Culture: Churches as space for art and... comedy clubs
Commerce: Macaroons and cakes as social enterprise - and 'start up' hints and tips
Congregation: Looking Up with Annie Lamont, Harry and Chris on the Apocalypse, Maggie Dawn on submerging church and Barbara Glasson on diversity
Community: Craftivist and introvert activism with Sarah Corbett - and Naomi Thompson on lessons from the Sunday school movement
Plus - Lucy Winkett on rare sympathy and holding fast in turbulent times
HeartEdge is making spaces where members give from their experience and take from others – an exchange that’s inspiring and mutually useful for all. HeartEdge works with members to find solutions, share resources and connect with others developing their church and community. If you have ideas or requests for topics on which you would like to share ideas and experiences with other churches, please call 020 7766 1127 or email Jonathan.
Broken has rightly been called a flawless depiction of a good priest. Jo Siedlecka writes that:
'Jimmy McGovern’s pitch perfect writing and Sean Bean’s hypnotic, understated performance as Fr Michael Kerrigan did not disappoint. This drama portrays one of those many good priests, who has really taken to heart the advice of Pope Francis to bring the healing power of God’s grace to everyone in need, to stay close to the marginalised and to be “shepherds living with the smell of the sheep.”
We are used to seeing clergy depicted performing their sacramental roles. But the huge amount of pastoral work the average Catholic priest does often goes unrecognised - the visits to the housebound, those in prison or in hospital, accompanying people in times of crisis. All those deaths, weddings, baptisms and funerals. All those problems. All that listening! This series has gone behind the scenes for what feels like a very authentic portrayal of life in a run down north country parish.'
It's worth pointing out, however, that seeing the dramatic and comedic potential of 'good priests' began in recent years firstly with The Vicar of Dibley followed by Rev. Set in a fictional small Oxfordshire village 'which is assigned a female vicar following the 1992 changes in the Church of England that permitted the ordination of women', The Vicar of Dibley has all the elements which characterise the phenomenon of the 'good priest' in comedy or drama i.e. a committed but flawed priest struggling with personal failings and the demands of contemporary ministry. Rev is a grittier reworking of the comedic value of the 'good priest' in being 'a contemporary sitcom about the daily frustrations and moral conflicts of Reverend Adam Smallbone - a Church of England Vicar who was 'promoted' from a sleepy rural parish to the busy, inner-city world of St Saviour's, in East London':
'It is an impossibly difficult job being a good, modern, city vicar. And, equally, it's a very hard job being married to one. Alex - Adam's long-suffering wife - does her best to support him, but she's got her own career as a solicitor to worry about. And she is no-one's idea of a conventional vicar's wife ... Every day throws up a moral conflict for the vicar. Adam's door must always be open to urban sophisticates with ulterior motives, the chronically lonely, the lost, the homeless, the poor and the insane. All are welcome at St Saviour's and Adam can't turn any of them away - even if they're clearly lying, mad or just very annoying.'
'Heavily researched and supported by anecdotes from a number of working city vicars and Church insiders, Rev lifts the lid on how the modern Church actually functions and what life is really like in a dog collar.'
Dramas featuring good priests continued with 'Calvary, a 2014 Irish drama film written and directed by John Michael McDonagh.' 'McDonagh explained the intentions he had for the film: "There are probably films in development about priests which involve abuse. My remit is to do the opposite of what other people do, and I wanted to make a film about a good priest."' He has also said, “The idea was a good man, a good priest, and what that would entail in a modern life where everything is ironic and insincere. Let’s follow a sincere man through to the end.”
'Calvary is a blackly comedic drama about a priest tormented by his community. Father James is a good man intent on making the world a better place. When his life is threatened one day during confession, he finds he has to battle the dark forces closing in around him.'
Like Diary of a Country Priest, Calvary is about a good priest in a small village where attitudes toward him range from benign indifference to contempt and abuse.
Yet where Bresson’s saintly protagonist was a wan young consumptive who could be wounded by something as minor as a saucy schoolgirl impudently flirting with him, Father James — played by the physically imposing Brendan Gleeson in a grizzled beard and cassock that makes him an even more formidable presence — is a battered Celtic warrior who seems impossible to rattle ...
it is Father James, alone among the cast, who offers a persuasive, integral, authentic example of what a human being should look like: too honest for cant, too jaded for naiveté, too self-aware for illusions, too solicitous for self-absorption, too fallen for self-righteousness, too down to earth for self-importance.'
The development of 'good priest' stories has gone hand-in-hand with reality TV series such as A Country Parish and An Island Parish which, again, demonstrate significant levels of interest in the demands of the priestly role within contemporary culture. This is a phenomenon that would reward more research and review as it would seem true the case that, rightly depicted or dramatised (i.e. with a honest focus on the commitment, struggle and integrity of the priest) authentic portrayals of parish life can generate significant interest and empathy. This is, in part, as Jo Siedlecka notes, because of the huge amount of pastoral work the average priest does; the visits to the housebound, those in prison or in hospital, accompanying people in times of crisis, all those deaths, weddings, baptisms and funerals, all those problems, all that listening!
How do you make economics funny? How do you put the comedy in commodity? That is the challenge that comedian Simon Evans has set himself with Simon Evans Goes to Market. The first series was interesting, thought-provoking and informative, as well as being funny. 'The market in radio comedy being what it is - [he] was rewarded with a second series.'
'In this new series for BBC Radio 4, he looks at the markets of four goods that might perhaps be referred to as 'Bads' - coffee, alcohol, tobacco and sugar. Addictive, stress inducing, even deadly - but a big part of our daily life that we just can't do without.
With the help of a variety of experts and regular co-host, presenter of More or Less, Tim Harford, he shows how economics really is part of our everyday life.'
Miranda Sawyer notes that Evans' humour 'doesn't quite fit the comedy norm' as he's 'not particularly leftwing, he has no time for cool posturing and he likes to know about stuff.' He laces 'proceedings with his clever jokes, some scripted, some off the cuff', and 'illuminates a subject as he riffs about it, takes it seriously and gets the laughs.'
'Here's some updates that will hopefully be of interest and help for your start-up business
Sat Kumar of Seven Kings Business Partnership and Hansons Estates is speaker at our lunchtime Enterprise club on Tuesday. He's got loads of experience and contacts.
Redbridge CVS have alerted us to lots of funding opportunities currently live. I've put the whole list here. Please get in touch if you want some help.
Who's joining us at the Chambers comedy night on Thursday? Still just about time to book.
We had a Timebank workshop this week led by start-up Wellspring Therapies. Info click here
The enterprise club this week will be featuring Jung, Plato and Clive! Info here.
There's some interesting free workshops for start-ups in London. Info here.
What would you like to learn or offer at our next Timebank community skills swap? We need to hear from you. Click here
You gotta keep up with news in your field and pass on to your Facebook and Twitter followers says Aceil Haddad, enterprise club speaker this week. Click here
And finally, we want to know WHAT HELP YOU WANT at the enterprise club? Tahir is helping us to tailor our support. Click here to file your requests.
And still places left for the Chambers comedy night. I'm going! Click here
Have a good fortnight and the next update will be in 2 weeks time.
News to pass on this week (please always pass on news for me to pass on!)
The speaker at the enterprise club on Tuesday (24th March) is Aciel Haddad on PR and also social media. Also Tahir will introduce a new feature to the club. Info here. We have been waiting to book Aciel for ages!!
The next skills swap is 21st April and we are looking for ideas click here
Stephanie, Timebank manager, has written a blog about the last skills swap - take a look. :)
The ECHO business timebank is offering a great range of workshops for free, click here for info.
Don't forget the Chambers comedy and networking night. Got 4 so far from Sophia Hubs - want more! click here for info.
A list of start-ups currently tweeting - please do follow them click here. If I have missed you off let me know!
Art and Life at Dulwich Picture Gallery: Ben and Winifred Nicholson were at the forefront of the Modern British movement and produced some of the most memorable works of the period. Discover ten years of artistic exploration by the couple in this exhibition curated by their grandson, Jovan Nicholson. It provides a rare opportunity to see their views of the same landscapes, seascapes, still lifes and portraits alongside pieces by contemporaries Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis and the potter William Staite Murray. I thoroughly enjoyed this excellent show when I visited on Friday.
The sur-real (or more than real) seems to suit some artistic mediums better than others. Surrealism's incongruous juxtapositions (whether satirical or transcendent) seem to work best in instant impact formats like comedy, paintings or songs as opposed to sustained, unfolding narrative-based forms such as films and novels. Here I mean instant in the sense that the incongruity is immediately apparent and acts as a teaser generating a confusion or curiosity which can lead to deeper examination. The surreal looks great visually (i.e. Dali, Magritte et al), is hilarious as alternative comedy (from The Goon Show to Another Case of Milton Jones) and, as documented by Bob Dylan from Bringing It All Back Hometo John Wesley Harding, is powerfully affective as images of a "strange, alternate, subterranean America".
I've been particularly enjoying more of Milton Jones' surreal comedy this break, so here are some great examples from the line of absurdist comedy of which he is part:
I was gripped by Antigone at the National Theatre tonight but that may have had more to do with the strength of Sophocles' play than the strengths of this particular production. King Creon and his advisers are depicted here more as managers and bureaucrats than as the military dictators that Sophocles would seem to have created. That may be a comment on the way in which military might is commonly exercised today, as the initial recreation of the US Government's viewing of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in the opening scene of this production would seem to imply. While that is theoretically a genuinely scary perception (Assad rather than Gadaffi, for example), here the look and feel of the office set and costumes meant that the petty bureaucratic tyrannies of a David Brent were also in view and may have underminded to some extent the forces Sophocles unleashes through the play.
I was left wondering from where those forces arose. On one level, Creon makes an ill-advised decision which he then feels obligated to enforce as to back down would undermine his authority which he assumes, as King, is and must be absolute. Sophocles would then seem to be critiquing absolutist approaches to power and advocating greater responsiveness from those with power to those who are governed. Yet the same stubborn insistence in following through an initial decision that is criticised in Creon also characterises Antigone's actions and these are presented, within this production at least, as fairly unambiguously heroic. The difference then would seem to be, in part, that one stubbornly follows the wrong course of action while the other stubbornly follows the right course of action. Yet that, by itself, is relatively banal.
The greater sense of tragedy comes partly from the sense that it is the combination of both the wrong and right stubbornnesses that create the inevitability of the tragedy and also the sense that this inevitability is either the judgement of the Gods on Creon, as prophesied by Creon, or an outworking of the curse on the family, the doom which befalls three generations across the Theban plays. This latter sense of Sophocles' tragic conception sits least easily with the contemporary managerial setting of this production and may well be what creates the greatest sense of disjunction between events and setting.
Before seeing this production, I had had a conversation in which a literature lecturer spoke of contrasting Greek tragedy with Biblical narratives. The latter, because they have 'happy' endings are seen as comedic narrative structures rather than as tragedies. This is despite in some cases using essentially the same plot elements. The contrast is instructive. The story of Daniel and the Lion's Den, for example, begins in essentially the same manner as Antigone in that a King enacts a law which is then deliberately broken leading the King to feel compelled to put to death the one who is the lawbreaker. In the biblical version of the story, however, God supernaturally saves the lawbreaker whereas, in Sophocles' version, the gods punish Creon through the deaths of all those he loves. Similarly, the biblical story of David and Bathsheba, in the confrontation between David and the prophet Nathan, parallels the confrontation between Creon and Tiresias in Antigone. The difference is that David repents of his wrong actions as a result of Nathan's intervention whereas Creon resists Tiresias until the point as which his attempt to redress the situation is too late. In the David and Bathsheba story, David does not escape the (still severe) consequences of his actions because of his repentance but does avoid the total meltdown that Creon experiences and which leaves him with nothing and as nothing. The biblical narratives consistently uncover hope in despair which is why they are, as J.R.R. Tolkien phrased it, eucatastrophes rather than tragedies.
Transpositions is a collaborative effort of students associated with the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St Andrews which was voted runner-up as Best Newcomer Blog in the Christian New Media Awards 2010. The blog aims to transpose from the mode of theology to the arts and from the arts to theology in order to create meaningful resonances.
In a recent post Jim Watkins advocates for William Lynch's contention in Christ and Apollothat "comedy is the imaginative form par excellence because it exposes, like no other form can, our concrete and finite reality." Watkins writes that:
"Lynch contrasts comedy and tragedy as the two ends of a telescope. Tragedy looks at life through the narrow end where the human condition is writ large, and so we weep for its frailty and death. Comedy, however, looks at life through the wide end where the human appears small and insignificant, and so we laugh at its foibles and awkwardness."
I agree that this is true for much comedy but not for my favourite form of comedy; which is the surreal. Surreal humour is either more than real - taking us on a flight fancy from a real starting point to a world that is other than our own - or really real - creating absurdity by taking literally what is commonly understood figuratively.
Here are several examples primarily as an excuse to post some great sketches:
Seagoon: Oh, jolly good, jolly good, ha-ha! [Nose throw sound] Now, where's the scene of the crime?
Navy Red Kilt: This is the hoose.
Scot No.1: Aye, welcome to the scene of the crime.
Seagoon: Ah, wheres the front door?
Scot No.1: It's in this brown paper parcel. [Opens it] We only use it for going in and out. Agh, there.
FX: [Door opens]
Scot No.1: The black-bearded criminal must have got in through the door or the windows. Everything else was locked.
Seagoon: I see. Right. Now, who was killed?
Scot No.1: No one's been killed.
Seagoon: Then this is a job for the police.
Scot No.1: You are a policeman.
Seagoon: Oh, yes, yes, I wasted no time getting here, did I, eh? - Hands up! You're all under arrest!
FX: [Door through which they enter]
Greenslade: The String Robberies, Part Two.
Seagoon: Part Two? That's us!
Scot No.1: You see that piece of string on the table?
Seagoon: Yes. What's that space in the middle?
Scot No.1: That's the piece that's missing.
Seagoon: So! So that's what a piece of missing string looks like, eh? Where's it gone? Ah! [laughs] But wait... can't you see, you, you poor Scottish fool!
Scot No.1: [Gnashing teeth sounds]
Seagoon: It's all, it's all a practical joke!
Scot No.1: [Gnashing teeth sounds]
Seagoon: Someone's cut that string in the center, pulled the two pieces in opposite directions, giving the impression that a piece had been removed from the middle.
Scot No.1: Hairy gringlers, he's right! Och, it's true! If you put these two pieces together, the gap disappears!
Scot No.2: Aye, but did you notice when you did that, the two outside ends got shorter?
Seagoon: Gad... Gad, Chisolm's right! Now I see what happened. What cunning! [laughs] The criminal's cut a piece off each end, then cut across the middle pulled them apart, making the string look the original length.
Scot No.1: Oh dear, this makes it a baffling case.
Scot No.2: Aye.
Seagoon: Ah yes. Instead of one piece we're looking for two separate ends... It's a good job I can count! [laughs] We must start investigations at once!
FX: [Link music]
Greenslade: [As radio announcer] ...Finally, here is a police message: Will all people in possession of two pieces of string please report to their local police station.
Loved this selection of one liners from the very wonderful Milton Jones when I was watching a repeat of Mock the Week recently.
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Janice Turner reflects on the false god of consumerism in today's edition of The Times reflecting young protestors on tuition fees and tax breaks are raging against consumerism's broken promises:
"Consumerism, the religion they grew up with, has let them down. The infrastructure of their lives - shiny shopping malls and coffee shops - led them to believe that living standards would keep being upgraded like mobile phones. And since less than half of under-24s are registered to vote, they believed in the power of shopping more heartily than in democracy.
How apt that they will show their political frustration, not just in angry protests, but by withdrawing their consumer support. Student unions are cancelling Vodaphone contracts and encouraging their members to do the same. The young built these companies; they can hurt them too.
As Naomi Klein pointed out in No Logo, brands win us by insinuating themselves into our hearts: a can of Lyle's Golden Syrup makes me feel warm and nostalgic; wearing my one pair of Prada shoes, I feel chic, though, in truth, they're nothing special ...
But those emotional associations matter ..."
A different attack on consumerism comes from comedian Richard Herring, currently touringChrist on a Bike: The Second Coming, who says that how show "is by no means as disrespectful to the Christian myth as all the barefaced commercialism that is going on in suposed celebration." He says that, though he is an atheist, he loves Jesus and thinks he is amazing - "It's just all the people who follow Him who tend to be such idiots. He's like the Fonz in that respect" - and notes that "if our society ran on genuine Christian principles of not judging or stone-throwing and looking after the weakest rather than rewarding the richest, then maybe we'd be better off."
There appear to be more than one artist publicly reconsidering the possibility of faith this Christmas. Tony Jordan, the writer of The Nativity(BBC1 from Monday), interviewed in Christianitysays:
"I think I represent a huge swathe of people that say: 'Yeah I believe in God and all that,' but don't tend to do much about it ... It's true to say that I had a faith. I had a faith that wrestled daily with my intellect. I really struggled with God as something I could see and touch and that had some sort of physical presence that I would know if I saw it. But then the more I thought about it, I did find a route through."
For him that involved a discussion with a scientist about dark matter, while researching The Nativity, leading to the thought that this thing without which the laws of physics do not work could be God:
"... I think that whoever God is and whatever God is, it's beyond my comprehension. I can't even get my head around what it must be, or what he must be, I can't do it. And once you understand that, I think it suddenly makes sense. So the story of the Nativity for me, I kind of found I reinforced my faith along the way."
As a result, he says he genuinely hopes that people are converted through the series: "I'd love to think that people are moved enough to believe it, to find faith, but to find the beauty of faith and not to say, 'my denomination is right.'" What he hates about religion is the contrast between the beauty of "faith and religion and the teachings of Christ" - the simplicity of 'let he who is without sin cast the first stone' - and the many people who have been killed in wars over denomination and interpretation.
Andrew Motion is another who is reconsidering. He writes about being in the ambivalent middle, with millions of others, "where faith flickers off-on like a badly wired lamp ... where honest doubt comes and goes, and in so doing keeps alive the argument with and about God."
For him, the catalyst has been a priest; clever, funny and moving, whose talks made him think about things he hadn't thought about for a long time and "then in not quite the same way." This has led to:
"the conviction that my faith is not proof of a God-down Universe in which human beings scurry around trying (or not) to do His bidding. But of a Universe in which the primitive hunger to imagine beyond ourselves is manifested in a series of overlapping stories that give us the possibility and permission to do so. They shape our ambition to think bigger and to live better, and they help to define our place in the scheme of things."
Bit late in the day for a post on Rev but, as I've been commenting on other people's posts, here's one bringing my thoughts together.
Firstly, I don’t think, as some have suggested, that Adam Smallbone was portrayed as either a fanatic or a wimp. That has often been the stock portrayal of clergy on TV but this Rev certainly wasn't held up for ridicule. Instead much of the comedy in the series came from moments when Smallbone's experience and expectations of ministry were at odds and, in my experience at least, that seemed an authentic reflection on an aspect of being in ministry.
While some of the storylines weren't as sharply observed as could have been the case (Episode 2 in particular), Smallbone throughout has been a nuanced character oscillating humanly between faith and doubt, integrity and failure, and for me that aspect of his portrayal has been the secret to the success of the series.
For example, his “I'm tired of having to tell people what they want to hear all the time” in the final episode was something that I would guess most of us who are ordained think at some stage in our ministry. In the context of the story told in that final episode, this comment was then deliberately undercut by the writers in the denouement to the episode where Smallbone said exactly what his dying parishioner wanted and needed to hear and this was restorative both for the parishioner and himself.
When the Last Rites are given to someone who has requested them, the person receiving is being given what they want, expect and need. This doesn't mean, though, that there is a simple continuity between this action and Smallbone's earlier statement. What Smallbone surely learnt to acknowledge, as his vocation was reaffirmed by administering the Last Rites, was that there are situations where it absolutely the right thing to tell people what they want to hear (this being one of them) and that to do so is to be a channel for God's grace. Prior to this point he only thought negatively of telling people what they want to hear and condemned himself for doing so.
What he learnt to acknowledge (and this was, I think, often the resolution of many of the episodes) was that his expectations of what ministry is and can be have to continually be nuanced because grace can be received and shared in wholly unexpected ways. The weakness of the man became a means of grace, which I think is absolutely right both theologically and in terms of comedic resolution in this series.
Finally, in the context of the series, his statement was not a fully accurate description of what we actually saw Smallbone doing and saying. Much of the comedy in the series came from a number of significant moments in the series where he does not tell people what they want to hear.
The fact that he was portrayed as doing both - showing a lack of backbone and acting with integrity - and the reality that we saw both cut both ways at different times (i.e. sometimes grace came through weakness and sometimes through strength of character) is part of what leads me to say that he is a nuanced character oscillating humanly between faith and doubt, integrity and failure.
The prayers in each episode acted as key turning points in each narrative. They are one of the plot devices which mean that Smallbone could not be a social worker or government bureaucrat and the comedy remain wholly in place. Prayer was portrayed as reorienting him to his vocation and triggering the moments in the narratives when he either grew in faith or became a channel for grace.
It is in the nature of a sitcom that the central character be fallible. Were this not so, from where would the comedy derive? The success of this series was that we identified with Smallbone’s weaknesses and that these same weaknesses were revealed as vehicles for grace or growth.
More interesting discussion of the series can be found here, here, here, here, here, ad infinitum.
Am currently watching The Last of the Blonde Bombshellswhich precedes an Alan Plater tribute on BBC Four. In it the Judi Dench character asks, "What is the best way of honouring the dead?" to which her grand-daughter replies, "That's easy, to go on living."
"Alan Plater, who has died of cancer aged 75, was one of a handful of writers, including Jack Rosenthal, Dennis Potter and Simon Gray, who truly made a difference on British television in the golden age of comedy, drama series and the single play. Like the other two Alans – Bennett and Bleasdale – his name guaranteed a quality of humour, heart and humanity, usually matched by high standards of acting and production values. And like them, he was definitely "northern"."
"Spanning four decades, writer Alan Plater's work has been described as a meeting of Coronation Street and Chekhov. With his spare dialogue and irreverent attitude, Plater helped introduce an entirely new voice to the world of television drama.
He is perhaps best known for the Beiderbecke Trilogy but has written in all forms and is especially known for his radio, stage and television work and also for his passion for jazz. The principles of jazz are at the very heart of the man and his writing."
"Stories about vicars are always being told because they're at the heart of our society. Vicars touch all parts of the community and see life in all its extremity. They meet everyone from people grieving for lost loved ones to those approaching imminent death to the homeless to youngsters eager learn about life. They cover all the bases. As a vicar, you're the one person who can't say no – your door is always open ...
The church is still one of the pillars of our society. Christian morality is in our daily lives whether we recognise it as Christian or not. When we get christened or married or die, we drift naturally in the direction of the church. And in moments of crisis, when our spiritual Tom-Tom is no longer telling us what to do, we find ourselves scrabbling at the vicarage door ...
The church has always been a useful litmus test for society. We're entering a phase now where people are becoming more interested in religion and that which lies beyond. It's a strange and frightening time – everything is changing so much. Nature is altering so dramatically, and science appears to have let us down. That's why people are turning to religion." Tom Hollander
"You are a sentient human being. What about all the activity that is going on in your mind right now? At this very moment billions of pieces of information are floating across the synapses of your brain. You have the secrets of the universe there inside your head. You are a unique individual. You have your own hopes, aspirations and desires. You can be anything that you want. It's up to you to make the decision. What is it that you really want out of life? ..."
Ghost Town is laugh-out-loud funny while 1408 is a psychological thriller that, while not as scary as the publicity would have you believe, keeps your interest through the twists and turns of its plot. Although using opposite genres (comedy and horror) the link between both is the way we respond to death including our sense of being haunted by those we have loved and lost and by our part in the events leading to their death. Ghost Town sees its central characters finding release from their sense of being haunted while in 1408 there is no escape for the central character but a choice to be made as to whether others should suffer as he has done.
For those interested in keeping up with the various goings on at the Lambeth Conference (both serious and humourous) then Dave Walker's Church Times blog promises to be a good way of keeping up with what is going down.
He'll be at Canterbury in his 'Cartoonist in residence' role which will commence on Wednesday and plans to post a Lambeth Diary the blog - the conference as seen from his special drawing tent.
His most recent blog includes reactions and responses to Gene Robinson's sermon last Sunday plus a link to a video of the sermon in full.
In October 2006 I had a review of the exhibition Humour et Critique dans l’art d’aujourd’hui published in Art and Christianity. The review initiated correspondence with the exhibition organiser, Rémy Le Guillerm, himself an artist with work represented in the exhibition I reviewed. In the course of this correspondence we exchanged thoughts on the place of religion in contemporary art and images and writings of our artwork. This series of posts documents our correspondence.
Rémy wrote: "All my good wishes for 2007 and good reading.
Amongst other questions that contemporary art can pose of religion is that of truth. Is Man born from chance and need or the creation of a mysterious divine will? For my part and to locate me, I lean towards chance and need but I do not exclude a will in the form of an energy which would be beyond that of a conscience and comparable with that of the spirit and human intelligence (even if a share of this force lives in it). The mystery, of course, hangs on this question, ‘is this what God is?’ and finally what is interesting for the artist (who is posed questions by nature and its works) is to observe the demonstrations of the spirit of mankind and society and to translate these questions so as to wake up the senses, to maintain alive and constructively a critical spirit and curiosity.
To fall into idolatry, in opposition to the progress of religious dogmas or policies is dramatic. As you know, we can observe how, for example, poor interpretation of a rigid Islam leads to disaster, in stupidity, with murder, with oppression and how it, fascism and communism crushed people. Before that the Inquisition tried to congeal and destroy freedom to imagine and to think of a multitude of curious spirits fleeing conventions. But the courage and imagination of some continues since the Enlightenment happened and still constitutes the foundation of our modern era, which, has arrived in a turn of materialism and individualism leading to a frightening paroxysm of financial interests and powers. We agree therefore that it is necessary to jostle dogmas where they have solidified becoming irritational or retrograde. The great religions are positive in that they made it possible to leave cruelty and that was overall good, so why not believe quite simple in mankind and in the good that is already recognised in the morality of various religions. While going in this direction, if god exists, he will be acknowledged because, ‘the sky will help you!’
I agree with you that all the works in the 'Humour and Criticism' exhibition did not claim to attack conventions in 'unique thoughts' or 'political correctness' and did not all try to give lessons or solutions. It is one of the functions of artist to ‘disturb’, it is this that humourists do with words and drawings and it is useful. Short of this is a vast debate which I do not control at all. Of course, many people on the planet also question your position. I am admitting to you a personal interest in writing on this subject but finally there are all the same risks to be become wrongly understood and poorly accepted, as much in art as in journalism and art criticism.
The image attached (Annonciation) is my most recent image, it was conceived to be the greeting card of the city of Allonnes, as requested of me each year by the Mayor. From now on I will be moving on from the organising of exhibitions to devote more time to sculpture and the design of images for myself and for art galleries, if I can find courageous ones. I have many ideas inside including religious and socio-political subjects.
I shall make a small personal analysis here of my image (although I do not doubt that you can do it yourself) but this gives me the occasion to try to formalise my thoughts into words. Finally each viewer will put their own personal interpretation on it, as for any work of art.
1. The tree is a symbol of life, exchange (bond and place) between the spiritual forces (sky) and telluric forces (today the majority of the plane trees in France are diseased, so one can see there a wink at ecology).
2. The sky is gilded and a little ruffled like wrapping paper for a gift. In the tree are several kinds of leaves representing the diversity of races and species.
3. The levitating woman is a mother, dispenser of life, who is divinized like the Virgin Mary on a flower-seat decorated with small bells (like a jester’s cap because history is insane). Children are in nests under her generous bosom as in life, home, (as long as goodwill, work, money and love allow, if not caught up in misfortune and misery!)
4. The church, architectural monument and its monumental door symbolise institutions in general, nuns or laymen. On the door ‘Jeff of Bruges’ (large chocolate mark) is engraved to mark that inside are good things to attract our interest. In the round window (the eye of an ox) an individual, a preacher or Muezzin, blesses the neighbourhood and exhorts people to enter. The red lantern is a little iconoclastic (a face appears inside, perhaps a devil) but red was necessary here to the plastic composition.
5. With his tricolour sash, Yvon Luby ‘true' mayor of Allonnes and the secretary of Armelle ‘the wrong’ Town Hall (agent of maintenance in our workshop) ready to receive complaints and to join those who will want for both the best and for the worst.
6. The crowd of demonstrators beat the advancing drum. Smiling people assert and hope that their democratically elected leaders will hold to promises that have often been deferred. In the large print photograph of this picture – the sentence on the streamer 'Allonnais hopes’ will be transformed into ‘the men still hope’. On the back of the Pax flag = Peace. At the bottom is a statue of freedom and doves etc.
