Review of exhibitions

I've had a proper day off today visiting several exhibitions and am looking forward to an equally relaxed evening watching the BBC's coverage of the likes of Fleet Foxes, the Vaccines, Mumford and Sons and U2 at Glastonbury.

I particularly wanted to see the exhibitions by Ai Weiwei at Somerset House and the Lisson Gallery. Weiwei's work often raises questions about our relationship to the past, in particular the contrast between mass manufacture and craft skills. With Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads at Somerset House Weiwei has sent on a world tour oversized re-creations of artefacts previously pillaged by the West. These traditional Chinese zodiac sculptures once adorned the fountain of Yuanming Yuan, an imperial retreat in Beijing. His Coloured Vases in the retrospective at the Lisson Gallery desecrate Han Dynasty pots by covering them in industrial paint; seen as a comment on the organized destruction of cultural and historical values that took place during the Cultural Revolution. Marble Chair, Marble Doors and Surveillance Camera work in the opposite direction by recreating ephemeral contemporary items in the material of longevity and status.

As with all who have been concerned about Weiwei's arrest, I am pleased and relieved that he has finally been released on bail and reassured to hear he is back home and safe. His experience is a reminder of the freedoms which we take for granted here in the West and for which many are struggling in China and as part of the Arab Spring. As Baroness Warsi said in an interview published in today's Guardian, "The great thing about our democracy is people believe in all sorts of things ... The great thing about democracy is you can engage in a democratic process."

Weiwei has said that "Power and the centre have suddenly disappeared in the universal sense because of the Internet, global politics, and the economy ... the Communists ... have to allow a certain amount of freedom, but this can't be controlled once it is allowed" (Ai Weiwei speaks). Weiwei is among those bearing the tensions of a process which, hopefully in the long-term and despite the current repressions, cannot be controlled and will lead to the freedom that we possess for people of all faiths and none to democratically exercise political responsibility and power being achieved by those who currently struggle for those freedoms.

At the Riflemaker Gallery Francesca Lowe has also been dealing in liberation. Headland: Woman in a Landscape consists of "five large-scale heads, five symbol-laden tree paintings, and a group of 'tree-cuts' which invite the viewer to indulge in a game of symbolic decoding, in order to reveal a woman's journey through the complex landscape of today." Made visible in the heads of each of her figures are their actions, choices and consequences: "Each woman's psychological thought process is openly displayed - an x-ray of internal activity." Lowe's Tree of Life paintings then contain on their branch each of the individual paintings in the series creating "a map of images and symbols which flow from place to place." Interestingly, in paintings like Grace and Abundance, the flow is towards renewal and ascension.        

Anna Gillespie's work can be seen for the first time at Beaux Arts London, having been shown previously at their gallery in Bath. Gillespie's combination of sculpted figures with found objects is far from original yet the juxtapositions of scale and statement that she imagines create genuinely emotive and dialogical images. Thou shalt not kill utilised the lid of an oil drum as a globe on which was positioned an adult figure holding a child head-down ready to drop. This simple but beautifully poised work is also beautifully poised conceptually in the questions it raises about generational genocides.

Marialuisa Tadei has written that in an extreme world of consumerism her intention is to create bridges between the material world and the spiritual dimension. She deals in opposites, both in terms of materials and concepts, making the weighty light and vice versa. Donald Kuspit has written that "...if the basic point of serious visual art is to apotheosize the eye, to elevate it to the prime place in sensing, to celebrate it for its own sacred self and cognitive powers, which is why Aristotle said it was the highest sense, then Marialuisa Tadei's most esthetically pure and sublimely abstract works are those in the Oculus Dei series." These mosaic works are among the stunning pieces currently on show at the Hay Hill Gallery.

Finally, I also visited the room of works by John Craxton which can currently be seen at Tate Britain. Craxton features dreamers, musicians, poets and shepherds within landscapes composed of cubist or abstract fragments held together by colour harmonies which shine and sing. His work has been unduly neglected both in his neo-romantic phase where he, more than any others in that movement, re-captured the awe and mystery of Samuel Palmer's Shoreham paintings, and in his subsequent Cretan works imbued as they are with the light, shapes and colours of the Mediterranean.

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Fleet Foxes - He Doesn't Know Why.   

The persistence of faith

FaithAction have today summarised the speech made yesterday by Conservative Party Chairman Baroness Warsi about the importance of faith to life in Britain:

"Baroness Warsi opened her speech, to Anglican bishops in Oxford, by stating that Britain has ‘a big problem in the way we think about faith in our society as a whole’.

Baroness Warsi referred to media reports which said how 'Faith charities have been put off from applying for public funding by a barrage of bureaucracy’. There is an imbalance in the relationship between the state, faith and society, which is shown by a suspicion of faith by the ‘political elite’.

Baroness Warsi said that the Government needed to put this right and presented three approaches:

1. Understanding the current state of faith in Britain
2. Having a richer recognition of the Anglican and wider faith-based contribution to society
3. Draw the right conclusions for policy

Understanding the current state of faith in Britain

Know that the proportion of people in the world who adhere to the four biggest religions has actually increased in the past century with increased turnouts at religious ceremonies.

‘The fact is that our world is more religious than ever. Faith is here to stay!’

‘Deny it and you deny the ability of a high part of society to articulate where they have come from, what they are working for, and who they are.’

Understanding the Faith based contribution

There are almost 30,000 faith based charities in the UK

‘We have come to a deeper understanding about the contribution of these faith communities to our society. In other words, why they do the good things they do. Unless we understand what drives people of faith to contribute to society, we cannot hope to help them on their way’.

‘Very often, faith communities offer us innovations which the whole of society can learn from’.

Faith and the Big Society

‘Just imagine if the whole nation could give to charity at the same levels as people of faith already do. The question is how can government help to bring that about?’"

Over the summer I read The Persistence of Faith by Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, and wrote a poem in response with the same title which echoes aspects of Baronness Warsi's speech:

The persistence of faith


“I remain convinced that, in many conflict zones throughout the world, if religion does not become part of the solution, it will be part of the problem. We have not yet learned what it is for religion to be a force for peace in our hyper-connected age.” Jonathan Sacks

On Dover beach Matthew Arnold heard
the melancholy, long withdrawing roar
of the retreating Sea of Faith.
A dead sea evaporated
by a lunar cycle of utopian visions and disastrous wars
revealing a place of disenchantment,
a dried-up Waste Land
devoid of meaning and cohesion
in which private piety was a song
played on a mental i-pod to while away
the idle hours at the end of history.

The returning flood-tide of religion –
a tsunami-like wave of fundamentalism –
overwhelmed sceptic and believer alike.
Driven full speed down the one-way street of secularism,
came the 4x4’s of the US Moral Majority,
the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the fall of Communism,
and the rise of tactical terror as weapon of choice
in religiously-defined cosmic struggles.
On the beach where Arnold mourned,
Richard Dawkins fulminated.
Where Europe doubted, the Majority World believed.

The timeless and timebound intersect
at a crossroads where the one-way streets
of secularism and fundamentalism do not meet.
The literalism inherent in the love of self or God
for self’s and God’s sake cannot interpret the signs
of past ideals in terms of present possibilities.
The voice of transcendent revelation calls
for love of others for the wholly other’s sake.
The fight for human flourishing is now within religion
calling forth a wave of compassion, not condemnation.
How long to hear this song? How soon is now? If not now, then when?

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U2 - 40.