Imagining the World Anew: The Arts and the Beauty of Impasse

The unifying thesis of these presentations claimed that the visual and performing arts not only make visible the often hidden or ignored aspects of the many impasses that shape our contemporary reality, but also offer an invaluable way to circumvent the American civic and religious aversion to impasses.The panelists explored the viability of the arts in squarely facing, entering into, and then imaginatively three contemporary expressions of impasse.In a paper titled, "Beyond the Devastation: Beauty, Ecology and Emily Carr's Clearcut Forests," Colleen Cullinan introduced the work of Canadian artist Emily Carr (1871Carr ( -1945) ) as a way to speak about the imagination as a route through impasse.Carr's most famous works are paintings of the British Columbian rainforest, a dramatic and intimidating landscape.Cullinan focused on works such as Logger 's Culls (1935), Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1935), and Odds and Ends (1939), all of which are strikingly gorgeous paintings of what should be a profoundly ugly subject: recently clear cut forest.A few trees remain in each painting, and in each, one can see the "screamers," Carr's word for the ripped edge of the stumps where the tree fi nally gave way.Cullinan contrasted these quite beautiful paintings with photographs taken by the British Columbian Forestry Service during the 1930s, and argued that Emily Carr's ability to see beauty in the midst of this devastation was rooted in Carr's particularly Christian focus on resurrection, not death, as the key to how to see and understand the world.Carr spoke clearly in her journal about how important it was to see the world "the Christ way . . .dipped in love," and that kind of vision clearly animates these particular paintings.Cullinan argued that fi nding a way to see the world "the Christ way" is in the end a route through impasse.Rachel Bundang, in "From Old School to New School: Rethinking Tradition and Social Change in Remix Culture," began by clarifying terms.She noted that hip hop, which is grounded in history and experiences of struggle, building community, and making both meaning and memory among the urban African diaspora, can be used as an exercise in moral and theological imagination and creativity, whether done collaboratively or independently.As a means of interactivity, cultural production, and resistance/engagement, it provides a liberative metaphor and practice for us to challenge ourselves to experience the world from different perspectives and-in the process-recognize the personhood and dignity of the other.She then explained that remix culture is born of hip hop's ethos and practices of sampling, much like jazz practices of improvisation that preceded it.Its

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