The currency of belief.

Koestle-Cate, Jonathan

In Richard Davey's recent monograph on the work of John Newling he describes the artist as a kind of art-scientist, 'an experimenter who constantly uses the visual to investigate the world' (p. 64). This could surely be said of many an artist; what is art if not a visual response to the world? In fact, far from making a banal point, Davey has understood precisely what drives this exceptionally imaginative artist. Newling's is an 'art seeking understanding', he suggests, reflecting St Anselm's 'faith seeking understanding', only with the caveat that it is an understanding willing to accommodate not-knowing, mystery and uncertainty (p. 102), themes which appear sporadically yet persistently throughout his work. Newling, says Davey, is an artist 'searching for a place for art, seeking to understand its role and function, its possibilities and parameters' (p. 35). Significantly that search habitually takes him outside the usual contexts and places for art as a means of extending this search into daily life. Of particular interest to readers of Art and Christianity, it frequently takes him into the spaces of the church and the realm of belief.

Newling's role as art-scientist is evident in the latest retrospective of his work recently on show at Nottingham Contemporary. Here the theme of mystery, doubt and uncertainty, and their relation to faith, is immediately apparent. On entering the gallery foyer the visitor is greeted by a video work, Singing Uncertainty, performed in the nearby St Mary's Church in 2011. In this performance each member of a choir assembled for the occasion was asked to sing a chosen phrase ending with a question mark from the Methodist hymnbook. Singing acapella, one participant after the other delivered their chosen question, each according to its own musical notation. The performance culminated in a discordant rendition of all questioning phrases simultaneously, producing a cacophony of questioned certainties. Those familiar with Newling's work will no doubt recognise the provenance of this piece. In 2004 Stamping Uncertainty, created for the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral, explored the nature of doubt and the test of faith as expressed in the words of the Anglican hymnbook. Where hymns are traditionally seen as the purveyors of certainty, part of the churchgoer's proclamation of faith, Newling's installation highlighted the uncertainties, ambivalences, and doubts so prominent in their declamations. Focusing exclusively on the perhaps surprising number of questions they contain, he manufactured an ink stamp for every questioning phrase and stamped each individually, displaying them on 152 lecterns arranged in rows throughout the Chapter House. His aim was to initiate 'a meditation on the possibility of certainty' (1), a willingness to dwell upon uncertainty, doubt, and the place of the unknown within the believer's experience. This was faith, says Davey, as 'a voyage into uncertainty' (p. 41). Here the rubber stamp, symbol of official authorisation, authentication or guarantee, is transformed into a questioning of all such guarantees of Christian affirmation.

A second major theme for Newling as an art-scientist is a concern for the relationship between an individual and their place in the wider world, above all the natural world (p. 118). Prior even to encountering Singing Uncertainty, the visitor is initially drawn to the gallery's large, street facing window, through which can be seen two silver-lined hydroponic tents in which young Moringa or Miracle Trees--so called because of the richness of their protein and nutrients, and resistance to adverse conditions--are growing within environments adapted to replicate their native climate. Generosity is the latest in a series of experiments in cultivating plants, previous efforts involving a lemon tree, vines, various forms of what he calls 'constructed soils', produced from unusual sources (numerous copies of the text of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, for example), several of which were on display, and Jersey Kale, otherwise known as Walking Stick Cabbage, which also plays a prominent role in this exhibition. One such experiment was conceived for a redundant 19th-century church in Chatham. In Chatham Vines St John the Divine became the setting for an unusual idea: the regeneration of life within a building and an area that had fallen into decline. Using hydroponics technology Newling planned to grow a vine within the nave of the church, literally bringing new life back into this empty space, and in a very direct way making a theological point: Christ as the true vine, and the vine as the source of one element of the Eucharist. At Nottingham this event was represented by a slide show of the year-long procedure, alongside a bottled sample of the wine produced.

This emphasis on uncertainty and ecology sets the scene for an exhibition whose predominating themes are nature, belief and, as the exhibition's title suggests, value. A particular fixation for Newling is the intimate relation between currency and belief, and questions around determinations of value, an ever-present concern in his work and the connecting motif between the two rooms of the exhibition. Issues of exchange and transaction fascinate him: 'the agreements that establish the worth of a work of art, the value of a printed piece of paper, or confirm the presence of a sacred space' (p. 22). But how does one assess the value of values? This exhibition presents us with several possible responses to this dilemma, whether explored through the residue left on hefty glass petri dishes consisting of the dirt and debris, usually calibrated as part of a coin's value, cleaned from 50,000 copper coins (Weight) or the discoloured patina of a copper well marked by the ghostlike traces of two-pence pieces tossed into its once water-filled bowl (Well). It is more blatantly represented by a series of copper castings of cash machines, laid on their backs and presented as our New Architecture, looking for all the world like architects' models of a domestic habitation, a corporate edifice, and an industrial building or perhaps even a modern gallery like Nottingham Contemporary itself. Newling habitually makes use of the banalities of the world, the mundane things that dominate our time and energy and seeks for the sacred or something of deeper, more lasting value to be gleaned from them. Hence his obsession with the two-pence piece, for example, in its popular nomination as the wishing coin, and its parity in size with the communion wafer, for which it becomes a kind of analogue of faith.

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We can perhaps make more sense of Newling's artistic concerns if we recall the important difference established by Marx between the usefulness of some thing, qualified as its 'worth', and its exchangeability, measured in terms of 'value'. It is this distinction of worth and value that motivates so much of Newling's work. His perpetual interest in issues of faith and belief is shadowed by a more materialistic sense of the trust invested in commodity fetishism and, above all, in that particular commodity we call money. Perhaps there is nowhere that this disjuncture between value and worth is more pronounced than the art world. It has instigated innumerable articles in the art press by critics anxious to redeem the art object from its all but inevitable commodification. What these critics bemoan is the debased value of art through its subordination to market values. It is this debasement of value, or perhaps relativisation of values, which interests Newling. As such, the church as institution and purveyor of value is a reoccurring theme, sometimes examined through its positive capacity to entertain a spirit of inquiry, sometimes through its negative tendency to lose sight of its primary mission in favour of maintaining its institutional existence (2). But it is, above all, the value invested in nature 'as a place of encounter with otherness, sacredness and slow time' (p. 50) that remains a constant source of inspiration for Newling. At Nottingham Contemporary one of its principal means of expression was Jersey Kale. Here ecologies of value translated into a curious and visually arresting series of works amalgamating cabbage leaves and currency. A fascinating game of exchange was enacted between gilded leaves and a kind of leaf currency, replicating two-pence pieces and 20 [pounds sterling] banknotes, the weight of the latter coincidently equivalent to that of the leaf.

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This small but well-selected retrospective of the work of an artist who is not as well-known within the art world as he deserves to be provides an opportunity to discover something of the range of Newling's artistic preoccupations. As Davey explains, a triad of realms of activity act as catalysts for his artistic output. Firstly, we can speak of a 'cultural plateau', the sphere of human activity characterised by the 'value transactions' that constitute 'the essential fabric of human society' (p. 93). This cultural sphere interconnects with an 'organic' and an 'etheric' or 'spiritual' sphere. These three mark the pivotal points of orientation in Newling's world. If the organic and spiritual attend opposite poles, the cultural is their place of touching or joining. Religion, for example, as a cultural phenomenon, operates as the linking plateau between body and spirit. And it is through human societies that we experience and give value to nature and the spiritual. Over a career spanning some thirty years, 'this geometry', as Davey calls it, has become 'the underlying structure through which Newling has shaped his engagement with the world, influencing work that explores nature, society and faith in different but sometimes interlocking ways' (p. 93).

This exhibition also coincides with the publication of Richard Davey's study of the artist. Davey is particularly well placed to interpret Newling's work, having had a close personal association with the artist over many years. Newling is himself an accomplished writer, his art projects often accompanied by substantial, well-produced texts. Davey's Spinning is, however, the first expansive overview of Newling's work to have appeared, providing an indispensible guide to his artistic career to date. Well-written and lavishly illustrated, this perceptive and thought-provoking, yet accessible, book undertakes the difficult task of documenting the oeuvre of an artist whose work resists simple categorisation and easy interpretation. Drawing on conversations with the artist alongside his own observations, Davey effectively negotiates a path through Newling's eclectic career, producing a satisfying and informative introduction to this complex artist, writing within the framework of themes like cathedral, pilgrimage, and nature, under the governing trope of spinning. Spinning is Newling's term for thought processes that lead to the genesis of artistic works--the idea that thoughts circulate and gestate in one's mind. For his part, Davey pictures Newling's artistic trajectory as a spiralling dynamic, expansive like the falcon of Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, 'turning and turning in the widening gyre' (p. 98), spinning away from art world conventions, while keeping an observant eye upon them. It is an apt metaphor for an artist whose projects seem so distant from the art world's more typical concerns. Spinning also infers a process of recurrence: a kind of creative disorientation (a key term for Newling). Various materials and motifs appear over and over in his work, like a problem continually nagging at the mind, but never with a sense of repetition; rather, with a sense of development or transmutation, or, to use a term frequently connected with Newling, process. This has become a constant tool in his working practice, ensuring a steady flow of inventive creativity, testing and learning. As another of his interlocutors has stated, 'the possibilities for artistic production by an artist with an imagination which is tempered by an assured grasp of transformation are virtually limitless.' (3)

I trust I will not be misunderstood, then, if I say that Newling is a genuinely creative artist. Creativity necessarily entails risk; most obviously the risk of failure. Chatham Vines, for one, was an audacious project that very nearly failed. Nevertheless, such risks are, as George Pattison has argued, 'one of the most important things about the making of art, and [are] integral to what makes art art, rather than just production' (4). There is no sense of production, in Pattison's terms, to be found in Newling's work, only well-considered concepts, always supported, as this exhibition and Davey's book attests, by strong aesthetic values.

Jonathan Koestle-Cate is an Associate Tutor at Goldsmiths College, London

'John Newling: Ecologies of Value' was at Nottingham Contemporary, 26 January-7 April 2013 and will tour to The Exchange Gallery, Penzance 20 July-14 September. Spinning: Nature, Culture and the Spiritual in the Work of John Newling by Richard Davey is published by Nottingham Contemporary, 2013, 144pp, s/b, 19.99 [pounds sterling].

(1.) Newling, J. (2004), Stamping Uncertainty, SWPA Limited, p. 8. Ten years earlier, in an installation called Skeleton created for a deconsecrated church in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the hymnbook again made an appearance. Newling repopulated this empty church with an unusual material, one which has since become a staple of his artistic work. Around 80,000 templates for holy bread, punctuated by evenly displaced holes the size of two-pence pieces, were stacked within the church pews, like a silent congregation. Set before each of the stacks was a fabricated hymnbook, modified to show a single phrase ending with a question mark. These 'skeletons' are the usually discarded sheets of unleavened bread from which communion wafers are punched out. Rather than the bearers of absences these are in effect the supporting structures for the communion experience. Faith, says Newling, is an unshakeable belief in a principle; it looks for validity in the truth of its convictions. For a holy wafer to have effect, it requires just such an act of faith, yet here once again, in an early incarnation, was a reminder of that questioning spirit rendered more fully in Stamping and Singing Uncertainty.

(2.) Newling's Targeting the Marketing, a stainless steel model of a church upended on its West side, can be read as an example of this secondary, critical aspect of the church.

(3.) Simon Herbert, in Newling, J. (1995), The Sacred and the Mundane, Manchester: Cornerhouse, p. 19.

(4.) Pattison, G. (2009), Crucifixions and Resurrections of the Image, London: SCM Press, pp. 137-8.

Jonathan Koestle-Cate profiles the artist John Newling