Art, Religion, and the Public Sphere
by Charles Pickstone
Charles Pickstone is vicar of St. Laurence Church, Catford, in southeast London. He is a trustee of the UK educational charity, Art & Christianity Enquiry, and is on the editorial board of Art & Christianity. Pickstone is a visiting scholar at Sarum College, Salisbury, where he teaches in their master’s degree program in Christian spirituality, and he is a board member of the UK section of AICA (the international association of art critics). His particular interest is in the overlap between the visual arts and theology, and he regularly contributes articles to books and magazines on art and spirituality, and lectures in the UK and abroad.
There are many ways of being revolutionary. The traditional image of an eroticized Liberty leading the People (i.e. men) to a testosterone-charged oedipal victory over the decadent forces of the old order that tends to come to mind when the word is spoken is not the only possible image of revolution. Neither is its Massachusetts equivalent—the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the famous poem in which Longfellow warns of the coming “hour of darkness and peril and need,” applying the probably legendary event of the War of Independence to the impending Civil War, two revolutions for the price of one. Such heroics are not the only way to be revolutionary, and over the last two decades in England, we have seen a number of very different—and rather more English—approaches to revolution: quietly subversive, witty, understated, wry. I would like to argue that these understated subversions are just as effective in revolutionary impact, and, indeed, one of the very things they undermine is the necessity of machismo to revolution, as they gently insinuate some rather disturbing questions especially about gender and role, both personal and public, private and political, secular and religious.
Particular themes addressed by this disparate group of four artists, all short-listed for or winners of the Turner Prize, the UK’s most prestigious award for contemporary art, are personal, cultural and class identity, colonial attitudes, the nature of art objects and also of the largely market-driven art world. Many of the criticisms they make of the contemporary world are so close to those made by religion that these works are in some sense at least natural allies.
Martin Creed
The first example is Martin Creed, born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1968; he has exhibited widely in Europe and the US since 1996, notably “Life/Love” (Paris and Lisbon 1996/7) and “Speed” (Whitechapel Gallery London 1998). What is perhaps most revolutionary about Creed’s work is its self-effacing quality. He is quoted as saying that the world is already full of too many things, and so he creates art that uses the modest means of everyday life, creating art out of ordinary, everyday objects: but not the glamorous objets trouvés of most artists of this type, or romantic objects such as urinals. For example, rather than using blu-tak to stick artworks on to the wall, he contents himself with just the blu-tak; or, at a time of particular hardship, he exhibited a piece of A4 paper crumpled into a ball. “One of the things I like about it,” he says, “is that it kind of disappears when you put it in the world, and it can be something quite precious and it’s also a piece of rubbish. I like that about it.”
Martin Creed, Work No. 203, Everything is Going to Be Alright, 1999. Commissioned by PEER. Photographed in its original location. Tate, London. Used with permission.
In 2001, he won the Turner Prize; in the accompanying exhibition, he notoriously showed the gallery lights going on and off, nothing more: “To me, they’re all ways of having something, of doing something, making something happen—but, in a way, without anything happening. The light’s just doing what it does, you know…” Simple, ordinary objects, can suggest complex and contradictory meanings.
A superb example would be his wonderful piece, Half the air in a given space, where the gallery is exactly half filled with balloons. “Air is the perfect material. When you go to an art gallery, it’s always full of air, so I was trying to work out a way of using air to make something. Half-full to balance the making of something and the not-making of something. If the gallery were full, no-one would get it. It’s important to me that the situation is normal, that, as usual, the space is full of air —it’s just that half of it is inside the balloons.”
This is art at its best: enabling us to appreciate the everyday in a new way, making the ordinary but invisible visible. Creed makes us aware of air (and therefore of space), this thick soup that clothes the planet and at the bottom of which we all live. Rather than creating something precious (his contemporary Damien Hirst’s jewelled skull comes to mind), he shows us the profound value of what we already have, the richness of the ordinary, whether blu-tak or crumpled paper or a light doing what it does.
My favorite example is his sculpture commissioned by Ingrid Swenson of Peer Gallery in 1999 for a sad, neo-classical façade, all that survives of a Salvation Army Training College in a notorious, down-town part of east London known as Murder Mile. Creed erected a neon message above the portico reading Everything’s going to be alright.
The apparent contradiction between words and context is powerfully multivalent: is the work a critique of the opiate of religion as promised by religion (the Salvation Army)? or of the opiate of commercial pleasure as promised by advertisers (the neon lights)? or is it a reflection of a genuine awareness among all human beings—no matter how oppressed by environmental or political powerlessness—that survival is always an option (just as this rather unlovely and out-of-place building has survived in London’s East end)? Cleverly, the artist does not say: the viewer is caught up in the rich ambivalence of an ordinary turn of phrase strangely illuminated in ordinary fluorescent lights, a juxtaposition that is truly revolutionary and, thanks to the very boldness of the statement if taken at face value, potentially religious, a sort of “faith” that is strangely affirmed despite its probable falsity.
Creed admits that his work is about politics and his anxiety about “adding stuff to the world” is a powerfully understated critique of materialism; his reticent view of art and lack of self-aggrandizement exhibit a distinctly Christian sense of humility.
Jeremy Deller
The second example is a much more outwardly political artist, Jeremy Deller (Turner Prize winner 2004), who creates work that is almost liturgical. Deller creates performances that highlight the effects of political policies on small communities. His events or performances are generally preserved in film. For example, Acid Brass (1997) is an exercise in cultural fusion; the Manchester-based William Fairey brass band perform reworked acid house anthems. The performance brings together two very different musical genres enjoyed by different constituencies of working-class Northern England. Unconvention (1999) addresses the politics of the day through an exhibition of the source material used by the Welsh alternative rock band, the Manic Street Preachers.
Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, 2001. Directed by Mike Figgis. Co-Commissioned by Artangel and Channel 4. Photograph by Martin Jenkinson. Used with permission of the artist.
His most famous work to date, for which he won the Turner prize, was the Battle of Orgreave, a reconstruction of a stand-off that took place between the police and the miners picketing a colliery in the north of England during the 1984 miners’ strike. This strike, widely seen in the UK as symbolizing the end of a cultural era, has over the years taken on a mythical status. Thatcher’s government came to be seen as responsible for the disappearance of working-class culture based around the mines and industry especially of the north of England, and the so-called battle of Orgreave became its symbol. As Deller himself puts it, “The miners’ strike, like a civil war, had a traumatically divisive effect at all levels of life in the UK. Families were torn apart because of their divided loyalties.”
Deller involved local miners, their relatives and local volunteers to re-enact this “battle.” Deller also used a professional actor to play the role of Arthur Scargill, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, and members of battle-recreation societies to play the role of the police. The event was filmed for television.
The effect on the participants was extraordinary: the battle-recreation enthusiasts, more used to minutely following historically researched ancient battles, found themselves caught up in an event from recent history, and encountering people who had actually participated in the original event (whom previously they might simply have written off as hooligans or revolutionaries); while for some of the miners and their families, the reconstruction was apparently deeply therapeutic. All sides found themselves involved as participants in messy, unfinished history, where neutrality was no longer an option.
Deller’s political work is revolutionary. He celebrates vanishing minority cultures, especially the working class ethos of the majority of British people that is rapidly disappearing in a bland sea of consumerism and mega-shopping centers; he uses the tools of re-enactment in a strange liturgy of celebration that is actually almost religious, and not unlike the anamnesis of the Last Supper celebrated in every church throughout the land to recall Christians to their historic roots and reconcile them to undeserved suffering. His events can have an effect that goes beyond what one might expect, both putting people back in touch with their roots and also healing their memories of defeat.
Yinka Shonibare
Yinka Shonibare is a Nigerian artist, the humor of whose works often beguilingly disguises their revolutionary import. In his work, mischievous cultural assimilation undermines the safe boundaries through which our cultural identities are often constructed. “His spectacular installations contain provocative and destabilizing elements that stimulate new perspectives on the world.” Born in London in 1962 of Anglo-Nigerian parents, he grew up in Lagos, later returned to London, and refers to himself as a “post-colonial hybrid.” He specializes particularly in creating ironic bonds between ages and cultures, “conjoining supposedly disparate elements.” For example, the “African” fabrics that he loves to use are all manufactured (for the African Market) in England or Holland. He plays with colonial and post-colonial stereotypes—the association of Africans with seduction, for example, Diary of a Victorian Dandy, or the particular racist stereotypes seen in the increasingly harsh immigration procedures of European and American nations, that tend to view Africans almost as aliens from space (Vacation – space-suited men); or the extraordinary fantasies that exist about the Victorian aristocracy at play (and that often form a strange stereotype of “quintessential Englishness”) as in Gallantry and Criminal Conversation. Shonibare exploits all these by juxtaposing them in a riot of humor that is actually profoundly unsettling. Gainsborough and Fragonard figures find themselves without heads and in African costume, not to mention Raeburn’s famous skating clergyman, parodied in Reverend on Ice.
Yinka Shonibare, Diary of a Victorian Dandy: 03:00 Hours, 1998m C-type print, 72 x 90 in., Photo courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, © Yinka Shonibare MBE. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2013
Again, this is revolutionary art, not in the Paul Revere sense but humorous, seductive—and always self-consciously so. Finally, the joke is on the viewer, who finds the humor holding a mirror to one’s own unexamined prejudices, and who is forced uneasily to question one’s own perceptions.
Gillian Wearing
There are other British artists one could mention such as Michael Landy, Tracy Emin, even Chris Ofili. But I conclude with the work of an artist who also challenges the safety net of identity—but this time, personal identity as the foundation of cultural or group identity. Gillian Wearing, born 1963, won the Turner Prize in 1997, and creates works that can be deeply anti-authoritarian or highly personal. In Sixty Minute Silence (1996), an hour-long video shows a group of people dressed as policemen and women; to begin with, they manage to remain still, but this stillness finally gives way to fidgeting. For Wearing, “The piece is about authority, restraint and control.”
Gillian Wearing, Self Portrait at 17 Years Old, Framed c-type print, 115.5 x 92 cm, 2003.
© the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London
More typically, Wearing uses anonymous subjects (their anonymity protected by masks or disguises) who confess anonymously to things they have done, or that have been done to them. The subsequent videos are extraordinary—often deeply unsettling—and much more so than the sort of revelation you might find on a chat show, precisely because of the anonymity of her subjects. Is what they say true? Is it a performance? Who is the “real” person who is talking? Is this a real liberation for the person who is being “documented”—or are these strangers being exploited by the artist?
In an early work, people held up signs that stated what they were really thinking at the time, revealing the conflict between inner and outer personae. More recently she has been working with masks, often herself wearing masks of other members of her family or even of herself at another age, or of her mother at her present age, asking what it is to be another person. Inevitably, this sheds doubt on our own identity. As Daniel Herrman puts it, in the end we will not be able to escape the fact that all our social roles are constructed. Or, to quote Alistair McIntyre, “the obliteration of the distinction between social surface and underlying human reality is itself an important instrument in deceiving us. Behind the mask there will always be another mask.” Such an apparently naïve but actually sophisticated challenge to our personal identity innocently undermines all those certainties that the right-pleasing press and crowd-pleasing politicians like to peddle, demonizing certain minorities and exalting others. One would hope that her destabilizing tactics might make even the most opinionated viewer of her work question their right to make generalized assumptions about anyone else.
In summary, these four revolutionary artists might be natural allies for those seeking a Christian critique of the present world. Creed questions the materialism on which our acquisitive society (of which the artworld is an important subsection) depends; Deller shows how an abstract decision taken by politicians can affect or destroy a hundred years of enfleshed cultural history; Shonibare prompts us to own up to the undeniably complex global and cultural interdependence of the modern age in all its aspects; and Wearing destroys the myth of self-sufficiency that equates me with my persona (literally, my mask).
It might be suggested that all these artists are focussed on interdependence and inter-relationship, and seek to make us aware of the extraordinary filigree of cultural, economic, and political relationships that bind us all together, despite our resistance and desire for self-sufficiency. Surely this is, in the last analysis, not only revolutionary but also profoundly religious.
Charles Pickstone is vicar of St. Laurence Church, Catford, in southeast London. He is a trustee of the UK educational charity, Art & Christianity Enquiry, and is on the editorial board of Art & Christianity. Pickstone is a visiting scholar at Sarum College, Salisbury, where he teaches in their master’s degree program in Christian spirituality, and he is a board member of the UK section of AICA (the international association of art critics). His particular interest is in the overlap between the visual arts and theology, and he regularly contributes articles to books and magazines on art and spirituality, and lectures in the UK and abroad.
There are many ways of being revolutionary. The traditional image of an eroticized Liberty leading the People (i.e. men) to a testosterone-charged oedipal victory over the decadent forces of the old order that tends to come to mind when the word is spoken is not the only possible image of revolution. Neither is its Massachusetts equivalent—the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the famous poem in which Longfellow warns of the coming “hour of darkness and peril and need,” applying the probably legendary event of the War of Independence to the impending Civil War, two revolutions for the price of one. Such heroics are not the only way to be revolutionary, and over the last two decades in England, we have seen a number of very different—and rather more English—approaches to revolution: quietly subversive, witty, understated, wry. I would like to argue that these understated subversions are just as effective in revolutionary impact, and, indeed, one of the very things they undermine is the necessity of machismo to revolution, as they gently insinuate some rather disturbing questions especially about gender and role, both personal and public, private and political, secular and religious.
Particular themes addressed by this disparate group of four artists, all short-listed for or winners of the Turner Prize, the UK’s most prestigious award for contemporary art, are personal, cultural and class identity, colonial attitudes, the nature of art objects and also of the largely market-driven art world. Many of the criticisms they make of the contemporary world are so close to those made by religion that these works are in some sense at least natural allies.
Martin Creed
The first example is Martin Creed, born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1968; he has exhibited widely in Europe and the US since 1996, notably “Life/Love” (Paris and Lisbon 1996/7) and “Speed” (Whitechapel Gallery London 1998). What is perhaps most revolutionary about Creed’s work is its self-effacing quality. He is quoted as saying that the world is already full of too many things, and so he creates art that uses the modest means of everyday life, creating art out of ordinary, everyday objects: but not the glamorous objets trouvés of most artists of this type, or romantic objects such as urinals. For example, rather than using blu-tak to stick artworks on to the wall, he contents himself with just the blu-tak; or, at a time of particular hardship, he exhibited a piece of A4 paper crumpled into a ball. “One of the things I like about it,” he says, “is that it kind of disappears when you put it in the world, and it can be something quite precious and it’s also a piece of rubbish. I like that about it.”
Martin Creed, Work No. 203, Everything is Going to Be Alright, 1999. Commissioned by PEER. Photographed in its original location. Tate, London. Used with permission.
In 2001, he won the Turner Prize; in the accompanying exhibition, he notoriously showed the gallery lights going on and off, nothing more: “To me, they’re all ways of having something, of doing something, making something happen—but, in a way, without anything happening. The light’s just doing what it does, you know…” Simple, ordinary objects, can suggest complex and contradictory meanings.
A superb example would be his wonderful piece, Half the air in a given space, where the gallery is exactly half filled with balloons. “Air is the perfect material. When you go to an art gallery, it’s always full of air, so I was trying to work out a way of using air to make something. Half-full to balance the making of something and the not-making of something. If the gallery were full, no-one would get it. It’s important to me that the situation is normal, that, as usual, the space is full of air —it’s just that half of it is inside the balloons.”
This is art at its best: enabling us to appreciate the everyday in a new way, making the ordinary but invisible visible. Creed makes us aware of air (and therefore of space), this thick soup that clothes the planet and at the bottom of which we all live. Rather than creating something precious (his contemporary Damien Hirst’s jewelled skull comes to mind), he shows us the profound value of what we already have, the richness of the ordinary, whether blu-tak or crumpled paper or a light doing what it does.
My favorite example is his sculpture commissioned by Ingrid Swenson of Peer Gallery in 1999 for a sad, neo-classical façade, all that survives of a Salvation Army Training College in a notorious, down-town part of east London known as Murder Mile. Creed erected a neon message above the portico reading Everything’s going to be alright.
The apparent contradiction between words and context is powerfully multivalent: is the work a critique of the opiate of religion as promised by religion (the Salvation Army)? or of the opiate of commercial pleasure as promised by advertisers (the neon lights)? or is it a reflection of a genuine awareness among all human beings—no matter how oppressed by environmental or political powerlessness—that survival is always an option (just as this rather unlovely and out-of-place building has survived in London’s East end)? Cleverly, the artist does not say: the viewer is caught up in the rich ambivalence of an ordinary turn of phrase strangely illuminated in ordinary fluorescent lights, a juxtaposition that is truly revolutionary and, thanks to the very boldness of the statement if taken at face value, potentially religious, a sort of “faith” that is strangely affirmed despite its probable falsity.
Creed admits that his work is about politics and his anxiety about “adding stuff to the world” is a powerfully understated critique of materialism; his reticent view of art and lack of self-aggrandizement exhibit a distinctly Christian sense of humility.
Jeremy Deller
The second example is a much more outwardly political artist, Jeremy Deller (Turner Prize winner 2004), who creates work that is almost liturgical. Deller creates performances that highlight the effects of political policies on small communities. His events or performances are generally preserved in film. For example, Acid Brass (1997) is an exercise in cultural fusion; the Manchester-based William Fairey brass band perform reworked acid house anthems. The performance brings together two very different musical genres enjoyed by different constituencies of working-class Northern England. Unconvention (1999) addresses the politics of the day through an exhibition of the source material used by the Welsh alternative rock band, the Manic Street Preachers.
Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, 2001. Directed by Mike Figgis. Co-Commissioned by Artangel and Channel 4. Photograph by Martin Jenkinson. Used with permission of the artist.
His most famous work to date, for which he won the Turner prize, was the Battle of Orgreave, a reconstruction of a stand-off that took place between the police and the miners picketing a colliery in the north of England during the 1984 miners’ strike. This strike, widely seen in the UK as symbolizing the end of a cultural era, has over the years taken on a mythical status. Thatcher’s government came to be seen as responsible for the disappearance of working-class culture based around the mines and industry especially of the north of England, and the so-called battle of Orgreave became its symbol. As Deller himself puts it, “The miners’ strike, like a civil war, had a traumatically divisive effect at all levels of life in the UK. Families were torn apart because of their divided loyalties.”
Deller involved local miners, their relatives and local volunteers to re-enact this “battle.” Deller also used a professional actor to play the role of Arthur Scargill, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, and members of battle-recreation societies to play the role of the police. The event was filmed for television.
The effect on the participants was extraordinary: the battle-recreation enthusiasts, more used to minutely following historically researched ancient battles, found themselves caught up in an event from recent history, and encountering people who had actually participated in the original event (whom previously they might simply have written off as hooligans or revolutionaries); while for some of the miners and their families, the reconstruction was apparently deeply therapeutic. All sides found themselves involved as participants in messy, unfinished history, where neutrality was no longer an option.
Deller’s political work is revolutionary. He celebrates vanishing minority cultures, especially the working class ethos of the majority of British people that is rapidly disappearing in a bland sea of consumerism and mega-shopping centers; he uses the tools of re-enactment in a strange liturgy of celebration that is actually almost religious, and not unlike the anamnesis of the Last Supper celebrated in every church throughout the land to recall Christians to their historic roots and reconcile them to undeserved suffering. His events can have an effect that goes beyond what one might expect, both putting people back in touch with their roots and also healing their memories of defeat.
Yinka Shonibare
Yinka Shonibare is a Nigerian artist, the humor of whose works often beguilingly disguises their revolutionary import. In his work, mischievous cultural assimilation undermines the safe boundaries through which our cultural identities are often constructed. “His spectacular installations contain provocative and destabilizing elements that stimulate new perspectives on the world.” Born in London in 1962 of Anglo-Nigerian parents, he grew up in Lagos, later returned to London, and refers to himself as a “post-colonial hybrid.” He specializes particularly in creating ironic bonds between ages and cultures, “conjoining supposedly disparate elements.” For example, the “African” fabrics that he loves to use are all manufactured (for the African Market) in England or Holland. He plays with colonial and post-colonial stereotypes—the association of Africans with seduction, for example, Diary of a Victorian Dandy, or the particular racist stereotypes seen in the increasingly harsh immigration procedures of European and American nations, that tend to view Africans almost as aliens from space (Vacation – space-suited men); or the extraordinary fantasies that exist about the Victorian aristocracy at play (and that often form a strange stereotype of “quintessential Englishness”) as in Gallantry and Criminal Conversation. Shonibare exploits all these by juxtaposing them in a riot of humor that is actually profoundly unsettling. Gainsborough and Fragonard figures find themselves without heads and in African costume, not to mention Raeburn’s famous skating clergyman, parodied in Reverend on Ice.
Yinka Shonibare, Diary of a Victorian Dandy: 03:00 Hours, 1998m C-type print, 72 x 90 in., Photo courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, © Yinka Shonibare MBE. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2013
Again, this is revolutionary art, not in the Paul Revere sense but humorous, seductive—and always self-consciously so. Finally, the joke is on the viewer, who finds the humor holding a mirror to one’s own unexamined prejudices, and who is forced uneasily to question one’s own perceptions.
Gillian Wearing
There are other British artists one could mention such as Michael Landy, Tracy Emin, even Chris Ofili. But I conclude with the work of an artist who also challenges the safety net of identity—but this time, personal identity as the foundation of cultural or group identity. Gillian Wearing, born 1963, won the Turner Prize in 1997, and creates works that can be deeply anti-authoritarian or highly personal. In Sixty Minute Silence (1996), an hour-long video shows a group of people dressed as policemen and women; to begin with, they manage to remain still, but this stillness finally gives way to fidgeting. For Wearing, “The piece is about authority, restraint and control.”
Gillian Wearing, Self Portrait at 17 Years Old, Framed c-type print, 115.5 x 92 cm, 2003.
© the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London
More typically, Wearing uses anonymous subjects (their anonymity protected by masks or disguises) who confess anonymously to things they have done, or that have been done to them. The subsequent videos are extraordinary—often deeply unsettling—and much more so than the sort of revelation you might find on a chat show, precisely because of the anonymity of her subjects. Is what they say true? Is it a performance? Who is the “real” person who is talking? Is this a real liberation for the person who is being “documented”—or are these strangers being exploited by the artist?
In an early work, people held up signs that stated what they were really thinking at the time, revealing the conflict between inner and outer personae. More recently she has been working with masks, often herself wearing masks of other members of her family or even of herself at another age, or of her mother at her present age, asking what it is to be another person. Inevitably, this sheds doubt on our own identity. As Daniel Herrman puts it, in the end we will not be able to escape the fact that all our social roles are constructed. Or, to quote Alistair McIntyre, “the obliteration of the distinction between social surface and underlying human reality is itself an important instrument in deceiving us. Behind the mask there will always be another mask.” Such an apparently naïve but actually sophisticated challenge to our personal identity innocently undermines all those certainties that the right-pleasing press and crowd-pleasing politicians like to peddle, demonizing certain minorities and exalting others. One would hope that her destabilizing tactics might make even the most opinionated viewer of her work question their right to make generalized assumptions about anyone else.
In summary, these four revolutionary artists might be natural allies for those seeking a Christian critique of the present world. Creed questions the materialism on which our acquisitive society (of which the artworld is an important subsection) depends; Deller shows how an abstract decision taken by politicians can affect or destroy a hundred years of enfleshed cultural history; Shonibare prompts us to own up to the undeniably complex global and cultural interdependence of the modern age in all its aspects; and Wearing destroys the myth of self-sufficiency that equates me with my persona (literally, my mask).
It might be suggested that all these artists are focussed on interdependence and inter-relationship, and seek to make us aware of the extraordinary filigree of cultural, economic, and political relationships that bind us all together, despite our resistance and desire for self-sufficiency. Surely this is, in the last analysis, not only revolutionary but also profoundly religious.
