By Angela Singer
Great artists have long created great religious art but today there is little contemporary religious art in public galleries. To counteract this trend, St Heliers Church, with the support of the Presbyterian Foundation and private donors, organised an Easter exhibition of the Stations of the Cross, which is the depiction in art of the final hours of the life of Jesus Christ.
The exhibition, the result of many months of planning, ran from 13-25 March 2008 at the prestigious Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland.
Fifteen artists were invited to participate: Octavia Cook, Darryn George, Tony Lane, Jae Hoon Lee, Niki Hastings-McFall, Peter Madden, Ani O’Neill, James Ormsby, Peter Peryer, John Pule, John Reynolds, Natalie Robertson, Hamish Tocher, Philip Trusttum and John Walsh. Each artist drew a station from a hat and then interpreted it using their preferred medium.
The artists, who hold a range of religious beliefs including atheism, were asked to respond from whichever point of view, and in whatever form, they chose.
To accompany these visual works, New Zealand composers were invited to contribute a piece of music. Work by Jack Body, Eve de Castro-Robinson, David Hamilton, Leonie Holmes, John Rimmer and Alex Taylor, among others, were performed at set times during the exhibition.
The random matching of artist and composer to a station was intended to test the idea that within each station there is an essential human experience that can be explored irrespective of religious beliefs.
Assembly Executive Secretary the Rev Martin Baker, who opened the exhibition, was critical of the treatment of religion in contemporary art, and the cynical attitudes adopted by many artists. “It seems to me that contemporary art journals are not interested in discussing religion unless the work in question is what we could call transgressive. If we were to ask the art-going public to name a contemporary work of religious art, the response is likely be Tania Kovat’s “Virgin in a Condom” or works by Andres Serrano.
“The fact that the biggest controversy surrounding a cross today is who actually owns it [referring to a work by Colin McCahon created some 40 years ago recently involved in an auction dispute] contrasts rather sharply with the perception of contemporaries of Jesus, who saw the cross as an object of torture, oppression and death.”
He went on to commend all the artists involved in the exhibition for creating works that speak to the viewer whether they are moved by religious impulse or not.
“This initiative has meant that they have embraced the opportunity to be taken on journeys in their art that they might not have otherwise considered.”
Organisers were thrilled with the positive feedback the exhibition received and hope to find a patron to make the Stations of the Cross an ongoing Easter event.