Going Public: International Art Collectors in Sheffield.

Koestle-Cate, Jonathan

Going Public: International Art Collectors in Sheffield

Sheffield Cathedral

16 September-12 December 2015

Sacred violence is not typically the vocabulary we use to describe the symbols of Christian devotion. Even when faced with the definitive image of Christian faith, the crucifixion, we speak more of suffering, compassion and sacrifice. Granted, this can, at times, result in a sanitisation of the salvific violence it depicts. As Peter Bradley, Dean of Sheffield Cathedral, reminded visitors to 'Going Public', the church is full of violent images to which we have become largely desensitised.

This is evident when turning to the punishments meted out to the suffering saints, like the hideous martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew. Hence the choice of a sculpture for 'Going Public' by Jake and Dinos Chapman, the contemporary specialists (Hirst notwithstanding) in visceral spectacle. Never ones to shy from the brutality of violence, their Cyber Iconic Man hung suspended upside down in the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, a naked, mutilated and partially flayed mannequin tied to a tree. Admittedly there is no reason to assume that it is intended to be Bartholomew. It could simply be another in their series of sculptural parodies of the horrors of war. Even so, its gruesome wounds and placing beside a reredos populated with several Christian saints, Barth-olomew among them, lends credence to this reading. (1) Furthermore, this particular sculpture, unlike earlier works of a similarly horrific nature, displays a kind of miraculous stigmata, in the form of perpetually bleeding wounds that drip 'blood' into a receptacle below.

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One cannot but admire the courage of the Dean in bringing this work into the cathedral (although, as he freely admits, if he had known it would actually bleed he might have reconsidered), even if it inevitably amassed disproportionate media attention, which overlooked other far more substantial pieces in this compelling exhibition.

In the south transept, for example, one of Douglas Gordon's video works offered an understated presence yet narrative complexity. Displayed on two adjacent box monitors placed on the stone floor, it showed two arms wrestling for dominance--one hairy, one smooth-skinned. A Divided Self I and II marks the extremes of our divided nature, for what appears at first glance as a forceful struggle between two people--calling to mind the sibling enmity of Jacob and Esau--soon reveals itself to be a contest of two natures within the one person, the artist himself. The title of the work overtly references the schizoid tendencies and competing personalities examined by R D Laing in The Divided Self. But it also draws heavily upon two Scottish 19th-century novels of split personality and monstrous doubles: Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Both are psychological narratives of the opposing yet codependent forces of moral rectitude and moral depravity. In one the personality is split, in the other the self is doubled, echoed in the mirror-like form of the double monitor. In this relationship of warring yet inseverable partners Hyde is always-already an aspect of Jekyll, an idea given a satisfyingly doctrinal twist in Hogg's tale. Here it is the protagonist's antinomianism that justifies his heinous acts, urged on by a sinister doppelganger. In its cathedral context, of course, we might more readily think of Paul's lament in Romans 7 'For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do' in response to the inner conflict playing out on the screens.

An identity crisis of another kind could be seen on the opposite side of the church, where a sculpture by Berlinde de Bruyckere embodied an altogether more ontological struggle. Bruyckere's fascination with mythical figures that metamorphose is a common factor in her work, sculpturally translated into figures of wax and synthetic resin that, though clearly anthropoid, are also disturbingly arboreal. Marthe is an apparently female but acephalic form disfigured by waxy excrescences, bodily limbs transforming into fibrous, barkless tendrils. She evokes the arborified figure of Ovid's Daphne who, in the Metamorphoses, is struck by Cupid's arrow, ultimately leading to her transmutation into a laurel tree. In the adjacent chapel another kind of transformation was signalled in Fiona Tan's film, Saint Sebastian, in which an archery competition mediates the rite of passage into womanhood for Japanese girls in a kyudo ceremony. Seeing the two works side-by-side, it was as if the arrows of Tan's young archers, aimed, as the title implied, at Saint Sebastian, had missed their target and hit Marthe instead.

The one piece with which I suspect the cathedral was loath to part was Cerith Wyn Evan's delightful neon riddle suspended above the choir. Evans had taken the famous Latin palindrome --In Girum, Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni--and curled it into a refulgent halo or crown, reading backwards and forwards in a perpetual loop. (2) Not all worked so well. Pae White's monumental Jacquard tapestry, Still, looked decidedly confined and out of place alongside Plus Ultra, another massive tapestry by Goshka Macuga, which dramatically hung between two pillars, accentuating one's ingress into the nave and daring to make an overtly political statement about the current migrant crisis.

The Dean and Chapter are to be commended for achieving a remarkably robust and thought-provoking exhibition. It was part of a city-wide venture in which five Sheffield venues hosted works from significant European private collections. The cathedral showed ten works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, in diverse media including sculpture, film, sound, tapestry and neon. 'Going Public' also initiated important debates around public funding for art. Should the church be wary of accepting works on the basis of private philanthropy? Are there concerns over control and choices made? Is the church the right place to showcase a collector's collection? As churches seek means to exhibit art in today's severely underfunded climate these issues are likely to come increasingly to the fore.

Jonathan Koestle-Cate is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London and on the editorial board of A&C

(1.) The parallel with Bartholomew is further enforced by an analogy from classical myth. Bartholomew suffers the same fate as the satyr Marsyas, flayed for his hubris. In Titian's celebrated painting of this scene the unfortunate piper is strung upside down to a tree, as his skin is pared from his body.

(2.) It is a riddle describing the life and death of moths. Loosely translated it reads 'we go into the circle by night and are consumed by fire'.