Why art and religion are natural bedfellows

[cbayer]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2013/mar/25/art-religion-natural-bedfellows

Dinner parties in a gallery make sense. As with religion, it takes more than a fleeting glance to glean the deeper purpose of art

Giles Fraser
guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 March 2013 10.07 EDT


Dinner at the Cock‘n’Bull gallery in Shoreditch, east London: 'The food isn’t really the main point. These are mini liturgical events, ways of trapping attention.'

Having the attention span of a gnat, I can go round an exhibition in minutes. I know it's a weakness. But I often stand before a work of art and want it to undress itself before me in seconds. And if it doesn't, I get the fidgets and move on. Unlike the theatre that traps you for a couple of hours, forcing you to take your time, visual art has less of a temporal hold. It requires an often absent quality of self-discipline. Art takes time.

Nicholas Alvis Vega's latest exhibition of paintings at the Cock'n'Bull gallery in Shoreditch, east London, plays with precisely this conundrum. Images of porn stars are juxtaposed with more chaste representations of Renaissance women, inviting the familiar observation that the partially hidden is so much sexier than the blatant, in your face, plastic enhanced and lifeless sexuality of porn. Sexuality, like art, also requires time. It demands a certain amount of work. Which is why this small gallery is now hosting regular dinner parties amid the paintings. But the food isn't really the main point. These are mini liturgical events, ways of trapping attention.

This week, being holy week, Christians will spend a great deal of time in church. On Thursday evening, following the last supper, I will sit up until midnight. It is an act of solidarity with the last hours of a man facing his death in the morning, who complained that his followers couldn't be bothered to stay up and keep him company. As someone with so high a fidget factor, it is a charge that I feel frequently convicted by. And that is the point of liturgy. It structures attention.

Arty dinner parties with Hoxton trendies may not have the moral density of the last supper, but they are secular expressions of the need for precisely this sort of captured attention. Which is why art and religion are natural bedfellows. There is no story that has captured the imagination of western art more than the Christian story unfolding this week. But like the paintings themselves, this story has little to offer those who want it to excavate its meaning in the few moments it takes to wander by with little more than idle curiosity. Given time, the relationship powerfully flips. Something happens. To begin with you stand before the scene, secure in your isolation as a lone voyeur. You are reading the painting. But after a while the painting begins to look back. When your interpretative gaze is exhausted, the work of art sets about its scrutiny of you. And that is when the deeper purpose begins to appear. Great art breaks down your assumed superiority of being in charge of the interpretation. Religion even more so. At some point, you stop reading it and it starts reading you.

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