CATHEDRALS and churches are
not museums, although some might have it so. For the believer, they
are places of encounter, where prayer has been valid, and where, in
some traditions, the beauty of God has been celebrated in music and
in art.
Each temple made by hands
reveals more truths about its makers than about their Maker. The
numinous sense that we can obtain from entering sacred space
reflects as much about what lies within us as about what is to be
found around us.
For many, galleries and
museums have become the new churches. It is, therefore, no surprise
that churches have rushed to offer their space to contemporary art
installations, to attract a wider range of visitors than might
normally cross the threshold.
"Crucible" at Gloucester
Cathedral in 2010 (Arts, 8 October 2010) demonstrated that this can
be surprisingly successful, as the contemporary converses with the
traditional. The outgoing Dean selected some 70 works of
contemporary sculpture with such assurance that there was no need
to name individual artists such as Damien Hirst or David Mach to
draw an audience.
But any such project
requires more than just the staging of a modern piece of work in an
old building. Celia Paul's The Separation Series was done
few favours in the hang at Chichester Cathedral last year (Arts, 2
November 2012), but happily is now on show at Marlborough Fine Art;
and, in Southwark Cathedral, Nic Fiddian-Green's head of Christ has
recently reminded visitors how difficult even placing a single work
can prove.
Fiddian-Green has worked on
the subject of the Passion of Christ since his involvement with the
Passion play at Wintershall in the early 1980s. Christ Rests in
Peace is a monumental head crowned with thorns. Cast in lead
plates and with a gilded crown, the head lies at an abrupt angle,
asleep in death.
It was balanced on a large
(and in itself beautiful) octagonal wooden table in the sanctuary.
Any power that the work had to challenge was robbed at once by its
almost-domestic setting, trapped in the sanctuary at the east end
of the choir, which is scarcely visited.
Had it been placed
centrally, on the floor of the crossing, where the modern portable
altar and bishop's throne are set on a temporary platform, it could
have offered a real stumbling-block: a forceful image of the
authority of the Son of God to obstruct and draw all to
himself.
No such charge of reticence
can be laid against Maggi Hambling, whose sculpture The Spirit
of the Resurrection is now suspended where once the rood stood
in the medieval church of St Dunstan's, Mayfield (News, 5 April).
At the unveiling last month, I overheard a gasped "Jesus Christ a
disco ball"; but the syntax and intended punctuation was
uncertain.
It reflects and refracts
everything around it in the highly polished steel, as the wings
shimmer by the light of the stained glass around it. This is a
permanent monument, however, and not a temporary installation, to
serve before God in 500 years' time.
At Bath Abbey, the clergy
have deliberately followed the lead of "Crucible" and teamed up
with Jemma Hickman of bo.lee projects to bring together just seven
works as a meditation on the fragility of human creativity within
sacred space.
The abbey itself is a
virtual pantheon of the good and great of the 18th and 19th
century, leaving very little room for any free-standing displays;
but, as at Gloucester, the large Gothic windows let in all the
spring light. John Flaxman, Joseph Nollekens, and Francis Chantrey
all worked here, although great monuments are almost entirely
absent.
The most impressive tomb
sculpture, and the largest in the church, is that for the earlier
benefactor, a former Bishop of Bath & Wells, James Montagu, who
died 20 July 1618. It was designed by the Lon-don denizens William
Cure and Nicholas Johnson/Janssen, and is one of the best Jacobean
pieces in the land. He is vested as a Prelate of the Order of the
Garter (he was later Bishop of Winchester), and his dignity is not
yet damaged by its being used as a support for a camera and sound
system in the north aisle.
The limitations of space
have encouraged some clever and satisfying conjunctions: a stuffed
swan in the Birde chantry chapel; Jacob's Ladder beneath
the great Jesse window, installed in 1872 as a thanksgiving for the
recovery of the Prince of Wales from illness; and a goldfinch, that
most lovely of eucharistic symbols, all but hidden just inside the
communion rails.
Damien Hirst's Saint
Bartholomew Exquisite Pain (2006), which dominated the
Gloucester Cathedral show, is here in a chapel dedicated (since
1997) to St Alphege, the Abbot of Bath (980) who became the first
martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, when he was killed by the
Vikings in 1012 at Greenwich. At his feet lie surgical instruments
that have an almost abusive power to maim and to kill, as well as
to restore and heal, while his left hand wields a pair of
shears.
The hard lighting and the
gleam of the Zambian cross behind on the reredos (a simple piece by
Melanie Sproat to mark the diocesan link) conspire to make Hirst's
figure a timeless admonition of man's inhumanity to man.
Also featured are works by
the Bristol based Patrick Haines (b. 1961), who lectures in
sculpture at Bath Spa University, and who has fabricated work for
David Mach, Antony Gormley, and Marc Quinn. Years ago, he was part
of the team that made Spitting Image so memorable; and
then, for seven years, he worked with Aardman Animations on
Wallace and Gromit.
I first came across his work
earlier this year when bo.lee gallery showed it at the London Art
Fair. He has said: "I like people to perhaps remember a past
experience or reconsider an ingrained belief." There is something
both unsettling and yet satisfying in Perennial (bronze
resin, 2009), a giant stem with a full seed head swaying in an
imperceptible breeze. It grows out of the sanctuary floor, the
small bird of piety hiding in its roots, and brought to mind the
suffering of Job under the gourd that withers, and André Gide's
1924 autobiography Si le grain ne meurt.
Of his two smaller works,
Chapel of Flight is a little model of a half-built church
formed of the wingbones of small birds, perched on a red-bound
Victorian copy of Coleridge's Poetical Works, set in a
niche at the door of the chantry chapel (1515), near the Tudor rose
and pomegranate that celebrated the marriage of Henry VIII and
Catherine of Aragon.
Like Haines, Tessa Farmer is
another sculptor born in the west Midlands. She has often used
microscopic insect parts to reflect on the created world. On her
installation, The Voyager 2013, of a white swan in flight,
caged in by the delicate folds of the Birde chantry, insects appear
to attack the neck of the majestic fowl. For his bird Lohengrin
might have a long wait.
As a ceramic artist from
Tokyo, Koji Shiraya has previously made a series of rings and
balls, pendulous cups, and oddly shaped boxes. Here he has
scattered a number of dented spherical balls in the south chapel,
both on the altar below the only surviving Norman window of Bishop
John de Villula's original cathedral, and across the chapel floor.
After the Dream, 2013, complicates the uneven floor,
making entry all but impossible.
The last work is a picture
by David Mach which comments on the vision for the rebuilding of
the abbey in 1499, when Bishop Oliver King had a vision of angels
ascending and descending a ladder. The great west façade of the
abbey includes such a depiction of the vision in its stonework.
Dr Garrow has chosen
Jacob's Ladder from Mach's 2011 project "Precious Light",
which marked the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the
Bible. It is one of the 80 photograph collages of biblical scenes,
and is given pride of place in the south transept, obscuring Sir
William and Lady Jane Waller (d 1633), immured in death. Above the
picture rises the tree of Jesse, another dreamer who looked to the
future, in a flash of sun-filled light.
"Odyssey: A Long Journey
where Many Things Happen" is at Bath Abbey until 6 May.
Opening hours:
Monday 9.30 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesday to Saturday 9 a.m. to 6
p.m.; Sunday 1 to 2.30 p.m. and 4.30 to 5.30 p.m.
www.bathabbey.org