Seeing is Believing has its eye-opening moments, but this is not a conventionally curated show and perhaps that is why it has a gawky defensiveness about it. It is a collection of individual preferences, and as such says more about the search for personal spiritualities than it does about religion’s power in the modern world or the role of religious art.
First: the gripes. The interpretation panels are a distraction: the testimonies of advisory group members often merge misleadingly with background information about the artist or the work. There is a dominant sense of safety and predictability, of ‘religion as it has been organised and received’. I only laughed once: at Stanley Spencer’s cartoon-like St. Francis and the Birds, surely ripe for computer animation.
There are several Creations, two Adams and an Eve; two Madonnas, a juvenile John the Baptist, a Last Supper and at least three Crucifixions. But, to its credit, the exhibition does escape occasionally from the Judaeo-Christian bias of the Tate’s back-catalogue. The two biggest explosions of colour come from Bridget Riley’s entrancing Nataraja (the Hindu Lord of the Dance) and Anish Kapoor’s As if to Celebrate I Discovered a Mountain Blooming with Red Flowers with its spice-market mounds of pure pigment. Shirazeh Houshiary, a Muslim, probes our cultural assumptions with her monochrome Veil and Shroud.
Two of the ‘Young British Artists’, Mark Wallinger and Damien Hirst, are reliably unsettling. Four of Hirst’s thirteen giant screen print pharmaceutical labels – Beans & Chips, Steak & Kidney, Sausages and Chicken – from his Last Supper series, stand together like rood-screen saints. I find myself wondering which is Jesus at this cure-all Communion? And, is Peter the Chicken? Mark Wallinger is on video, inhabiting his curious alter-ego, Blind Faith.
Hymn shows him on his Primrose Hill soapbox. He holds a helium-filled balloon bearing a picture of himself as a child and inhales from a helium cylinder at regular intervals. His gas-altered childish voice sings Albert Midlane’s saccharine verses: ‘There’s a friend for little children above the bright blue sky’. At the end he releases the balloon and falls from the box. The piece manages to be amusing, sad, eerie and irritating, all at the same time.
The other video installation is Christian Jankowski’s Holy Artwork. It features the Texan Harvest Fellowship Church and their tele-evangelical pastor, who is capable of the kind of stream-of-fundamentalism delivery that could make your ears bleed. One suspects this should be viewed as a piece of ‘found art’!
Certain works gain power from this setting. The religious tension in Sonia Boyce’s Missionary Position II is heightened by one’s awareness that the Tate building was formerly a store-house for colonial trade. The lack of space and the difficult lighting conditions mean that the nine exquisitely embossed mosque floor-plans – Enclose and Identity – by Turner Prize runners-up Langlands and Bell, have to be peered at to be seen at all. Staring at the serene white papers, it is disconcerting and salutary, in these Islamophobic times, to find William Johnstone’s threatening Golgotha and Graham Sutherland’s hysterical Crucifixion reflected onto their stillness.
The work which really blows me away is Adam by Didier Vermeiren, which the Sunday Times’ Waldemar Januszczak dismissed as: ‘a tottering pile of plaster’. This piece requires some wrestling with. I begin by searching the upper layers, casting about for Adam’s – or humanity’s – remains, but the tomb seems to be empty. I suddenly realise that I am looking in the wrong place, these layers are God’s collapsed mould, and Adam is the smart plinth beneath! As I leave, I notice that the edges of God’s mould are number coded, so there is always a temptation to reconstruct the old thing and obscure the human.
Ultimately, though, Seeing is Believing amounts to less than the sum of its parts, a charge which cannot be levelled at the exhibition showing two floors above it. Richard Wentworth’s retrospective is engaged in the genuinely religious tasks of making and re-making connections, celebrating human resourcefulness and exploring the possible meanings of our material existence. And half a mile away is Tracey Emin’s newly unveiled Roman Standard. Her little spirit-bird dances in and out of view on its slender pole, chirruping at that indigestible hunk of a Cathedral. Now, I believe!
Andy Kemp reviews Seeing is Believing: Faith in the Tate Collection at the Tate Liverpool. Exhibition was on show at the Tate Liverpool from 11 December 2004 to 2 May 2005.