THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

Elizabeth Wright is a graduate of the Royal College of Art and is shortlisted for the Institute of Contemporary Arts’ annual award on the strength of such works as a photocopy of the telephone Yellow Pages (sic).

She has recently produced a ‘sculpture’ (for so it is called) entitled Honey, I parked the van in the living room, presumably echoing the title of a well-known film of a decade ago.  The work consists of just that: a Volkswagen van inserted into somebody’s sitting room (not hers, but that of the art dealer who commissioned it for her home in Camberwell, south London).

To complete this work, it required four mechanics taking two days to dismantle a new van, take it to Camberwell in bits, and reassemble it in the relevant sitting room, where, not surprisingly, it takes up most of the available space.  If it is not to be a permanent exhibit, the whole process will later have to be done in reverse.  A £2000 grant from the Millennium Commission made it possible.    And that’s it.

The artist says: 

          ‘The van dwarfs the room and transforms it.  The industrially designed and crafted object becomes remade and recast as an art object … whilst the domestic interior becomes strangely unfamiliar, invaded by a new presence.”

Funnily enough, in case you think the world is going mad, Christians believe something rather similar happens in the case of the Resurrection.  The world, our familiar day-by-day world, is transformed, made ‘strangely unfamiliar’ by an ‘outlandish’ presence:  that of the risen Christ.

Just as one understanding of the Nativity was that the world stopped for a milli-second when Christ was born, in order to resume as something different (though externally the same), so we believe that the Death and Resurrection of Christ have actually made our world different.  Externally the same, but still different. 

It obviously requires an act of faith to believe this: that what we see is actually changed (a similar act of faith is of course necessary at our Mass).  But it also requires us to act in harmony with our belief – to show the invisible change through visible changed behaviour.  Just as our Mass is in some way ‘weakened’ by the poverty of our response to it, so the power of the Resurrection will become clearer if we attempt to change externally the visible world which Christ has invisibly and internally changed – and here we can bring in a host of topical ingredients, such as ecology, waste, landscape,   roads, and all the rest.  In other words, do we do everything in a ‘Resurrection manner’?  If not, why not?