But are our kisses true? “There are many kinds of kiss, but are our kisses true?” (Peter Holzapfel, photographer) “All the best things in life are love.” (Kitty North, painter) It was the dead animals that did it: the heads of pigs, straight from the butcher’s shop; sheep and goats indistinguishable, post-slaughter. Combine such Hirstesque monstrosities with the superficially traditional religious imagery of crucifixion and you’re bound to excite the interest of the media and of unthinking conservative politicians. And so it was with Glimpses: A Photographic Meditation, an exhibition in Worcester Cathedral (July 5-19) by Peter Holzapfel. Slagged off by the Sunday Telegraph for his “bad taste”, but holding his own wonderfully on Radio 4’s Today, Rev Holzapfel couldn’t have wished for more attention for his work. This exhibition was that rare thing: a creative outcome of a clergyman’s sabbatical.
We are told by the artist that this was “an exhibition about seeing”: what we see and don’t see; how we can learn to see or refuse to see; how we see the same things differently. Certainly the exhibition itself, combined with the burst of media attention, confirmed the subjectivity and creativity of the act of “seeing”. We know what the media saw, for we have the press cuttings to prove it. We know what “the public” saw, for a visitors book tells us: “No contrivance, no manipulation, but the sincerity of your inner eye seeking to express your heart”, says one person. “Moved to tears, awakening the spirit, a glimpse of agony, joy and love” says another. We know what the artist sees in the images, for his written reflections offer his own commentary.
Here’s a few of the things I saw.
An image entitled, “Trees of Auschwitz” shows five trees; bark a beautiful work of art through the sharp constrasts between dark and light. Then you read that the bark is stained black with the soot of burned humanity... “Choice” shows two trees side by side on Dartmoor: one dead, the other alive.
The dead one leans towards the living - has done for so long that its shape is defined by its stretch towards life.
Likewise, the live one grows away from death - strives to evade its touch. There is desperation here. “Skipping” shows Sally with her skipping rope, disrupting the hard lines of light and shadow that segment her playground. It is such definite shadow: straight, restrictive, uncompromising.
Yet Sally seems oblivious to it. However definite, though, the shadow moves.
And Sally moves in a quite different way. She scampers and meanders. She is “jouissance” - the playful presence.
Solar? “Gate of death: entrance to Camp Birkenau at Auschwitz 2”. For me, the most arresting image of them all. A long, straight, single-track railway line recedes from the absolute middle of the foreground, ending at the central gates of a huge, deserted, single-story building of the most fearful symmetry. The other half of the composition is a fantastically threatening sky. This is an image of no warmth. No warmth at all.
The exhibition as a whole, therefore, constitutes layer upon layer of “seeing”.
Ironic, perhaps, that a clergyman from the most “realist” of traditions - Anglican evangelicalism - should set in train (on purpose) such a frenzy of subjective meaning-making.
In a way, the media and a protesting Tory councillor were right about this exhibition. There’s much that is truly revolting about it. For here is beauty and abjection; humour and horror - side by side. Here is an exhibition that explores the blurring of boundaries between animal and human, nature and artifice, gift and sacrifice. Trees look like people; people look like rocks and stone, and buildings brood with human malevolence. One of the most wonderful images is of an old man in a graveyard.
You don’t see him at first. It’s as though he has been there so long that he has become yet another marble outcrop. But eventually you pick him out. Perhaps the underlying message in my own interpretations in the centrality of the human: does the human eye always seek for itself?
Love in a North landscape The place of the human is explored in a very different but no less “spiritual” way by artist Kitty North. This time we are reminded that humanity is not all there is. I have come to associate North with Sea of Faith largely because of a string of “coincidences” which have brought us into one another’s orbit. Her Love and Landscape exhibition was showing in Kendal during last year’s SoF holiday in the Lake District. I caught it by accident - escaping, ironically, from a landscape of cold and rain. Then I joined an organisation called Art and Christian Enquiry, and her work turned up again, reviewed in its newsletter. In search of an image to incite the creative imaginations of SoFers at this year’s conference, I got in touch. Those who were there will remember the postcard of North’s “Proximity”.
The book of the Kendal exhibition, by Andrew Lambirth, is still available (see below) and, although her paintings (like anyone’s) are best viewed “in the flesh”, this book gives a rather wonderful account of them. Her work is rooted in the tradition of landscape painting, but it’s also about the blurring of boundaries. As Lambirth says, “some of [her paintings] run a very fine line between abstraction and representation.” She has worked for several years within a four or five mile radius of her home near Skipton, Yorkshire. And it’s as though limiting her geographical range has enabled her to access an infinite emotional one.
Her intense and passionate engagement with the world around her produces a moving directness, but one senses a restlessness too. She’s always on the move, always in process - never seeing the same thing twice, even if she’s painting from the same place (especially when she’s painting from the same place?). There’s so much of Kitty North in her paintings that each one is like a personal gift.
Interestingly Lambirth explores, via Kitty’s work, the “role and function of art”. In the process he proclaims, “Art is Kitty North’s language, her means of making sense of the world.” He also tells us, “North’s meaning exists only in potential. It has to be mined, to be dragged to the surface...It has to be intuited, remembered, discovered, invented.” And finally, “The activity of art is a process of making things special (and of making special things).” In a magazine whose thematic focus is “what is religion for?”, the parallels are obvious. (“Kitty North: Love and Landscape”, by Andrew Lambirth, Swan Mead, 1998, ISBN 0 9534052 0 6, enquiries to Primrose House, Church Lane, Broughton, Skipton, North Yorkshire, BD23 3AE)