This comes from Hope Not Hate:
"The BNP's message of hate is being spread across the country by a small but dedicated band of racist activists.
But now, a commercial media organisation is seeking to financially profit from the BNP's vicious campaign. Clear Channel - one of the UK's largest poster and billboard companies - have sold the BNP adverts across the country.
They have provided the BNP with high profile sites - putting the BNP's racist message on a pedestal and giving them the oxygen of publicity. In a matter of days these billboards and posters will be spreading across the country. But we can stop them if enough of us complain to Clear Channel and we get them to cancel their contract.
We have set an easy-to-use page so you can send a letter of complaint - will you send them a message of complaint?
Although unpalatable, it is right that every party gets access to the news and the media during elections - including the BNP. That's one thing. It is totally different for a company to profit from the BNP's message of hate. We've already successfully managed to get one of their billboards taken down in Essex - now we need your help to stop these spreading across the country.
We've set up a page on the campaign site where you can let Clear Channel know what you think of their policy to advertise and spread the BNP's racist lies. The tool lets you really easily register a complaint. Once you've done that we then need you to send this email to all of your friends and get them to do the same - this will only work if you take ownership of this campaign and spread our message to your friends.
We've made it easy to send a note of complaint. We need to send them as many messages as we can - will you take action and send them a message? We've had some amazing results in this campaign when we've taken collective action. Please take 30 seconds and help get these advertisements withdrawn."
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Willard Grant Conspiracy - The Suffering Song.
Friday, 22 May 2009
Visionaries
Visionaries is a sampling of Visionary Art which moves forward chronologically and selectively from Stanley Spencer to Street Artists while referencing Blake and Goya as giants on whose shoulders all Visionary Artists stand.
The exhibition sets up a series of polarities that derive, on the one hand, from Blake’s visions of spiritual reality breaking into the material world and on the other, from Goya’s nightmares revelling in the material reality of death and decay. The two are opposed as twin gateways at the exhibition’s entrance where a Stanley Spencer study for the Betrayal in the Garden, in which the everyday provides the setting for the mythic, faces down two of the Chapman Brothers’ revised and improved etchings from Los Caprichos, in which Goya’s original images of human vice are themselves defaced and destroyed.
The strongest works in this exhibition are those which work with these polarities in place of resolving them in one direction alone. Noel White’s Downland Discourse features three travellers walking between the parallel worlds of flesh and spirit with the central character of the three holding together the polarities towards which his colleagues veer. The Black Madonna of Norman Adams is integrated into the garden in which she stands, her form echoed by the natural geometry of which she is part. Here, darkness and light form one whole.
Crossing the Water to the Promised Land by Albert Herbert depicts turmoil and upheaval as a baptism through which we pass to emerge as children returning home. Peter Howson Legion portrays the violent expulsion of the demonic in the claustrophobic context of a fevered crowd by a Christ who is calmness personified. Adam Neate creates an icon of suffering humanity by transcending his transient materials of cardboard and spray paint, a reversal of iconographic technique and materials.
Meryl Doney, who has curated Visionaries, writes of Visionary Art as existing on the margins of contemporary art yet stubbornly refusing to wither and die. Its place can be that of the unheard, unregarded prophet, the holy fool crying out in the wilderness. Its strength, and that of this exhibition, is the vigour and passion with which the spiritual and material territories of the human condition are explored.
Visionaries is at the Wallspace Gallery, London, 20 May to 10 June and Greenbelt Arts Festival, Cheltenham, 28 to 31 August.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Dylan - Every Grain Of Sand.
The exhibition sets up a series of polarities that derive, on the one hand, from Blake’s visions of spiritual reality breaking into the material world and on the other, from Goya’s nightmares revelling in the material reality of death and decay. The two are opposed as twin gateways at the exhibition’s entrance where a Stanley Spencer study for the Betrayal in the Garden, in which the everyday provides the setting for the mythic, faces down two of the Chapman Brothers’ revised and improved etchings from Los Caprichos, in which Goya’s original images of human vice are themselves defaced and destroyed.
The strongest works in this exhibition are those which work with these polarities in place of resolving them in one direction alone. Noel White’s Downland Discourse features three travellers walking between the parallel worlds of flesh and spirit with the central character of the three holding together the polarities towards which his colleagues veer. The Black Madonna of Norman Adams is integrated into the garden in which she stands, her form echoed by the natural geometry of which she is part. Here, darkness and light form one whole.
Crossing the Water to the Promised Land by Albert Herbert depicts turmoil and upheaval as a baptism through which we pass to emerge as children returning home. Peter Howson Legion portrays the violent expulsion of the demonic in the claustrophobic context of a fevered crowd by a Christ who is calmness personified. Adam Neate creates an icon of suffering humanity by transcending his transient materials of cardboard and spray paint, a reversal of iconographic technique and materials.
Meryl Doney, who has curated Visionaries, writes of Visionary Art as existing on the margins of contemporary art yet stubbornly refusing to wither and die. Its place can be that of the unheard, unregarded prophet, the holy fool crying out in the wilderness. Its strength, and that of this exhibition, is the vigour and passion with which the spiritual and material territories of the human condition are explored.
Visionaries is at the Wallspace Gallery, London, 20 May to 10 June and Greenbelt Arts Festival, Cheltenham, 28 to 31 August.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Dylan - Every Grain Of Sand.
Apophatic Ascension
Imagine how the disciples must first have felt when they heard that Jesus was planning to leave them in order to return to his Father. They had had an incredible roller-coaster three years of ministry together with him which had culminated in the agony of watching him die. They thought that they had lost him and that all their hopes and dreams had been dashed. Then there was the joy of the resurrection; the dawning realisation that Jesus was alive, was still with them and was not lost to them after all.
And then the Ascension. The Jesus that they thought they had regained leaves them. What was that all about? There was so much that they still had to learn? There was so much that they could have done together? Why? What happens at the Ascension is also similar to the words that Jesus spoke to Mary Magdelene when she became the first to recognise him after his resurrection. As she did so, she naturally reached out to embrace him but his words to her were, “Touch me not.” Why?
There is a strand of theology which is called ‘the Negative Way.’ Within this way of thinking about God all images and understandings of God are consistently given up and let go because they are human constructions that can only show part of what God is.
So, all talk of Jesus as shepherd, lamb, son, brother, friend, master, servant, king, lord, saviour, redeemer and so on goes out of the window because God is always more than the images that we construct to understand him. In saying that I was speaking of God as being masculine something which is, again, only a limited human understanding of God. Ultimately, God is neither male nor female but is Spirit and the Negative Way says that in order to encounter God as being beyond our limited imaginations and understandings we need to give up and let go of all our human ways of describing him.
The Ascension and Jesus’ words to Mary seem to say something similar. Jesus seems to be saying to the disciples, “Don’t cling on to me. Let go of me as you know me because, when you do, you will gain a greater experience, less limited experience of me. Don’t cling on to me. Let me go, because then the Spirit will come.”
To let go of what is safe and familiar and secure in order to be open to encounter what is beyond is both scary and exhilarating. But it is what Jesus calls us to and it is the way in which we encounter the Spirit in our lives.
The title of a Madness song, ‘One Step Beyond,’ has been a catchphrase that has developed real spiritual meaning for some of us at St John's Seven Kings over the last few months by challenging us to go further in living out our Christian faith, to go one step beyond where we are now in the way that we live as Christians. The Ascension seems to challenge us to go at least one step beyond where we are now in our understanding of God.
We need to leave the safety, security and familiarity of the past in order to encounter the new thing that God is doing in the present. When our aim is to hold on to and preserve what we had in the past, we put it in mothballs and it becomes a museum piece; something that is looked at but not used. The best way to preserve what was good about the past is to use it as the foundation and basis for going one step beyond. It is only when something is alive, growing, developing and changing that its past can feed its present.
So, the Ascension seems to teach us that nothing is sacred: not buildings, not books, not actions, not people, not even Jesus! We must always move beyond the place, space, people and understanding that we have now because that is how is how the Spirit comes!
Where is Jesus now?
Not here!
Jesus has left the building,
left the earth.
The last we saw of him
was the soles of his feet
as he ascended to heaven.
Where is Jesus now?
No longer God with us,
now God in heaven.
Distant,
removed,
out of our league.
What is he like?
We do not know –
we cannot see him!
What does he say?
We do not know –
we cannot hear him.
What is he to us?
We do not know –
he is not with us.
Where is Jesus now?
Here in body.
Here in what body?
The body of his people.
In the diverse,
differing,
fallible,
forgiven folk
who follow him
forming
his body on earth,
becoming his hands and feet,
his eyes, ears, mouth
on earth.
Where is Jesus now?
Here in Spirit.
Here in what Spirit?
The Spirit of love,
joy, peace
and hope.
The Spirit that
animates his body
into acts of service
and words of love.
Who are we
to be where
Jesus is now?
Only the struggling,
the failing,
the falling.
Only those calling out
for the Spirit’s
empowering.
Where are we
who are where
Jesus is now?
Only a fragment –
the minutest part -
of the glorious whole
that is his body
on earth.
How do we feel
to be where
Jesus is now?
Affirmed and humbled,
gifted and graced,
on top of the world
and
put in our place.
What does it mean
to be where
Jesus is now?
Like children
becoming adult
to grow up into him,
together
becoming him.
Each playing
our part
in the whole
that is Jesus,
Emmanuel,
God with us.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
16 Horsepower - Cinder Alley.
And then the Ascension. The Jesus that they thought they had regained leaves them. What was that all about? There was so much that they still had to learn? There was so much that they could have done together? Why? What happens at the Ascension is also similar to the words that Jesus spoke to Mary Magdelene when she became the first to recognise him after his resurrection. As she did so, she naturally reached out to embrace him but his words to her were, “Touch me not.” Why?
There is a strand of theology which is called ‘the Negative Way.’ Within this way of thinking about God all images and understandings of God are consistently given up and let go because they are human constructions that can only show part of what God is.
So, all talk of Jesus as shepherd, lamb, son, brother, friend, master, servant, king, lord, saviour, redeemer and so on goes out of the window because God is always more than the images that we construct to understand him. In saying that I was speaking of God as being masculine something which is, again, only a limited human understanding of God. Ultimately, God is neither male nor female but is Spirit and the Negative Way says that in order to encounter God as being beyond our limited imaginations and understandings we need to give up and let go of all our human ways of describing him.
The Ascension and Jesus’ words to Mary seem to say something similar. Jesus seems to be saying to the disciples, “Don’t cling on to me. Let go of me as you know me because, when you do, you will gain a greater experience, less limited experience of me. Don’t cling on to me. Let me go, because then the Spirit will come.”
To let go of what is safe and familiar and secure in order to be open to encounter what is beyond is both scary and exhilarating. But it is what Jesus calls us to and it is the way in which we encounter the Spirit in our lives.
The title of a Madness song, ‘One Step Beyond,’ has been a catchphrase that has developed real spiritual meaning for some of us at St John's Seven Kings over the last few months by challenging us to go further in living out our Christian faith, to go one step beyond where we are now in the way that we live as Christians. The Ascension seems to challenge us to go at least one step beyond where we are now in our understanding of God.
We need to leave the safety, security and familiarity of the past in order to encounter the new thing that God is doing in the present. When our aim is to hold on to and preserve what we had in the past, we put it in mothballs and it becomes a museum piece; something that is looked at but not used. The best way to preserve what was good about the past is to use it as the foundation and basis for going one step beyond. It is only when something is alive, growing, developing and changing that its past can feed its present.
So, the Ascension seems to teach us that nothing is sacred: not buildings, not books, not actions, not people, not even Jesus! We must always move beyond the place, space, people and understanding that we have now because that is how is how the Spirit comes!
Where is Jesus now?
Not here!
Jesus has left the building,
left the earth.
The last we saw of him
was the soles of his feet
as he ascended to heaven.
Where is Jesus now?
No longer God with us,
now God in heaven.
Distant,
removed,
out of our league.
What is he like?
We do not know –
we cannot see him!
What does he say?
We do not know –
we cannot hear him.
What is he to us?
We do not know –
he is not with us.
Where is Jesus now?
Here in body.
Here in what body?
The body of his people.
In the diverse,
differing,
fallible,
forgiven folk
who follow him
forming
his body on earth,
becoming his hands and feet,
his eyes, ears, mouth
on earth.
Where is Jesus now?
Here in Spirit.
Here in what Spirit?
The Spirit of love,
joy, peace
and hope.
The Spirit that
animates his body
into acts of service
and words of love.
Who are we
to be where
Jesus is now?
Only the struggling,
the failing,
the falling.
Only those calling out
for the Spirit’s
empowering.
Where are we
who are where
Jesus is now?
Only a fragment –
the minutest part -
of the glorious whole
that is his body
on earth.
How do we feel
to be where
Jesus is now?
Affirmed and humbled,
gifted and graced,
on top of the world
and
put in our place.
What does it mean
to be where
Jesus is now?
Like children
becoming adult
to grow up into him,
together
becoming him.
Each playing
our part
in the whole
that is Jesus,
Emmanuel,
God with us.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
16 Horsepower - Cinder Alley.
Airbrushed from Art History? (6)
Vincent Van Gogh wrote that he wanted “to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our colouring.”
This introduces a new means by which the spiritual is to be encountered in modern art. Those aspects of emotion, spirit and soul that previously had been conveyed by symbol are now to be found in colour and line alone. Van Gogh continues in this letter to his brother Theo:
“I am always in hope of making a discovery there [in the study of colour], to express the love of two lovers by the wedding of two complementary colours, the mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibration of kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a sombre background.
To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is no delusive realism in that, but isn’t it something that actually exists?”
Alan Bowness sums this up in Post-Impressionism when he writes that:
“... for Van Gogh deeper and more universal meanings emerged from his study of reality, by a process of association. In his colour and brushwork, he harnessed the effects which he found in his subjects to expressive ends, using certain colour relationships and patterns of natural forms as metaphors for emotional and religious experience, as in the Night Café, whose red-green contrasts were meant to express the ‘terrible passions of humanity’, and in his canvasses of the asylum garden and olive orchards of Saint Rémy.”
Robert Rosenblum in Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition sees Van Gogh as being engaged in “a Romantic search for a new kind of religion in the scrutiny of nature” and “perpetuating in his own art many metaphors of divinity that were first invented in the visionary landscapes of [Caspar David] Friedrich, [Philipp Otto] Runge, and [Samuel] Palmer.”
He notes, for instance:
“Van Gogh’s recurrent image of the sun as something almost sacred, a connotation that can often become explicit. Even in a thoroughly secular scene like that painted in Arles in June 1888 of a sower in a wheat field, the sun, blazing on the horizon, has an almost supernatural power. Its location, in exact centre and just over a high horizon, is that which, in earlier art, one might have associated with a symbolic representation of an omnipotent deity; and its form and colour, a pure disc of golden yellow from whose clearly incised circular periphery radiate symmetrically ordered spokes of golden light, suggest that this is, in effect, the pantheist’s equivalent of a golden halo.”
Contemporary visionary artist John Reilly frequently bases his works on a central circle (often, the sun) from which facets of colour emanate, like ripples on the surface of a stream. The painting’s imagery is then set within these facets, each figure or object being embedded in the overall patterning of the painting and related to the environmental whole that Reilly creates. By these means fragments of form and colour (the facets of the painting’s patterning) and the images that they contain are united to circle harmoniously around and within God, the central life and intelligence which is the light of the world. Reilly’s use of the sun as a central organising symbol in his work may well reflect the influence of Van Gogh.
Van Gogh wrote of needing something greater in his life, although he is clear that this is not God:
“Oh, my dear brother, sometimes I know so well what I want. I can do very well without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life – the power to create.
And if, frustrated in the physical power, a man tries to create thoughts instead of children, he is still part of humanity.”
Such comments reveal a need for transcendence of or in ordinary life, even when standing outside of the framework of institutional Christian faith. So, Rosenblum writes that Van Gogh’s:
“... complaint about Émile Bernard’s Christ in the Garden of Olives – that it would be better simply to paint real olive trees – is a clear avowal not only of Van Gogh’s personal dilemma but of that of so many artists who inherited the problems of those Northern Romantics who tried to create, consciously or unconsciously, a religious sentiment in things observed that would be far more truthful to their personal experience of the supernatural than the perpetuation of traditional Christian iconography.”
James Elkins in On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art suggests five categories for contemporary religious art, one of which is art that sets out to create a new faith. Van Gogh could be an early example of such artists.
Although Van Gogh lost the ardent Christian faith of his youth, he nevertheless retained a love of Christ. To Émile Bernard he wrote:
“But the consolation of that saddening Bible which arouses our despair and our indignation – which distresses us once and for all because we are outraged by its pettiness and contagious folly – the consolation which is contained in it, like a kernel in a hard shell, in a bitter pulp, is Christ ... Christ alone – of all the philosophers, Magi, etc. – has affirmed, as a principal certainty, eternal life, the infinity of time, the nothingness of death, the necessity and the raison d’être of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as a greater artist than all artists, despising marble and clay as well as colour, working in living flesh. That is to say, this matchless artist, hardly to be conceived of by the obtuse instrument of our modern, nervous, stupefied brain, made neither statues nor pictures nor books, he loudly proclaimed that he made ... living men, immortals.”
Here Van Gogh connects himself to Christ through the work of creation; he brings thoughts to birth while Christ brings “living men, immortals” to birth. While Christ is so much greater - “a greater artist than all artists” – all artists are, therefore, connected with him through the act of creation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers - Vincent Van Gogh.
This introduces a new means by which the spiritual is to be encountered in modern art. Those aspects of emotion, spirit and soul that previously had been conveyed by symbol are now to be found in colour and line alone. Van Gogh continues in this letter to his brother Theo:
“I am always in hope of making a discovery there [in the study of colour], to express the love of two lovers by the wedding of two complementary colours, the mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibration of kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a sombre background.
To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is no delusive realism in that, but isn’t it something that actually exists?”
Alan Bowness sums this up in Post-Impressionism when he writes that:
“... for Van Gogh deeper and more universal meanings emerged from his study of reality, by a process of association. In his colour and brushwork, he harnessed the effects which he found in his subjects to expressive ends, using certain colour relationships and patterns of natural forms as metaphors for emotional and religious experience, as in the Night Café, whose red-green contrasts were meant to express the ‘terrible passions of humanity’, and in his canvasses of the asylum garden and olive orchards of Saint Rémy.”
Robert Rosenblum in Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition sees Van Gogh as being engaged in “a Romantic search for a new kind of religion in the scrutiny of nature” and “perpetuating in his own art many metaphors of divinity that were first invented in the visionary landscapes of [Caspar David] Friedrich, [Philipp Otto] Runge, and [Samuel] Palmer.”
He notes, for instance:
“Van Gogh’s recurrent image of the sun as something almost sacred, a connotation that can often become explicit. Even in a thoroughly secular scene like that painted in Arles in June 1888 of a sower in a wheat field, the sun, blazing on the horizon, has an almost supernatural power. Its location, in exact centre and just over a high horizon, is that which, in earlier art, one might have associated with a symbolic representation of an omnipotent deity; and its form and colour, a pure disc of golden yellow from whose clearly incised circular periphery radiate symmetrically ordered spokes of golden light, suggest that this is, in effect, the pantheist’s equivalent of a golden halo.”
Contemporary visionary artist John Reilly frequently bases his works on a central circle (often, the sun) from which facets of colour emanate, like ripples on the surface of a stream. The painting’s imagery is then set within these facets, each figure or object being embedded in the overall patterning of the painting and related to the environmental whole that Reilly creates. By these means fragments of form and colour (the facets of the painting’s patterning) and the images that they contain are united to circle harmoniously around and within God, the central life and intelligence which is the light of the world. Reilly’s use of the sun as a central organising symbol in his work may well reflect the influence of Van Gogh.
Van Gogh wrote of needing something greater in his life, although he is clear that this is not God:
“Oh, my dear brother, sometimes I know so well what I want. I can do very well without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life – the power to create.
And if, frustrated in the physical power, a man tries to create thoughts instead of children, he is still part of humanity.”
Such comments reveal a need for transcendence of or in ordinary life, even when standing outside of the framework of institutional Christian faith. So, Rosenblum writes that Van Gogh’s:
“... complaint about Émile Bernard’s Christ in the Garden of Olives – that it would be better simply to paint real olive trees – is a clear avowal not only of Van Gogh’s personal dilemma but of that of so many artists who inherited the problems of those Northern Romantics who tried to create, consciously or unconsciously, a religious sentiment in things observed that would be far more truthful to their personal experience of the supernatural than the perpetuation of traditional Christian iconography.”
James Elkins in On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art suggests five categories for contemporary religious art, one of which is art that sets out to create a new faith. Van Gogh could be an early example of such artists.
Although Van Gogh lost the ardent Christian faith of his youth, he nevertheless retained a love of Christ. To Émile Bernard he wrote:
“But the consolation of that saddening Bible which arouses our despair and our indignation – which distresses us once and for all because we are outraged by its pettiness and contagious folly – the consolation which is contained in it, like a kernel in a hard shell, in a bitter pulp, is Christ ... Christ alone – of all the philosophers, Magi, etc. – has affirmed, as a principal certainty, eternal life, the infinity of time, the nothingness of death, the necessity and the raison d’être of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as a greater artist than all artists, despising marble and clay as well as colour, working in living flesh. That is to say, this matchless artist, hardly to be conceived of by the obtuse instrument of our modern, nervous, stupefied brain, made neither statues nor pictures nor books, he loudly proclaimed that he made ... living men, immortals.”
Here Van Gogh connects himself to Christ through the work of creation; he brings thoughts to birth while Christ brings “living men, immortals” to birth. While Christ is so much greater - “a greater artist than all artists” – all artists are, therefore, connected with him through the act of creation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers - Vincent Van Gogh.
Thursday, 21 May 2009
Crossrail Corridor Area Action Plan
We hosted the Council's Planning and Regeneration Service yesterday for a consultation meeting on preparing an Area Action Plan (AAP) for the High Road, running from the eastern edge of Ilford Town Centre to the Borough boundary with Barking & Dagenham in Chadwell Heath.
The Area Action Plan will set out a planning framework for the area and aims to improve the overall character and quality of the High Road, and maximise the potential benefits of the future Crossrail stations at Seven Kings, Goodmayes and Chadwell Heath.
Consultation is underway on the issues, opportunities and options as set out in the Consultation Leaflet and runs until Friday 19th June. If you are interested, the consultation leaflet is available at the Council’s One Stop Shop, all local libraries or on the Council's website, Redbridge
http://www.redbridge.gov.uk/cms/environment__planning/planning_and_regeneration/planningpolicy/ldfpage/crossrail_corridor_aap.aspx
For more information please contact Jennifer Millard or Ian Rae in the Planning Policy Team on Tel 020 8708 2073 or 020 8708 2072. Alternatively you can email comments to dpd@redbridge.gov.uk.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Athlete - You Got The Style.
The Area Action Plan will set out a planning framework for the area and aims to improve the overall character and quality of the High Road, and maximise the potential benefits of the future Crossrail stations at Seven Kings, Goodmayes and Chadwell Heath.
Consultation is underway on the issues, opportunities and options as set out in the Consultation Leaflet and runs until Friday 19th June. If you are interested, the consultation leaflet is available at the Council’s One Stop Shop, all local libraries or on the Council's website, Redbridge
http://www.redbridge.gov.uk/cms/environment__planning/planning_and_regeneration/planningpolicy/ldfpage/crossrail_corridor_aap.aspx
For more information please contact Jennifer Millard or Ian Rae in the Planning Policy Team on Tel 020 8708 2073 or 020 8708 2072. Alternatively you can email comments to dpd@redbridge.gov.uk.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Athlete - You Got The Style.
Responses to 'Airbrushed from Art History?'
I'm grateful for the encouraging messages that folk have sent in response to my recent email about the 'Airbrushed from Art History?' series of posts. I have also been encouraged to receive the first substantial comment on the series from Revd. Dr. Richard Davey, Anglican Chaplain at Nottingham Trent University. Richard writes:
"Thanks for asking for feedback on your project, which I have been following on your blog. I will happily help if I can. A few unformed thoughts have immediately come to mind whilst reading them.
You contradict yourself from the start. Christianity and religious influences have not been airbrushed from art history, as the books and exhibitions you cite demonstrate. What has happened, however, is that the recognition of these influences has come from a particularly secular and disengaged position. What makes us as people of faith uncomfortable is not that these influences have been airbrushed but that the interpretations of works which are informed by a position of faith, or employ christian iconography are largely made from a position of secular theology, which seems to offer a contradictory sensibility to the one the work itself seems to embody, or we feel before a work. The problem is not that Christianity has been airbrushed out but that it has been understood and read from outside the parameters of faith.
Theology has airbrushed art out of its history as well. There are any numbers of books including David Brown, George Pattison, Richard Harries etc., which engage with art and use images to offer insights and reflections on theology and biblical studies, But what they engage with is iconography, they do not allow the work of art to be a sensuous embodied thing which offers its own knowledge of the world; providing a natural theology that may not sit comfortably within the confines of theological method and praxis.
Both Dan Siedell, in his book 'God in the Gallery', and you, in this series of postings, are undertaking valuable work in reinvesting twentieth century art with a theological and spiritual meaning. On one level this is a deeply relevant and catholic approach - the embracing of the world as a sign of God's presence and being. But just as we need to be careful of approaches that read a secular theology into works that are informed by a metaphysical theology, so we need to beware of reading our own faith into works that are essentially 'secular' [whatever that means]. I think Siedell's 'iconographic' reading of modern art is valuable and fascinating, but I wonder if he has taken it too far?
It seems to me that the war is not about recognising religious influences in modern art, but about allowing those influences to have a proper theological interpretation, but then if the work is made by someone outside faith, or on the edge of faith, who is to say what the right interpretation is. Secular approaches may not allow the spiritual nuances of a work to be felt, but then again theology may not allow those nuances to be experienced either. This brings me back to the real problem, the lack of attention to the work of art itself as something made by an individual with their own subjective space within the world. The issue is not airbrushing, but respect - respect for the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings.
Anyway, good luck with the project."
I'll respond shortly to the challenges that Richard helpfully poses to the basic assumptions underlying this series of posts.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Woven Hand - Sparrow Falls.
"Thanks for asking for feedback on your project, which I have been following on your blog. I will happily help if I can. A few unformed thoughts have immediately come to mind whilst reading them.
You contradict yourself from the start. Christianity and religious influences have not been airbrushed from art history, as the books and exhibitions you cite demonstrate. What has happened, however, is that the recognition of these influences has come from a particularly secular and disengaged position. What makes us as people of faith uncomfortable is not that these influences have been airbrushed but that the interpretations of works which are informed by a position of faith, or employ christian iconography are largely made from a position of secular theology, which seems to offer a contradictory sensibility to the one the work itself seems to embody, or we feel before a work. The problem is not that Christianity has been airbrushed out but that it has been understood and read from outside the parameters of faith.
Theology has airbrushed art out of its history as well. There are any numbers of books including David Brown, George Pattison, Richard Harries etc., which engage with art and use images to offer insights and reflections on theology and biblical studies, But what they engage with is iconography, they do not allow the work of art to be a sensuous embodied thing which offers its own knowledge of the world; providing a natural theology that may not sit comfortably within the confines of theological method and praxis.
Both Dan Siedell, in his book 'God in the Gallery', and you, in this series of postings, are undertaking valuable work in reinvesting twentieth century art with a theological and spiritual meaning. On one level this is a deeply relevant and catholic approach - the embracing of the world as a sign of God's presence and being. But just as we need to be careful of approaches that read a secular theology into works that are informed by a metaphysical theology, so we need to beware of reading our own faith into works that are essentially 'secular' [whatever that means]. I think Siedell's 'iconographic' reading of modern art is valuable and fascinating, but I wonder if he has taken it too far?
It seems to me that the war is not about recognising religious influences in modern art, but about allowing those influences to have a proper theological interpretation, but then if the work is made by someone outside faith, or on the edge of faith, who is to say what the right interpretation is. Secular approaches may not allow the spiritual nuances of a work to be felt, but then again theology may not allow those nuances to be experienced either. This brings me back to the real problem, the lack of attention to the work of art itself as something made by an individual with their own subjective space within the world. The issue is not airbrushing, but respect - respect for the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings.
Anyway, good luck with the project."
I'll respond shortly to the challenges that Richard helpfully poses to the basic assumptions underlying this series of posts.
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Woven Hand - Sparrow Falls.
Monday, 18 May 2009
Windows on the world (54)
Chelmsford, 2009
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Jim White - Jailbird.
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