Interview: Andrea Useem, religionwriter.com
January 14th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
According to her bio on religionwriter.com, Andrea Useem is a writer, editor and web producer for many venues, including: the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Knowledge@Wharton and Religion News Service. She is based in Reston, Va., and holds a Master’s of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. She lived in Nairobi, Kenya, for 4 years, freelancing as for the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle and Chronicle of Higher Education. Andrea replied to several questions via email, with the caveat that she is “completely flat-footed when it comes to art.”
MW: I see from your bio that you are interested in Quakerism. Have you had a chance to see Rowena Loverance’s new book “Christian Art” [which I covered here]? If so, what do you think about her focus on religious Quaker art?
AU: While spending three months in 1995 at Woodbrooke, the Quaker Study Center in Birmingham, England, I was extremely lucky to take an art course called Appleseed with Brenda Clifft Healy and Chris Cook. They used a Quaker spiritual approach, focusing on our individual experience of the divine—in Quakerism, of course, there is no priesthood, and each believer must experience God for themselves. With Chris and Brenda we responded to other art works — even a Shakespeare play at one point — through art. I remember one assignment of painting with our eyes closed. It was enormously fun. Woodbrooke has a fully stocked art room that’s open 24 hours a day, so I would sometimes run over there early in the morning to paint. I never had any talent at painting or drawing or creating art, so I abandoned it in favor of what I was good at (writing). But with Chris and Brenda, I discovered the obvious: that you don’t have to be good at something to enjoy it.
As to the book you mentioned, no I haven’t seen that. I should confess that, as a journalist, I rarely — okay, never — write about visual arts or other high art. The closest I come is reviewing books of fiction, and even that is a stretch for me. When I read poems I skim through for the main points. I think I’m like a lot of journalists in this way: I have, essentially, a non-fiction mind.
Once while I was traveling back and forth between the U.S. and East Africa, where I worked as a journalist for several years, I spent a few hours of my lay-over at the Tate Gallery in London and saw a painting by Alan Reynolds. On the placard beside it, art critic Robert Melville wrote that the painting captured the tension in human nature “between dread of confinement and fear of the void.” I think that one line almost completely defines our psychology as humans: that oscillation between safety and risk. It also says everything about me as an art-appreciator that I wrote down and remembered the quote, but don’t remember the painting.
MW: Do you think journalists are often closed to art and all things artsy? I know journalism is often based on the premise that stories should be made to fit into organized words with a lede and short, concise graphs, and art often resists that sort of form. Do you see that as a limitation of journalism that it might be ill-equipped for reporting on art? Do you think it would better serve artists to communicate in a better and less esoteric way?
AU: I can only speak for myself, but I do tend to view the world through a journalistic prism. I simply can’t imagine writing a news story about a piece of real art. That would be an art form in itself, one I’m not trained for. I think about James Agee’s description of a piece of music in Now Let Us Praise Famous Men — he was a journalist, and he managed to capture something essential about music performance using words. But of course in Famous Men he really pushed the envelope of journalistic style, further than most of us can go in the average article or posting.
MW: How, if at all, would you define religious (or sacred) art—must is it be made by religious artists or can it simply respond to religious experiences or texts?
AU: I love this question. What makes something qualify as “religious?” Karen Armstrong, the prolific author and former nun, says that for her, study can sometimes reach the level of the divine, in the tradition of lectio divina. That’s an example of an activity that can be incredibly non-religious — we can read a book or a newspaper no divine purpose or feeling at all — but in some cases that very same activity can reach the level of religiosity. People talk all the time about how, for them, going on walks with their dog, or cooking food, or taking care of their children is a religious activity for them. Would it be too post-modern and cliché to say that religious art is in the eye of the beholder? I hope not, because that’s how it appears to me.
On the question of whether a person must be religious to create religious art. I have been thinking recently about the definition of religious and non-religious people. This is a very obvious statement, but people who are not religious — as in, they are not affiliated with any religion, or they are anti-religious, or they even don’t believe in God — do have spiritual, moral lives. This is just part of being human, I think, whether people want to recognize it or not. So if an artist doesn’t belong to a church or temple or mosque, and they create great art, who is to say it is not religious art? The artist may feel it expresses the deepest possible truth about the universe as they see it, and that is, in itself, an expression of his or her spiritual awareness.
MW: What is the relationship between religious art and kitsch?
AU: When you mention religious kitsch, I think immediately of Mormon art, since that is a particularly egregious example in my mind. I remember visiting the newly opened Mormon temple in Belmont, Mass., in 2000, which was open to the general public before it was dedicated, and a British friend with me was absolutely shocked by the quality of paintings she saw there: to her it was very clearly kitsch.
The evangelical world has its share of kitsch too. Hanna Rosin, a journalist who recently published a book on Patrick Henry, an evangelical college, said that many students want to distance themselves from the kitschy aspects of Christian culture, and in this effort, they point out they don’t own any paintings by Thomas Kinkade, whose paintings, I think it’s safe to say, are kitschy. Muslim culture has a lot of kitsch too: I think of the Quran verses written in fake gold on fake velvet backgrounds.
I would say kitsch is art that lacks some critical element of authenticity or courage. I like how journalists Dick and Joan Ostling, in their recent book, Mormon America, describe Mormon art: “A characteristically literal turn of mind, combined with doctrinaire Mormon ideals and a certain cultural isolation, results in highly sentimentalized representational and visual arts. … Art is confused with propaganda, never with a quest.”
MW: What are some of your favorite example of religious art? Why?
AU: I have always been drawn to icon paintings and portraits from the distant past. I find a certain mesmerizing stillness in them. I am too art-historically ignorant to mention those that have caught my attention. But one modern one that I do like is Robert Lentz’s Saint Mary Magdalene. Someone sent that image to me on a card years ago, and I still have it. Maybe there is a journalistic reason I like that image: art blogger Mark Vallen wonders if that image might have been inspired by that famous National Geographic cover with the Afghani girl on it.
I have also been very drawn to the religious themes in the work of Amy Morel, a close friend and sculptor who now lives in Vermont. One of her early pieces, exhibited at Dartmouth College where we went to school together, was a miniature worship space, created out of tiny wooden branches bowed together. It was very evocative, as if you were suddenly walking into Notre Dame. A later exhibit of hers in Boston incorporated crosses into everyday objects and furniture, including a bathroom set and a bicycle; that exhibit had the wonderful title, “Bed Bath and Beyond.”
MW: To what extent have you found that religious schools emphasize religious art as an important part of their educational programs? How aware do you think most religious people are of their own cultural heritages?
AU: I attended Harvard Divinity School and can only speak to that experience. I didn’t find any emphasis whatsoever on the visual arts, but of course I didn’t seek it out either; I’m sure you or I will get an e-mail from a professor or former student there who is all about art and bristles at my characterization. But in my experience, art simply wasn’t on the menu.
MW: To what extent can non-religious people understand religious art?
AU: This is a cliché but the great thing about visual art is that it communicates directly, like music. I think we interact with works of art on an almost subconscious level; it’s often very hard to explain why we like or don’t like a painting. As I said before, non-religious people are still human, and I think all humans have some innate spiritual consciousness: all humans must grapple with what it means to be alive. So can a non-religious person grasp and respond intuitively to a great piece of religious art? Absolutely, and many do. I think the effect is even stronger for music, perhaps because we are more used to listening to music than to looking at paintings or other art.
I think the question also goes both ways: Can religious people understand non-religious art? Many religious traditions have prohibitions on what can or cannot be represented visually. There are some sociological issues in the U.S. as well. The elite art world is generally associated with the secular East Coast and West Coast cultures; many religious people (read: evangelicals) feel alienated from the art world and would perhaps see it as decadent or secular or worse. And then of course there is bad blood because of past controversial exhibits, such as Piss Christ: I think that title really says it all.
MW: How much emphasis do you think the religious press places on covering local and national religious art stories? Do you think this trend is changing with the proliferation of the internet?
AU: Among religious reporters right now, there is a lot of attention to “culture” issues. Reporters have to explain why The Passion of the Christ and the Left Behind series have been so popular, for example. When it comes to pop culture, then, like best-selling books, and films and to some extent music, we do pay attention to art (if you can call that art.) But when it comes to the high arts? I can’t remember a single conversation with a fellow journalist about art. When I attend the yearly Religion Newswriters Association conference, that topic doesn’t come up. That said, I am hoping to write about the new National Islamic Arts and Culture Foundation, which has a gallery in Reston, Virginia, where I happen to live. And of course now that we’re chatting about this subject, I’ll have my eye out for religious art angles. That in itself shows the power of the Internet, I suppose, how easy it is for bloggers to cross boundaries and discover shared interests.