I have gone before you

I find myself reading a lot these days and pondering: what is the Real? One of the great books of art theory is Hans Hoffman's Search for the Real - and he devoted his career to this search, teaching and painting, exerting influence upon the group of artists who created Abstract Expressionism - the painterly idiom that shifted the balance of power in the artworld from Paris to New York: an idiom whose basic tenet is that the subject of painting is paint, and how paint shows the process of the artist. He determined that what is real in a painting (or sculpture) is not an ostensible subject (puppies or trees or battles) but the manipulation of the plastic qualities of the artist's materials. It's possible to represent a subject with great clarity and at the same time have a terrible painting, because the truth of the materials has been denied. This result is typically called kitsch. On the other hand, a primitive work, even clumsy work, may exhibit an emotional or personal investment in the materials, thus exhibiting the Real. This is the attraction of folk art. What Hoffmann's work does is articulate artistic freedom from mimesis. This is probably not new, per se, but Hoffmann stated it in terms that allowed artists to invest themselves more fully in the process, their process. Hence the Real does not depend on resemblance.
I think that this is perhaps one of the most difficult things for people looking at art to get. I often hear "I liked that picture because it looked like the real thing." This observation is I think related to the sentiment we feel about certain photographs: what looks real, is what we project our desires onto. Even photographs call into question what is real: photographs are subject to the same "faults" that modern paintings suffer from in the eyes of observers regarding the Real: photos are blurry, ugly, and increasingly subject to manipulation. Hence mimesis, what is casually called Real, has the characteristic of being false - a false Real.
This search for the Real is compelling. I feel that I am on to it in my art - but only because I've been on it for many years, learning to recognize the signs of what is true and what is false Real. I know that when psychiatrists like Lacan talk about the Real, they're describing not just the artistic Real, but what we might call "all that there is and how all that there is fits together." This Real is something beyond description. We fall into describing our "real" situations in terms of imaginary or symbolically.
This Real eludes description. I discover this as I've tried to come to terms with my own history and what is happening in the world today. There are many descriptions, typically labeled left and right, conservative and liberal; and these descriptions of the Real reduce human history to either/or dialectics. Is the Real the working out of a materialistic scenario? Today we hear free market capitalism enjoined as the mechanism that will usher in a world utopia - and do we not hear in this promise the Marxist promise, equally mechanistic, equally materialistic, of another kind of revolution: that human history resolves in simple ways. When the tide rises though, we see that not all boats float. The reality is more complex than either system pretends and unintended consequences (and who takes responsibility for those?) are the more lasting result. Whatever the Real is, it is more complex than the politicians of either party are likely to speak out on. Instead we get spin and marketing - slight of hand. Perhaps we most often recognize the Real in its shadow: that feeling of inauthenticity we find ourselves in when the buying spree is over, the degree obtained, the election won.
Even though the Real is more complex than something that can be described in a slogan or boiled down to a party platform, our faith compels us to investigate it and try to live lives that display an understanding of that complexity: lives that don't give into consumerism or ideology. Lives that don't settle for the imaginary or the symbolic - although Lacan would say that that is impossible. I think we can try.
One place to begin is in this story of Joseph. Joseph has been given up for dead by his family. The brothers certainly don't expect to see him here, in Egypt, in charge of who gets to eat in the kingdom. Joseph makes himself known to them and twice he says, "God sent me before you to preserve - life - a remnant." He tells them not to be angry with themselves or afraid. He reassures them. He has gone before them.
In this story the Real the brothers thought they knew has been turned upside down. They thought their lives hung by a thread. They thought their brother Joseph was dead. Think of the guilt they'd harbored over the years: the shame they felt for their lie and how that secret overshadowed the life of the father they loved. Now they have been thrust into a different and truer reality. The reality is that God has sent someone before them, into their predicament, and that their fears and anxieties are founded on nothing.
That sense of someone being sent sent before us is very present in other parts of scripture. In Psalm 77 God's footprints go before the people. And in the New Testament we meet God incarnate going before us. In Hebrews where Jesus passes through the veil of death and is called the pioneer of our faith - and in John's Gospel where Jesus tells his disciples that he is going before them.
Jesus too comes to his disciples, the first Christians, and to us. He has gone before us.
But we don't see it, Perhaps. What we see is like what Joseph's brothers saw: lies and secrets shadowing us; death of hopes, death of us and those we love. Even Christ might seem as dead to us, or as absent, as to his disciples during that first Easter weekend.
And so have we lived too much of our lives in a world imagined by marketing agents and politicians, dogmatic revolutionaries and moralistic hedonists - all with some material mechanism or materialism couched in spirituality as the paragon of the Real. An answer that explains everything and promises our desires. Like painting that isn't true to paint, the images look pretty, just like we've been trained to imagine them. Yet we live among images that are unreal. Kitsch. How can we recognize the Real?
God has gone before us to preserve us. In Jesus' resurrection we encounter nature in a new way and we encounter ourselves in a new way. We are freed from false likenesses of the Real. This false likeness springs from death. The fear of death trains us to find gratifications for our anxieties in the approval or others or in possessing what others have - either through conquest, theft or projection. And so these images are bound to disappoint. Each promise of this false Real ends in a death, a harbinger of the ultimate death.
God goes before us. Don't forget. God has claimed death, removed its teeth. And God calls us to follow Christ. Follow Christ on the path that loves. Follow Christ in the path of life, a path that restores creation.
When we are true to the material of our faith, that it is a faith in a generous, loving, tolerant, healing God (who sent Christ not to condemn but to save the world), whose wrath is for a moment and whose favor is for a life time [psalm 30], we produce a life that is a work of art.