Engaging with religious approaches to grief and loss

Exhibitions at Glasgow International 2018 and by Art Angel engage with religious approaches to grief and loss:

'For his solo exhibition at Tramway, Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey has taken as his starting point an 18th Century wooden figurine of Job held at the Wellcome Collection in London. Leckey has enlarged the object to human scale. This single forsaken biblical figure occupies alone the vast space of Tramway.

The title ‘Nobodaddy’ is taken from the poem by William Blake, a name that for Blake is a play on the idea of God the father of no one, but also the man with no body. In Leckey’s sculpture this body is expanded and infiltrated by technology. Man’s limbs are hollowed out, the organs removed, and filled with speakers that give voice to his state. Opposite the sculpture a large video projection mirrors the figure as it is toggles through different scenarios.'

Laura Cumming writes: 'Based on a German carving, Mark Leckey’s statue is larger than life and fully as profound with its sorrowful face and putrefying sores. A poor soul lost in suffering, almost, he sits alone in his melancholy contemplation, head in hand like Rodin’s Thinker.

But what he’s thinking is voiced in the air. The statue speaks, words emitting from its wounds and also from a screen in which the motionless Job is given some kind of life through a flux of shifting light and scenario. Time passes, place changes, the days speed and slow; and still the prophet endures. He talks of his plagues, ancient and modern (the camera enters the figure, an endoscopy of hollowed tracts), bewildered by their harshness; and yet there is still hope: he dreams of swimming, and even of flying.

The lament is powerfully moving, not least because the Turner prize-winning artist sets up a tension between the virtual and the real. The screen, with all its brilliant CGI effects, is restlessly compelling, and yet one is drawn loyally back to the poor simple statue. It is a gripping standoff between old and new technologies, in which the biblical agonies of Job, thousands of years ago, are made devastatingly present and timeless.'

Taryn Simon's first major performance work An Occupation of Loss takes place in a subterranean location in Central London. 'Each night, professional mourners simultaneously broadcast their lamentations, enacting rituals of grief from around the world.'

'Their sonic mourning is performed in recitations that include northern Albanian laments, which seek to excavate “uncried words”; Venezuelan laments, which safeguard the soul’s passage to the Milky Way; Greek Epirotic laments, which bind the story of a life with its afterlife; and Yezidi laments, which map a topography of displacement and exile.'

Adrian Searle writes: 'Alone, in couples and in trios and quartets, these singers and musicians – Armenian Yazidis, Cambodian performers of Kantaomming, Ghanaian women wailing and crying, performers of Greek polyphonic panegyri – are singing for those who are not here ... Their indifference to us despite our proximity is disturbing, as one is led by sound from one group to another, from culture to culture, language to language, ritual to ritual. Sometimes I feel like I am intruding on a stranger’s grief. At other moments transfixed and bewildered, like a lost anthropologist, a rubber-necker, a ghoul. Do I think about my own losses, the dead I didn’t mourn, my insufficiency of tears, my failed gravitas?

For all the polyphonies and cultural differences, there is an overall measure to the forms and sounds of lamentation, a register of sorrow that appears to cross times and places, religions and beliefs. What they mostly have in common, apart from a display of outward mourning and loss, is a sense of paying witness, and of being alive among the dead.'

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John Prine & Nanci Griffith - The Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness.

Truths imparted seem more profound with every year

In the Guardian this week Jonathan Jones wrote about Bill Viola's forthcoming exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park from 10 October 2015 – 10 April 2016:

'A chapel that stands among the rolling landscapes of Yorkshire Sculpture Park provides a perfect setting for part of this retrospective of the pioneering video artist. Viola is daring and unusual among contemporary artists in the forthright way he engages with religion. The spiritual art of the past echoes in his work – martyrs, triptychs, meditation, all that sacred jazz. But it is not (necessarily) an art of belief. Rather, this Californian artist is fascinated by the loneliness and insight of the saint and the mystic, by the varieties of religious experience. Out of this real emotional quest he has arguably created the most serious and worthwhile work ever done in the name of video art.'

Adrian Searle wrote about Sanctum by Theaster Gates which will be at Temple Church, Bristol, from 29 October – 21 November:

'For 24 days, the medieval ruins of Bristol’s Temple Church, bombed in 1940, are going to come alive with the voices and sounds, beats and songs of the city. Theaster Gates’ first public project in the UK follows his extraordinary interventions in his Chicago hometown and in a destroyed Huguenot house in Kassel. Gates wants the church ruins to resonate with sound, round the clock, for 576 hours. Gates’ public projects are sites for protest and celebration, and have a therapeutic, spiritual core. Above all, they’ve got soul. An unmissable treat.'

Peter Paphides wrote:

'Time has a crude way of separating the good songs from the bad songs. The bad songs don’t grow or change. They harden in the light and remain exactly as they were when you first encountered them. The music you keep coming back to, though, isn’t like that. It does all the things that living things do. It grows and assumes new shapes with time. The truths it imparts seem more profound with every year, be it what Martha and The Vandellas’ Heatwave has to say about love or the anguished questing of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. Some songs connect straight away. Others are gifts from writers to their future selves. These days, when Yusuf Islam – formerly Cat Stevens – sings Father & Son, he does so “from the point of view of someone who has still a lot to learn from their children”.

When Fleetwood Mac perform Silver Springs now, it takes on the form of both a karmic pasting issued by Stevie Nicks to Lindsey Buckingham and an apology from the band who elected, against her wishes, to omit it from the album Rumours. It’s hard not to feel like an intruder when you see Nicks eyeball her ex-lover and sing: “You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loved you.” The best songs transcend the limitations of their authors and display a wisdom often lost on the people who created them. I fear we’ve lost the Morrissey who once sang, “It takes guts to be gentle and kind”, but we still have the bands who hardwired the humanity of his early songs into their outlook: bands such as British Sea Power, whose Waving Flags exhorts new émigrés from eastern Europe to “welcome in/From across the Vistula/You’ve come so very far”.'

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U2 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.

Grappling with the differences between what we hear and what we see

It is interesting to compare the response to Soundscapes at the National Gallery with reviews of the Richter/Pärt collaboration at the Manchester international festival.

Laura Cumming thinks that, in Soundscapes, 'sound ... is working against art' and Jonathan Jones says that 'great paintings do not need the emotional prompt of music and sounds to make them come alive' but, by contrast, Stephen Pritchard thinks that Richter's paintings 'don’t truly come into their own until you hear Pärt’s response to them.'

Cumming writes: 'Soundscapes is the worst idea the National Gallery has come up with in almost 200 years. It is feeble, pusillanimous, apologetic and, even in its resolute wrong-headedness, lacks all ambition. Invite a sound artist to compose a work in response to a masterpiece from the collection and you might expect something original, given all the precedents in music alone, from Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition to Philip Glass’s piano portrait of Chuck Close. But instead this show feels more like the ambient soundtrack on a pair of National Trust headphones ...

Anyone can (many people do) walk around the National Gallery listening to their own private music. I can imagine how it might focus the mind or block out the buzz of other lives. But paintings create their own soundscapes, which may arrive in the form of wordless thoughts.

Sound here is working against art. Instead of seducing people into staying longer with a painting, concentrating harder, noticing more, it is limiting our free response by filling the gallery with sounds that one has to make an effort to ignore. And this does no favours to the living or the dead.'

By contrast Pritchard writes that Richter's paintings 'are wonderful creations; the deeply subtle Double Grey reflecting the streaked reds, greys, greens and blues of the Birkenau set. And yet they don’t truly come into their own until you hear Pärt’s response to them.

His piece, entitled Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fatima, is sung at intervals throughout the day. On preview afternoon last week there was no warning of its start; the singers of the Estonian choir Vox Clamantis mingled with the crowd and simply sang where they stood – an electrifying moment. It’s vintage Pärt; at first it could be a gentle, lilting folk-song as old as time but it unfolds into a multi-layered, densely harmonised acclamation of alleluia, which both triumphs over the horrors of Birkenau and bestows a profound nobility on the victims of that terrible place.'

Why is one art/music collaboration perceived to succeed when another does not? Adrian Searle suggests that the difference lies in the grappling, which goes on in the Richter/Pärt collaboration, between the differences between what we hear and what we see, what we are told and what we experience with our senses, what is mediated and what hits us directly':

'Pärt’s singers repeat the same song, seven times in succession. Every time it sounds different. Richter’s four grey diptychs, hanging opposite the Birkenau panels, play a further formal game of similarity and difference (the paint hidden from us on the reverse of glass sheets). The grey, paired panels are alike one another, but no two greys are the same, though each pair of panels has one lighter, one darker sheet. Comparisons between the different pairs are difficult to make, and shift according to where we stand, the ambient lighting and time of day. They are filled with murky reflections. Similarly, listening to Pärt’s music, we sense differences in the rendition, even though exact comparisons are difficult.'

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Arvo Pärt - Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fatima.

Struggles to contend with the Australian landscape

Australia is "the first major survey of Australian art in the UK for 50 years, this exhibition spans more than 200 years from 1800 to the present day and seeks to uncover the fascinating social and cultural evolution of a nation through its art. Two hundred works including painting, drawing, photography, watercolours and multimedia will shed light on a period of rapid and intense change; from the impact of colonisation on an indigenous people, to the pioneering nation building of the 19th century through to the enterprising urbanisation of the last 100 years."

Anthony Gormley comments: "When I think of Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams or Arthur Boyd, I think of harsh earth and fierce sunlight. Through its new occupiers, somehow Australia produced modernist vigour ... There is a directness in the Indigenous traditions, whether the dots of the Western Desert or the colour field paintings of the Great Sandy Desert, where pigment is used to carry mineral truth as well as lived feeling."

Leading Australian contemporary landscape painter Idris Murphy has said:

"I’m not interested in negotiating my way around Indigenous painting. I think it is going to be a problem – can the Western tradition sustain a view of the world? I mean, Peter Fuller used to talk about this when he came to Australia very briefly; he saw in Fred Williams and Sidney Nolan the potential for the ‘last great hurrah’ of the Northern Romantic tradition and I think there’s a lot of truth in what he said. I think it’s going to be a problem – it’s not a problem for me – I’m just lapping it up! Of course I’m not Indigenous but I love the idea of this great wonderful European tradition, which I belong to, fusing with Indigenous art – happening right under my nose, in my lifetime! And I can see that as a whole new sort of language base for contemporary painting."

It will be interesting to see if this show gives any sense of this new sort of language base that Murphy sees in contemporary Australian art. By contrast Adrian Searle has suggested that the show is strong on Aboriginal art and full of classics – but loses its way in modern times:

"The show peters out in a parade of examples, a checklist of single works hung cheek by jowl with no real coherence. There is too much that feels secondary, or like retreads of flavour-of-the-month international fashions.

 

I am certainly no expert on Australian art, but even I can tell that, however enlightening parts of the earlier sections are, the show fails to give a sense of any of the more recent art except in a tokenistic way."

 

The Guardian does have a helpful timeline of Australian art, however: A history of Australian art – interactive timeline.

 

Back at the RA, author Tim Winton will explore his belief that ‘Australia the place is constantly overshadowed by Australia the national idea. Undoubtedly the nation and its projects have shaped my education and my prospects, but the degree to which geography, distance and weather have moulded my sensory palate, my imagination and expectations is substantial. Landscape has exerted a kind of force upon me that is every bit as geological as family.’

In today's Guardian, Winton selects Fred Williams's Yellow Landscape, 1968-9 as his favourite artwork from his homeland:

"he renders the scale and mystery of the physical world by tiny marks. The forms and figures are like scars in the hide of a beast too big to properly conceive of, let alone see entire. All these wens and divots are without pattern and yet they bring to mind calligraphy. These are the marks, the messy, chaotic texture that even the practised eye struggles to contend with in the Australian landscape. Whether you're seeing it from the air or at ground level, this is what your senses struggle with in the open country, such flat planes worked over with hieroglyphics born of fire, erosion, meteor showers, drought and epochal passages of time. Here humans might seem incidental."

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Midnight Oil - Dreamworld.