Beating the bounds of art: Makoto Fujimura

Makoto Fujimura, from his essay Withoutside: Transgressing in Love:

What if we considered limitations as the beginning of our creative acts, to see the boundaries of life (and death) as the starting point of our discussion?  If we are to honor such a reality, then, paradoxically, we may see beyond them. Limitations can be a catalyst to find freedom.  That is what the Incarnation of Christ teaches us. Jesus “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing.” (Phil. 2:6,7)  By humbling Himself, he lifted all of us broken human beings with Him. Following Christ is also to recognize and honor the limits and boundaries of being human; less is more.

In William Blake’s Jerusalem, he coined the word “Withoutside.” We vacillate between needing the boundaries of “with/outside” and needing the freedom of “without/side.” As we do, perhaps it is possible to expand the borders of art in both ends of the spectrum of human potential and brokenness.   But our call at first is to deal with the excess of our past, to turn towards humble, normative human acts.  Then, paradoxically, we must also seek excellence, to reach for the stars of artistic promise, to seek generative solution to cure the impoverishment of the language of art.

The first part of this journey, “with/outside,” will involve a willingness to volunteer restrictions on choice, such as honoring traditions and communities, to allow for the roots of our expressions take deeply in the soil of culture.   We may need to pause and give birth (perhaps literally) in order to be human now.  Even raising children, and other such self-discipline of not making art can be the “art form” of our new century. This could be the most transgressive art of our times. For if our starting point is no longer in our capacity to make (an Aristotelian definition of art), but also in our capacity to destroy (as in the Manhattan project), our Ground Zero lives should begin anew with the basics.  In such a time as this, our songs may sound more like lamentation than celebration. In facing the sinister, active forces at work in culture, our strategy may seem invisible to the powerful, and powerless as a newborn, our focus localized to the minute particulars of our daily lives.  And at such times, rebellion may look like ordinary human activities simply done in faith. We are, after all, attempting to draw life unto death by scratching our lines in the ashes of ground zeros all around us.  Perhaps we need to start with loving each other.

Read the whole article. (Originally published in Image Journal, Issue 60.) Fujmura has studied, and creates in, the Japanese Nihonga tradition.