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Sunday 19 November 2006

Galatians


Went to a new church today and was really inspired by the teaching, which was on Galatians, a book of which I am woefully ignorant. It's so great to discover bits of the Bible that immediately sound their truth and speak so eloquently what one has felt instinctively but not been able to fully define:
"You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace... For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.
...You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: "Love your neighbour as yourself."
... the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law."
I think the reference to circumcision can be taken to stand for the irrelevance of arbitrary rules, regulations and ritualistic gestures, which in and of themselves do not bring one closer to God in the least; the only thing that does is love, both the practising and receiving of it. I love the simplicity of Paul's message: "The entire law is summed up in a single command". This is what I have always felt to be at the heart of the Christian faith, the primacy of love as the only rule we must live by. If only we Christians were able to keep to it more consistently, both in our individual lives and in the life of our established churches/denominations.

Thursday 16 November 2006

An exhibition



Visiting 'Fischli and Weiss: Flowers & Questions' last weekend was a rare treat: an exhibition that was mainly just a lot of fun. That might sound strange - perhaps people who go to lots of exhibitions would argue they're all fun in some way. But to me it seems that too often art takes itself too seriously, so that it feels wrong to speak above a whisper in a gallery; silent awe seeming the most desirable response even when you're not quite sure what the artist is saying. And although there's definitely a place for silent awe, it's a refreshing change to be offered art that engages on a lighter, more playful level.
Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss have been partners in their own brand of brilliant artistic crime since the 70s, and at the exhibition on Level 4 of the Tate Modern last Saturday, there was a fair scattering of silent awe, but also a lot of giggling, guffawing and even the odd gasp of disbelief. Subtitled 'A Retrospective', the Tate's selection of Fischli and Weiss' work is cunning in its range, staving off any potential for boredom with a succession of rooms each offering a short, sharp burst of bizarre, unexpected and beautiful art in wildly divergent forms.
The most popular room was that showing 'The Way Things Go', a thirty minute film from 1986-7 in which an incredible sequence of small-scale, domestic catastrophes is set in motion: we watched, hynotised, as like an exaggerated game of dominos, a bucket of water fell on a plank, which seesawed a ball into an arc, that knocked a test tube into a jug of chemicals, setting off a chemical reaction that created steam, that melted a hanging bag that spilled a liquid onto a slope, that kickstarted a rubber tyre's tumbling fall... and so it went on... Normally I find it hard to watch video art for longer than a few minutes but despite having to perch uncomfortably on the end of an overcrowded bench to watch the film, twenty minutes flashed by in no time at all.
And although accessibility and lightness were the first things that struck me about the video, an undercurrent of seriousness seemed to sneak in the longer you watched it. Observing the way inanimate objects became helplessly subject to the laws of motion, gravity, time, it suddenly struck me that they were like little emblems of human helplessness; the wheel that was nudged down a slope only to knock a glass over became somehow imbued with tragedy, unconscious of its own role in a chain of events, unable to control its own inherent, inevitable responses, doomed to a predestined fate. The title 'The Way Things Go', seems to echo, in tone and metre, the certain truth of Yeats' line 'things fall apart', though is less explicit in its tragedy, leaving the audience to draw its own conclusion from the cycle of destruction presented on screen.
Despite stimulating this somewhat morose line of thought, the video was highly entertaining, even to the four year old child sitting in front of me who couldn't resist exclaiming 'OH NO!' at each choreographed catastrophe, which was probably what we were all thinking but were too restrained to say out loud. The rest of the exhibition was similarly populated with generous portions of wit and gentle provocation, and I was particularly enamoured of the airport photos, which introduced a surprisingly spiritual beauty into the mundane reality of aeroplanes, runways, luggage carriers and luminous yellow bibs. (see http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/fischliandweiss/)