Art Matters: Asking the Questions No One Can Ask

We recently watched a German mini-series (English subtitles) called Generation War, the story of five young friends in Berlin and what happens to them from 1941 to 1946. Two are brothers, soldiers in the Wehrmacht, sent east to fight the Russians. One girl is a café singer with dreams of a singing career. Her boyfriend is a Jewish tailor with his own dreams of fashion design. And the fifth wants to be a nurse, “representing German women” and helping to tend the soldiers wounded at the front.

It was a riveting series. When it first aired in Germany in 2013, it caused no end of controversy, including a protest by the Polish ambassador over the anti-Semitic depiction of Polish partisans fighting the Nazis. Overall, the series renewed a public conversation lying rather dormant over German war guilt.

The series, and the conversation it inspired in Germany, might not have been possible without the paintings of Anselm Kiefer.

Breaking of the Vessels by Anselm Kiefer (1990)

Until 2014, the sum total of my knowledge of Kiefer and his art was limited to a multi-media sculpture in the St. Louis Art Museum, entitled “Breaking of the Vessels” (photograph above). Few St. Louisans know the work’s official title, but ask anyone who’s been to the art museum “Where can I find the broken glass?” and they know exactly what’s being sought. It’s currently in the main entry hall of the museum. Kiefer created it in 1990.

Last year, I was able to see a major exhibition of Kiefer’s work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (“Breaking of the Vessels’ wasn’t included; I can’t imagine anyone shipping all that broken glass, and there’s a lot of broken glass). His work is overwhelming and often overpowering. It was the kind of exhibition, and the kind of art, you can leave as a changed person. I walked out with the exhibition catalog and a biography of the artist.

Kiefer was born in 1945, not the most auspicious time to be a baby in the wreckage of Nazi Germany. He grew up in southwestern Germany, and graduated from the University of Freiburg in 1969; he began his studies in law and romance languages but switched to painting. Through a series of art installations and also artworks presented as books, the artist asked the question that no one in the German art world was asking or even wanted to ask: what does it mean to be a German artist after the Third Reich?

Anselm Kiefer

Kiefer’s art essentially forced Germans to consider that question. It was part of a broader question: What does it mean to be a German after the Third Reich? That was the conversation Kiefer started. And it was a conversation that had to happen, or Germany and Germans would have forever lived in the dark shadow, and the dark sin, that was Nazism.

The Royal Academy exhibition included numerous striking works: A large oil and acrylic painting entitled “Interior,” representing a rather decayed and ruined version of Albert Speer’s Mosaic Room in Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery; “Man in the Forest,” a man in a nightshirt holding a burning bush in the deep forest; and “Iron Path,” showing railroad tracks through a muddy, gray landscape (railroad tracks have a special meaning in our understanding of Nazi history).

This is what art can do, and this is one of the reasons why art matters. It isn’t just about beauty and the creative act. Art can take us to places we need to go, but that may be politically or culturally difficult if not impossible. Art can force us to acknowledge that “there’s an elephant in the room.” And art can keep asking the questions, which is what Kiefer continues to do with his art today.

More on Anselm Kiefer:

Anselm Kiefer by Matthew Biro provides a good overview of the artist’s works and development.

Anselm Kiefer by Richard Davey and Kathleen Soriano, the book produced for the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Related to the theme “Art Matters:”

What I Learned from a 400-Year-Old Painting

The High Calling has a community linkup with the theme of “Art Matters.” To see what others have to see, please visit The High Calling.

Top painting: “Interior,” oil, acrylic and paper on canvas by Anselm Kiefer, 1981; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

The Power of a Good Question

In the short time I worked for an urban school district as director of communications, I traveled to almost all of the city’s schools. I saw parts of my metropolitan community that I had never been in before; I saw neighborhoods that I didn’t even know existed.

Like the elementary school that sat by itself, isolated by lots around it so long abandoned that trees had taken roots about the weeds. The school had bars on the windows on the second floor. The eight-foot fence around the school was topped with barbed wire. And to enter the steel entrance door, you had to look at the surveillance camera mounted high on the building and be buzzed through.

In spite of that, with all of the schools I visited, with all of the crises I had to deal with, I never felt unsafe, not even at night, not even when 400 people would be shouting in a school board meeting, or 2,000 people would be massed outside in the parking lot.

Perhaps it was ignorance on my part, or assurance. Or both.

The school district’s budget was a shambles; the district was utilizing deficit spending and had been for some time, and hadn’t known it. The day of reckoning had arrived, and the acting superintendent, acting chief financial officer (CFO) and top financial administrators had prepared the possible options for dealing with the crisis. All the choices were bad.

Rather than impose one of the draconian solutions (and all of the options were draconian), officials decided to take the message out to the district – to parents, teachers, students, voters and taxpayers. A series of meetings in different parts of the city were being planned, not only to present the administration’s options but also to solicit ideas from everyone on other possible actions.

This had never been done before.

The CFO called 30 of us into a meeting in his office, which, while nice, was designed to hold perhaps 10 people comfortably. Fifteen was a squeeze. Thirty was like a sardine can. I remember I was sitting on the floor. We were the people who would be making the presentations and answering questions. All of the meetings were scheduled in the evening.

As the CFO walked us through the options and the school locations selected for the meetings, he was interrupted by a long-time administrator.

“I am not going into that building,” she said, referring to one of the high schools. “It is not safe at any time of the day or night, and I’m not going into it.”

The ensuing silence in the room was profound. She had articulated what many of the people on the room were thinking. I could see heads nodding.

No one, including the CFO, knew what to say.

Leave it to the politically naive communications guy to ask the obvious, from his commanding position on the floor.

“If the school is unsafe at any time of the day or night, what are we doing sending children into it every day?”

It was a question no one could answer, or would answer. Some looked away. But no one responded.

Finally, the CFO said, “Let’s get on with finalizing the plans for the presentations.” Everyone went where they were assigned. No one’s safety was threatened. The presentations were made; the community was able to participate in helping the school district make a difficult choice.

A good question can make needed change happen.

The High Calling is hosting a community linkup this week on “The Power of Good Questions.” Please visit the site to see other posts, and consider sharing your own story.

Top photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Good Question Image by Mary Anne Morgan; designed by Kris Camealy. Both used with permission. 

Her Name is Char

The office building I work in is shaped like a slight altered “H” – two wings connected by a central corridor, three stories tall. It’s a campus-like setting, and three adjacent buildings are constructed exactly like it.

Every morning, a cleaning crew arrives at the buildings, a “crew” of one for each building. They work steadily throughout the day at three tasks.

They empty trash cans in every office and the common rooms, like small kitchens, copier areas and conference rooms.

They vacuum the floors.

And they clean the bathrooms – toilets, urinals, sinks, and floors. They empty the paper trash in the bathrooms, too.

The next day they return, and the cleaning starts over again. Every day is like every other day.

Turnover is high. Often the crews change weekly. It’s not a dangerous job, but it is repetitive, and boring, and it doesn’t exactly have the status of exalted work. The people are paid better than minimum wage, but not much better.

For about a year, we have had the same person cleaning our building. It’s highly unusual for a member of the cleaning crew to have that length of service.

Her name is Char.

She’s short and a little on the hefty side. She doesn’t so much walk as sway side-to-side going forward.

She has learned the name of every person in the building. That’s more than 300 people. In the same time period she’s been working our building, our department, which has previously occupied about 60 percent of one floor in one wing, grew dramatically. It pushed the other 40 percent into other buildings, moved one team to yet another building, and moved about 15 of us to an office suite area in the first floor of the building.

In numbers of people, the department grew from about 40 to 120.

Char learned the names of every new person who became part of the team. Every one. She knows every one of 120 people in our department by name. Not even the head of the department did that. And she knows the names of the other 180 people in the building, too.

And she talks.

She stops by my office for the trash, and always asks how I’m doing. (She calls me “Mr. Glynn.”) She’s asked about things on my desk (“Is that a chess piece, Mr. Glynn?” “Yes, it a replica of a Lewes chessman, found on a British island and made about 1200 A.D.” “I love to play chess.”) (“You’ve read all those books?” “Yes, I read a lot for the job.” “Oh, man, that’s a lot of books.”)

So one day curiosity gets the better of me, and I ask Char if she enjoys her job.

“Well,” she says, “I do most days. It’s not hard. There’s just a lot of it. But it’s like any job, I suppose, it has its highs and its lows. But I really like the people, I mean the people I work for. They treat us well. And I like the people here. Everyone is always nice.”

She pauses a moment, and then lowers her voice as she continues.

“My job is a gift, Mr. Glynn,” she says. “It is a gift from the Lord. It is a gift every day from the Lord.”

Her name is Char, and she just preached a sermon to me in 23 words.

I feel like I’ve been to church.

The High Calling has a community linkup this week, and the theme is “designed for work.” Take a look at the story there, and the links already added. If you have a story to share, please visit The High Calling and consider writing it, posting it, and adding your link. The linkup continues until Saturday night.

Photograph by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Story of the Second Chance

I was raised a Missouri Synod Lutheran, courtesy of my mother. I was raised with a strong Protestant work ethic, courtesy of my father. Both of those influences fused me into something of an overachiever, although only for those things where I felt I had a chance to overachieve. Academics were one area. Sports were not.

Until my senior year in college, my life followed that overachiever pattern. Set goals, achieve them, surpass them, and then set new goals. As a college freshman, I set several goals, and kept adding to them.

By the middle of my senior year, I had achieved or overachieved everything. All the positions, honors, accolades, recognitions – I had captured them all, including being the managing editor of the student newspaper for my final semester – the position that ran everything in the paper except the editorial page. I had the power position on the paper, likely as powerful as any student office on the campus.

Nothing was left. Nothing.

I crashed and burned.

I kept working; the work ethic was too strong for that to stop. But I crashed. Everything I had accomplished seemed meaningless. Everything I had done seemed like wasted effort. Meaningless. Chasing after the wind.

What I didn’t know was that I was careening, wildly careening, right into the arms of God.

Through what seemed a strange series of circumstances, I landed one night in a conversation with the director for my college’s Campus Crusade for Christ chapter. I was angry, believing that I had been taken advantage of by this man’s organization, which seemed to preach one thing and practice another.

We talked, possibly for hours. I don’t remember how long. But by the end of our conversation, I found myself in God’s arms. I had become a story – the story of the second chance.

This wasn’t an opportunity to reinvent my life. This was a transformation of my life. In a matter of minutes, I understood that everything had fundamentally changed.

About 11 p.m., I found myself in the newspaper editor’s office. He was working late. He asked me if I was okay. “Has something happened?” he asked. And I nodded. “Everything happened,” I said. “Everything. And I can’t explain it.”

The story of the second chance didn’t begin and end that night. If I have learned anything about my life, it’s that the second chances keep coming.

Fourteen years after that night, I had a career crash and burn. Same pattern of overachievement; same result. It happened again 10 years after that, and then 11 years after that.

And each time brought an opportunity for a second chance.

I can say this: had not that second crash and burn happened, I would not have written a speech that changed an entire industry.

Had not that third crash and burn happened, I would not have spent nine months as the communications officer for an urban school district in extreme crisis, learning that a lot of people think differently than I do and they all don’t live in nice, comfortable suburbs, and that some of their children attend schools with 110 percent turnover – annually.

Had not that fourth crash and burn happened, I would not have had published two novels and a work of non-fiction. I would not be a weekly columnist on poetry. I would not be an editor and writer for The High Calling.

Four stories of second chances. And each time, something changed, something was learned, and something was realized.

Something was being grown inside of me.

What was growing, what is growing, is less of me.

The High Calling has a community linkup this week on finding new life – and discovering second chances. If you have a story to tell about your own second chance, visit The High Calling for details. The deadline is tonight.

Photograph by Patricia Lizbeth Medina de Anda via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“He wants to see you. Now.”

The phone rang. Focused on the words on my computer screen, I absentmindedly picked up the phone.

“He wants to see you.”

“Now?” I asked.

“Now.”

I grabbed my suit coat (that’s what we wore in those days), made a mad dash down my building’s back stairs of my building to the tunnel that connected all of the buildings on our campus. I surfaced in the executive building next store – granite, art work and polished wood bathed in silence.

In corporate communication circles , I occupied one of the high positions – the CEO’s speechwriter. I had written for CEOs before him, and I would write for CEOs after him. But no one had the reputation this CEO did.

He had run through three speechwriters in four months before the dreaded call had come. I had expected it. I had written a speech that had received outsized attention inside and outside the company.

The CEO wants you to write his speeches.

In normal circumstances, I would have been thrilled. These were not normal circumstances. This CEO could be awful to work for. He relished being awful to work for. His supervisory style was known as management by intimidation.

After 18 months of my career being over once a week, we both had had one of those business epiphanies. He realized that I wasn’t trying to run the company through his speeches. I realized that there was a human being inside of his business suit.

I reached the outer office where his secretary sat. She nodded toward his door, and arched a eyebrow slightly.

The eyebrow was code. The CEO was not in a good mood. I didn’t know how I was going to handle going back to square one in our working relationship.

I took a step toward his office and he started yelling at me. Literally yelling. And waving the pages of a speech draft I had written.

You don’t know how to write. This is trash. It’s the worst thing you’ve written. You think you’re a writer but you’re not. I don’t have flacks write for me. This went on for some time.

I sat in the chair in front of his desk, and let him finish his rant. I knew it wasn’t the speech draft. I knew I had written a really fine draft. But I knew it must be something, so I listened for clues.

He finally muttered something about me not knowing how to write for certain audiences, and then it clicked.

“It’s the audience, isn’t it?” I asked.

He exploded again.

“You’ve never spoken to a minority audience before, have you?” I asked, surprising myself at how abrupt I was being.

He sat there, glowering at me.

“What if we do this,” I said. “I will send the draft to” – I named two company executives who happened to be minorities – “and have them read it. And see if they think it’s OK for this audience.”

Grumbling, he agreed.

The CEO never allowed anyone to read his speeches beforehand. So this was a rather unique move for him. The two executives read the draft. One suggested a single word change (in a 2,000-word text). The other said he wouldn’t change anything, and that he would give the speech if the CEO wouldn’t.

The CEO gave the speech, to a group of 250 African-American business students.

A couple of days later, I received another phone call.

“He wants to see you.”

“Now?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Now.”

When I arrived, the secretary nodded me toward the door and winked.

That was a good sign.

I walked in his office.

“I gave a great speech,” he said. “I knew it would go over well. They gave me a standing ovation.”

I nodded. “I don’t think I would have expected anything less.”

He nodded. “So let’s talk about the Boston speech next month.”

The High Calling is hosting a community linkup on the power of storytelling at work. To see what others have written, please visit The High Calling. Better still, consider writing and linking your own story about work. the deadline is this weekend.

Illustration by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

A Letter to My Younger Self

Dear Glynn,

I’m looking back to a moment, sometime in the spring of 1970, when you considering a decision to switch majors. You were discouraged by chemistry, and how many courses lay ahead for a pre-med major. And you knew that you heart wasn’t in pre-med; instead, your father’s heart was in pre-med, because he had wanted to be a doctor. And you were toying with two ideas simultaneously – the ministry and journalism.

You made the right decision. You didn’t know it then, and you disappointed your father by abandoning pre-med, but you made the right decision. You were not cut out to be a minister. And truth be told, you weren’t cut out to be a journalist, either. But journalism was the closest thing you were cut out for, because of the way you thought and the way you would be trained to think.

You could have been a poet, too, but you would have starved to death.

Be encouraged: you will reach the seventh decade of your life and not regret a single decision about your marriage, your work, your children, and your faith. You will look back and say I would change nothing about any of these major decisions, even if I could.

You will find disappointments, frustrations, and often – perhaps usually – tremendous stress. You will find anger and hurt. You will experience unhappiness and grief. But you will have no regrets.

You will learn to understand that life does have meaning, and that includes your life. And everything happens for a reason and a purpose.

You will discover that you will come to love your wife even more than you did when you married her.

You will find joy in your two sons (and it shouldn’t be a surprise that you will have only sons, because that’s all your family ever has). You will find joy in your grandsons (you see what I mean about our family and sons).

You will take extreme career risks. You will challenge status quo thinking, often fearlessly, and sometimes you will frighten and threaten others who believe in and own the status quo. You will pay a career price for that, but you will change things.

The dream you had in your 20s – you know which one I’m talking about – will become real in your 50s. You will come to writing fiction and poetry late, but you will come. And you won’t get rich, but you will write. You will understand that the image of God that is in each of us is first the image of the creator.

Not long before you retire, you will find poetry at work, in the most surprising ways and places. Seeing work as a kind of poetry will allow you to look at the everyday and see it in a new way. You will find the poetry late, but when you look back, you will see it is the poetry at work that has always led you to challenge the status quo.

I would tell you not to sweat some of the things you will worry about, and sometimes obsess over, but those things, too, will become part of who you are, the decisions you make, the opinions you hold, the stories you write. Life is a whole, and all things in a life make it a whole. Your stories are about the pieces, but they all come from the whole.

That is what your life will ultimately be about: the whole. And you will want to be remembered for the whole.

The High Calling is hosting a community linkup this week on Writing a Letter to Your Younger Self. For details (and the deadline), please visit The High Calling.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Not another team like it

Ten years ago, I was hired by a company I used to work for. My job was dealing with issues that had unexpectedly landed in the company’s lap, issues for which it had no current experience. I had the experience they were looking for.

The first year was almost magical from a work perspective. No one really understood what I did; I was known as the guy who “handled all that old mess.” I had close to free rein to get the work done. I worked with people from other departments, but my own department generally let me do my thing. When you have an individual contributor job, it doesn’t get much better than this: interesting work, good people to work with (I even liked the attorneys I had to work with), the sense of getting something done.

After about a year, I found myself one day helping to a speech for the CEO. Someone had forgotten to do it, it was to be given in two days, and panic reined. I had a long background as a speechwriter, and I was asked to help. I did, and it worked. For the next 18 months, I was the CEO’s temporary speechwriter, while still doing my regular work.

I was asked to take on fixing a web site project. I had background here, too. You work long enough in communications and you generally have background in just about everything. The web project was over budget and behind schedule. I took it on. We got the new site up and running.

One morning my boss told me I was also now in charge of employee communications, and I would be reporting to her boss. They had asked me to do this before; I said no. This time I wasn’t asked. I now had two people reporting to me. I was told that one of them wasn’t working out, and to fix it. No one had previously told the individual there was a problem. I chose to work through the process for these kinds of situations. The problem was eventually resolved.

Then someone had to take leave from work. I was given most of their work. Instead of two people reporting to me, I now had 10. Within a year, because of reorganizations and expansions, I had 25.

We took enormous care in hiring during that expansion. The functions were planned carefully. They were integrated. We knew what skills we had and what we needed. Four people who had not previously supervised anyone found themselves supervisors. They planned their teams. They wrote job descriptions. They organized interviews and did the hiring. Then they got down to work.

And what work they did! It was beautiful to watch it unfold each day. They were so good they blew people’s socks off. They blew their own socks off. We made major strides across the board. We didn’t have a single weak team, or a single weak team member. We were creative and innovative. People wanted to join our team. Human Resources expressed amazement at what was being accomplished. We were known as “the team who knew how to get work done.”

I knew the organization, though. I knew the odds of this lasting were not good. And it wasn’t long before the clouds began to gather.

I told the team at our meetings to cherish this time. Things could change overnight, so they should cherish the time, use the time to do the best work they knew how to do.

It didn’t last. When you change the status quo it’s often easy to forget that change is threatening, that there can be vested interests in maintaining the status quo. And there were. The vested interests moved one day. And everything changed.

It lasted all of a year. But it was a golden year indeed. It was the best team I’ve ever worked with. There wasn’t one like it before or since. And I work with good people.

Not long ago, one of the people who had been part of the team came to my office to tell me something he had been thinking about. Five years had passed.

“That year,” he said. “That year we all worked together.”

I nodded.

“It was how work is supposed to be.” He paused. “It tells me that it might happen again. One day.”

The High Calling is hosting a community linkup this week on helping employees fulfill dreams. If you have a story as either an employee or someone who helped an employee fulfill a dream, consider sharing it. The linkup continues through Saturday, and some posts will be featured at The High Calling next week.

Top photograph by Michael Drummond via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. Bottom photograph by me: view from the balcony of Laity Lodge in the Texas Hill Country.

Your Work Matters

I’m sorting through files at work, files that cover roughly the last 10 years. It’s about four file drawers in volume.

It’s remodeling time at work. We’re facing a total of three moves. We were first moved three weeks ago, into the space we will eventually occupy permanently. But it has to be remodeled, and so we will move again to temporary quarters before we return to our redesigned workplace. I was moved from one office to a smaller office; I was fortunate, as most people moved to cubicles. What I will eventually end up with will make a cubicle look like an executive suite.

They tell us it’s collaborative workspace, designed to foster team communication and synergy.

Whenever you hear the word synergy, you know that someone is trying to save money.

There wasn’t time to do anything with these files except bring them with me. We had about a week’s notice of the first move; I had no time to do the careful sorting they require.

One pile is paper that can be recycled.

One pile is what needs to go in a special cabinet unit for shredding.

And one pile, the smallest, is what will go to the company archives.

It’s all mixed together, so it has to be sorted carefully.

The files represent the last 10 years of my work life. The height of the three piles tells me that most of what I’ve worked out can be recycled.  The second biggest pile has to be shredded. The most valuable pile will go the archives.

It’s easy to start thinking of the book Ecclesiastes in the Bible. Is it really all just a chasing after the wind?

Here’s a brief that was filed in a lawsuit settled years ago. That’s an easy decision – public document, no pending litigation – it can be recycled. Others have to go to the shredder.

And here’s the speech I wrote for the CEO in 2006, given to a large group of college students. It’s a beautiful speech. I heard it when it was given; I was there in the auditorium, sitting on the front row. I flew to the event with the CEO on the corporate plane. That had happened only once before. At the dinner before the speech, I bumped into a fellow speechwriter I hadn’t seen in almost 15 years.

The CEO did a fine job with the speech. Actually, he did a superb job. The speech was widely distributed afterward. It was reprinted in Vital Speeches of the Day, which is a big deal for speechwriters and CEOs.

And now it’s almost eight years later.  I’m not part of the speechwriting group. I’m called “social media strategist” which sounds a bit too presumptuous to me.

What do I do with the notes of my conversation with the CEO about the speech? Part of me says keep the notes with the final text for the archives. Part of me says that isn’t a good idea. I place the notes in the pile to be shredded. CEOs have to trust their speechwriters.

It’s easy to think that this is where all of our work ends up – recycled, shredded, perhaps archived and rarely seen except by an occasional academic researcher (our archives are managed by a local university).

Does this matter? I ask myself. Is it really all vanity?

I think about that speech. It didn’t change the course of history. But it did inspire a few college students to do something with their lives. It moved a few teachers and administrators to think about life outside the university.

And the important point is that the speech was done well. Written well. Written with care and attention, with a special effort to find exactly the right story that would illustrate it. Part of what that speech did was to tell that story, the story of a woman farmer in South Africa who brought in a crop so bountiful that she was able, for the first time in her 45+ years of life, to buy a pair of new shoes.

The story mattered. The speech mattered. The work – the hard work – I put into it mattered.

And it all mattered because I didn’t ultimately write the speech for the CEO, or for my own gratification, or for the story of the woman and the new shoes.

No, I wrote it for Someone else, because the work I do is ultimately about that Someone else.

And it matters.

The High Calling is hosting a community linkup on the theme of “Your Work Matters to God.” Take a look at the submission guidelines, and consider whether or not you might have a story to tell.

Top photograph by K Whiteford. Bottom photograph by Lucy Toner. Both via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. Community linkup badge designed for The High Calling by Jennifer Dukes-Lee.