Mormons and modernity, LDS Art Critical Reader first look
Hello and Happy Thanksgiving!
No Mormon Literaturstreit post this month—but there are still some echoes to come, including a post on Eugene England I hope to publish in December.
Also not much to report on the Mormon writing front: I’ve been focusing on an essay for wmhenrymorris.com instead.
But I do have a few days off this week and plan on devoting some of that time to the Mormon architect creating a memorial for the site of a space disaster novella. The first draft is about 2/3 complete.
Gerrit de Jong Jr. on modernity
I managed one AMV post this month: On Gerrit de Jong Jr.’s “An Approach to Modernity in Art”
Modernism is one of my aesthetic fascinations so this 1959 BYU Studies essay by Gerrit de Jong Jr. was high on my list of works on Mormon aesthetics to dive deeper into.
Unfortunately, but predictably, de Jong Jr. doesn’t go into modernity in Mormon art or discuss how Mormon artists should approach modernism, rather he focuses on why Mormons shouldn’t be afraid of modern art, especially music and visual art. The essay essentially is: stop being afraid, you Philistines, although de Jong Jr. presents his ideas in a more measured, systematic way.
He argues that Mormons reject modernity simply because they are unfamiliar with it, and so they should put more trust in critics, shouldn’t be afraid of learning to become connoisseurs, and should focus on form more than content.
In my post, I situate Mormon responses to modern art in relation to their belatedness (along numerous vectors) to modernity/modernism. I also defend de Jong Jr.’s empahsis on form, but also argue that even though his essay is about modernity in a art, it does a disservice to readers by situating the avant garde of the first half of the twentieth century in a sort of universal aesthetics of “the new” instead of in the specific experiences of modernism (speed, urbanism, Fordism/Taylorism, war, disenchantment of the world, etc.) that the artists were responding to.
Thus, somewhat ironically, rather than the content itself (which is interesting but not groundbreaking in that it) a large part of the value in de Jong Jr.’s essay is his modeling of a Mormon who is interested in all kinds of modern art.
And yet that this model exists at all—let alone in the pages of BYU Studies is awesome.
A quick look at Latter-Day Saint Art
Some kind, generous soul sent me a title from the AMV bookshop registry: Latter-Day Saint Art: A Critical Reader. I was delighted and surprised to receive it. It’s a hefty thing and will take me a while to process. It’s also focused on visual art so part of my task will be to think through the aesthetic ideas presented and how transferrable they might be to literature.
I’ve only scanned the book so far. I do anticipate that several, perhaps numerous, AMV posts (and newsletters bits) will come out of it.
Some initial impressions:
Yes, the list price is hefty. But it’s a beautiful hardbound book of 644 pages filled with color reproductions of art and pages that feel nice to the touch and don’t cram the copy in.
This is a very small thing, but I like that the list of contributors is at the front of the book and is in order of appearance; it reinforces the sequencing of the book and makes it a bit more likely readers are actually going to read the contributor bios—I’m going to crib this idea if I ever edit another short story anthology.
The chapters that are most obvious for inclusion in my Mormon Aesthetics project are Terryl Givens “A Theology of Mormon Art” and Chase Westfall’s “Toward a Latter-day Saint Contemporary Art”.
I’m struggling to determine whether I’m going to read it front to back or skip around. Certainly, it’s the type of work one doesn’t need to read sequentially and there are chapters I really want to get to, but at the same time, it is largely ordered chronologically in relation to the artists/works/historical periods each chapters focuses on, and I also want to experience it as the editors—Amanda Beardsley and Mason Allred—sequenced it.
Setting aside the bookending more aesthetic theory-focused chapters mentioned in point 3 above and the Foreword, Introduction, and Afterword, the four chapters I’m most excited to dig into are:
“Establishing Zion: Identity and Communitas in Early Latter-day Saint Art” by Ashlee Whitaker Evans
“Creating Something Extraordinary: Nineteenth-Century Latter-day Saint Women and Their Folk Art” by Jennifer Reeder
“George Dibble and Modernism in Utah” by Glen Nelson [as you’ve probably guessed, I’m fascinated by the Mormon response to Modernism]
“‘Draw All Men Unto Him’: The Mormon Art and Belief Movement” by Menachem Wecker [shout out to Menachem who is one of the journalisst/critics that focuses on the intersection of religion and art and does so ecumenically]
I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to approach writing about such an abundance of work on Mormon art, but I’m looking forward to digging in.
See you next month!
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