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INTRODUCTION
It was Pope Paul VI who said
that the split between faith and
culture was the drama of our
time. In another time, the
Church was the great patron of
the arts, and Christian faith an
extraordinary source of artistic
creativity. But things
have changed. The Church
still produces devotional art
for its own purposes, and much
of it is deeply evocative.
Yet art, for the most part, has
taken its leave of the Church
and Christian faith, as has
Western culture more
generally. The search for
meaning and beauty tends to
follow other paths. For
Christianity, the danger here is
that it can find itself in a
kind of billabong in which it
can only repeat the forms of the
past. It can find itself a
stranger to the quest to forge
meaning and show forth beauty in
ways attuned to the deeper
currents of culture today.
But this cannot be the way of a
Church called always to speak
the word of Christ – ultimately
meaningful, ultimately beautiful
– in the idioms of today.
At the heart of Christianity,
there must be a creative tension
between the forms of the past
and the forms of the present,
between devotional art and art
that stands outside the circle
of faith, between sacred space
and the still resonant spaces
created by art which, if not
explicitly sacred, is clearly
open to the transcendent.
Such a tension will tend to
subvert conventional and perhaps
too-easy perceptions of meaning
and beauty in order to bring to
birth new perceptions which are
more difficult and more
revelatory. That is why
this exhibition, Crisis,
Catharsis and Contemplation,
strikes the right note. It
sets the tension and strikes up
a conversation which may at
times be unsettling but which
can also be enriching, even
enabling, both for Christian
faith and for art.
Bishop Mark Coleridge
Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne
ESSAY
"Art is born and takes hold
wherever there is a timeless
and insatiable longing for the
spiritual." Andrei
Tarkovsky
This “timeless and insatiable
longing” has inspired twenty-two
challenging, thoughtful and
evocative works for display in
two extraordinary locations.
Their visual poetry opens an
unexpected dialogue between
contemporary art and the gothic
revival Cathedrals of Melbourne
and Sydney. For millennia
artists have been bridging the
invisible with the visible.
Similarly, religious tradition
has been witness to and
reactivated the Divine mysteries
which lie at its core. Religious
tradition has been witness to
the divine mysteries and
constantly reactivated their
meaning. The gradual forming of
a chasm between the contemporary
artist and the Church over an
interminable period is rarely
addressed in contemporary
culture. Crisis, Catharsis
and Contemplation comes at
a time when the Church is in
crisis, most contemporary art
struggles to engage religion,
and our visual contemplation of
the sacred is desperately in
decline.
......
Read moreArtist Conversation
The following is an edited
transcript of a discussion
between David Rastas, Robert
Klein Boonschate, Lindy
Patterson, and James Waller
concerning the nature of sacred
space in respect to the
cathedral exhibition,“ Crisis,
Catharsis, and Contemplation”.
The discussion was recorded in
the artists’ studios, with works
in progress for the exhibition
hovering around and resonating
with ideas as they arose.
DR: My hope is that this
exhibition will help us
rediscover the Gothic space.
Contemporary art in the
Cathedral can help us to see
with new eyes; this is not a
game; the experience is
potentially transformative.
LP: The space wishes to have
that transformative property.
RKB: Yes, and it can only
achieve that through public
interaction.
DR: The viewer is invited into
the heart of the space and it is
in the heart that this encounter
with the sacred takes place.
JW: We are elevated through the
space
LP: It is a consecrated space;
made so through ritual.
......
Read moreTestimonials
Crisis,
Catharsis, and Contemplation
April – May 2006
St Patrick’s Cathedral,
Melbourne
-
Curator David Rastas
Curatorial Assistants Carly Housiaux and Ishmael Bryce
Catalogue Editor Brendan Rodway
Designer Miriam McWilliam
Contributors Bishop Mark Coleridge and Rosemary Crumlin
Artists Patrick Bernard, Godwin Bradbeer, James Clayden, Francis Denton, Clayton Diack, Robert Drummond, Angela Di Fronzo, Grant Fraser, Melissa Hawkless, Gerhardt Hoffman, Robert Klein Boonschate, Queenie McKenzie, Michael Needham, David Rastas, Patricia Semmler, Claudia Terstappen, James Waller