ART preview
SCULPTURE Man Walks Among Us
St Ivlungo Museum Of Religious Life And Art, Glasgow, until Sun t Apr t ir
Hunter's Jesus: all clean lines and smooth modelling
In Kurt Vonnegut's book Slaughterhouse Five, an alien remarks that the flaw in Jesus' story was that he was the son of the most powerful being in the universe. For the alien, the moral of Jesus’ life thus became 'before you kill somebody make sure he isn't well connected'. In the alien’s alternative gospel Jesus is a bum who is adopted by God. God then warns
PAINTING Significant Others
National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 7 Jan Jr * it it
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‘0 Allan Ramsay‘s delicate sentimental portraits
The pressures of modern times often eclipse the important relationships we have With parents, spouses, siblings and friends. Familial and social gatherings are brief affairs captured on instant film, creating a snapshot socrety.
Opposing this is the remarkable and pOignant exhibition Significant Others which celebrates 300 years of the art of relationships. Immortalised for posterity are ordinary and famous people whose main accomplishment
that he will destroy anybody who torments a burn with no connections.
I don't know if Kenny Hunter is well connected, but his receipt of the £10,000 commission (with up to £16,000 for materials) for sculpting a contemporary figure of Christ must have made him gaze fondly at the heavens. Hunter's Jesus, while not obviously a burn, is an attempt to humanise the son of God. He's ethnically correct and has elongated hands to stress his carpentry background. Of course this kind of demythologising is nothing new. Caravaggio after all, painted a chubby Christ with greasy hair.
Technically, Hunter’s Jesus is all clean lines and smooth modelling, appealing to the present penchant for lkea modernity. It has the look of an expensive religious toy, no doubt The Simpsons’ Ned Flanders would give it to his children. The cartoon edge could be construed as a sly hint that the piece is 'making a point' about the commodification of Christianity. Let's hope not, it would smack of the kind of hypocrisy that regularly inflamed Jesus.
This piece deserves some political and artistic controversy. Apart from the absence of much imagination in the commission/artwork, the representation of a Christian icon in a new millennium of overt secularism and multi-culturalism grates. That the level of funding is a substantial chunk of the city's annual fund for purchasing a variety of contemporary art, only deepens the insult. (John Beagles)
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