Cross Purposes (2)

Cross Purposes is not only an excellent survey of crucifixion images found primarily in Modern British Art but is also an exploration of the extent to which the crucifixion has become a universal image of significance to those who do not hold the Christian faith.

The principal means by which this issue is explored is through the inclusion of work by the Jewish artists, Marc Chagall and Emmanuel Levy. Chagall provided the initial impetus for the exhibition through the proximity to Mascalls Gallery of Tudeley Church, the only Church in the world with a full set of stained glass by Chagall (see photographs above).

Their crucifixions, which include Chagall's previously unknown ‘Apocalypse en Lilas, Capriccio’, emphasise the Jewishness of the crucified Christ and equate his suffering to that of the Jewish people throughout their history and, particularly, during the holocaust. These paintings, therefore, are not based on and do not seek to explore the Christian doctrine of the Atonement but gain much of their force and power by deviating from that doctrine and would not exists or have the resonance that they do possess without it. These are images therefore that universalise the image of the crucifixion by exploring its resonance outside of the specifics of the Christian faith but which rely on the particularity of Christian usage of the image in order to give these wider uses their emotive power.

Another approach is seen in an image by Scottish artist R Hamilton Blyth. Here a broken and hollow crucifix hangs from a cross set in a shattered wartime landscape. This is not a depiction of Christ's crucifixion but instead the destruction of all that has stemmed from it; the end of Christendom and the failure of Christian faith in the face of worldwide conflict. Again, Hamilton Blyth's image moves outside of Christian understandings of atonement but depends on those understandings in order to do so.

What we see in these aspects of the Cross Purposes exhibition is the vital importance of understanding and valuing what the artist may ultimately seek to subvert or critique in order that that subversion or critique have relevance and resonance. This is also the way in which Susan Shaw's Dispersal, a linked exhibition at Capel Church, also works (see photographs above). Shaw's mass produced Virgins grouped on a pallet for distribution but located in a church as a worshipping collective raise issues of the commercialisation of religion and the religion of commerce but rely on the actual and emotive power that the image of the Virgin has had in Christianity in order to give the installation and the issues it raises their force.

In this way, the exhibition seems to demonstrate, all crucifixion images - whether subversions, explications or critiques - are predicated on the real and raw power that the crucifixion possesses within the Christian understanding and imagination.

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Julie Miller - How Could You Say No.