Transubstantiation Of Art: A Bill Viola Case Study
The Horsham parish has had enough with contemporary art, at least in their church. In 2008, the local parishioners decided that Edward Copnall’s ten-foot tall resin sculpture was too “horrifying” and unsuitable for their church. The sculpture in question was a stylized crucifix that had lived on the front façade of the St. John’s Church for forty years. They removed and relocated it to a local Museum.1 Horsham’s Anglican church was not unique in commissioning a modern art sculpture and then transitioning it to a museum. Starting in the 1960s with artists like Henry Moore, churches became the space where parishioners could question contemporary art. British philosopher Nigel Warburton states that from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Tate Modern, museums set a “quasi-religious genius-worship, where the artist becomes a kind of god . . . and the gallery-goer a worshipper”.2 Museums as temples of knowledge can hinder the questioning of art, but contemporary art placed outside of the white cube and into the church allows debate. Thus, the movement of artworks from a gallery to a church and vice versa changes the aura of the artwork. This paper seeks to examine the contemporary art exhibition practices of Anglican churches in the United Kingdom in order to speculate if the critical acclaim of the Bill Viola commissions by the Tate for St. Paul’s will transfer if the works relocate from the church setting to the white cube of Tate Modern across the river.
To understand the environment that lead to Bill Viola’s commission at St. Paul’s and the critical reception of contemporary art in Anglican churches it is important to understand the relationship between the Anglican church and icons. The Reformation expunged many of the visual elements from church worship in favor of written or sung word.3 Sir Christopher Wren designed St. Paul’s after the Reformation in England, yet the Baroque building echoes its Catholic contemporaries and feels sparse without embellishments like the Bill Viola work. The Bill Viola commissions at St Paul’s is a major step in healing the rift between artists and the Anglican church. Bill Viola’s works are the first “permanent” installation of a video in a church in the United Kingdom.4 Bill Viola created Martyrs (2014), depicting four bodies engulfed by the four elements. Moreover, it is the first collaboration between St. Paul’s and the Tate. In 2010, the Tate’s Board of Trustees accepted the St. Paul’s commission into the collection with the intention of placing the work on permanent loan to the cathedral with Tate’s conservation department working on long-term maintenance.5 Viola’s interest in the commission came from his previous experience in temporary church exhibitions. He claimed that to the “European mind the reverberant characteristics of the interior of the Gothic cathedral are inextricably linked with a deep sense of the sacred and tend to evoke strong associations with both the internal private space of contemplation and the larger realm of the ineffable”.6 Bill Viola understood how the exhibition space of the cathedral can change the aura of an artwork.
Figure 1. Bill Viola, Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) (2014), St Paul’s Cathedral.
One of the reasons why St. Paul and the Tate chose Bill Viola was because of his experience creating site-specific artwork for a church. However, these previous works of his were shown in the churches in an exhibition context rather than permanent installations. Churches heavily rely on the museum system. In 2017, the Church of England published Commissioning New Art For Churches: A Guide For Parishes & Artists. In this guide, they state that before commissioning a work for they need to create a group including “a churchwarden, an interested member of the parish . . . and at least one person with expert knowledge, who may be brought in following advice from a gallery, museum. . .”7 Thus, new church commissions rely on museums for validation of the art added, as in the case with St. Paul’s and the Tate.
While churches have borrowed heavily from the museum set-up, they can never quite be museums because of the people who populate those spaces. An art gallery cannot function without art. However, a church can function without art but not without people.8 Furthermore, when art enters a Gothic church, they confront a space of an unparalleled aesthetic environment as it has a visual heritage. Moreover, they have more visible or audible distractions than a regular gallery. Through understanding the biases with putting artworks in a white cube versus a church we can understand how the aura of an artwork changes from museum space to church and vice versa. The aura of an artwork is deeply connected to German Jewish Philosopher Walter Benjamin’s notion on art’s “cultic value”. While his arguments on the aura of an artwork are grounded in the notion of film as art in the age of mechanical reproduction, his argument fits with church art in regarding art’s “traditional context”. When art is removed from its “traditional context” it opens it up for multiple interpretations.9 The cathedral space cannot be used as a mere exhibition venue but adds to the aura of the artwork. A sacred space can never be just a simple location for a work of art.
Figure 2. Bill Viola, The Messenger (1996), Durham Cathedral.
The relative success of Bill Viola’s commissions at Saint Paul’s is largely due to his previous commissions for churches that dealt with the issues outlined above. Bill Viola’s work faced censorship, but that misfortune became the building blocks for a successful relationship between Bill Viola and St. Paul’s. One of the obvious examples of difficulties faced between Viola and a church is The Messenger at Durham Cathedral. 1996 was the United Kingdom’s “Year of Visual Arts” and Canon Bill Hall commissioned Viola to create a work for Durham Cathedral. Viola created The Messenger, a larger than life image projected onto a screen mounted on the wall. The image starts with a small abstract form in a dark blue void. The shape begins to grow into an illuminated human form laying on his back in the depths of a body of water. Eventually, he breaks through the surface, his eyes open, and he takes a deep breath. The work then moves in reverse until it returns to its original state and starts anew again.10 The cathedral projected The Messenger near the baptismal font, in order to create a dialogue with the space and the subject matter in the video. The water of the baptismal font and the video makes a connection between birth and death.
However, the man in the video is naked. While fig leaf censors over nudity seem to be the territory of Catholic churches, the nudity of The Messenger caused controversy and partial censorship. Canon Bill Hall’s contemporary, Canon Keith Walker during the controversy stated that the “Church should dictate the subject matter, the artist the treatment . . . due regard should be paid to what a congregation will accept”.11 Yet The Messenger was never meant to be a controversial work of art. It was meant to be understood as the messenger being an angel from a non-distinct time and space who can never be fully understood.12 Dressing the angel, would ruin the non-distinct time concept. Rather than removing the work, Durham Cathedral visually constricted the work with screens.13 While this created an intimate viewing of the work, almost assuming the role of a chapel, it meant that the work was cut off from the rest of the cathedral, drastically changing the aura of the artwork.
Beyond the lack of nudity, there are other reasons why the new commissions at St. Paul’s are lauded by art critics and parishioners alike for Viola’s placement in the Cathedral. Martyrs originates from another successful work by Bill Viola in 2007 for the Venice Biennale. His work Ocean Without a Shore was incorporated intimately with the architecture of the 15th-century Church of San Gallo. Three stone altars held video screens with bodies. The more intimate size of the work makes it more appetizing than The Messenger. These Viola’s depiction of bodies for Martyrs fits so well in his body of work that it would be have been the strongest contender for the Royal Academy’s Bill Viola / Michelangelo comparative exhibition.
Figure 3. Bill Viola, Ocean Without A Shore (2007), Church of San Gallo.
However, with these accolades aside, the question of whether Martyrs will continue as a “permanent” installation still remains. If they are a “permanent” installation as their press releases promote, it begs the question why they are considered long-time loans from the Tate. Beyond the unique video-conservation team that the Tate brings, on a surface level it seems that the Tate mostly provides validation of the commission for St. Paul, as if St. Paul is trying to seem more museum-like in adding the Bill Viola for the sake of art rather than a work for meditation. Moreover, the involvement of Tate’s video-conservation team brings up the question of will the works remain the same as technology changes? The twenty-first century witnessed a rapid change of technology. The once ubiquitous VHS is now almost obsolete. St. Paul’s has no way of confirming whether the permanent installation can be maintained “permanently”. The next hundred years may see such a rapid change of video technology that video screens in St. Paul’s may no longer be supported or worse may seem kitsch. If any of these considerations cause the work to move across the river to Tate Modern, the aura of the artwork will certainly change as in the case of Salcedo’s installation. His first installation Martyrs relies on the space of the Cathedral to perform for the work. The bodies under duress from the elements in the video are in conversation with the stories told at Mass of the sacrifice of Jesus’s body. Out of this context, the work loses that conversation. Moreover, it will seem as ripped from its environment as altars seem in medieval galleries in American museums. In conclusion, while Bill Viola’s work at St. Paul’s successfully navigates the realm of balancing contemporary art with the church, if they were to remove the artwork from its setting it would lose its aura and meaning.
Conclusion
By examining the contemporary art exhibition practices of Anglican churches, it is clear that the space of the church has a major significance in the aura of an artwork. The historical removal of artworks from the United Kingdom’s churches during the Reformation engendered a unique relationship between churches and their contemporary art. It is through the study of Anglican churches’ relationship with imagery, their museum-like exhibition practices, and contemporary art cases studies that we can speculate on the fate of the Bill Viola commissions. If the works transfer from the church setting to the white cube, the aura of the artworks will alter to the point that it is no longer the same artwork as the works commissioned for St. Paul’s Cathedral.
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Bibliography
Bayley, Paul. “Contemporary Art & Church Commissions: Boom or Bust?” In Contemporary Art in British Churches, edited by Eileen Daly and Laura Moffatt. London: Art & Christianity Enquiry, 2010.
Bejamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf.
Bowden, Sandra, and Marianne Lettieri. Contemporary Art and the Church: A Conversation Between Two Worlds. Edited by David O. Taylor and Taylor Worley, IVP. Downers Grove, IL: VP Academic, 2017.
“Cathedral Art.” Cathedral Art – St Paul’s Cathedral. Accessed May 07, 2019. https://www.stpauls.co.uk/history-collections/the-collections/arts-programme.
Church of England. Commissioning New Art For Churches. London: Art and Christianity Enquiry, 2017.
Footnotes
1. Gascoigne, Laura. “New Art in Catholic Churches.” In Contemporary Art in British Churches, edited by Eileen Daly and Laura Moffatt. London: Art & Christianity Enquiry, 2010.
2. Koestlé-Cate, Jonathan. Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace: Ecclesiastical Encounters with Contemporary Art. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.
3. Viola, Bill. Bill Viola Commission : St Paul’s Cathedral. London: St Paul’s Cathedral, 2010.1
4. Jonathan Koestlé-Cate, Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace: Ecclesiastical Encounters with Contemporary Art (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 151.2
5. Ibid, 22.3
6. Sandra Bowden and Marianne Lettieri, Contemporary Art and the Church: A Conversation Between Two Worlds, ed. David O. Taylor and Taylor Worley, IVP (Downers Grove, IL: VP Academic, 2017), 48.4
7. The author acknowledges that the use of permanent by the Tate is a misnomer as the work may return to the Tate.5
8. Bill Viola, Bill Viola Commission: St Paul’s Cathedral (London: St Paul’s Cathedral, 2010), 5.6
9. Jonathan Koestlé-Cate, Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace: Ecclesiastical Encounters with Contemporary Art (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 67.7
10. Church of England, Commissioning New Art For Churches (London: Art and Christianity Enquiry, 2017), 3.8
11. Ibid, 313.9
12. Walter Bejamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 6, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf.10
13. Bill Viola, Bill Viola Commission: St Paul’s Cathedral (London: St Paul’s Cathedral, 2010), 17.11
14. As seen in Jonathan Koestlé-Cate, Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace: Ecclesiastical Encounters with Contemporary Art (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 428.12
15. Ibid, 69.13
16. Ibid, 68.
