WALKING in from Westgate past a former tailor’s shop known to Beatrix Potter, I had quite forgotten how Gloucester Cathedral, all golden-yellow stone, seems to sail on its own green inland sea. The beautifully maintained sward is now littered with modern works of sculpture, and still surrounded by a hotchpotch of domestic and ecclesiastical buildings.
The late Eduardo Paolozzi’s eight-metre-tall 1999 bronze, Vulcan, is a stark reminder of just how high the cathedral behind it is. Paolozzi’s piece, dating from nearly six centuries later, serves as a brilliant comment on the sheer process of fabrication.
Although little in the cathedral is forged, almost all of it was made here in Gloucestershire, whether the bravura carving throughout of Cotswold stone from Painswick or the glass of the great east window (said to be the largest medieval window in Northern Europe, although Yorkists may disagree), glazed in Bristol and then shipped and installed as an early triumph of prefab art.
This installation of more than 70 works of contemporary sculpture owes its origins to Gloucestershire, as the majority of works were cast in the Pangolin foundry there. Many of the artists are Gloucester born and bred, like Lynn Chadwick and his son Daniel (the latter responsible for two jolly mobiles that breathe over the nave), or are heirs by adoption: Damien Hirst, whose figure Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain, memorably dominates the choir, has a house near Toddington.
I entered the cathedral during the singing of the Nunc Dimittis and stood quietly beside Jon Buck’s embracing heads You and Me, as the canon-in-residence prayed the “Prayer of the Ox”. The almost horn-shaped heart of the two oversized red faces with blue outlines seemed oddly at ease in the empty nave, stripped of the clutter of chairs that so often disfigures this and so many of our greatest medieval churches. The rhythm of the huge cylindrical columns of the arcades, counterpointing the elegance of the much later (1242) rib vault above, can be appreciated fully only when seen as originally planned for a monastic church.
During the final voluntary, the younger Chadwick’s plates began to move gently as the organ swelled, and I went to meet the Dean, the Very Revd Nicholas Bury, beside the waters of the meniscus in William Pye’s site-specific piece, half fountain and half baptismal pool. Pye first introduced water into his work in the 1980s, and in 2007 I had been moved by his watery reflections of Venice, which he had sent to a charity auction at Sotheby’s as part of the fund-raising for St George’s Anglican Church in Venice, to mark that chaplaincy’s 400th anniversary.
The exhibition is very much the inspiration of Dean Bury, who retires this month. Curators worldwide would envy him its range and excitement as a sort of Festschrift, since he and the Chapter have brought so much art in to the cathedral in the past 13 years. Many of the artists have helped him with the installation of their own pieces and suggested settings; and, in most cases, this works.
The next morning, I went back to view the exhibition as a whole after the early-morning communion, which was said by a chaplain in the side chapel of St John, walled off by Sue Freeborough’s grid Exposition, its panel of words including Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus.
I found only two works that seemed ill-matched to their surroundings. First, Leonard McComb’s Young Man Standing, which he conceived at the height of the Cold War, is now trapped in the north-east corner of the cloister walk, and it cries out silently for us to walk around it. Second, Ralph Brown’s Mother and Child, fittingly in the sanctuary of the Lady chapel, is no match for the striking reredos paintings Crucifixion, Pietà, and Resurrection of Iain McKillop, who grew up in Gloucester.
The Dean explained that he had been able, despite the soaring costs of conservation and the necessary expenditure of maintaining such a rich inheritance, to introduce some small works of art, both paintings and stained glass (after the earlier great commission of Thomas Denny for the south ambulatory chapel window of Doubting Thomas) on a permanent basis with the work of artists in residence.
The last (2008-09), Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, had grown a bank of hawthorns in the cloister garth that now curled around in front of John Sydney Carter’s Falling Man 9/11. Coming in from the cloister garden, I was fortunate to run into the present artist on the foundation, the Italian David Behar-Perahia, who was adjusting his installation of sound and light in the cloister. Taking its cue from the lavatorium of the Benedictine monks, what he preferred to call an intervention shines a rippling light (video of water from his washing) on the flagstones between the trough in which the monks washed their hands and the doorway of the almery opposite, where towels were kept, while the sound of Dripping is of the artist’s washing of his own hands in a lead tank that he had set up in the water trough, making his work archival and archaeological in turn.
Depending on the natural light, the effect of dappled water on the stone floor varies, and when I went back to sit quietly, there was a profound sense of time, and of history gathering all things into one.
I spent more than three hours variously in and around the cathedral space, and could have taken much longer, as the juxtaposition of the contemporary with the old delightfully distracts almost every line of enquiry; I defy anybody to walk from John Humphreys’s warped head, Pontius Pilate, and Almuth Tebbenhoff’s Five Star to Nigel Hall’s geometric hoops (Han River II) without first pausing to stand and stare at the greatest of medieval sculptures, the tomb effigy of Edward II, who may or may not have been buried here on 20 December 1327.
Perhaps we are even called to kneel in prayer as devout pilgrims used to do throughout the 14th century at this martyr-king’s shrine, and as Marc Quinn’s skeletal Waiting for Godot does in the nearby transept chapel, the object of its present devotion two marrows left on the altar (Sarah Lucas at her more provocative).
Prayer of another sort is inevitably called for by the subtle placing of Marcus Harvey’s Nike in the south transept or the distorted head of a baby Jesus (John Humphreys) that ends up sitting in the red sandstone Gilbert Scott font that has long been relegated to the crypt. The oversize winged German helmet from the Second World War rests on three rifles demanding that we ask the cost of Victory while the babe’s head is presumably the only one dipped in the waters of baptism for generations.
It is in the crypt that perhaps the most ambitious work is shown, with maquettes for four figures of the Crucified which David Mach is working on for the City Art Centre, Edinburgh. These will mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, which, of course, paradoxically never really made any inroad in Scotland at all. Mach is unashamed that the four figures are in agony, as the howling figure of his six-metre Calvary standing at the west end of the nave shows.
As if in a remote conversation, the flayed apostle by Damien Hirst has been positioned to face down the choir towards the Mach figure at the west end of the cathedral. When it was rumoured last year that the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s had commissioned a work from Hirst, press speculation and his notoriety as the leader of the Young British Artists of the 1990s led to its being quietly set aside. This figure is almost conventionally a Renaissance throwback, self-consciously showing that, taken on his own terms, even this young Turk is a deeply skilled artist.
What is notorious about this figure, which was installed in time for the red-letter day of St Bartholomew, before the show (24 August), is not that it confronts us in all its barbarity, nor that Hirst has intellectually married the cruelly martyred apostle to Edward Scissorhands, a conceit at once horrifying and satisfying, but rather that we prefer to be kept at a safe distance from such intrusive and powerful works. How cheaply do we sell our Christianity?
Previous bishops and deans have left their mark indelibly in the fabric of the building; William Laud’s 1616 altar rails now guard the sanctuary of the Lady chapel, as they run between two former chantry chapels, in one of which Bishop Goldsborough (d. 1604) lies in rochet and self-satisfaction on his table-top tomb, while in the other chapel five severed heads (Christie Brown) are ranged across the communion table.
Two of the daughters of Bishop Miles Smith, who first used the 1611 Bible, gaze down from the walls; the youngest, who died in 1622, aged only 17, is shown clutching her infant daughter, while her elder sister died the following year. The works of a local sculptor, Samuel Baldwin of Stroud, they may be deemed provincial, but this exhibition is their direct inheritance.
The Dean, himself the descendant of the 18th-century sculptor John Bacon, reminded me that it was the late poet-priest R. S. Thomas who claimed that Protestantism was “that castrator of art”. The Dean has worked hard with Gallery Pangolin to set such concerns aside, and, although there will still be those who are shocked or disturbed by some work that is on view, the correspondence of the old and the contemporary will educate and enthral; for this show has been brought together in an exciting space that is already one of the richest architectural and sculptural buildings in Northern Europe, and is now reclaimed as the sacred space for art which it once was intended to be, to the Glory of God.
That all this can happen in Gloucester is fitting, not least as the county is rightly regarded as the birthplace of the Arts and Crafts movement. That the exhibition succeeds so handsomely must be simply thanks to all those Gloucestershire genes.
“Crucible” is at Gloucester Cathedral until 30 October. Monday to Friday: 9.15 a.m. to 5.15 p.m.; Saturday: 9 a.m. to 4.15 p.m; Sunday: 11.45 a.m. to 2.45 p.m. and 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. (Visitors are advised to check the closures diary on the cathedral website before making a special visit.) Phone 01452 528095.
www.gloucestercathedral.org.uk
www.gloucestercathedral.org.uk