How art should be used to grow a banana

Some while back the Christian group at Tas uni hosted an artists' forum. Gosh it was good - and just as dense and stimulating on the second and third listen. On the panel were a poet/writer, a graphic designer/musician and a poet/painter/writer. They had all obviously given a lot of thought to their responses, and spoke with honesty and insight about their experience and observations on the process and place of artistic endeavour. The first 20 minutes was about their personal journeys and individual crafts, and after that they explored the relationship between Christian faith and art.

I kinda did a painting course at Art School and that was when I became a Christian. So I guess a few people who became Christians around that time can relate to this feeling of being a bit punk about being a Christian and having a lot of impatience for aesthetic subtlety and stuff that takes a long time and stuff that perculates and relationships... [Nicholas Gross]

I think it can sometimes stretch art - and I guess I'm talking about especially figurative art, not so much books and films cos they've got a bit more scope - but it's stretching that medium a bit to ask it to do too much and to be too didatic. And just thinking about your conversion story, I guess we're so sensitive about kitsh, we're so sensitive about happy endings - I'm not sure why, whether it's just we see such a volume of pictures and read such a volume of things that we're very sensitive to that kind of easy answer - so maybe it is hard to picture and to represent that kind of stuff in a convincing way, in a way that really compels - you really need those twists. [Nicholas Gross]

Art can have any number of functions and forms and aesthetics that go alongside it. To say that art is just about representing reality is a very sort of maybe 15th to 16th century view of art into about the 19th century view of art. I mean art for the Egyptians was a completely different thing and thus took different forms. Art for Rothko was a very different thing and took different forms. So I can imagine art for conversion I guess - because as a liberal minded person I want to say that art can be used for all sorts of things, and throughout history has been used for all sorts of things. But I think that, given our culture's understanding of the function of art since the early 20th century and through a tradition that began earlier than that, I think it's really difficult to think of art as being directly towards conversion. Cos it's a bit like saying how art should be used to grow a banana or something like that - it's missing the point. [Ben Walter]