https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GfPQBBTnTps
I guess this brings us back a little bit to Christianity, which we keep sort of circling around, described as the religion that is ever ancient, ever new. You are not just an artist, you are an iconographer, not just an iconographer, a Christian iconographer. Is that just a coincidence? Not at all. You know, I studied fine art when I was in my 20s, and I struggled a lot to find a way to integrate myself, let’s say. I was a Christian, I was doing contemporary art, which is already a problem because it’s so cynical and so heady, and it’s difficult to make something. You’re always making a comment on something. And I really wanted to create things that had a place in the world. So already that was a problem, and then also I needed to find a language, and discovering the traditional, call it the traditional language of the church. You know, the church developed this powerful visual language like the first 1,000 years, and it wasn’t top-down, it was this really organic negotiation. If you went in a church like in Spain, or if you went to Syria or to England, you would have recognized what you see. There was like this universal language, I would say. And so diving back into that universal language, to me, is very deliberate, because I think that our understanding of art and our participation in culture, if we want to renew it, even at the level of entertainment or at the level of furniture, it has to start in the highest place. And so for me, this was really a strategy. So I make images for churches. I make things, chalices, things that people use within the traditional churches, but I also make t-shirts. And I wrote a graphic novel, and I write fairy tales. And so for me, all of this is connected together. That is, nothing is bad. Like t-shirts are fine. It’s okay to wear a t-shirt, but don’t wear a t-shirt when you go to church, let’s say. Right, it’s like just, everything has to be in its place. And I think for things to kind of flow down and orient themselves properly, they have to start in the highest. And so for me, it was really important to rediscover the Christian aesthetics and the Christian language of art in order to then know that later I would be making other things, and having them, let’s say, flow down from that. And I think it’s the same with architecture, for example. Like if we recapture beautiful churches, that’s probably the best thing we can do. And then the world will flow slowly out of that. It’s gonna take time, but we’re gonna at least have the place where we gather together and we recognize what is highest. That’s what we’re doing when we’re in church. We’re like, this is what is highest. So if the space is this ugly thing that looks like a strip mall, we’re not honoring. Even if it’s not overtly ugly, even if it’s not aggressively ugly, even if it’s just plain and ordinary and banal. No, I totally agree. I always tell people, your church should really be nicer than your house. If you at least keep that hierarchy and make sure that your church is nicer than your house, then you should be okay. There is, though, there is a traditional language of Christianity, even in the architecture as well, that is the most, I think, reflective of what a church is. And you see that, there’s still plenty of churches that have that, but it’s difficult. A lot of the modern churches, they’re going for the entertainment mode. They’re going for a theater or something that’s more like a stadium. It’s reflective of what you’re doing. Spaces aren’t arbitrary. Spaces have, the way we give our attention to things and the way that things happen have meaning. You can’t avoid it. Let’s say this is gonna be hostile to a lot of people. I understand, but if you stand in front of people, the way you dress is going to affect the impression you give. It doesn’t matter what you want. So if you’re standing in front of everybody and you’re saying, well, I don’t want my clothing to say something, so I’m gonna wear ripped jeans and I’m gonna have messy hair, I’m gonna sit on the side of the stage, you’re saying something, my friend. You’re inevitably saying something by your demeanor, by the way you’re dressed. And so I think that one of the powerful things of the traditional Christian churches is that they were able to create a language that every piece of clothing that a priest wears in the Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church is related to a psalm, like for sure in the Orthodox Church. When they put their clothing on, they say prayers, they actually recite psalms as they put on their clothing. And so they’re putting themselves in a space where they’re going to really represent what it is they want to represent, which is they want to gather the people in attention to God. And the space is the same. The tripartite way that a traditional church is set up is there specifically for a reason. The altar is higher than the seats. I know if you have a place where all the seats are higher than the stage, let’s say, you’re saying something. You can’t avoid entering into the language of hierarchy that’s in scripture, like going up the mountain. Jesus going up the mountain or Moses going up the mountain. You have to think about that, because that’s the world in which we have our experience. So if you create a stadium where all the viewers are higher than the pastor, you’re saying something. And even if it’s not explicit, it’s going to imbibe the culture and it’s going to affect the way you understand the world. Because we have bodies. That’s right. Because we’re incarnate. It’s just unavoidable. We perceive the world. The same reason your head is at the top of your body, for the same reason these hierarchies of attention are, the same reason when you lift your head up to look over something or to see the sun, or to, these are all real embodied realities that we deal with. Well, you mentioned this big shift in the culture, and specifically in churches, from reverence and worship of God to more entertainment. And you see this, especially in the Catholic Church, in the 1960, really 1970 and afterward, the mass was changed radically such that the priest, who since time immemorial had faced the altar, and all the people in the priest were facing the altar together worshiping God, the priest turned around and faced the people. And a priest friend of mine, Father George Rutler in New York, described what happened then, which is the priests would begin to entertain. They would often tell jokes. He said like a ham actor in a dying vaudeville show, they would tell jokes. They might consider, my priest friend suggested, limiting their repertoire to the jokes that Saint John told the Blessed Mother while her son bled on the cross. Previously, how’s that imagery? Yeah, there you go. Previously, and I know this because I attend the traditional Latin Mass, and that had been robbed. We had been robbed of that Mass for most of my life until in the 2000s, Pope Benedict started to loosen it up again and allow people to go back to it. It was a total revelation to me, because I grew up in the era of priests making dumb jokes and the hymns being lame little ditties from the 70s that weren’t even cool in the 70s, and acoustic guitars and felt banners, and just ugly, banal, bland, whitewashed churches, and iconoclastic kind of moment where you take out all of the beauty. And then I began to glimpse a Mass where every syllable is a symbol. Every article of the priest’s clothing, as you mentioned, all of the language, all of the chanting, all of the orientation of everything is symbolic of something. It’s imbued with meaning, and I said, oh my gosh, we’re really doing something here. This is really significant. Oh, I totally agree. I mean, I’m an Orthodox Christian, and so this is, luckily we haven’t had that change, let’s say, so we really, we live in that world where the purpose of church is to worship, and it’s not, it’s something which is, it really does reflect North American culture, and I think sometimes you could say that, at least here, it happened in ways that are insipid. People didn’t totally realize what was going on, but there’s a manner in which we view church as something that we consume. Just an inevitable part of the way we understand culture as also entertainment, that we’ve reduced culture to entertainment, and so that gets brought into the church where we’re there to consume whatever it is that is going to be presented to us, and that is a problem. It is a problem, and it’s definitely helpful to have properly oriented spaces and properly oriented liturgies to help us understand that no, we need to orient ourselves towards God. Everything, and if we do that, then the world will, it’s funny, if we orient ourselves towards God properly, then everything will kind of flow, even in terms of beauty. That’s what I was saying before, is that for me, becoming an iconographer was about orienting my art practice in the highest way possible. In a world also where it was so weird to do that, it’s like, okay, you’re an iconographer, I’m an icon carver, how many of those are there in North America? Yeah, I can count them on two fingers, really. But still, it was a very strange thing to do, but I knew that I had to, in order for anything else that I do to flow, I had to be oriented properly. It’s the same with our family. So if we think of church as a place to consume, let’s say songs and messages or whatever, then when we go home and we sit at the table, we think that food is just there to consume. And so we’ll watch our family dinners erode for this downstream from the manner in which we worship. And it’s gonna happen in the culture generally, right? It’s not a direct correlation, but you’ll see it kind of happen, whereas we don’t orient ourselves properly, then things are gonna start to fragment. You’ll come to a point where people, families don’t even sit together at all. There’s a principle, lexarondi, lex credendi, lex vivendi, the way that we worship affects the way that we believe. It determines the way that we believe, and it determines the way that we live. So you’re talking about this orientation, all coming down, it affects the whole rest of life. Thank you.