Christian art shouldn’t be too smart – it takes away from the meaning, argues Niall Gooch.
In March, a minor shrine at St. Mary’s, a CofE church in Kersey in Suffolk was finally rehallowed, a mere three and a half centuries after being destroyed by Roundhead soldiers during the Civil War. The BBC News website published a picture of the new shrine, which consists of a wide shallow bowl full of water, laid on a bed of stones, surrounded by anaemic blue neon lights and topped off with what, I imagine, is supposed to be a halo. It seems incredibly abstract and bloodless, all the more so by comparison with the original shrine, which featured a Pieta: a statue of Our Lady holding Jesus after the Crucifixion.
Now I’m sure that if I spoke to the artist who designed the new shrine, he or she could explain to me that it actually represented life, or forgiveness, or resurrection, or something. The problem is that you shouldn’t need to be well-educated or well-versed in the jargon of conceptualism to gain something from Christian art.
The fundamental power of a Pieta lies in its visceral portrayal of grief. – Niall Gooch
If you look at a traditional Pieta such as Michaelangelo’s sculpture in St Peter’s Basilica, you can immediately see what is happening. It is a portrayal of a woman mourning her dead son: a tragic experience with which everyone can empathise. Indeed, in the Middle Ages – the Kersey shrine’s heyday – an era of frequent warfare and primitive medicine, many women looking at a Pieta would have themselves undergone such a loss. Obviously there are further layers of artistic significance, but the fundamental power of a Pieta lies in its visceral portrayal of grief. By meditating on it we enter imaginatively into the narrative of the Passion and grasp the drama and sadness of the story.
What is one supposed to think about when confronted with a giant saucer? Perhaps it is a peaceful place to sit. Perhaps it has clear, austere lines and a sense of space and calm, like a Zen garden or the library of an Oxbridge college.
But this is not what a Christian shrine is for. The fundamental purpose of a Christian shrine is as a site for Christian devotion and for Christian prayer. It is not meant to be an opportunity for “spiritual not religious” aesthetes to “escape the hectic modern world”.
What is one supposed to think about when confronted with a giant saucer? – Niall Gooch
I raised a sceptical eyebrow when I saw the date chosen for the rededication of the shrine – 8th March, International Women’s Day (IWD). It seemed strange to select a pseudo-festival popularised by the Russian Bolsheviks and to ignore the Annunciation, which falls only a fortnight later.
The reason, I suspect, for the selection of IWD over Lady Day is probably similar to that which favoured a peculiar design for the shrine, rather than one which employs a more recognisably Christian visual language: in some quarters, there is a drift away from a concrete and grounded faith, towards an airy and generalised spiritual uplift, which expresses itself through abstraction, symbolism and allusion.
This is a problem because it represents a move towards a religion for the gallery-goers, those who understand Mark Rothko paintings and free verse and Damien Hirst.
But churches and shrines are designed to aid worship and devotion. They should therefore have a more accessible sensibility. This does not mean that they should be bad, or kitsch; it does mean that they should avoid being overly abstract or conceptual or they will simply not fulfil their purpose.
One also thinks of liberal theology that so often works against the plain meaning of words and concepts employed in the Bible or the Church’s teaching, and so is premised on a kind of gnosticism, whereby the true deep teaching is hidden – except to an enlightened few.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with intellectual approaches to faith and unconventional artistic interpretations. But these must be matched and balanced by the knowledge that ours is a faith for everyone, and by the remembrance of holy simplicity. “Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?”
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