Editorial.
As is appropriate in an issue that records the ACE Awards, this
number of Art and Christianity celebrates the intensifying liveliness
and diversity of interactions among artists, scholars, and communities
of faith. Those encounters are of course the raisons d'etre of this
journal, but the features here lay bare not only the fruitful
interactions among them but also the gulfs of competing agendas and
misunderstandings that divide them. We remain thankful that ACE exists
to facilitate and host conversation and comprehension.
In Art Chretien / Art sacre (reviewed by Caroline Levisse) Isabelle
Saint-Martin describes how art historians in nineteenth-century France
created the category of patrimoine, in which 'religious works of
art belonging to the past are considered for their cultural and
aesthetic values rather than for their liturgical, devotional, and
theological values'. Christian art became the subject of
'objective' and 'scientific' examination, rescued
from the 'irrationality' of religion. Thus was the gulf
opened, and it remains firmly in place in the beginning of the
twenty-first century, despite the occasional, fragile rope bridge
extended across the void.
In her subtle and penetrating review of the exhibition 'The
Problem of God' at K21, Dusseldorf, Deborah Lever reminds us that
the 'patrimonial' tendency remains in rude good health. A
large, lavishly state-funded exhibition of works of artists of
international significance and calibre, this was a resolutely
'secular' event, zealously insisting on confining itself to
works 'of art understood to deal with 'God' but
putatively without God'. Such a museum mentality insists that its
'independence' depends on an attitude of enlightened
secularism, without recognising that this as much a faith position as
religious faith itself. There is a relentless, remorseless activism and
busy-ness, a fear of letting-be, to an exhibition so committed to
insisting on God's invisibility.
How great a contrast, then, to the values the various panels of
judges brought to the ACE Awards. The presence of God is something to be
sought rather than fearfully evaded. Art should engage with the life of
communities both in and outside the liturgy. Bishop Nicholas Holtam
writes of looking for the quality of 'slow-burn intensity'
(read the work of the Holy Spirit), for art that 'transforms a
place of worship and renews both the place and people who are the
church'. In the face of the hysterical activity that characterises
so much of our culture and its art, it was surely a prophetic act on the
part of the judges for the religious architecture award to award
buildings representative of Christian traditions characterised by
silence and patient waiting upon God: a Quaker meeting house in suburban
Kingston and a remote Northumbrian hermitage chapel. In stillness of the
reality of God, in the rejection of the shadows and fictions of violent
control, there will be found our hope of reconciliation.
Letters to the editorial board of A&C are welcomed and may be
published at the board's discretion. Please write to us at ACE, St
John's Church, Pitfield St, London N1 6NP or
enquiries@acetrust.org.
