Sabbatical Art Pilgrimage: Latest ArtWay report

My latest Church of the Month report for ArtWay focuses on Coventry Cathedral.

'Coventry Cathedral was the first major opportunity in Britain to combine contemporary religious art and architecture. [Basil] Spence wanted the cathedral to be, in his own words, “like a plain jewel casket with many jewels inside”—that is, a simple framework that houses a trove of high-quality artworks, which he wanted done in a modern style. His approach to commissioning art for the church was synchronous with that of the Dominican friars Marie-Alain Couturier and Pie-Raymond Régamey, who sought to revive Christian art in France by appealing to the independent masters of their time, as well as that of Canon Walter Hussey in Britain.'

This Church of the Month report follows on from others about Aylesford Priory, Canterbury Cathedral, Chapel of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, Hem, Chelmsford Cathedral, Église de Saint-Paul à Grange-Canal, Lumen, Notre Dame du Léman, Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce, Plateau d’Assy,Romont, Sint Martinuskerk Latem, St Aidan of Lindisfarne, St Alban Romford, St. Andrew Bobola Polish RC Church and St Mary the Virgin, Downe, and St Paul Goodmayes, as well as earlier reports of visits to sites associated with Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Antoni Gaudi and Henri Matisse.

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Eric Bibb - Don't Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down.

Post Pop: East meets West

Post Pop: East meets West at the Saatchi Gallery 'brings together 250 works by 110 artists from China, the Former Soviet Union, Taiwan, the UK and the USA in a comprehensive survey celebrating Pop Art's legacy. Post Pop: East Meets West examines why of all the twentieth century's art movements, Pop Art has had such a powerful influence over artists from world regions that have had very different and sometimes opposing ideologies.

The exhibition celebrates the art being produced in these four distinct regions since the heyday of Pop, and presents them in relation to each other through the framework of six themes: Habitat; Advertising and Consumerism; Celebrity and Mass Media; Art History; Religion and Ideology; Sex and the Body.

Although from fundamentally different cultures and ideological backgrounds, the artists in this exhibition play with imagery from commercial advertising, propaganda posters, pictures of the famous as well as monetary and patriotic motifs in wry and provocative works that unmistakably reference the Pop Art movement which emerged in America and Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. In the Soviet Union region these works draw attention to state control, conformity, ceremony, pomp and the façade of unanimity amongst the people; in America and the UK they serve as a critique of commodity fetishism, the cult of celebrity and our mass-produced, status-driven man-made world; and in Greater China as commentary on the social dislocation created by a new super power's fascination with wealth and luxury following a period of extreme austerity.'

Wallpaper says, 'You'd think a generation of artists raised in the relative absence of religion would have escaped the pull of iconography. But therein lies the conflict in 'Ideology & Religion', perhaps the show's strongest section. If you're not scared straight by 'Die Harder', a screaming steel crucifix spiked with coat hangers by Turner Prize-nominee David Mach, you will be by the 12 shrouded figures worshipping at the altar of carved-wood toast slices by Anatoly Osmolovsky.'

Patricia Manos highlights, 'Moscow-based Irina Korina’s Chapel (2013), a structure of what looks like stained glass emerging from behind a thicket and a corrugated metal fence, and which deals with the idea of Socialist utopia as dol’gostroi, a construction project abandoned for lack of funds. Chapel is luminous and puzzling, with a touch of the seductive sadness that draws people to ruin-porn in the first place. It also shows a persistent optimism about the revolutionary potential of beauty, something that makes ‘Habitat’ probably the most conceptually cohesive part of the whole exhibition ...'

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Rhiannon Giddens and Lalenja Giddens Harrington - I Know I've Been Changed.

Dalton and Deller in Waltham Forest

Pen Dalton's printed wall installation 'Matrilineal Descent' at Tokarska Gallery uses Dalton's own family history to raise issues identity, gender, migration and motherhood. Originally designed for an academic conference on identity in Northern Ireland and informed by writings on identity from Michel Foucault and Stuart Hall that regard ‘the self’ as formed within specific historic, cultural and social contexts, 'Matrilineal Descent' is a powerful, personal piece where the personal informs the wider work and the issues it raises. This installation is complemented by a series of text-based prints - copies of which are in the V&A - that draw on feminist psychoanalytic/linguistic theory – notably that of Julia Kristeva - in exploring understandings of motherhood.

Through her work in art education Dalton has argued "that modernist art education has been and continues to be a complex of gendered discursive practices: saturated through with masculine and feminine divisions and hierarchies which in turn produce gendered identities as hierarchical and working class girls as subordinate, ready to assume subordinate positions in the wider social and
economic culture."

Identity is also the theme at the William Morris Gallery which hosts Jeremy Deller's English Magic. English Magic reflects "the roots of much of Deller’s work, focusing on British society - its people, icons, myths, folklore and its cultural and political history." He has addressed events from the past, present and an imagined future and worked with a varied range of collaborators including archeologists, musicians, bird sanctuaries, prisoners and painters.

His film, also entitled English Magic, forms a major part of the exhibition, bringing together many of the ideas behind the works and featuring the visual and thematic elements that reflect Deller's interest in the diverse nature of British society and its broad cultural, socio-political and economic history. The music is performed by the Melodians Steel Orchestra from South London and was recorded in Studio 2 of Abbey Road Studios in London:

The William Morris Gallery, the place of Morris birth, has recently been transformed to create a new world-class destination and international centre of excellence for the study of Morris, where visitors can enjoy the most intense and personal encounter with one of the foremost creative artists and original thinkers of the nineteenth century.

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Jeremy Deller - English Magic.

Best of British

The wonderfully creative flower arrangers in our neighbouring parish of St Peter's Aldborough Hatch have once again done a great job with the displays at their annual Flower Festival. Their theme was Best of British and their interesting choices included William Morris, the Cornonation, the weather, the Royal Albert Hall (and the Proms), and John Constable. Other displays had the themes of: the Queen; Forests of Britain; the Armed Forces; the Ascent of Everest; The WI; the legal system; the Spitfire; the building of St Peters (their 150th Anniversary); and the 2012 Olympics. The church remains open today for the final day of the Flower Festival.

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The Kinks - Days.

Christendom is on the way out

Responding to the Ipsos-Mori survey of 'census Christians' commissioned by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science UK, Simon Barrow, co-director of the Christian think-tank Ekklesia, has made what is in my view a very accurate and sensible response:

"This opinion survey makes interesting reading as part of a whole web of research on the changing shape and location of Christianity in Britain over the past thirty or more years.

"It shows that 'civic' and 'cultural' Christian self-identification is a very different thing to the deeply-rooted faith held by a much smaller number of people whose believing, belonging and behaving is strongly shaped by regular participation in active Christian communities.

"While we can argue over details, the broad outline of what this survey reveals should not come as any shock or threat to church leaders who have been paying attention to what has been happening in recent decades.

"Top-down and institutional religion is in decline. Trying to restore or maintain the cultural and political dominance of Established religious institutions in what is now a mixed-belief 'spiritual and secular' society is a backward-looking approach.

"Churches have a creative opportunity here. It is to rediscover a different, ground-up vision of Christianity based on practices like economic sharing, peacemaking, hospitality and restorative justice. These were among the distinguishing marks of the earliest followers of Jesus. They have always been part of the 'nonconformist' tradition shared in different ways by Anabaptists, Quakers, radical Catholics, Free Churches and faithful dissenters in all streams of Christian life.

"The mutually reinforcing pact between big religion and top-down authority that we call 'Christendom' is on the way out.

"The kind of conservative religious aggression that claims 'anti-Christian discrimination' every time Christians are asked to treat others fairly and equally in the public square is a threatened response to the loss of top-down religion's social power. So is overbearing 'Christian nation' rhetoric, and the 'culture wars' that some hardline believers and non-believers sometimes seek to launch and win against each other.

"A positive, post-Christendom perspective suggests that Christianity can and should flourish beyond the demise of 'big religion', and that a level-playing field in public life can and should involve both religious and non-religious participants.
"Likewise, while Richard Dawkins may not be a subtle, unbiased or persuasive analyst of religion overall, it would be entirely unhelpful for believers to dismiss this survey because they disagree with its commissioner in other respects. Its content evidently needs further and deeper analysis, alongside other data, than the initial response to it has allowed."
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Al Green - Belle.