The Tate Modern in London is currently showing an intriguing video work by the British artist Mark Wallinger. The screen is massive, occupying a whole wall of the darkened room in which it is displayed. You see Wallinger at the bottom of a long escalator at the Angel underground station in north London, walking on the belt towards the camera, against the movement of the stairs which rise behind him. He appears as a blind man, with dark glasses and a white cane, which he twitches rhythmically in front of him, like a metronome, from side to side. Two other escalators to the left and right ascend and descend, carrying commuters who watch the artist in silent bemusement.
Wallinger is speaking as he walks. The words are indistinct, strangely deformed, the intonation and emphasis misplaced; but after a while the phrases acquire clarity, they become familiar, and you realize that he is reciting the opening verses of John’s gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God….’ He pauses at the end of the recitation, then begins again. You notice too that there is something peculiar, something unnatural, about the movement of the commuters on either side. Eventually it dawns on you – an epiphany in itself – that the video is being played backwards. Wallinger’s speech is indistinct because he is speaking the words backwards; the clip has been reversed making his words just about intelligible.
Handel’s coronation anthem Zadok the Priest begins to swell and surge in the background until eventually Wallinger stops speaking, stops walking, and is carried up into the diminishing gloom. At that point the struggle to make sense of it all is brought to an end, transmuted into a moment of disturbing wonder by the joyous exuberance of the music and the quiet, effortless ascension.
Now I have some questions about that experience. First, why was it so powerful? Where did the element of transcendence come from? Inevitably people will react to it in different ways, but for me it had to do with the journey that the viewer makes from the struggle to make sense of Wallinger’s repetitive, mesmeric pantomime to the unforeseen experience of sublimity. Underpinning that journey is the hearing of a classic religious text that has been made unfamiliar but which through the difficult process of interpretation has acquired a new urgency and power.
It seems to me that we need these means of defamiliarization, we need to make our approach to the transcendent difficult again. I have for a long time appreciated the argument of the Russian formalist Shklovsky: ‘The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged’ (‘Art as Technique’, 1917). An understanding of the power of the unfamiliar and difficult is almost entirely absent from contemporary evangelical culture.
Secondly, was the experience anything like worship? In a small way it was a shared event. There were people wandering past unmoved by the whole thing, numbed by the aesthetic deficit of modern art. But others appeared to ride the escalator from the indistinct to the ineffable together, in mute communion – if not worship as such, it was certainly like worship. At the vanishing point was not the glory of the living God, revealed to those who have eyes to see, ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’. But there was a marvellous question at least. As Paul recognized, as he stood in the middle of the Areopagus, the poets are not entirely ignorant and blind.
Thirdly, how far outside the sphere of the kingdom of God did I have to go in order to be moved by Wallinger’s puzzling performance? I regard myself as a believer, someone who has been granted unconditional access to the presence of God, who has seen ‘the light of of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ’. So why should I walk out into the darkness again? Why should I be so moved by the reversal of motion, the disruption of communication, the distortion of Scripture, the lapse into silence and uncertainty? Perhaps I am tired of the sterility and superficiality of my religious culture. Perhaps it is only through struggle and misunderstanding that I can rediscover my humanity. Perhaps it is simply, as Shklovsky says, that the ‘process of perception’ is an end in itself – Wallinger has devised a vehicle that transports us through that process. But I wonder too whether this is not the Spirit of the living God putting me, physically and spiritually, where others are. It helps to see what the journey looks like from the beginning.
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