Sof 57 January 2003 ‘| need - art - like | need - God’ "fossilised religious imagery... the futility of the historical Jesus hunt" Andy Kemp visits ‘To the Glory of God: New Religious Art’. Part of ‘independent’, the Liverpool Biennial ‘fringe’ funded by Afoundation.
In Toxteth in the mid-80s, I worked at St. Peter’s, High Park Street. The building was a vast Victorian barn, a galleried Wesleyan preaching-house once frequented by hundreds of Manx Methodists.
The place had been gutted, stripped bare, and we built a high multiangled wall, dividing the void. An engineering training project, Liverpool Appropriate Technology (now MTG) was to occupy the pulpit end and the hall, and the congregation to meet in the separated space, under the gallery; secular and sacred, work and worship, in a new religious co-operation. Nearly two decades later and two kilometres down the hill to Seel Street in Liverpool’s nightclub quarter, another older St. Peter’s stands: ribs, joists and brickwork laid bare, soon to receive a hip restaurant, its resurrection hope. Understandably, the Roman Catholics of 1788 chose a plain inconspicuous Protestant fagade and reproduced a three-sided gallery within. Now, only the fragmentary baroque decor of the chancel remains, to blow their pre-emancipation cover. The building’s limbo is ameliorated by a month’s indulgence for modern artists. The central void is occupied by a thirty foot high bareplastered architectural model, a square sectioned tower, “To the Glory of God: New Religious Art.’ Young. This produces a beautifully weird cacophony with brief snatches of synchronicity where the versions coincide. I return to the tower enlightened, and begin to spot sporadic synchronicities. Hands are obviously significant: Colin Self, Inigo Batterham and Emin again. ‘Text’ seems to be grouped together: Agergaard and Schafer’s ‘Instructions’ ("Make a temporary home.... worship divinity by becoming divine, etc.") is fun, but I prefer Sarah Brown's poem ‘Important message from God’ - "I am passionate about questions, why do answers leave me cold". Bill Drummond invites us to comment on ‘Is God a C***?’ As I contribute I ponder what a ‘Sea of Faith line’ could be on this: ‘Is C*** a God?’ Perhaps: ‘Is religion the new sex?’ Maybe. Cats: a found text on 19 tons of mummified Egyptian moggies shipped to Liverpool in 1889 for use as fuel and fertiliser, sits next to Clack’s feline ‘Christ Head’ and a ‘burnt Madonna’.
A common purpose greater than their own personal exposure The curator, Neal Brown, has brought together the works of thirty London and Liverpool artists in a "collective artistic service" on a theme of the religious impulse - "the great taboo in contemporary art practice." The tone is set by Tracey Emin’s headline text at the top of each face of the tower: ‘I need - art - like I need - God’. Originally written as ‘I need God like I need art’, it is for her a salvatory realisation which struck powerfully on the wave-swept promenade at Margate, in a naive pantheistic kind of way. She concludes: "From one moment in my life of having nothing, I suddenly realised that I had so much to do." Most of the individual pieces are arranged on the faces of the tower, grouped haphazardly and in odd juxtapositions, several well beyond helpiul visual range even when viewed from the top of the gallery steps! What was powerful here? Christopher Clack’s impressive work - an ammonite, a dinosaur, an amphora and the crucified Christ - all emerging from the same piece of excavated rock, seems to me to speak of fossilised religious imagery and perhaps the futility of the historical Jesus hunt! Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Victorian-style circus freak-show print - ‘windows to the world’ - hangs over the doorway into the tower’s interior. The small dark space within - Church of the Holy Sepulchre meets fortune-teller’s booth - is lit by a single beam which illuminates one of the Chapmans’ deformed WWII dioramas: the disciples or mourners, partially clad in German uniforms, reach up to the defleshed figure crucified on a telegraph pole. Tracey Emin’s sextet of line drawings with their woolly ghostlike feel, is a revelation, especially the treatment of ‘Madonna and child’, ‘crossing of the waters’ and ‘rising of the spirit’.
At 12.30 four members of the St. Nicholas Singers arrive and perform 1 Corinthians 3 in plainchant. Standing below the words ‘Et tu petrus’ and in front of a reredos of bare brick, each singer intones a different translation of the passage: Tyndale, King James, Darby and sof 57 January 2003 Goshka Macuga’s kitsch little ‘temple’ sums it all up. It ‘quotes’ other works in the exhibition by Clack, Julie Goldsmith and Marc Camille Chaimowicz, but the whole tottering edifice is built on a pile of sickly sugar cubes and a cute tinfoil nativity scene. A white flag waves from an upper window bearing the words: "I don’t Adam and Eve it!" Just when St. Peter’s Seel Street has been emptied of dubious Christian imagery a whole lot more has fallen into it on this beachcombing tardis. What is religious about this art? Does the quotation of recognisable religious symbols make it religious? Can art that does not do this, be religious or have a religious impact? Is this art in the service of religion? Or, religion in the service of art? For me, the genuinely religious aspect of this almost exclusively "Christian" work, is the fact that these fiercely individual artists have contributed their untitled and unattributed work, to be placed in very close proximity to the works of others, and for a common purpose greater than their own personal exposure. ‘Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?’ (1 Cor. 3.16) The young security guard says he hates the night shift, and points up at Sebastian Horsley’s 36 human skulls, all alike but different, variegated, like pulses, pasta or dried flowers in a squared vitrine. Holocausts and monastic charnel houses come to mind and I retreat to the tiny derelict graveyard. Here lieth the remains of Capt.
John Clark who commanded ‘The Auspicious’ when she was cast away in Hoylake Bay and all hands perished on the 20th of September 1819. Those hands again.
And all this time Christ has been dying silently in the Lady Chapel.
Mat Collishaw’s amazing video installation of the crucifixion, churns on its eternal cloudy loop. In the dark damp bare-brick rafter-rotting quiet he writhes, pierced; a fatally bad trip in the shooting-gallery. It’s hard to watch and it’s hard to turn away from. As I departed, exhilarated and dusty, I noted that someone had taken the piscina.