most intriguing in the garden. Called “the Monument to the Priesthood,” it is like much of the garden; at once obvious and obscure. Four books that rest on a rock represent the standard works on the rock of revelation. A carved globe, representing the world, was to rest on  the books, but Child couldn’t finish the globe before he died. Next to the books is an arch, and on the far side of the arch is a tall, two-part spire, representing the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods, topped off by a wire sculpture of the Angel Moroni.

The Joseph Smith Sphynx

Gilgal is perhaps best known for the Joseph Smith Sphynx, which includes an illustration of a Temple carved into its front (between the paws and below the face). Child clarified the sculpture’s meaning with a fragment of a well-known poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which he carved in a text stone near the Sphynx:

The Sphynx is drowsy
Her wings are furled
Her ear is heavy
She broods on the world

Who’ll tell me her secret
The ages have kept?
I awaited the seer
While they slumbered and slept

To those who see Gilgal cold, without knowing anything about it, this all might come across as rather strange. Child recognized this possibility, writing:

You don’t have to agree with me. You may think I am a nut, but I hope I have aroused your thinking and curiosity.

What is important in all forms of art, I think, is the meaning that we, the consumers of art, can glean from it. It may be that, given how familiar many of the texts are and how obvious some of the sculpture is, that the meaning found at Gilgal is something we already have elsewhere. But looking beyond the obvious, I think there is more here. There are, for most of us, meanings that are not familiar or that come from repetition. And, most of all, I think there is much meaning in Child’s audacity and perseverance; in his insistence in literally carving in stone his vision of the gospel. May we all have something in our lives that means that much.

Notes

Quotations are from:

• Thompson, Lisa. Gilgal Garden, an historical sculpture garden created by Thomas B. Child, Jr., Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts and Parks Program. Brochure available on site.
• Gilgal: A Circle of Stones. Interactive tour of the Gilgal Garden. Online at: http://extras.sltrib.com/NIP/gilgal/index.htm

Here are the courses I’m most anticipating, though I likely won’t be able to engorge myself on them all:

*Friday, March 25: 9:00–9:50 AM: MSH: Jonathon Penny, United Emirates University, “Godsbody—Image, Icon, and Word Made Flesh Made Word (in Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers and Paintings by Kirk Richards and Brian Kershisnik).”

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Kirk’s work. I also appreciate Kershisnik’s. And I like Jonathon Penny’s stuff. too. He’s just emerging on the poetic scene and he’s a striking poet and scholar with a keen wit. I first came across Jonathon when I lurked on the LDS-HERM(eneutics) listserv for a short time last year (you can join the group here if it pleases you). And I’m deeply interested in LDS conceptions of embodiment (see this, for starters). So I think this session would start me off right.

*Friday, March 25: 11:00–11:50 PM: MSH: Blake Ostler, “An Embodied God before/after/with the Universe.”

Enough said.

*Friday, March 25: 2:15–3:45 PM: MSH: Wyatt Brockbank, Brigham Young University, “Only through the Body Do We Know, Experience, Live: Philosophers, Poets, and Prophets on the Importance of the Body.”

And again.

*Saturday, March 26: 9:00–9:50 AM: AML: Tyler Chadwick “21st Century Lyric Mormonisms.”

Oh, wait: that’s me! Here’s a taste of what I’m planning:

In the more than two-decades since Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems was published, many poets who maintain a variety of connections with Mormonism have established themselves within the field of contemporary American poetry. Indeed, since the turn of the millennium (from 2000 to the present), many have published in national venues and received national recognition and support for their work. Many others have risen to prominence within the Mormon literary community, publishing high-quality poems in Mormon-centered periodicals. Several of the poets from these two categories frequently publish work in both arenas. Still other poets with ties to Mormonism have used social media to potentially share their work with a broader audience than would be possible through publication solely in national or Mormon periodicals.

While each of these poets speaks with a distinctive voice and from a wide array of experiences, identities, and agendas, one thing that draws them together is a shared understanding of the language of Mormon experience. Although each understands this language to a different degree; although some speak it more openly and with greater accuracy than others; and although they claim various degrees of closeness to and activity within the LDS Church, their work can be profitably gathered and read–individually and collectively–as lyric manifestations of the contemporary Mormon cultural and religious experience. I’ve taken to calling these manifestations “21st century lyric Mormonisms.”

My intention here is three-fold: 1) to bring attention to the many Mormon-affiliated poets who are making names for themselves both within and beyond the growing number of Mormon periodicals and publishing houses (something I started here and will continue for years to come), 2) to examine the best of what these poets have published within the past decade, and in so doing 3) to discuss the varieties of the contemporary Mormon lyric voice and what such varieties may suggest about the current state and the potential of Mormon poetry.

Take my completely unbiased and un-self-aggrandizing word for it: you won’t want to miss this session! (But if you do, I may forgive you. Sometime. Maybe.)

*Saturday, March 26: 11:00–11:50 AM: MSH: Kirk Richards, “Embodiment and Duality: An Artist’s Perspective on the Physical and the Spiritual in Imagery.”

Um, yeah. I’ve been itching for years to see Kirk’s work in person. That is all.

*Saturday, March 26: 12:00–1:50 PM: AML Awards & Luncheon and Presidential Address.

Sure hope it’s good grub. Oh, and I’m interested in the awards and what the prez has to say, too.

*Saturday, March 26: 2:00–3:30 PM: AML: Gideon Burton, “Eugene England Online: Liberating Mormon Biography in the Digital Age.”

Eugene, Gideon, and new media. Sounds simply apocalyptic. Suh-weet.

*Saturday, March 26: 3:45–5:15 PM: AML: Gerrit van Dyk, “‘Miltons of Our Own’: Form and Convention in the Mormon Epic Poem”

OR

*MSH: David Heap, “Embodiment and Sexual Addiction: The Search for Intimacy in a World of Disconnection”

OR

*MSH: Todd Mack, Stanford University, “The Physical Engagements of the Literary Scholar”

OR

*MSH: David Isaksen, Brigham Young University, “The Body and the Poetic Universe”

OR

*MSH: Kirk Caudle, Marylhurst University, “The Discovery of Embodied Knowledge through the Discovery of the Authentic Self: A Guide for Revealing Ultimate Truth”

So. Many. Potentially. Awesome. Choices.

* * * *

So after looking over the offerings, what’s whet your appetite?

And, by the way, who’s going?

That first impression was less about what Nancy actually said and more about what she did. Nancy rarely answered Sunday School questions with words. Fairly often she gave a sound–some of which were musical, others guttural, and others as “humphs” or “ah-ha’s.” Other times she simply gave a movement: a flip of the hand or a drop of the arm or a roll of the head. When she did answer with words she usually started with, “I don’t know where this is coming from but I just find myself thinking. . .” And then the blank would be filled in with anything but what the teacher was expecting. When she was called as the Relief Society chorister instead of leading the music with standard 4/4 loops or 3/4 triangles Nancy waved her arms in circles and walked the room as if she were gathering our voices and hearing them and mixing them in some sort of harmonic alchemy. She would then nod and look at each of us and smile as if thanking us. Our half-hearted sounds had somehow turned to gold in her ears.

Nancy isn’t your standard “Utah Mormon” or “Molly Mormon” or whatever other label we use to describe each other. Nancy is something else. Nancy is unorthodox, but in a truly unorthodox way. She isn’t jaded or disaffected (which seems to be the standard version of unorthodoxy). She is unorthodox in a real way. An honest way. A faithful way.

I was doing my second tour of duty on the Enrichment committee when I finally got to know Nancy better. She offered to run an “expressive arts experience” for the sisters and it was my job to help her set up and take down and make sure the opening prayer got said. It was an easy-peasy, run-of-the-mill, do-it-with-my-eyes-shut assignment.

When I arrived that evening Nancy had already draped the door to the gym with red and orange fabric and posted a sign that said, “Silence Only.” She was contemplating adding flames to the door frames–somehow it just seemed right–but didn’t want to scare anyone off. When I entered the gym she had set up tables with clay, tarps on the floor dotted with small, empty canvases, and a big drum circle outlined with scarves.

This Enrichment was going to be something else. I completely forgot about the prayer.

That night only a few sisters showed up, but each left with several pieces of her own “art” and a slight smile on her face. As they walked out of the gym Nancy commented on each work and what she’d remember about it. Basking in Nancy’s glow, I felt like a three year old–but in a good way. Like I’d just played harder than I knew I could and felt things for the first time and learned things that I didn’t yet have the words to describe but couldn’t wait to discover.

Nancy said, “Jesus created the Earth. He is an artist. THE Artist. And He made each of us just like Himself. He made us to be artists. Each of us is the writer and painter and dancer of our own experience. We may not be experts but we are artists.”

Tonight we had another expressive arts experience for Enrichment. This time it was folded into our annual Relief Society Garden Party and there was a great turnout. “What color is Christ to you?” Nancy began. There were a lot of sidelong glances and giggles. A few sisters even asked if she was serious. But each picked out a single pastel, closed her eyes, and meditated on Christ and let the crayon guide itself. Then Nancy invited us to put ourselves into the image. What color were we? How did we fit ourselves into our vision of Christ? What did He mean to us? Then, what words would we add to the image?

Women began to panic a little. How were they supposed to draw the right thing with their eyes closed? How could they pick the right words when (for some of them) English wasn’t their first language and (for the rest of them) they weren’t even writers? Coloring and free-associating seemed silly and more than a little embarrassing. What was everyone else going to think?

One by one, as Nancy directed us, we gave in and played at creating something. We let go of our everyday selves and tried to find out what color Jesus really was. Lots of sisters picked cool blues because Christ calmed them and held them up like water does. Some sisters picked yellow because Christ was the light. Some made Him circle, like a hug, and others drew Him like a river. One sister even drew a turnip (she said she couldn’t explain it but it just came out of the crayon. Maybe because Christ nourishes her?). In another picture the sister drew a mermaid and layered Christ around her in different shades of water–some of which were yellow because she remembered someone describing faith as a glowworm and Christ was like a glowworm to her. And maybe, just maybe, we were all like glowworms for Jesus.

At some point, the Spirit snuck in and sisters were bearing testimony through simple art and disambiguated yet meaningful words, without even realizing it. And I couldn’t help but think that this was Mormonism at its best. People with little in common leaving behind their skill sets and comfort zones to bear–to create–testimony of a real, living Christ and fumbling to incorporate His light into their lives in artful ways. And through the process becoming just a little more like Him.

Last summer I was very posh and attended frequent lectures at The Bridge Academy in Provo. If you’re not wealthy enough to take classes at the Bridge, I at least recommend attending their guest speaker and workshop events. It’s honestly kind of the best thing Mormon art has going for it.

Christopher Young was fantastic, James Christensen was inspiring, Walter Rane was lecturing the weekend I was leaving the country (fie!), but my favorite moment so far was getting to attend a presentation by Brian Kershisnik. And the moment I had been waiting for came at the end when he opened it up for questions and answers.

See, I’ve had this connection with Brian Kershisnik’s paintings for years. There’s something about his world inhabited by industrious, angelic Mormon women that just fascinates me. It connects to this Mormon quality that I saw in families in the ward I grew up in in Colorado, but has been harder and harder to find in recent years. I know a lot of Mormons, a lot of faithful people, but there is a certain quality in Mormon women that seems harder and harder to come by. I don’t know what exactly the quality is, but it’s shared by Mormon women who grow their own zucchini and/or wear their hair in one really long braid and/or dress their children in holiday-themed fabric from the discount rack at JoAnn’s and/or have those needlepoint covers for Kleenex boxes in their living rooms. Do you know what I mean? The quality isn’t defined by any of these practices of course, but it seems to be present in women who do those sorts of things. Women who have some sort of earthy connection to the divine, and you would almost think it’s just small-town fundamentalism but it’s not because these women also watch the Discovery Channel. Maybe it’s just some sort of surreal Southern Utah mineral that he eats and extrudes in his paintings somehow, and maybe the women in his life that he paints are just nutritionally primed to emit whatever serene righteousness rays it is that I’m picking up from his paintings. But there’s something behind it, and Brian Kershisnik knows what it is because he paints it, on purpose, over and over again.

Well, now was finally my chance. Here I was, with the man himself, and it was time for me to ask the question that had been burning within me: “Why do all the women in your paintings wear dresses?”

He looked startled. His eyes darted back up to the screen he had been displaying images on. “Do they?” he asked.

“Yes! They all do! I always imagined there was some sort of cultural message buried there. I’ve been wanting to know for years why your women look so Super Mormon; suspended between centuries.”

He flipped through a few slides, verifying that all of his women were wearing dresses. “Hmm,” he said thoughtfully, “it looks like they do.” He paused, and I sat breathlessly waiting for him to continue with his grand revelation. “I think it’s because I like to paint patterns and a dress is a big open space to paint a pattern.”

He smiled beneficently at me and then took the next question.

Arnold Friberg’s passing this week is cause to reexamine him. His work has been a victim of backlash lately from the High Minded. (I suspect because of the massive influence his Book of Mormon paintings have had on depictions of the book’s characters, particularly of Lehi’s family. It’s simply understood now that, for instance, Nephi wears leather over one shoulder, Lehi has a long white beard, Laman and Lemuel are physically brutish. His influence has so overwhelmed Book of Mormon art that sometimes people seem to forget that his work is not The One True Depiction.)

Then there’s the fact that he’s Mormon and you know how Mormons think other Mormons can only make crummy art. So for them, here’s some worldly acclaim:

Friberg originated the iconic looks in DeMille’s second Ten Commandments movie and received an Oscar nod for his efforts.

Friberg was commissioned to make his famed Washington portrait for the Bicentenniel, when it hung at Valley Forger.

Friberg was commission by Britain’s royal family to paint Prince Charles in 1978 and the Queen in 1990.

He’s an honorary Mountie.

His original works are expeeeeeeensive.

But no matter who makes the point for me, I cannot doubt that Friberg’s work was consistently iconic and has shaped the way Mormons in particular view ourselves in significant and real ways.

Let’s return to taking him seriously.

.

A couple Saturdays ago, my wife and I were visiting friends who are notable (among other reasons) for buying art. They have a Bryan Mark Taylor for instance and they had two other pieces on the wall near their computer that I found quite striking. They were the work of Casey Jex Smith, whose name I suppose I should have recognized as I had seen it often enough. For instance, he was the driving force behind the now defunct Mormon arts forum Head of Shiz.

Our friends then set me in front of their computer to look at his site, and also that of his wife, Amanda Michelle Smith.

I’ve since been nosing around a bit, reading up on them — reviews like this and gushing like this — and I must say, of all the Mormon artists I know, I have a hard time imagining a more in-your-face journeying than some of the stuff they’re sticking in galleries.

So of course I ran them down.

.

Theric: Last Saturday after I saw two of your paintings on a friend’s wall, Casey, I hopped online and spent a while perusing your work online. I was struck by how intentionally religious so much of your work is — specifically in the names of works, bits of temple iconography, images from old Church clip art and 1970s Bookcraft picture books — I’m curious how the greater art world reacts to your defiant Mormonness?

Casey: Half of the art world is intrigued by the mysterious iconography of small, quirky population residing in Utah. The other half dismisses my work outright. I try to work with people who are the former but have had the displeasure of working with many of the latter. However open-minded the art world pretends to be, they are not as a whole.

.

Theric: I wasn’t surprised to see that you have a 2003 BFA from BYU. Your style was something I saw a lot in BYU galleries at the time — the seemingly random images bleeding into each over a plain background — I’m glad to finally be able to ask this of someone from your generation of BYU artists: what was so compelling about that mode of composition and how did you distinguish yourself from your peers?

Casey: When I was at BYU I wasn’t making that kind of art at all. I did two shows that were conceptually based on the question of male violence and where does it come from. A nature/nurture thing and reaction to 911. For those shows I did large reproductions violent boy drawings on canvas, sculptures of melted GI Joes, projections of war video games on the XBOX, and canvases with ironic stills taken from the GI Joe Cartoon. It was very mediocre work. I didn’t start having the overlapping imagery on a white background until my 2nd semester of grad school at the San Francisco Art Institute. I started using drawing as my primary medium again. With that I think comes a natural tendency to draw what is important and leave the background unfinished. In drawing as opposed to painting, it’s more accepted to do that.

But I do remember well the work you are talking about. The printmaking department had a big influence on that kind of work. I remember lots of map fragments, drawn lines, sacred geometry, and almost no color.

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Theric: Amanda, I see your work and I think immediately of Henry Darger, only with the addition of ceramic flowers. (I might as well add now that while I like Darger quite a lot, I like your work better. Just don’t tell the people dropping tons of cash on Darger.) Are you intentionally referencing him? And if so, to what end? (And if not, how did you come by your blond girls in not-quite-normalland?)

Amanda: This is actually a question I’ve been getting for years.  Funny thing is, and maybe this is a little embarassing to admit too, but I didn’t even know who Henry Darger was until I was in graduate school and I got this question for the first time.  At that point I sought out his work, became familiar with it and came to love him.  I’ve even shown at his gallery in NYC, but he’s never been a direct influence on my work.  While Darger has created a fantasy world spirited little girls fighting for their lives, I feel like his narratives are very different from mine, which are mostly stories from my life.  I grew up with three sisters and my mother, my dad not being around very much and not very involved in my upbringing.  I lived in this hyper-feminine household and so these little girls just became my mouthpieces for telling stories.  They’re characters I feel comfortable speaking through.

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Theric: One thing I like best about your work is how most pieces flit back and forth between painting and sculpture. Could you comment on what you’re trying to accomplish by melding the second and third dimensions?

Amanda: I think at first that this was just unintentional.  I started college as a psych major, and then I was a visual technology major, then I was a painting major and ended up being forced to take ceramics as an elective.  I found out then that you could paint on clay and when I discovered that it became only natural to want to take advantage of clays three dimensional nature and get the best of both worlds.  I love reliefs.  I’ve been looking at the work of the della Robbia’s and wanting to get even more 3D lately.

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Theric: Since Casey had a book published by the Mormon Artists Group, I assume you’re tapped into some of the Mormon artist communities. What sort of relationship do you have with the community / communities and what value do you find therein?

Casey: Glen has been a huge supporter of my work. He has purchased several pieces, published the drawings I make during church meetings on Sundays, come to my openings in NYC, and put me in his newsletters. He has been a great friend as well and we have had many wonderful conversations about what it means to be Mormon and creating art. This kind of feedback is really important to me because my work most of the time exists outside of Mormon Culture and is purchased and seen by a secular audience. I am fine with that, but half of my original intent is to help push the definitions of what “Mormon Art” is for Mormons. Glen has helped my work circulate within the Mormon art world.

Aside from the Mormon Artists Group, there is a small group of BYU graduates (Jared Lindsay Clark, Todd Chilton, Sean Morello, Jared Latimer, Adam Bateman, Trent Reynolds, Allan Ludwig, Daniel Everett, Ryan Browning, Susan Krueger-Barber, Chris Lynn, and others) that have stayed in touch and supported each other in navigating the art world. I wish there were more women in that list. My biggest support of course has been my wife Amanda who is dealing with the gallery system too.

Amanda: I love Glen Nelson who heads up the Mormon Artists Group, but I’ve never worked with him directly, I’ve only met him through Casey.  I have a lot of friends who are Mormon artists though and I’m married to one as well.  I feel like there’s definitely a community there and I feel like it’s incredibly valuable to have a group of people you can bond with over faith, career ambitions and common experiences.  The Mormon art world is so small and comfortable.

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Theric: Getting narrower in our definition of community, do you ever create work together?

Amanda: I love to collaborate with Casey.  We’ve been so busy lately in our own careers that we haven’t made a lot of time for collaborations, but we have grand ideas and we’ve done some in the past.  I feel a little insecure working with him just because I think he’s a genius and a brilliant draftsman.  Ceramics is technically very challenging for people who aren’t familiar with the medium so usually our collaborations tend to be drawings.  I always end up feeling like my portion of the work looks clumsy inserted next to his impeccably rendered pen drawings.

Casey: She’s insecure but in all honesty she is a better draftswoman, especially when it comes to the human form. My figures are always awkward and stiff and hers are graceful and full of expression. I love to collaborate with her but it’s hard to just make enough solo work to supply the galleries I work with and her as well. We will collaborate in the future when we hit a slow spot.

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Theric: How did you two meet, anyway? Did art play a role in that?

Amanda: Yes, I think art’s played a role in everything we have since the beginning.  I moved to the Bay Area about a year after Casey started grad school at the San Francisco Art Institute.  From the minute I moved out here I started hearing about Casey this and Casey that.  I’d never even met this guy and he had a girlfriend at the time and yet at least four different people tried to set us up.  Long story short, my friend was dating his roommate and she brought me to one of his art shows.  It was kind of like a blind date.  I was so impressed with his work not only because it was technically impressive and beautiful but because it had so much integrity and substance, plus he was cute, so I fell for him.

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Theric: Creating as a couple — no matter what it’s like now — is a particularly Mormon pastime in the sense that someday, the goal is, you will be Creators. In that sense, how does your work reflect your faith (and vice versa)?

Amanda: Well to be honest I’ve never thought of that before.  I mean, I think creating artwork has given Casey and I a special kind of bond that I’m very grateful for.  As far as my work reflecting my faith, most of my artwork doesn’t revolve around Mormon themes, but my values are absolutely imbedded in it.  While the trend in contemporary art seems to be moving more in the direction of the edgy and the abject I find myself going in another direction.  I want my artwork to be rated G and I try to make it “virtuous, lovely and of good report or praiseworthy” although that’s up for debate.

Casey: Ditto.

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Theric: I think it’s safe to say you’re both still at the beginning of your artistic careers. So how do you balance art with concerns like rent and family planning? And how is success changing your approaches to art?

Casey: It’s hard. Part of me does feel like I’m a pathetic musician holding out to be a rockstar. I have a writer friend that ditched his writing career to go back to law school and get a proper job that could support his family. But I just don’t have a fall back. There is no plan B. Luckily we’ve had a bit of success to keep us going and help us feel that we’re not wasting our time. Having a baby in August might change some things. We’ll see.

Amanda: It is hard to balance our love of art with provident living and family planning.  Both making art and living the gospel are labors of love but if they’re ever at odds we try to make living the gospel priority number one.  If it wasn’t, I think we’d both be unemployed starving artists, making art all day everyday.  It would be our only priority, our religion.  Instead, we go to work, come home and go to work on our art when we’re not too tired.  We’re expecting our first baby in August, so we’ll see how that changes things.  I have a feeling it will slow us down even more.

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Theric: What advice do you offer Mormon artist couples like yourselves?

Amanda: I think sometimes the pressures of the art world make it easy to lose sight of what’s important.  There’s not a lot of room for faith in it, so I guess my advice would have to be that you can have both.  Keep your testimony strong and keep working hard on your art.  I also think you have to sacrifice for each other because it’s not an easy career choice financially or emotionally.

Casey: You can be an artist and good member at the same time. You can tackle difficult questions in your art without turning your back on your faith.

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Theric: Any question I should have asked, but didn’t? Any upcoming shows or suchlike that you want to plug before you close? Anything else at all? Favorite sandwich?

Casey: Favorite sandwich is an italian sub with everything except mayo. I have a show at Galerie Polaris in Paris right now and I’m working on a show at Allegra LaViola Gallery for October that will have a live performance of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure that is based on a drawing of Lehi’s Vision.

Amanda: Favorite sandwich… does a burrito count?  Upcoming shows, I have a group show in NYC at Allegra LaViola Gallery coming up in June.  It’s called “Off the Wall.”  That’s about it right now.

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Elder Douglas L. Callister of the Seventy wrote a delightful article in this month’s Ensign, “Our Refined Heavenly Home.” I’m ashamed to admit that I might never have read it had not my dear wife told me I should. (I keep saying I’ll stick the Ensign in the bathroom where it will actually get read, but it seems weird to have all those pictures of Jesus on my toilet, Backslider or no Backslider.) The article is adapted from a BYU devotional Elder Callister gave in 2006 which is about 1800 words longer and has even more dandy quotations. (Frankly, it’s tempting to just lift all his quotations and anecdotes and place them here for discussion, but I can’t quite feel good about that.)

The article has three main thrusts, language, literature and music, with an everything-else category to finish things off.

For brevity’s sake, I will take a short excerpt from each section to comment on, but in your comments, feel free to reference any part of his talk.

Language

Considering how frequently I speak before dozens and how poorly I prepared I generally am, I feel ashamed. I respect few writers like I respect Emerson, but if I were speaking at his 300th, I would wing it without my notes, considering myself prepared enough for having had notes until a moment ago. And then I would get a few laughs and trot out my David-O-McKay-called-him-the-wisest-American and talk about reading him in high school and sit down.

But I do agree with Emerson that it is best to be well prepared. I sculpt, for instance, my sacrament meeting talks with great care. And I spent, apparently, too long polishing my Sunstone presentation.

In 2009, where soundbite culture has trickled down even to the written word, carefully crafted sprachen is a rarity. But speaking of sacrament meeting, Mormon culture has a grand opportunity to share its preservation among all.

Literature

I’ve abandoned the mansion metaphor for heaven, but I do like the temple metaphor for home and mine certainly has a library. I’ve taken to reading for breadth and not depth so I memorize nothing these days, but I am still active among the minor prophets. And the world is still producing them! Minor prophets I’ve read recently or am currently reading include Ian McEwan, Thomas Lynch, Edward Gorey, Francesca Lia Block, Mary Shelley and Cormac McCarthy. And we Mormons are supplying some prophets as well. I’ve been enlightened recently by Angela Hallstrom and Brad Teare and Orson Whitney.

When people ask me about being Mormon, I often speak of our openness to Truth. And nothing proves this more than our canonized love of literature.

Music

I’m planning on rising early this summer and writing a book. I don’t see me wearing a tie, though. Perhaps this speaks poorly of my book?

I agree fully with Handel however: entertainment alone makes for poor art. Forgettable. Leaves you no better and thus, given the laws of entropy, leaves you worse. If I am not improving, I am sliding.

As for music, Callister seems to be placing classical above, say, rock. But if you have the same local classical radio station I have, you know that plenty classical music is just pretty notes pointlessly arranged. And a closer reading reveals that he is not explicitly calling modern music poor in comparison to the Old Masters. And it would seem that not making such distinctions has a decent history:

Art, Appearance, and Attitude

This is where the article starts to seem rushed, with art being smashed next to dressing neatly. And it leaves me wanting for much much more. (Also: How did you come to meet Audrey Hepburn, Elder Callister?)

Edouard Dantan's Un Coin du Salon en 1880

The strength of the Salon’s influence is perhaps most evident in the drama that ultimately tore down its authority – the  Salon de Refusés of 1863 in which many “refused” artists, among them the radical impressionists like Manet and Whistler, exhibited work that the Academy had sneered at. The Salon eventually splintered and waned in importance, but the concept of the juried show lives on. Each year, the Springville Museum of Art holds a Spring Salon, which is not exclusively Mormon art, but is definitely Utah art, and it is my personal belief that the Spring Salon is where Mormonism’s burgeoning Manets and Davids may well first show up.

I’m going to end the analogy there, though, because I don’t want to speculate about what on earth a Utah Salon de Refusés would look like.

The 85th annual Utah Spring Salon is on display in Springville until July 5th and I hereby exhort you with all the feeling of a tender stranger from the internet to get yourself there and take it in. It’s a wonderful exhibition every year, but this year it’s particularly grand.

There are themes emerging in Mormon art that are diverging widely from anything I think we’ve had before. One of them has a cousin over in Mormon lit and I think, though it’s a bit genre (they used to use that word pejoratively – the Paris art snobs that we’re pretending to be), it’s interesting. Two weeks ago I found myself at the Provo Library listening to a panel of LDS fantasy authors who were speaking as part of the Provo Children’s Book Festival. My friends had gone to hear  Brandon Sanderson, but he was accompanied by Jessica Day George, J. Scott Savage, James Dashner, Brandon Mull, Dean Hale, and Shannon Hale. I quickly texted my 12-year-old sister to tell her that I was in the same room as the Fablehaven guy, and it was then that it struck me that, even though Fantasy hasn’t been my genre of choice in my adult years, I was in the middle of a Mormon cultural phenomenon that has leaked out into the national literary market. And at Springville, I realized that it’s leaking into the visual arts as well. There’s not a market in fine art for dragons and sword-bearing maidens, but the fantasy consciousness is very much there. And its king (why didn’t I realize this before?) is James C. Christensen. Now, I don’t want to get too far into this because I have a whole separate essay that wants to be written about James C. Christensen and the marriage of the fantastic and the sacred, but I did notice that he’s developing a school and I met some of his disciples on Saturday.

One way in which Christensen has opened the door for something totally new is by allowing decorative art to be framed in gilt and sold as ridiculously overpriced limited-edition giclées. Until very recently, decorative art was something that you did at homemaking meetings and it usually involved your husband first cutting out a teddy-bear shaped piece of wood on his jigsaw. It’s also evolved through the scrapbooking phenomenon  and quite probably BYU’s prestigious graphic design, illustration and animation programs, to create a very hip illustrative aesthetic in casual Mormon culture. Did you notice the title designs in the LDS Pride & Prejudice and the cover art of the Pink Bible? We’ve got this entire, usually female, design culture that likes to eat at trendy frozen yogurt places along the Wasatch front. And now it’s finding its way into our art galleries. Christensen was the first one (and maybe he could do it because he is a man? I didn’t say that. I promise I didn’t vote for the ERA.) to market a frilly, decorative, illustrative style as fine art, and now it’s acceptable. Emily McPhie has a piece in the Salon titled Two Sisters and Melissa K. Peck has one titled Vivian. The two paintings are very different in style – McPhie’s is soft and resembles a Caldecott children’s book while Peck’s consist of bright color fields that would be at home on funky greeting cards or a Threadless.com t-shirt. But they are both reminiscent of Christensen’s women – sleek, high-cheekboned ivory-skinned women wearing fashionable frou frou. And they’re fun.

Another tell-tale sign of Christensen’s influence is this very marketable appeal to fantasy, and it his own special brew of magic and medieval Europe and Catholic kitsch. (Saints & Angels was particularly influential. “We can do that!?”) Christensen himself has a piece in the salon – a fantastical aristocratic family adorned in sumptuous golden robes eating glowing white fruit from the Tree of Life. And others have borrowed his characters – no one in Utah put wings on angels for a good hundred and fifty years until Christensen did. And so now Chris Miles can – his Muse sails blissfully over a landscape foliated by Henri Rousseau, playing a lute. I like her; she’s cute and her face is Dutch and I like the reminder that not all angelic women have high cheekbones and straight hair.  (There’s another winged angel in the show – a plaster piece that’s just lovely – but it didn’t make it into the catalog and I’m ashamed to say I left my notebook on the bus coming back from Springville. If anyone knows the artist name on that piece please let me know.)

Oh. Where to go? There are so many pieces at the exhibition here I want to show you, but the bus leaves at 1:34 and there’s just never enough time or space. A couple pieces that deserve their own brief mention before I attack another theme:

Philip Fisher Barlow’s Exchange Students; a title turns a still life into a delightful social commentary.

Vance L. Mellen’s Omphalos; edgy installation art breaks into a Mormon venue beyond the BYU MOA. I’m not sure whether it’s the LCD screen eyeball that creeps me out or the haunting feeling that postmodernism is stalking me.

Bruce H. Smith: The Bride and a Stack of Glittery, Sightless Bachelors Feigning Insight. You thought it was just an interesting still life of a Roman bust. But it’s not. It’s Orson Scott Card’s short story Inventing Lovers on the Phone, some serious oil paint skills and my social life, all rolled into a 25″ by 25″ frame.

When you first enter the museum, you’ll be greeted by Franz M. Johansen’s A Restoration of Spirit, and you’ll feel automatically rewarded for driving all the way down here. Lovely, lovely.

My homeboy Ben Steele is back in the Salon, with just the sort of postmodern pleasantness I hoped he would paint. It’s fun, like his Rembrandt coloring book images are fun, but it’s a little deeper. It’s whimsical, but it also makes you think.

OK, one more theme I want to address and then I want to show you the best painting in the Salon this year and then I promise I’ll let you get back to the rest of your RSS feed. Mormons are again looking at the female nude. With surprisingly heartening results.

We still don’t know what to do with the nude figure in our art. We’re a little prudish, but we’re not really, not doctrinally. We’re not in the Gnostic Gospels camp where the physical body is dirty. But precisely because of that, and because of our profound respect for women as human beings (Wyoming and Utah were letting the sisters vote before anyone else even broached the topic), we are naturally opposed to the lecherous gaze that was part of the good old boys’ club of academic European art. So we’re extra-vigilant. When Trevor Southey invoked Dürer in his portrayal of Adam & Eve, it necessitated a footnote on the SMA website that in the medieval period, nudity was a symbol of innocence and chastity. And we still tug at our neckties and turn away when the subject is broached today, perhaps because of the deep wound that pornography has inflicted on our culture.

But two artists in particular this year open the door again in a very powerful way, and they both do it by highlighting our mother, the first naked woman – Eve.

In the room with the abstract pieces, you’ll find a surprisingly representational painting that was so powerful it took a while for me to take it in. Nuditas, by Patrick Marco Devonas, is subtitled “the Burning of the Daughter of Eve.” The focal point is a nude woman, hands raised in a pose reminiscent of a crucifixion. There are crucifixes and superimposed pictures of Christ flanking her and obscured as watermarks behind her, and from the edges of the frame two Roman soldiers taunt her with puppets and smoking guns. It’s a little bit Dalí, it’s a little bit Hieronymous Bosch, but very original. It hit me solidly and if it’s not a scathing condemnation of pornography I don’t know what is.

The last painting I will mention is the best painting in the Salon, I say with absolutely no authority to say so. Sean Diediker, in The Condition #1, paints Eve, the apple, and the fall, and this, my friends, is what Mormon art has to offer the world. This is Lewis’s Perelandra, except this time informed by the restored gospel.

Our most unique doctrine is our understanding of the fall and what it means. We turned the Christian world upside-down when we asserted that it wasn’t a tragic mistake. (OK, we didn’t say that. Moses and Nephi said that. But we made sure it got translated into Italian.) And this is what we can offer the world with our art – it’s profoundly educational without being didactic, it’s aesthetically astounding without being trendy, and it’s genuinely and uniquely Mormon. And I love it. I’m going to keep my eye on Diediker, because I think there are some amazing things on the way.

The Condition #1, used with permission of Sean Diediker

Well, thanks for making the trip with me. I promise it will be a lot more fulfilling when you’re there at the SMA in person. If you’re a diaspora Mormon without the wherewithal for trips on a whim to Utah Valley, the catalog is available for sale for $14 and is lovely – very nice printing. I applaud the SMA for keeping the Salon tradition alive and I hope to see it produce wonders in years to come.