The art world needs more beauty and suffering

Metaxu – the word itself is pleasant, and rolls off the tongue like Henry James’ favourite words of the English language – summer afternoon.

Only it’s Greek, and a word borrowed from Plato by the modern prophet Simone Weil. It means an in-between existence. Weil wanted to grasp the dignity and suffering of embodied life, trivialized in a modern world fed on the acids of irony and disinterested technology that were tearing apart the fabric of beauty – beauty inextricably linked to suffering.

Erica Grimm-Vance, assistant professor of art at Trinity Western University, Langley, B.C., has taken up this cross, and for the last 24 years has tried to embody Simone Weil’s twin sisters – beauty and affliction.

“Remembering to breathe.” Erica Grimm-Vance, 1998

In January, she was guest lecturer at Canadian Mennonite University, Winnipeg, where she talked about “art, the incarnation, and the way of unknowing” – a misleading title perhaps, since all of her work is an attempt to reclaim attentiveness towards being.

Gilded in the silence and throes of contemplation, Grimm-Vance paints the urgency of the body and matter as a symbol of spirit incarnate, as a gateway towards the divine. Weil uses the metaphor of a prison wall. We can tap messages to others through the walls – our bodies – but they are barriers as well as bridges. This is the unresolved and often painful in-betweenness of metaxu.

Grimm-Vance’s arching, always moving or pulsating human figures are often juxtaposed against slabs of stark steel, cornered, gated, weighed against, heightening the presence and vulnerability of human flesh. Her slides tried to capture that feeling of “being moved” by art – a woman kneeling, thinly outlined by graphite on Baltic birch, is overlaid with wisps of red encaustic wax as Grimm-Vance read aloud a poem by Rilke: “let life happen to you . . .”

Her recent, more abstract work pits the human form against medical MRI scans, stock market reports, and other “signifiers of meaning” that crowd us in.

Grimm-Vance has been fascinated with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ search for “inscape” – or the inner essence of a thing as seen through its form. The act of drawing, she says, focuses our mind on form, and can itself be a kind of healing activity. The attentiveness to the form of matter also brings out the beauty in the everyday. “Now I see beauty in everyone’s face!” said one of her students, forced to observe detail.

Through attentiveness, says Weil, “the soul is cultivated for God.” Evangelicals mystified by the fine arts have something to learn here. Instead of the saccharine banalities of sentimental and commercial kitsch, we must regain a sense of suffering and bravely bear silence. Silence, mystics and artists know, is a necessary preparation for action.

But how can the artist understand beauty anymore, in a society of spectacles where consumerism mediates relationships between people and gaming revenues outdo Hollywood? In recent cultural theory, preoccupations with meaning vs. appearance have dissolved meaning and left a superficial euphoria, says Grimm-Vance. Beauty, and especially affliction, are very unpopular today. Based on her own experience, she discards euphoria, but also doesn’t give in to the temptation to see money, sex, and power, behind every action.

Instead, she says beauty is a “trap” that enters the senses to gain access to the soul. Grimm-Vance describes herself as a medieval in this respect. She’s like Dante, whose “spirits of sight” were “destroyed” when he first sees Beatrice in his Vita Nuova. Later, that beauty leads him to contemplate the source of that beauty, and Beatrice becomes a symbol of theological truth in his famous Commedia.

What makes Grimm-Vance’s work so gripping is her lifelong engagement with the universal questions. Even though she paints first and thinks later, Grimm-Vance says she “does philosophy” through her painting.

However, her eclectic and non-systematic method betrays fundamental contradictions in her thought. Do her paintings cultivate and assume the attentiveness of the viewer, or do they attempt to portray the feeling of being attentive? And perhaps the awkward mixture of Plato, Heidegger, and French cultural theorists in after-the-fact justifications allow her to paint on yet another veneer of meaning – a Christian mystical “unknowing.”

Unknowing is an especially comfortable posture these days, one that escapes Simone Weil’s own discipline and suffering, which included learning Greek in order to read Plato and find herself in metaxu.

Grimm-Vance’s lectures were a sad reminder of the pallid form of modern academia. Like freshmen at university, we were inundated with a spate of hyper-condensed arguments like trinkets, and were asked to digest them immediately. Enormous landscapes of beautiful thoughts were shared in brief moments and made to sound as if they agree – Rilke, Aquinas, Plato, Heidegger – side by side, oozing like patina from tubes. The quotes were endless. If I were in church, I’d call it prooftexting. The cheapened grace of consumerism so cleverly described by the postmoderns Baudrillard, Foucault, Lacan, etc., seemed endemic in her dependence on others’ thoughts, encouraging a lack of detailed attention she so courageously tries to foster.

Yet, as an artist, Grimm-Vance gives to the Christian community a glimpse of what art can and is supposed to be – an act of worship that takes the created realm seriously, probes the depths of suffering in an age of superfluity, and pays heed to the great conversations about being. It’s universal. “My artwork doesn’t talk about God or biblical narratives,” she says, “but understands from the inside the need to interact with God.”

Samples of Erica Grimm-Vance’s work can be seen at assiniboia.com and egrimmvance.com.