Church Dialogues

My colleague and artist Tollef Thorsnes has recently, during the Easter holidays, had an art exhibition in Nøtterøy church. His thee-dimensional works in wood placed on the floors, walls and spaces between the columns, addressed the visitors in variety of ways: invited them to touch, to open and close, and children were even invited to make drawings and attach them to one of the art works; The observers were invited to actively take part in “creation of the art” – because the artist does not see his art as some ready made product that exists unaffected by the visitors’ body and mind. New “meanings are created and negotiated within a community”(Bruner, 1990: 11).

Bakhtin addresses art as a dialogic and interactive concept. He wrote that both art and creativity “must be understood in a dynamic relationship where self and other, work and world are intimately connected” (Haynes, 1995, p.21). An art work is “not a finished world but a range of possibilities, of potentials for interesting and unpredictable histories” (Haynes, 1995, p.12).

When experiencing the art in the church, each person brought his own understanding into the context, and different dimensions had different significance: For some of the visitors, the fact that exhibition was set up during the Easter had a significant importance for their experience and meaning making; For some others, the relation between the art objects and the church room was probably important; While for the children, I assume, the functional quality of the benches designed for them to sit while drawing (and knowing that their drawings would become a part of something larger) might have had a significant importance for their conceptualization of the exhibition and for their meaning makings.

We all bring our earlier experiences and pre-understanding with us to the new contexts. We ”act toward things on the basis of the meaning that these things have for them” (Blumer, 1969: 50), but this past experiences are “given new life and soul through having to meet a new situation” (Dewey, 2005: 63).

BLUMER, H. (1969) Symbolic interactionism: perspective and method, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice Hall.
BRUNER, J. S. (1990) Acts of meaning, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
DEWEY, J. (2005) Art as experience, New York, Berkley Publishing Group.
HAYNES, D. J. (1995) Bakhtin and the visual arts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.