Understanding: Art and Craft

We read an interesting article today in Kirk Lynn's class, "Who's Afraid of the Avant-Garde." The "garde" in this case, was the garde of classical music.

There was one passage that stuck out to me in the article; the author talked about "the hatred for an art that one does not understand -- or rather, for an art that one is UNWILLING to understand."

Forgive me for quoting out of context, and I DO suggest reading the whole article, if you can find it. But this fragment made me itch, and it was the focus of a whole morning of mulling. It seemed to me like the author was saying "with enough time and effort, an viewer/audience member should always be able to understand any piece of art...the involved effort might be herculean, but understanding is always possible."

It felt like the author was denying me permission to NEVER understand something.

Which, okay, I understand some art should and does require a LOT of effort on the part of receiver, and that I shouldn't "shut down" in the face of such effort.

But isn't it also possible that some things might be BEYOND our understanding? Isn't it also possible that part of what art does is express or make manifest or at least point to something that is BIGGER than our understanding?

So I circle back to my secretly strong belief in God. I'm not a churchgoer...my God is less burning bush, more force that exists within and between people. And theater -- a living art that happens on the bodies and in the minds and of people sharing time and space and breath -- theater is my church.

If that's true, then I hope there's always a part of every performance that is bigger and beyond what can be "understood." If you can understand it, you can take it apart and put it back together and measure it and claim it and reduce it to the sum of its parts. And yes, maybe you can still APPRECIATE it. But you're taking the God out of it. The God part is the slippery part, the part you can't quite nail down, the part you strain toward, the part you wonder at, the part that frustrates, uplifts, teaches, and flays you all at once.

Of course, when you're spending your days in a classroom, you get caught up in the "understanding." That's what we're here for; to break things down to its components, to take apart the engine so we know how to build it. In a very real (and very good) way, these three years are about CRAFT, not art. These three years are about the "how."

But the Art is the Why. Lose that, and you're lost.

So I respectfully insist on my right to try, and sometimes FAIL, to understand art.