With and Without
How a small church, a sculpture, and a video help make sense of the strange fact that we're alive
By David Plans Posted in Architecture, Humanity, Visual Art on February 22, 2021 0 Comments 7 min read
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Standing in front of the humble wooden door of St. Ethelburga at Bishopsgate, its simple gothic arch and stone façade an inviting refuge amongst the glassy giants crowding its flanks, I feel the urge to walk in, but I am momentarily contained by shafts of pale reflected sunlight. They beam weakly through the fog from Foster’s stretched-egg monument to insurance, its rhomboid glass diagrid glistering over the small gap this survivor, this church without a parish, quietly occupies. I put my hand on its wall. The Great Fire of London. The Blitz. A massive IRA bomb. It has overcome great odds, enduring numerous feats of violence to stand now, an improbable refuge, in the middle of this livid sea of London’s financial edifices.

Earlier, I walked away from an insurance giant and its own, more modest glass palace and into the unfolding concrete skirt of Tower 42, after an unsuccessful funding pitch during which I singularly failed to make my point. And now I have found myself taken in by this place. The explosion without, letting my temper voice concerns out loud in my investor’s offices, now triggering an implosion within, a reckoning for which I am wholly unprepared.

St. Ethelburga’s unpresuming nave is empty, and my gratitude swells as someone sticking their head in from a side door beckons me to sit down, somehow knowing what I do not yet know myself. That is, that I need to break down and I cannot face doing it in the middle of Bishopsgate. A few hiccuped sobs later, quietly contained by the thick winter scarf wrapped around my neck and pressed into my mouth by my freezing hand, I am able to see the place anew. I wonder with amazement at its fragmented nature. Its fabric is a composition of time beyond time, of time outside the affronts of human violence, its south arcade clearly 15th-century, its columns rebuilt to its original plan after a tipper truck loaded with almost a ton of fertiliser detonated outside its benevolent door.

As I sit pondering the gigantic effort and sums of money it must have taken to rebuild this nave piece by piece, it brings to mind Cold Dark Matter, a 1991 work by Cornelia Parker, the British Dame of exploded and extruded quotidian objects. Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, writing for the Guardian in 2019, thought it resembled “a giant chandelier poised between destruction and creation.” Parker’s piece consisted of the charred and splintered remains of an archetypically British small garden shed, hung from the ceiling mid-explosion. Its miscellaneous domestic and agricultural contents were blown up by the British Army at the artist’s request, and then carefully arranged around a single, powerful lightbulb, creating a shadow play resembling the energy contained in the birth of an explosion, or a planet, or the universe itself. I could, when I saw it exhibited, see the pulsing will of something other than Parker’s imagination and her “cartoon violence” at work. It gave me a view, as does the broken skeletal frame of this uncommon refuge, of our origin, at the planetary and singular level, of the births of planets and of our own bodies. Parker used the shed, a quintessential British object as viewed from without, to invite us to peer into the heart of violence. Her orchestrated death brings us into quiet contemplation while the shed’s objects, perpetually alive and free of the pathos of inert post-explosion debris, invite us to view the unstable core of Being, forcing us to explore our placement in the Universe.

I want to pray, but I haven’t in years. Was never taught how in the first place.

Instead, feeling my unuttered supplications trail with me to the door like trails of unspooled string, I step out into the light again, and walk down to Gracechurch and eventually to Southwark Bridge, the vast industrial shape of the Tate Modern looming in the evening murk. I have tickets to see Ryoichi Kurokawa perform in the cavernous vacuum of Turbine Hall.

As he begins his show, the giant dual screens projecting fractured curves and shattered lines of digital light, I realise he is performing a similar invocation to that of Parker’s shed. Conjuring light and stillness from moving form; finding vibrancy in the exploded view of a material that he then refactors in a way not dissimilar to Parker’s explosive and redemptive process. Later, I buy a piece of his, syn_mod.2. Owning the right to reproduce it at will, I play it to myself on my meagre laptop screen, pausing here and there to admire his astonishing fragmentations, then letting it play out so I can hear its accompanying music again, shivered parcels of white and brown noise, synthesised into synchronised detonations with their visual form, pausing for vertiginous effect that evoke’s György Ligeti’s sharp orchestral drops in Lontano, playing in the shadows afterwards, the ear longing for explanation, the eyes feasting in the dark.

As I sit on the cold concrete floor of the Turbine Hall, I realise both Parker and Kurokawa give us a way to account for the world. Parker freezes time in violent stills. Kurokawa uses time-based audiovisual material to extemporize our inner violence.

In writing about meaning-making, Garth Greenwell illuminates how accounting for the world we see—for our veiled perception can only ever allow an account of it, and not its full reality—is the core of artistic practice: “This is what I value in Augustine, what I value in all the art I love: not a set of arguments and conclusions, not a message, but the shapes a mind makes as it struggles to make meaning from a life.” Greenwell’s accounting, drawn through St. Augustine’s confessional questioning of the world, allows us an ultimately useful perspective: the helplessness we experience before “the ultimate, irresolvable question, which we so often experience as an impasse” becomes a conduit to overcoming the overwhelming notion of aliveness, of being thrown into this world.

One might extend Greenwell’s argument: beyond the sense of helplessness from which we can, try as we might, never fully divorce ourselves, St. Augustine found darker places to look than his own vulnerability. The Earth of Genesis, our feral origin, signifies for him “the invisible, unstructured, and abysmally dark incompleteness of the bodily mass from which things existing in time were to come” (De Gen. ad litt., I, 8.). In that abyss, and in the text of Genesis itself, one finds time out of time again: a “formless and empty” Earth where “darkness was over the surface of the deep,” the formless, global ocean that engulfed the planet three billion years ago. The text and St. Augustine point at something we now know as scientific fact, having found the telltale chemical signatures of this endless water in ancient blocks of ocean crust. In my faithless and unstructured world, where I fumble my non-prayers in the dark, I can’t account for how the writers of Genesis knew of our planet’s origin as one devoid of any continents, and lacking the tooled faith of a non-atheistic mind, I construct a logical argument that we story formless origins because each of us transformed from formless ichorous intention into a clump of beating, pulsating cells.

I wonder now as I watch Kurokawa turn the knobs of his digital periscopes if time, in Parker’s frozen shed-origin and in Kurokawa’s in-time explosions, is offered to us in as violent a form as the unstructured pre-Earth, to help us account for the violence we see around us in the world, and within ourselves. And is this not enough? That we might peer into the dark sublime, and re-surface helpless, finding our way out?


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