Roger Hiorns: Untitled (a retrospective view of the pathway).

Turner, Claire

Roger Hiorns: Untitled (a retrospective view of the pathway)

Birmingham Cathedral, 15 and 17 June

In his book, God in the Gallery, Daniel Siedell recalls literary critic and philosopher George Steiner's assertion that 'art is a dangerous thing that can take over our inner house and transform us.' If this is so, Birmingham Cathedral is a house prepared to take risks. Its Arts Policy, published on the Cathedral's website, commits to commissioning art 'worthy of the beauty and dignity of this sacred space' while also welcoming 'art and installations of work in the cathedral that enable worship or reflection or stimulate thought or are simply beautiful or provoke wonder for individual visitors and for worshipping congregations.' In their recent collaboration with Ikon Gallery and artist Roger Hiorns, they appear to have achieved just this.

On 15 and 17 June 2016, the Cathedral embraced Hiorns as he intervened in the regular service of Evensong with his work, Untitled (a retrospective view of the pathway). Such words have been carefully chosen the Cathedral neither presented nor hosted the work but welcomed the artist's intervention with a level of openness that can only be described as impressive. This was neither a performance nor an attempt to curate worship. The service itself was to continue in its usual way; the regular congregation of worshippers, joined by an arts audience for whom the formal liturgical pattern of the service may have been unfamiliar, standing, sitting and responding so as to participate. Seated along both sides of the nave these two groups were drawn into the rhythm of the worship as they looked down upon the members of the Cathedral choir, lying flat on their backs, heads resting on kneelers, in the centre of the worship space.

This change in posture, from the vertical to the horizontal, instantly and rather profoundly changed the experience of the worship event. In her homily, the Very Rev'd Catherine Ogle, Dean of the Cathedral, drew out how this shift in stance reflected both the vertical axis inherent in the Christian imagination and the horizontal reality of our lives. She held together our shared longing to ascend alongside the great descent of the incarnation and placed it alongside the horizontal imperative of the Christian life, to reach out in solidarity and love.

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Approaching the choir as material, Hiorns, a former chorister at the Cathedral himself, reshaped something of the choristers' purpose. As opposed to holding a space for worship, they were held by it. Rather than the sound emanating from the distant stalls, it lingered between the worshippers. Instead of experiencing the choristers as providing a function, they lay, exposed on the stone floor. The effect was at once disconcerting and fascinating. Standing over the choir revealed their vulnerability and yet their relaxed, out-turned feet and occasionally fidgeting hands suggested a certain effortlessness. Grounded in this way, glorious sound appeared to be produced as easily as breath. The fragility of the moment, of the earth/ heaven encounter seemed to surface, made visible in the juxtaposition of vertical worshippers and horizontal choir. The only slight jarring came from the myriad of cameras, cables, recording equipment and their accompanying photographers and technicians who, while attempting to be discrete did occasionally imply we were present at a performance or installation as opposed to participating in worship and inhabiting sacred space.

In discussing his work and process, Hiorns says, 'You always have to think about materials and objects in terms of being malleable--you have to cut them off from what their established use is, to directly interfere with their worldness, it becomes a process of human empowerment to re-use and re-propose the power of objects simply left lying in the street.' Lying on the floor, the choristers' power was reimagined alongside that of the worship itself thereby inviting those present to focus on experiencing otherness as opposed to simply receiving knowledge or understanding of the other. As Steiner would perhaps comment, both the inner and outwardly visible house was transformed.

Claire Turner is Vicar of St Chad's Rubery