IF Jesus Christ walked down O'Connell Street tomorrow, there is a good chance that someone would tell Him to feck off back to Africa. However, there is also a lobby, inveterate letter-writers to this newspaper, who would like to erect a statue of Him there, in O'Connell Street that is. You have to wonder if this is really a good idea. Having spent a considerable amount of time myself over the past 15 years on a series of paintings of the Passion, it might be assumed that I would be in favour of such a venture. What I am in favour of is good and ambitious public art.
Throughout the history of western art there are many examples of great art depicting the life and death of Jesus Christ. None of these works is great because of what it depicts; some are significant because of how their themes have been given form by the artists who made them.
For instance, in the National Gallery in London, one of the curators in a light-hearted moment decided to hang Alvise Vivarini's Virgin and Child next to Titian's painting The Ma- donna and Child with St John the Baptist and St Catherine of Alexandria. Both paintings come from roughly the same place and the same time. In Vivarini's dysfunctional family group, the Christ child looks about to fall out of the picture unnoticed by his mother who is in the kind of bored stupor one would normally only associate with prolonged exposure to daytime television. The whole thing is done in a kind of lacklustre, going through the motions, "Madonna a month" style.
In Titian's painting of a more complex grouping we get everything we would expect and more, a great composition, extraordinary combinations and relationships of colour, wonderful handling of the medium itself and then there, at the centre, the blow to the solar plexus is delivered in the form of the gaze exchanged between St Catherine and the Christ child in what is possibly the greatest evocation of human love in western art. It is there to be recognised by anybody who has ever experienced the emotion. Titian has gone further into the subject than one would have believed possible before it was done and, therefore, arouses the responses of the viewer in an unexpected and shocking way, revealing in the process the true meaning and content of his picture.
What has all this to do with a statue of Jesus in O'Connell Street you may well ask? Two things, I would say: any such statue should aspire to be good art, and as such, cannot be anachronistic. It must be of its time and relevant to it. This is something that has remained a constant prerequisite for ambitious art over the years. What you put up as art in the nation's main thoroughfare says something very telling about the nation. You may get away with a lump of abstract bronze called The Spirit of Duty Free in the concourse of Shannon Airport but a public sculpture in the heart of the capital should be central to the nation's sense of its identity.
Secondly, and this is something that has changed since Titian's time: the shared order of belief and values that enabled Titian and Vivarini's pictures to be constructed as valid art is no longer in place in Ireland in 2001. This fracturing of a consensus is a universal thing, but it seems to have been particularly swift and shocking in Ireland's case. Perhaps this was because for so long Ireland seemed to have such a strong sense of who and what it was.
Monuments tell us more about the societies that erect them than anything they are intended to memorialise. It is easy enough to see this in the case of the totalitarian monuments of the former Eastern bloc countries where the political hierarchies were depicted in the manner of Greek and Roman gods, or in Nazi Germany or in modernn day Iraq or North Korea.[IT
IT is less easy to see it when it is closer to home. As a child I travelled around England to the various towns that had football teams in what was then known as the English First Division. My Dad worked for British Railways and I had a privileged railway pass which made my journeys possible. What I remember of it is vague but, as well as the different games and towns, are the monuments, always slightly different but essentially the same - the list of names, the regimental crests, the bronze soldiers or wreaths. The Tyneside Irish, The Leeds Pals, The Sheffield City Battalion, The Liverpool Pals, The East Lancashire Regiment, The Manchester Regiment, The Birmingham Pals, The Employees of the Great Western Railway. It went on and on, and the cumulative effect was very powerful. The monuments didn't tell you anything about the men or the battles or how they all died. You just got this big sense of loss, guilt and trauma.
In the 20th century, the subject of Christ's life and passion has not disappeared from advanced art. As recently as last year, a statue of Christ was temporarily erected on the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, a work by the British artist Mark Wallinger. If you look, it is quite surprising to see how many artists have probed the subject, often in the later stages of their careers. They are looking for a subject with profound meaning perhaps, something with gravitas. In this century, though, it has been the individual artist's choice and it is difficult to think of a successful case of patronage by the church. The fact that this subject became private rather than public has negated the sometimes stifling and controlling effects of patronage and has resulted in a changed image of Christ.
Often the imagery has seeped into an artist's work in an unexpected and ambiguous context. Picasso's sculpture of a man with a sheep, for instance, has an unmistakable Christian lineage, but is new and unexpected. In other cases, the restrictions of the extreme formal language adopted by the artist make the work virtually impenetrable to the uninitiated viewer. This would apply to the American artist Barnet Newman's sequence of paintings The Stations of the Cross in the National Gallery Washington D.C.
In the latter half of the 20th century, the painter most often associated with the spiritual is Mark Rothko. His images have often been seen as almost abstract representations of God. His major work is a sequence of paintings for a secular chapel in Houston where this group of enormous and sombre, virtually imageless paintings impose an atmosphere of meditative solemnity. Essential to the ethos of these works is that no ideology or correct way of thinking is being imposed upon the viewer, and this is perhaps the greatest challenge facing anyone proposing something as literal as a statue of Jesus Christ for O'Connell Street. Not everybody is comfortable with the way that Christ's image and moral authority have been used and manipulated.
When thinking about the sort of sculpture that might work now, the image which kept recurring in my mind was that of Alberto Giacometti's Pointing Man (Tate Gallery, London 1947) and also his sculpture Large Woman 11 (Maeght Foundation, St-Paul 1960). These works would, I think, have been enormously successful realised as huge, monumental sculptures, and in a very direct way speak to every man and woman. They are, in fact, very simple things, but resonant with history and experience, the grandeur and dignity of the human form is expressed in a way that evokes Greek and Egyptian sculpture, yet also the apocalyptic horror of 20th century extermination camps.
The essential question that emerges in relation to a public sculpture of Jesus Christ is exactly what we think we will be representing with it, and this will involve digging deeply in search of some solid shared foundations.
In the fourth chapter of William Golding's novel, The Spire, a large sheet of metal is set up on a trestle so that it will catch the sun and reflect it down into the pit underneath the crossways, where the great spire of the cathedral is being erected. The dean of the cathedral crouches over the pit with the master builder and below them a patch of ground falls away and descends to the bottom of the pit, where it lands with a soft thud: "The pebbles that fell with it lay shining dully in the reflected light, and settled themselves in their new bed. But as he watched them and waited for them to settle, the hair rose on the nape of his neck; for they had never settled completely. He saw one stir, as with a sudden restlessness; and then he saw that they were all moving more or less, with a slow stirring, like the stirring of grubs. The earth was moving . . ."
A permanent exhibition space for Hughie O'Donoghue's series of sacred paintings, Episodes from the Passion, is currently being sought in Ireland
