Adam: starting at the very beginning

I am looking forward to being part of the launch this evening of a Spiritual Art exhibition at Silbury Gallery in MK, curated by my dear friend and brother Anouar Kassim. Last year we celebrated and explored Spirituality and Mathematics — this year Adam.

Adam, whom Muslims think of as the first prophet, is the beginning. He defines the global scope of all the Abrahamic faiths. We are all of one flesh and blood int he final analysis. This is why sectarianism is never enough.

Western Christians have so emphasised Genesis as a story about guilt, and perhaps missed the fact that it is more about shame, and flawed coming of age. Lose touch with this story and we lose touch with the tragic and paradoxical dimension of what it means to be human.

Thinking about what is distinctive about the Christian vision of Adam brings to mind a hymn from 100 Hymns for Today (1969) by a man called Richard G. Jones. The language is that of forty years ago, but I'm sorry it has consistently failed to make it into hymnbooks since — especially if it implies the English are just too Pelagian for this kind of thing. I hope not.

God who created this Eden of Earth,
Giving to Adam and Eve their fresh birth,
What have we done with that wonderful tree
Lord forgive Adam, for Adam is me.

Adam ambitious desires to be wise,
casts out obedience and lusts with his eyes,
Grasps his sweet fruit, "as God I shall be"
Lord forgive Adam, for Adam is me.

Thirst after power is the sin of my shame,
Pride's ruthless thrust after status and fame,
Turning and stealing and cowering from thee,
Lord forgive Adam, for Adam is me.

Cursed is the earth through this cancerous crime,
Symbol of man through all passage of time,
Put it all right, Lord, let Adam be free:
Lord forgive Adam, for Adam is me.

Glory to God! What is this that I see?
Man made anew, second Adam is he,
Bleeding his love on another fine tree,
Lord forgive Adam, for Adam is me.

Rises that Adam the Master of death,
Pours out his spirit in glorious new breath;
Sheer Liberation! with him I am free!
Lives Second Adam, in mercy, in me.

Heaven 10 in Milton Keynes

Saturday morning at Heaven 10, a Music and Arts Festival organised by Ernesto Lozada-Uzuriaga-Steele artist adn priest, at the Church of Christ the Cornerstone in Milton Keynes. Anouar Kassim put together a celebration of Islamic Arts heritge and culture, incuding fascinating and beautiful stuff from Iran and Somalia, as well as work by a remarkable Muslim Caligrapher, Haji Noor Deen. He combines Arabic and Chinese writing in ingenious and thought-provoking ways, at all shapes and sizes including some giant originals that would test most caligraphers’ art to destruction.

I was also fascinated by an installation by Air-MK, which produces multimedia sensory zones to stimulate prayer and reflection. Howard Williams and friends transformed the small chapel at Cornerstone into a remarkable reflective space, with a screen on which people could react to questions about themselves and God, in their own time. There’s a great vibrancy and creativity in the air in MK, and the way the city is sucking in people from all over the world in interesting ways is becoming very apparent...

Secretes, Shoots and Leaves

Once upon a time, all we had to prevent us eating each other in public places was Civic Virtue and the Old Bill. Now we have over 4 million surveillance cameras in the UK. We British really love ’em — New York gets by with a paltry 5,000, where London has more than 400,000. Keep smiling, because unless you are in Church or on the can, you can pretty much bet you're starring in someone’s real life Big Brother show. And they call it a liberal society.

Tate Modern is putting our ongoing Snoopy Show into context with a summer exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. I thought I’d go along to find out where it all began. The Victorians had a variety of gadgets, including cameras hidden in shoes and the tops of canes, to record the unwilling. Cartier-Bresson snapped his Leica around the streets of Paris with sublime results, some of which are in the exhibition.

Developing technology since the nineteenth century has delivered images to feed a growing culture of celebrity. Here is Garbo sheilding herself from the camera with a perfectly formed hand, and an utterly wonderful shot of Kim Novak trying to sit down discretely in a dining car whilst a row of men in homburgs sit and stare. The exhibition includes Weegee’s iconic shot of Marilyn Monroe accidentally on purpose flashing her thighs over a stream of hot air. All culminates in the Paparazzi martyrdom of the Princess of Wales, captured in some newspaper stories of the day. There was interesting work by Alison Jackson, who spoofs the whole idea by using lookalikes in a way that makes you think “surely it can’t be...” It isn’t.

There were some fine historical examples of Candid photography, in the Monty Python sense — Brassai’s images of 1930’s secret and scenes from mexican bordellos to travellers on the New York Sunway. Stripped of the accoutrements of glamour photography most people look surprisingly contemporary, simple and innocent.

There is a harrowing section on war, which takes us from the shocking images of carnage thrown up by the American Civil War to the human débris of concentration camps, Nick Ut’s Vietnam and various recent gulf wars. One image stays on the memory — Lee Miller’s shot of the fair-haired daughter of Leipzig’s Bürgermeister, draped exquisitely over a chair, hours after she had committed suicide with Nazi Germany collapsing around her.

The extraordinary mechanisation of snooping has not improved the quality of the images. The final rooms make you wonder who watches this stuff, and how close we are coming to an entirely surreal position where we are all constantly photographed for the amusement and edification of machines. Once nobody’s watching any more, what is the point? The almost complete elimination of privacy raises interesting questions about the integrity of the person, and the almost complete elimination of liberty by the control mechanisms required by unfettered liberalism. Time for a re-think?

Holocaust Memorial Day in MK

A great honour to say a few words with others at this year’s MK City Holocaust Memorial Day celebration at Christ the Cornerstone. We were opening an exhibition of art principally by two artists, Edna Eguchi Read and Alicia Melamed Adams.

Edna’s work explored the legacy of war, including Afghanistan, as someone of partly Japanese ancestry. She encodes the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not as anger, but an errily ash-covered general and domestic world of stuff. Ordinary things are reduced to a kind of useless sterility, where all that is left is form, bereft of function. She does something similar in this exhibition with passport-sized images of troops killed in Afghanistan, flattened as a collage onto a wall. Drat! I didn’t take a picture... you’ll just have to go and catch the exhibition if you can. I had seen the same thing on Sunday at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre — a collage of ordinary people’s photographs greets you as you enter the historical displays area.

During the evening Arran Hartley and Georgia Bateman, presented a moving a/v collage reflecting on their school visit to Auschwitz. It took a fresh, powerful view. They had been especially shocked and moved by the piles of stuff, shoes, hair, artifical limbs. Alicia’s work as an artist who survived the holocaust puts faces to the story. This is very important because we are about the last generation to have the privilege of talking with and learning from holocaust survivors. All our grandhildren will have are the faces in art, or the Holocaust may be reduced to a mere topic in history, not an exposure of our own tragic capacity for evil.

Alicia’s work is fundamentally a statement of hope in the face of the unspeakable. She pulls no punches. Consider this picture, The Parting, and commentary:

My parents and I and a few relatives who had survived worked for a German, Victor Kremin, who set us up in a small camp where we collected iron and rags. On 24th July 1943 we were surrounded by Gestapo and taken to the local prison. It was their custom to keep people for three days without food until they were weak and then to load them onto lorries and shoot them outside Drohobycz in Bronica Woods. When we were brought into the prison I saw Poldek Weiss who was 17. We had met twice before in a friend’s house. His father was a tailor for the Gestapo. His father made a suit for the head of the Gestapo and the son was released from prison. He begged his father to intervene on my behalf. I was 14 at the time. His father made another suit and I was let out on the third day as Poldek’s wife. My whole family were shot the next day. This picture is called The Parting. It shows me parting from my family in prison.

Ultimately, though, what makes Alicia’s work so extraordinary is her capacity for hope and joy that was not entirely rubbed out. Her final painting was entitled Going up soon, but where? in which, Julia Weiner says:

the artist thinks about her own death. After the horrors of her childhood, death appears to offer little horror to Alicia, and this light-filled work with its radiant pink backround contrasts to the earlier works about death. There, she used dark colours and menacing shapes to evoke death by violence and at the hands of others. When death comes naturally it’s not to be feared.

Sustaining the Sacred Centre 2

Reflecting on our Area Deans and Lay Chairs residential, the thought was that we could go away and talk in the abstract about how to sustain the sacred centre. Alternatively, we could instead go and sustain our sacred centre, with three creative spiritual guides to accompany our group and catalyse thoughts and prayers in ways that would deepen our awareness of God in our lives. I reccomend this approach highly for tired churches and groups.

Our Second guide was Dani Muñoz-Treviño, a wondrfully gifted, creative and reflective priest. Dani has done a curacy at Hazlemere, and is just coming to the end of a time in Marlow, during which he has built an emergent congregation and led a number of arts projects and activities involving hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people. He’s off soon to create a new project in Andalusia, Los Olivos — a two hundred year old hacienda, set in thirteen acres of national park. This will be Spain’s first Christian Art and Spirituality Retreat Centre, opening in the autumn of 2010.

Dani took us through a journey together around the ways people engage with God in a time of change, accompanied by movie clips and community art. His presentation built, very much, on Ernesto’s in which we entered an Old Testament narrative at depth, connected with the soundtrack of our lives in Christ, then crystallised th learning into an image. There’s a sense in which this is an area where the first are last and the last first. Some well established churchgoers have real difficulty engaging with God through art and creativity, where people everyone might think of as being complete outsiders sometimes get it instinctively.

I was also struck by the way that high energy arts projects such as Dani has been encouraging in Marlow seem to generate the energy to sustain themselves in new ways, sometimes by the seat of their pants, but well enough to survive. This said something powerful to me about the possibiities if we think we are short of resources; one response is to go round weeping need until someone feels sorry for us and shells out. Another is to kindle more energy at the heart of the project, so that a kind of mutual firestorm develops between people who understand and feel passionate about it. If nobody’s passionate about it, this could be divine guidance to give it your best shot, then try another project. If people get passionate about it, energy and all kinds of resources seem to flow from that shared commitment.

That’s the theory, and the gubbins of getting Los Olivos up and running will certainly test the theory. If Art is many people’s route to spiritual awareness, what matters is to unlock that potential in everybody, churchgoer or not. Gospel, good news, in an age where so much popular imagiation is locked down by sterile rationalism and superficial manipulation, is partly about refreshing the whole culture by releasing imagination. The Church’s role is not primarily to dogmatise at people from its own little bubble, but to celebrate and share images and experiences that create openings to God for hearts and minds and free the Spirit...

Anish Kapoor: Goo and Mirrors

Arty types will recognise from my blog header my respect for the work of Anish Kapoor. It was a great joy to spent a day off yesterday at his latest, largest and most absorbing exhbition at the Royal Academy. He’s still fascinated with space, bigtime, playing with mirrors and reflections. Vistors are greeted by a socking great pile of 76 mirrored bubbles in the courtyard outside which, like Cloud Gate, entertains all day.


Inside, there’s a good selection of dense colour works — strangely deep and absorbing even in poster paint primary colours. Somehow he manages to make the spindliest and sharpest geometry look as though it was simply powder that could blow away at any moment. As ever, he’s interesed in the plane as well as the shape, with a pregnant wall, hinting at things to come — a wall of pure sunshine orange that turns out to have depth when you get close to it (denser of not quite as monumental as the sun in Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project at the Tate the other year).

So far, Kapoor been before. The new dimension is goo. There’s dusty scatalogical goo, that being intestinally shaped coils and turns of concrete loaded on pallets like piles of guts or one of those snake scenes in an Indiana Jones movie. “Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked” is the finished resentable title. Many fellow visitors were drawn into the texture of various squigglies loaded on the pallets, longing to touch.

But the most spectacular way Kapoor claims his space, blasting it out or dominating everything, is with shimmering waxy scarlet goo. For those who like their goo monumental, Svayambh (Sanskrit for “self-generated”) is a 40 ton slow train that takes one and a half hours to scour its way through five galleries, splashing blood-red wax and vaseline on the high imperial gilded arches as it goes. Like the original juggernaut it slides noiselessly through the huge space, drawing children of all ages back again and again to check on its progress.

If you prefer indoor fireworks, there’s Shooting into the Corner. Every twenty minutes a ritual is enacted by which a shell shaped red wadge is fired at the wall of the next gallery, filling the smaller room gradually with goo. Even though it’s powered on compressed air, I would guess, and there’s no conventional explosive bang, the whole thing makes a predictably intense indoor game. Various people near me were holding their ears, and somebody near me jumped. The kids loved it.

The show manages to be a monumental, dynamic and playful workout for the imagination. I shall certainly be back before December.

Brancusi: Reductionism and Reality

New in Chicago is a newly opened Modern Wing of the Art Institute. It was very good, among other things, to catch up with what Cy Twombly has been up to over the past decade or so.
The wing in itself is a something of a work of art — clean, light and unassuming, drawing attention to exhibits and not itself, with some fabulous occasional views when you catch a glimpse of its extraordinary architectural context:

The generous display space being allocated to foreign modern art seems to have triggered a walk-out by two famous Chicagoans since 1930, the Grant Wood American Gothic couple.

They have now decamped with their suitcase to a 3-D pitch downtown by the Tribune building, renounced Grant Wood for John Seward Johnson, and re-Christened themselves “God Bless America.”

The Art Institute has two fascinating Brancusis — Suffering of 1907 is very clearly the work of someone who worked, even if only for a few weeks, in Rodin’s Paris studio.

Meanwhile, Brancusi’s slightly chunky but essentially graceful Golden Bird of 1919/20 is a real beauty that wonderfully prefigures his more famous Bird in Space works from the later twenties.

The latter apparently so annoyed a 1920’s dumb literalist / simple materialist customs officer that he refused to acknowledge it could mean anything artistic and reclassified it as an industrial chunk of metal — after all, that was all it could be proved to contain, so what else could there be to it?

Brancusi himself had a slightly more nuanced and grown-up way of seeing reality that is a challenge to cloth-eared reductionism in every age — Il y a des imbéciles qui définissent mon œuvre comme abstraite, pourtant ce qu'ils qualifient d'abstrait est ce qu'il y a de plus réaliste, ce qui est réel n'est pas l'apparence mais l'idée, l'essence des choses — (“Some idiots call my work abstract, in spite of the fact that what they call abstract is actually the most real of all — not the outer appearance, but the concept or essence of things”).

Devil Gets Knotted in Stone

Whilst out leading the patronal festival at St John the Baptist, Stone, this morning, I couldn’t help noticing the font. Heavily restored as it has been, it is still one of the most remarkable pieces of Norman Carving I’ve ever seen.

As well as various characteristic rope patterns, it carries a strange picture of a man (Adam?), his son crushing the serpent’s head, and representations of the Holy Trinity with fish & dragons.

It came from Hampstead Norreys in Berkshire, and has only been in Stone since 1845. E. F. M. Watson described the design thus in 1906:

The Monster on the Left is the Evil One with open mouth and unknotted tail, free to destroy and hinder the free course of the Fish, that is the Christian Faith. On the right is the same Evil power, but a Hand is in its mouth and the tail is knotted; it is being subdued by the might of the Three Persons in the Holy Trinity, though it still holds in its claws a human head, whose expression is one of hopelessness and terror.

The Church guide is a bit more down to earth:

The font which is Norman is richly carved all around the bowl, with scenes thought to depict the conflict between Satan and the Trinity. A dragon representing Satan is baring his teeth and waving his tail. We then see him muzzled by the arm of the Father, pecked by the Spirit in the form of a Dove, and having had his tail knotted by the Son.

Reeling from this encounter with things fantastic, among other fine flower arrangements, I noticed a windowsill display containing Pitcher Plants — hardly your standard bunch of daffs, but they looked rather triffid-like and unusual. I imagine they also keep the flies down in the summer.

Disappearing Car: No tricks, no CGI

Could our wheels be less intrusive? Sarah Watson, 2nd year Art Student at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, has found an utterly brilliant, if only partially effective, way to reduce the visual environmental impact of the car.

"I was experimenting with the whole concept of illusion but needed something a bit more physical to make a real impact."

Emerging? Off the wall?

Something for the weekend? Open your mind to what things could be —how they morph — what they really mean. With turbulence and emergence all around, and associated forming and deforming structures, this MUTO animation is off the wall but, perhaps, on the button:

Made in Buenos Aires and Baden by BLU

Trashing people, wrecking the joint

Patronal festival this morning at St John the Baptist, Crowthorne (Berkshire) near my old parish. We prayed the ancient collect for the grace to repent according to his teaching, and then constantly to speak the truth, boldly to rebuke vice and patiently to suffer for the truth’s sake. This had me wondering what a real prophet trying to follow John the Baptist’s lead might draw attention to in our culture. That quest took me to a talk at TED Monterey this year by artist and photographer Chris Jordan, in which he uses everyday objects to call into question some of the hidden assumptions of our Western culture: