Weekend essay

Art

Climate

Culture

13 October 2023

9 min read

Life Is more important than art

Recent art exhibitions tackle life’s big questions. Jonathan Evens reviews their themes and the roles creators take.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A photo-realistic work of art depicting a fiigure raised on fire wood wearing a colour of large metal rays, against a desertifying landscape of dead trees.

The Prophecy, Untitled No.9, Fabrice Monteiro.

The Sainsbury Centre.

Life Is More Important Than Art claimed the recent summer exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery. Taking inspiration from African-American writer and novelist James Baldwin, who proposed that life is more important than art which is why art is important, the exhibition explored the intersection of art and everyday life and the role of contemporary art institutions in a time of uncertainty and change. As Whitechapel Gallery Director Gilane Tawadros has explained, Baldwin “meant that we have the bare necessities of life - a roof over our head, food to eat and so on - but life should be more than the bare necessities” and that’s “where art comes in.”

The Whitechapel Gallery has not been alone at this time in exploring the place of art in relation to big issues and contemporary challenges. Recent exhibitions at the Gagosian, Hayward and Tate Galleries have each used specific philosophical theories to explore the legacy of colonialism and posit creative ways forward in the future, while Dear Earth, also at the Hayward Gallery, explored themes of care, hope, and emotional and spiritual connection with our environment.

Their approach understands art as alive and capable of engaging people with the fundamental questions of life.

Norwich’s Sainsbury Centre has perhaps been most systematic and ambitious in pursuing this particular trend in exhibition curation. In September, the Centre launched the first of its new Big Question seasons exploring the theme of Planet for our Future: How do we adapt to a Transforming World? The Centre is setting the exploration of big issues at the very heart of their exhibition programming, seeking to empower art to address fundamental societal challenges. Their approach understands art as alive and capable of engaging people with the fundamental questions of life and will see artworks from all over the world travelling to the Centre to pose urgent, global questions to visitors and help them find the answers. Future seasons will ask: What is truth? (Spring 2024); Why do people take drugs? (Autumn 2024); How do we resuscitate a dying sea? (Spring 2025); Can humans stop killing each other? (Autumn 2025); and What is the meaning of life? (Spring 2026).

Planet for our Future has an interconnected programme of exhibitions, interventions, collection displays, an artist residency, museum-late, artist-led workshops, and special projects, taking place across the whole art landscape and out into neighbouring communities. It aims to empower art to generate a living dialogue with visitors, inviting them to consider the global challenges of pollution, environmental destruction, and climate change. The wider aim is to mobilise the Sainsbury Centre as a space of hope through the transformative power of art: a space where we can imagine better futures in which collective human behaviour mitigates the effects of climate change.

Given the extent to which the exhibitions mentioned above include themes of spirituality, it would seem that Greenberg and his ilk were on the wrong side of history in this respect too.

These approaches represent a remarkable success for the arguments that artist and academic Suzi Gablik made in the 1980’s and 1990’s in books such as Has Modernism Failed? and The Reenchantment of Art. Gablik contrasted ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ with ‘Art for Society’s Sake’ whilst arguing for the latter, a prescient choice given the current approaches of curators. At the time, Gablik was challenging the received wisdom of art critics such as Clement Greenberg who “rejected the notion that there is any higher purpose to art, or any ‘spiritual’ point to its production.” Given the extent to which the exhibitions mentioned above include themes of spirituality, it would seem that Greenberg and his ilk were on the wrong side of history in this respect too.

I recently took part in The Art of Creation, a conference held at King's College London and organised through the National Gallery’s Interfaith Sacred Art Forum, which brought together speakers from a wide range of disciplines to explore the intersection of art, theology, and ecology. The conference was part of a year-long series of reflections on three paintings from the National Gallery’s Collection – Claude Monet’s Flood Waters, Vincent Van Gogh’s Long Grass with Butterflies, and Rachel Ruysch’s Flowers in a Vase - which raise ecological concerns. The papers exploring aspects of these paintings drew on an eclectic, yet fascinating, range of sources including: Maori beliefs; the Jewish and Christian scriptures; South African poetry; the Nouvelle Theologie; the theology of resonance; the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Marilynne Robinson; and a range of related artworks including the work of Barnett Newman and Regan O’Callaghan. The conference initiated a dialogue regarding ways in which art and faith together can help us make reparative connections in a fragile world and its approaches suggest ways of engaging with the big issues that artists and curators are exploring.

This relationship with creation mirrors that of artists (in the broadest sense), who are both sub-creators and co-creators.

In my paper, which brought verses from Chapter 38 of the Book of Job into dialogue with the three paintings, I argued that God is calling humanity into a relationship with creation in which we respond with humility, awe and wonder to its abundance and diversity, which always exceeds our grasp however much knowledge of it we gain. I suggested, too, that this relationship with creation mirrors that of artists (in the broadest sense), who are both sub-creators and co-creators. As sub-creators, artists recognise that we cannot create from nothing (‘ex nihilo’) and are, therefore, always in a humble, interdependent state where we are as aware of boundaries, edges and frames as we are of openings, doorways and possibilities. As co-creators, we are called to work with the grain or tend the essence of creation and its creatures, as in the approach of sculptors who seek to be true to the materials they use or in the ideas Gerard Manley Hopkins developed regarding inscape and instress.

This section of the poem concerning Job begins by initiating a dialogue as God challenges Job to stand up and answer the questions he poses about the created order; questions such as, do you know the measurements of the earth or the sources for oceans, light, snow and rain? At the time of writing Job, and the writer of this poem, could not answer those questions, so are left simply in a state of awe and wonder. We, however, are, often, able to answer such questions and are, as a result, able to discuss the meaning of such knowledge while also retaining an awareness of the vast dimensions of the abundance and diversity of creation within which our expanded and expanding knowledge remains infinitesimal compared with the whole. Interestingly, the novelist Marilynne Robinson suggests in an essay on ‘Psalm 8’ that,

“A question is more spacious than a statement, [being] far better suited to expressing wonder”.

Artists have regularly worked with just such a balance through an awareness of being sub-creators and co-creators with God. Artists, including those considered by The Art of Creation conference, have often had a different relationship with the divine and with creation. Whether figurative artists working from nature, as are the three principal artists considered by The Art of Creation conference, or symbolic artists creating secondary worlds, artists are often aware of themselves as co-creators or, in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, sub-creators. We are sub-creators or co-creators when we recognise that we create from creation, not ex nihilo, which involves humility in order that we tend, rather than dominate, creation.

Claude Monet’s Flood Waters, Vincent Van Gogh’s Long Grass with Butterflies, and Rachel Ruysch’s Flowers in a Vase.

A Monet painting of a flood with bare trees emerging from the grey water.

Claude Monet, Flood Waters.

A Van Gogh painting of grass tufts of green, yellow, lavender, grey and other colours.

Vincent Van Gogh: Long Grass with Butterflies.

A 17th century style painting of flowers in a vase against a dark background

Rachel Ruysch, Flowers in a Vase.

Van Gogh paints an expanse of grass extending beyond his canvas in Long Grass with Butterflies, while Rachel Ruysch’s Flowers in a Vase brings flowers that bloom at different times of year together in one image. Awareness of edges, frames, borders, boundaries and other constraints in regard to their canvasses are used by these artists as an element in contrasting the limits of human understanding and the fecundity of nature. Even when artificially exceeding these boundaries, as Ruysch does, this can be in order to highlight our inability to do so in our primary world.

Co-creation is a concept which takes us further in that it involves human creation which is in line with the essence of God’s creation. Another creation story, that of Adam naming the animals, this time from the Book of Genesis, is key to understanding this aspect of creativity. Names in ancient times described the essence of the creature or object so named. That is what is described in this story. In our naming of the animals together with God, we look for the essence of each creature and then name that essence. This suggests a path to exploring possibilities within creation in partnership with God by creating the new in harmony with the essence of the actual.

This process of paying attention to come to know the essence of a thing by imaginatively exploring its various possibilities in order to realise its distinctive essence is what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called instress. He also called the essence that we identify the inscape. Ultimately, he suggests, “the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it.” He wrote more about this understanding in the poem ‘Kingfishers catch fire’:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

In an essay entitled ‘Wonders Never Cease: Integrity & the Modern Intellectual Condition’, Marilynne Robinson suggests that a theistic vision of the world, like that of Hopkins, “is freer to see the world whole, as it is in itself, so to speak” and she quotes Hopkins who says, “The world is full of the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil”. She continues: “Within this great given, that Being is an astonishment, any aspect of being can be approached with an expectation of discovering wondrous things. The slime that comes up from the depths of the sea in fishermen’s nets is a ruined universe of bioluminescence. Microorganisms live in clouds, air moves in rivers, butterflies navigate the earth’s magnetic field. The matter cosmologists call “dark,” which makes up most of the mass of the universe, seems to be non-atomic. Wonders never cease.” As a result, in her essay on ‘Psalm 8’ she gives this credo,

“I have spent my life watching not to see beyond the world, [but] merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes … [as] With all due respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”

The approach that Robinson and Hopkins advocate as artists is one that could assist us more generally in relation to the climate emergency, while the sense of wonder found in their work is replicated in the images of Monet, Van Gogh and Ruysch and is, I suggest, what God looks for from us in the questions that are posed in the Book of Job. By responding to a wide range of ideas and sources, The Art of Creation conference demonstrated a similar balance to awe and knowledge, recognising that this attitude and approach opens up reflection on the abundance of the world and cultures that God created and also holds out the possibility that new inspirations will be sparked from the interplay of ideas that ensues. These ways of relating art, creation and faith suggest one approach to engaging with the big issues that artists and curators are exploring and which faith communities, including the Church, have explored throughout the history of humanity.

Interview

Assisted dying

Culture

Politics

S&U interviews

13 February 2025

5 min read

Marsha de Cordova: the personal experiences driving her passionate politics

“What disabled people need is assistance to live, not to die.”

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A woman wearing a red jacket stands formally beside an office stair case.

When Marsha de Cordova talks about most issues relating to her work as the Member of Parliament for Battersea, in south London, she sticks to the standard position of her Labour party. Meeting at her constituency office by the busy Clapham Junction railway station, she dutifully defends her party’s government, elected last July. She points to ministers’ work to reform planning and improve renters’ rights as evidence they are making progress.

But when conversation turns to the Assisted Dying Bill currently going through parliament, her tone becomes unmistakeably more urgent and her passion more obviously personal.

The strong feelings mark de Cordova out as one of a group of Labour MPs who have been spurred by personal experience and, in many cases, religious conviction to oppose the Assisted Dying Bill introduced by a colleague, Spen Valley MP Kim Leadbeater. While the legislation is a private member’s bill without official government support, it has been widely seen as reflecting the views of Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

De Cordova, who is Black, expresses similarly trenchant views about the government’s rhetoric on immigration. She is also a strong supporter of rapprochement with the European Union.

However, her views on assisted dying – informed partly by being a committed Christian – are particularly forcefully expressed. She answers tersely, “No, I’m not”, when asked if she is happy about the political capital the new government has expended on the Assisted Dying Bill. She adds that she voted against it at second reading, the first parliamentary vote on a bill. She intends to oppose it again at third reading, before it passes to the House of Lords.

“We didn’t need to expend so much capital on it,” de Cordova says. “The aim now has to be to ensure the bill doesn’t pass third reading.”

Many of the Labour MPs who have opposed the legislation have cited religious objections. In the Cabinet, they include health secretary Wes Streeting and foreign secretary David Lammy, both Christians, and justice secretary Shabana Mahmood, a Muslim.

De Cordova also links her opposition to her disability. De Cordova is registered blind because of nystagmus, in which the eyes repeatedly move involuntarily, disrupting vision. There have been fears assisted people could come under greater pressure than others to seek assisted death.

“As a disabled woman, I’m incredibly concerned,” de Cordova says. “What disabled people need is assistance to live, not to die. That should be our government’s priority.”

“My faith is an integral part of who I am. It really is part of my values, my beliefs, my politics.”

The assisted dying fight has garnered unusual levels of publicity for the Battersea MP, who entered parliament seven years ago when barely expecting to do so. De Cordova, now 49, was serving as a Lambeth borough councillor when the 2017 snap general election was called and decided to seek the Labour nomination for Battersea, then held by the Conservatives.

The seat was one of several Conservative seats in pro-Remain areas that fell to Labour’s surprisingly strong showing in the election in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum.

“No one really thought I could win here,” de Cordova says. “Obviously, Brexit I would say played a role in that I’m a strong Remainer.”

De Cordova increased her majority in 2019 and last year’s general election. She sees strong continuities between serving as an MP and her previous role in the charity sector. She had been working when elected as the engagement and advocacy director for the Thomas Pocklington Trust, which supports blind and partially sighted people.

“I didn’t grow up wanting to be a politician,” de Cordova says, of her upbringing in Bristol. “I’ve always had the desire to be making a difference. All of my work before becoming a politician centred around that – being that voice for the voiceless.”

She links her work to her faith. She became a Christian in her late 20s and now attends Holy Trinity Clapham. The church is famous as the spiritual home of William Wilberforce and the “Clapham Sect” of early 19th century campaigners against the slave trade and other social evils.

Her faith has led to her appointment as second church estates commissioner – the liaison between parliament and England’s established church, who answers questions in the Commons on behalf of the church.

“My faith is an integral part of who I am,” de Cordova says. “It really is part of my values, my beliefs, my politics.”

It becomes clear speaking to her that her objections to the policies of the government – and the Assisted Dying Bill, which many of her party colleagues support – are clustered around areas involving challenges to fundamental rights.

She objects to the Assisted Dying Bill because she sees it as part of a steady erosion of disabled people’s rights.

“The issue will have a hugely, hugely disproportionate impact on disabled people,” she says. “That, for me, is a no-no.”

Provision for disabled people was “hollowed out” under the last Conservative government, she says.

“That, for me, will always be the issue,” de Cordova says. “I want to campaign and fight for full equality for us.”

She also views immigration issues through the prism of immigrants’ rights.

Asked if she wishes the government took a less hostile tone on the issue, she replies: “From my perspective, when I think about immigration, I tend to think about it in a compassionate way.”

She calls for the establishment of “safe routes” to ensure people fleeing persecution can claim asylum from outside the UK, without making dangerous Channel crossings. The government has shown no signs of introducing such rights.

“Let’s think about immigration in a positive way,” de Cordova says, adding that her grandparents were immigrants to the UK from the Caribbean. “The Tories and the right have always tried to portray it as a negative. It’s not always a negative.”

For de Cordova, the unglamorous role of church estates commissioner forms part of that pattern of advocating for the voiceless.

The job entails dealing with every aspect of MPs’ questions about church life, including the status of historic buildings and other less obviously morally important questions.

However, de Cordova, who was appointed a month before publication of the Makin Report on the church’s handling of abuse by John Smyth, is clear the church has urgent problems to resolve.

The Makin Report has to be a “turning point”, she says.

“I understand steps are being taken to address the challenges,” de Cordova says. “They need to set out over time how they’ll ensure such abuse never happens again.”

The campaigning approach is part of de Cordova’s wider philosophy. She says she has faced many challenges as a result of her disability and tried to overcome them.

“I want to ensure that I can break down the barriers for people coming after me, so that people don’t have to face those same experiences,” she says.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up