The Artist Alive shows us a passionate teacher of undergraduates drawing his students into a course about knowing and understanding social and cultural injustices and their potentially transformative demands on us. The book is an emotionally intense journey through the motivation driving this course and the material used in it. Pramuk draws students into the course experience through popular music, with briefer excursions into modern Christian icon making, literature, and film. The music, beloved of the author, is apparently a powerful means of engaging students, though the general reader may be less moved by, for example, Pink Floyd and less ready to consider popular lyrics compelling poetry.
Pramuk describes the book's chapters as a series of “case studies,” each about a particular artist and his or her work as used in the class, and about the way the work helps us see into societal and personal reality. Appendices A through E are descriptions and directions for student activities and class work.
The author makes many connections between the work of the artists considered and theology, often presenting art as a means of theological understanding. Artists’ concerns and intentions, and the responses of listeners, viewers, and readers, are often laid alongside biblical texts. Meetings of art and theology are usually seen in the light of Christian, often Ignatian Catholic, insight and challenge.
The author suggests that the arts are “pre-religious” (16) and that they can “prepare the way” for “the experience and language of grace” and “the mystery of the divine” (17). This is a common but problematic way of connecting the arts and Christian theology. Defining the artist and the arts as servants of religion tames and controls the meeting of the two disciplines. Both are human attempts to make meaning out of experience and perception, including experiences and perceptions of God. Releasing both theology and art from Pramuk's “served” and “servant” preconception lets them simply meet on the thin and mysterious boundary between them. There they cast often disconcerting light on each other, they wrestle, they dance together, they shout each other down, they sing together, as only equals can. This kind of meeting offers more to a project like Pramuk's book than the hierarchical conception of art as a servant of theology.
As I write, people across the world are protesting the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police and demanding societal change and racial justice. Many of these protests are organized and led by student-age people. Pramuk's course and book can nurture this sort of courage, drawing students away from the cultural lure of technological self-absorption, into the gloriously and horrifyingly human world where we survive and flourish only face to face, heart to heart, body to body, standing against whatever would divide us. As students meet the commitment of artists, religious people, and others who fight injustice and change culture, they are offered hope and ground on which to stand in their chosen struggles. Pramuk has given us a highly personal and compelling example of teaching that offers time and room to see, to fall in love with, and finally to take one's place in human pain and beauty. He helps his students and readers understand that our pain and beauty are where our joys and responsibilities are opened to us, the only place where we can confront the question of God and the lifelong urgency of bringing justice and making meaning.
