Our task is to create worlds:
Antonucci, Emil
OUR TASK IS TO CREATE WORLDS AN ARTIST & THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD EMIL ANTONUCCI The most intense perception of my childhood, undiminished after fjfty years was 11 that everything...
...Art is making...
...This ambiguity runs through all our lives...
...I see art as the creation of structures, the creation of worlds that meaning may inhabit, but not define...
...Artistically, it is safe in our time to deal in fragmentation and disassociation...
...I suspect that in some complex and confused way we may even be moving away from the notion of the artist as an exclusive occupation, to a wider participation in the making of the symbolic structures we inhabit...
...Whatever the original intentions and meanings invested in them by their creators, they continue to provide structures that can be inhabited by successive generations...
...This process is a constant one of reconciling the random events of daily life with the spiritual values we maintain, of integrating the contradictions inherent in everyday life...
...It is a task that, like the artist's, depends not on theories and explanations, but on the skill with which they are fashioned: life as skill...
...But I have never been satisfied with the notion of art as a revelation of meaning or as the communication of meanings...
...We received such positive response to the series that we have decided to continue it...
...Antonucci is currently the design consultant to the NYC Charter Revision Commission and the NYC Campaign Finance Board...
...Our era is like the cinematic effect of "the dissolve," i.e., two scenes, one fading away, one coming into being, caught at that instant when both images are of equal strength...
...People create structures in the mind, in society, that God can inhabit...
...So, I became, as all artists must, obsessed with appearances, with the very thingness of the world, with looking constantly and carefully at the world, certain that if I made the right visual connections in the constantly shifting patterns of both the world and my own mind, I would see...
...The great appeal of the visual arts for me is that approximation of the experience of totality, of everything happening everywhere at once...
...As film director Jean Renoir once said: "Art is not a calling, but the way in which one exercises a calling, and also the way in which one performs any human activity...
...Our second contributor to this series is Emil An-tonucci, an instructor at Parsons School of Design in New York City...
...The individual experience of making something, whether a shoe or a painting, from start to finish, must somehow be regained in a society where most of us are the passive users of the skills of a few others...
...OUR TASK IS TO CREATE WORLDS AN ARTIST & THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD EMIL ANTONUCCI The most intense perception of my childhood, undiminished after fjfty years was 11 that everything of consequence in life is hidden: God, the sources of art, the workings of our bodies and minds, the forces of nature, the heart of another human being...
...The artist's skill is simply the paradigm of the process...
...That's why great works of art last...
...Anyone who makes things in the sense I speak of knows that something works through them, waxing and waning without their control, that only a kind of faith and constancy of belief will get them through...
...In my early teens, crossing the bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan over a dark, dank East River one wintry morning, I watched a patch of reflecting, golden light move across the water beneath me...
...We asked each individual: How is your Catholic faith manifest in your daily life and work...
...It is this fragmentation and ambiguity that make the creation of religious art so difficult...
...In 1987, Commonweal published a series of articles by lay people who described their personal experience of faith in the work place...
...Prayer is less petition or communication than this daily structuring of our minds to permit God's entrance...
...Without it, I believe, our notions of God become too mental, not actual enough to inform our daily lives, and too "personal" to enable us to share the experience of God with others...
...My own sense is that the best we can expect from the believing artist is the patience to wait, to pursue his goals of wholeness in his work in solitude until we, as a society, can find our way to some degree of integration and harmony...
...Such contradictions account for the prevalence of religious art that is either "popularly" sentimental or vaguely nostalgic for the art of some "religious" era...
...The notion that artists are "divinely" inspired is presumptuous and sentimental...
...The working artist who is trying to shape his work in the artistic values of the time may face impossible contradictions between high art and popular art, modernity and tradition, the private symbol and the public one...
...I see the way art works as an analogy for God's presence in the world...
...The development of the interactive computer video, capable of drawing on a data base of all art of the past and mingling these images, opens incredible possibilities of wider participation in the making of art...
...Our task is to hone the skills that enable us to live in a world that will always be full of contradiction...
...What is difficult and full of risk is to create images and structures of wholeness, integration, and harmony...
...Without this skill, some inevitable law of spiritual gravity drags us down and away from the reality of God's presence and reduces us to rote definitions of God that have no life...
...I feel no conflict between artistic solitude and my concern for society...
...We who come to consciousness at that instant cannot say which elements of this composite image will fade, which will endure...
...Even the simplest and humblest of things partook of mystery...
...The being of things, I suppose...
...We need to recreate the very definition of religious art...
...Where do you find spiritual strength and guidance...
...and vice versa...
...People with the same religious beliefs may still have very different sources for their images and symbols of the world, since these images are largely formed by the dominant culture, which is clearly not religiously motivated...
...All human beings possess high orders of skill, progressively diminished in industrial societies...
...darkness/radiant light...
...How has faith shaped your choices: vocational, financial, ethical...
...The pressures from all the forgotten ones of the earth, from the cultures excluded from the dominant white Western culture, are inexorable...
...He redesigned Commonweal in 1965 and 1987...
...God around us, within us- impenetrable darkness/radiant light...
...God was there, hidden in the world of appearances, but somehow not separate from them...
...It suddenly struck me that the entire river surface was, at once, both dark and radiant, depending on one's angle of vision, but clearly both...
...art as skill...
...It is the prime characteristic of our art and our religious lives...
...I don't think we understand enough about the era we live in to make convincing images of wholeness...
...All require unremitting awareness, a kind of constant scanning, just below the level of consciousness, the ordering of myriad small currents of the mind...
...Whatever God is, God is a totality, a wholeness that connects the world and ourselves, the past with the present and the future, the living and the dead...
...And as crude as these developments may appear to be at the moment, they offer the hope of escaping the commodification of art and healing the split between high art and mass society...
...See what...
...All human beings participate in the continuing creation of the world...
...In a word, I don't think skill is the prerogative only of the artist...
...I still don't know the "meaning" of that image, but I have never lost the feeling of its power: the reconciliation of contradiction, the embodiment of both appearance and inner reality...
...At best art is only an analogy for this sense of God's totality, but it does exercise all the right mental and spiritual muscles...
...I fell sure that all the hidden forces of the world interconnect as much as the overt ones do, that our task is to create worlds that sustain the mystery of God's presence, not resolve it...
...I see spirituality not as some force lurking behind appearances, but as the perception and even creation of a pattern in appearances-the figure in the carpet, always present, but unseen until we order our vision...
...the experience of God as skill...
...One had, somehow, to live with these mysteries...
...I see prayer as this skill...
...This experience of making something forms the grammar of religious experience...
...Literature and music must take place in time, but a painting gives you a whole world in the instant you see it...
...Our task, as believers, is to create structures of ourselves skillfully enough that they can be inhabitable by God, in the way that art and music can invest a cultivated sensibility...
Vol. 116 • June 1989 • No. 11
