Friday's art tour

Last Friday I enjoyed a great day out in London viewing current art exhibitions. Seeing From Outside also had the benefit of taking me to six City churches while viewing an interesting and diverse selection of art by emerging European artists that raised questions of contemporary morality.

I had seen Mark Titchner's work last year in the Turner Prize exhibition and therefore was keen to go to Vilma Gold to see his new exhibition, The Eye Don't See Itself. It didn't disappoint with a mesmerising video projection of an unblinking eye against a phallic obelisk, on an endlessly shifting background based on a Rorschach inkblot commonly believed to represent the father. As Vilma Gold's publicity suggests this is video projection as monument, mirrored in a black reflecting pool, and referring to the Washington Monument.

The Estorick Collection of modern italian art currently has a surprising exhibition; an exhibition of Futurist sacred art. This is surprising because Futurism was vehemently anti-clerical and eulogised speed, energy and the man-made machines that produced them. However, as this exhibition shows there was in the 1930s a flowering of Futurist sacred art that makes this exhibition well worth seeing and which adds considerably to our knowledge of the Catholic cultural renaissance in the early twentieth century even when, as in this case, artists and clerics were conflicted.

Finally, I returned to church. This time to the Sam Taylor-Wood exhibition at the Wallspace Gallery. Wallspace is an exhibition space in All Hallows Church, London Wall, designed to explore the relationships between art and spirituality. Major contemporary artists such as Taylor-Wood and Damien Hirst have been keen to exhibit their work within a sacred space and happy with the association that this causes. Others, interestingly, have been less willing for the same reason. One of the questions I plan to reflect on as a result of Friday's art tour is to consider what it is that happens to art works when they are exhibited in a church rather than a gallery.

My time at Wallspace ended as I caught up with Malcolm Doney, a friend from ordination training, and shared in the end-of-show Eucharist that Malcolm led. Reflecting on Taylor-Wood's three film pieces from the exhibition (Pietà, Ascension, and Prelude in Air) he spoke about 'muscle-memory' (instinctive reactions learned through repeated experience) and compared this to our experience of communion (the repeated participation in Christ's passion and resurrection) which can lead to instinctive Christ-like action that is, in essence for us, a form of ascension or divinization of our humanity.

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John Tavener's Eternal Memory.