property - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

church, going*

But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure.

Philip Larkin, Church Going (1954)

Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky

Given that Christianity seemed to be – in the sense of being a kind of shared societal glue – on its way out in the 1950s, and was undermined further by the social revolutions of the 1960s and 70s, it’s surprising in a way that churches are still standing at all. But what Larkin, for all of his humanist cynicism didn’t foresee, is what seems the obvious fate of churches in the 21st century: they won’t be allowed to peacefully moulder into dust and neglect like the menhirs and cairns of previous eras – they get sold instead.

At the time of writing, the Church of Scotland has seventeen churches for sale, among other kinds of properties and plots of land. The same thing isn’t happening with Catholic churches, Mosques, Synagogues or Mormon temples or whatever it is that Scientologists have – not because of anything inherently superior about those religions or the quality of their followers’ faith, but because, at the time when these churches were built – mostly in the 19th century, but some even earlier – the Church of Scotland was something you had to opt out of, not something you had to join. And therefore, in a way – although not of course a legally binding way – the Church of Scotland is selling off something which belongs to the people of Scotland.

The idea that money is more important to the Church of Scotland than the buildings that were at the centre of the spiritual and social lives of generations of people (and also, the place that God lived, I guess) seems grotesque, but there it is. It’s just bricks (or stone) and mortar, after all; or that, presumably is the logic, because God doesn’t actually live in a stone building but in either heaven or the hearts of believers etc, etc. And yet, if it’s just a building, how come people can only vandalise houses or schools or barns, but they can “desecrate” churches? “De-consecration” – what the church does in order to render its buildings saleable – is just a non-inflammatory way of saying desecration. De-consecrating the church doesn’t affect the material of the building, but it does remove its purpose – but what it can’t do is remove its history. So if you buy a church, what is it that are you actually buying? In a book I liked as a teenager, Terry Brooks’s Magic Kingdom For Sale – Sold! (1986), a depressed lawyer called Ben Holiday buys what turns out to be something like Narnia or Middle Earth, from a catalogue (nowadays it would be from a website). If Mr Holiday bought a church, he wouldn’t be mystically transported to an otherworldly realm, but he would – and the buyers of these buildings do – become the owner of a place where thousands of people were, in a meaningful way, transported to a place where, whatever the privations and terrors of their daily lives might be, things made some sort of black-and-white sense. Somewhere that virtue was rewarded with eternal paradise, vice was punished with eternal damnation and the person in the pulpit had the correct answers to whatever questions life was throwing at you. You don’t have to believe in any of that to realise that it was (and to some extent I suppose still is) important.

Like, I’m sure, many convinced lifelong atheists (and I’m a very un-spiritual one at that), I love churches. The architecture, the fixtures and fittings, the solemn atmosphere. The idea of building on top of (Native American) Indian burial grounds was enough to fuel horror fiction and urban legend for a century; will turning churches into houses, flats and offices do something similar? Probably not; although some of the churches for sale do indeed still have graveyards attached, the churches themselves, whether used or not, are utterly familiar to the local people. Like the Indian burial grounds, they have, for these people, always been there, but unlike them, they have always been visible, and have far more mundane connotations. They aren’t, or weren’t just the places people got married or had funeral services, they are places where, very recently, a few times a year you trooped along with your primary school classmates to hear about the less commercial, less fun aspects of Easter or Christmas and to sing a few hymns. In short, even now churches aren’t, or are rarely “other” in the way that (to non-indigenous settlers and their descendants) Indian burial grounds are. But, after generations will they still be familiar in that way, or will they become just funny-shaped houses? Who knows, but it’s sad to think so.

However much one does or doesn’t believe in the mythology that put them there, churches, just as local landmarks, bear the weight of memory, just as schools, war memorials, statues and monuments do. Although a valuable and significant thing, it’s a personal, private and unknowable kind of value; nostalgia, in its original, Greek meaning of ‘homecoming pain’ can be evoked in all of its intense complexity by almost anything, and in your own private iconography a road sign or piece of weed-strewn wasteland is likely to be as potent as, or even more potent than the more obvious celestial symbolism of the heaven-pointed steeple and arched windows. But the fact remains that the hopes, beliefs, dreams, grief and pain of generations was directed towards the church like lightning towards the weather vane that surmounts it; there is a kind of power just in that.

So what should be done with churches? You can’t keep everything forever, after all, and the Church of Scotland is, strange though it is to say it, a business. The people used to belong to it; it never belonged to the people and its churches are not public property in anything but the spiritual sense. But perhaps they should be: granted, they only reflect one strand of what is now a multicultural (and what was always a multi-faith) nation, but it’s a strand that informs attitudes and ways of life that contribute, both negatively and positively to the character of the country and its culture to this day. And although I don’t personally believe in the idea that buildings and land absorb a kind of psychic residue that manifests itself in the ghosts, hauntings and folklore beloved of digital TV channels, I feel like they should.

Those fundamental life events; christenings, marriages, funerals, wars, disasters – all of those lost people and all of that vanished emotion, should have some kind of monument or repository – and what better place than a church? Still; maintaining empty buildings purely for the sake of their history is an expensive, ethically dubious business and hardly an indicator of cultural good health. Finding new uses for these kinds of buildings that somehow respects their history is no easy task either. Personally, I’d like the government to buy them and use them to display the large percentage of publicly owned art that is currently languishing in the storerooms of galleries and museums, fulfilling in some ways at least, the National Galleries of Scotland’s strategic plan: “we will make the national collection accessible to all and inspire curiosity across the world. We want to connect with our audiences and with each other in new, collaborative and involving ways.” It would be appropriate in a way; human beings create art as god is supposed to have created people after all, and people with or without gods make art; it expresses many of the same fundamental impulses and emotions as religion. But it’s hardly an idea that’s likely to capture the public imagination, except in the negative sense that ambitious government spending on the arts – not that there has been much of that – always invites manufactured outrage. Ah well, it’s probably best to just make them into flats.

* I realise the double meaning was already implied in the title of Larkin’s poem, but why not render it completely unsubtle with a comma?

chocolate eggs & bunnies & pregnancy & blood: happy Easter!

ceramic sculpture of a Moon Goddess and her rabbit or hare partner, Mexico, c.700 AD

Imagine a culture so centred on wealth, property and power that it becomes scared of something as fundamental to human existence as sex, and frets endlessly about what it sees as the misuses of sex. A culture that identifies breeding so closely with with money, wealth and status, and women so closely with breeding and therefore with sex that, when looking to replace the traditional symbols of birth and regeneration it rejects sex and even nature and, in the end makes the embodiment of motherhood a virgin and the embodiment of rebirth a dead man. Unhealthy, you might think; misanthropic even – and yet here we are.

But when that misanthropic culture loses the religious imperative that fuelled it for centuries, what should be waiting but those ancient symbols of fertility; rabbits and eggs. But whereas Christianity in its pure, puritanical form found it hard to assimilate these symbols, preferring instead to just impose its own festival of rebirth on top of the pagan one, capitalism, despite being in so many ways compatible with the Judeo-Christian tradition, is essentially uninterested in spiritual matters. So even though capitalism is mostly pretty okay with Christianity, which creates its own consumer-friendly occasions, it proves to be equally okay with paganism, as long as it can sell us the pagan symbols in a lucrative way.

In Christianity the idea of the life cycle is almost surreally reproduced in the (male) Trinity; God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit – defined by the Lateran Council of 1213 – 15 as “the Father who begets, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds” – there’s no room for anything as earthly or earthy as motherhood. The Virgin Mary is essentially a token female presence, and one with her biological female attributes erased. And yet in every society that has worshipped under the Christian banner, child-bearing has historically only been done by women and child-raising has almost entirely been ‘women’s work’ too. Which makes you think that really, patriarchy is one of the great mysteries of humanity and the fact that it’s seen by many as the natural order of human society is even stranger.

But anyway; Easter. Easter is a mess, even to begin with; its name is pagan (Ēostre or Ôstara, Goddess of the spring) and its Christian traditions, even when embodied in the tragic idea of a man being murdered/sacrificed by being nailed to a cross, were never entrenched enough to suppress the celebratory, even frivolous feeling that spring traditionally brings. Okay, so Christ ascending to heaven is pretty celebratory without being frivolous; but as, in the UK at least, represented by a hot cross bun, with the cross on the top to represent the crucifix and even – to play up the morbid factor that is so central to Christianity – its spices that are supposed allude to the embalming of Christ’s dead body, it’s hardly solemn: it’s a bun.

On the other hand, birth, since the dawn of time and to the present day, is not just a simple cause for rejoicing and in that, the Christian tradition – although it tries to remove the aspects that seem most central to birth to us: women, labour (the word presumably wasn’t chosen accidentally) and procreation – probably tells us more about the seriousness and jeopardy of childbirth than the Easter bunny does.

St Margaret, “reborn” after being eaten by a dragon

Childbirth is the central and most fundamental human experience and, until the 20th century it was one of the most perilous ones, so naturally the church had to address it. And so there’s a ‘patron’ (interesting choice of word) saint of childbirth; clearly the Virgin Mary is too specialist to be identified with (and perhaps it would even be blasphemous to do so?) so instead there’s St Margaret. Not much help; firstly, St Margaret should surely be a ‘matron saint’ but that’s not a thing, and secondly, in herself she has nothing to do with birth, although she was presumably born. Instead she becomes the saint of childbirth through the symbolic act of bursting out of the dragon who ate her – a strange analogy but one that reflects the hazardous nature of childbirth in medieval times, when mortality rates were high, not just for babies but for their mothers. And what mother couldn’t relate to bursting out of a dragon? But Christianity’s real issue with the whole topic of birth has less to do with birth itself than how humans reproduce in the first place. Rabbits and hares may represent – in ancient cultures across the world, from Europe to Mexico and beyond – fecundity, but it’s an animal idea of fertility for its own sake that has nothing to do with the practical or emotional aspects of producing new human beings, or the legal, dynastic and financial ones that the Old Testament and the ancient world generally saw as the purpose of reproduction.

Jan & Hubert Van Eyck’s Eve from the Ghent Altarpiece (completed c 1432)

Pregnancy in Western art was a rarity until fairly recently and the puritanical ideas inherited by Victorian Christianity shaped art historical studies, to the point that people (until quite recently) tended to deny the evidence of their own eyes. Surely to believe that Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s hyper-realistic Eve – the mother of the human race – from Ghent Altarpiece (completed in 1432) just has the preferred medieval figure, rather than being pregnant, is perverse, isn’t it? Or that Mrs Arnolfini (Costanza Trenta) in the Arnolfini Portrait of 1434, who is touching her swollen stomach and who had died, presumably in childbirth – the year before this painting was completed, is just an example of that same fashionable shape, seems ridiculously far-fetched. (My favourite among the many theories about the Arnolfini portrait is Margaret Koster’s – which is explored in Waldemar Januszczak’s excellent short film about the painting.)

To go back to Eve; the idea of the first woman pregnant with the first child makes more sense for the 15th century, which was neither squeamish about or embarrassed by the realities of life in the same way that the 19th and early 20th century gentlemen who codified the canon of Western art history were. It’s not impossible that she is just the medieval/gothic ideal of femininity as seen in illuminated manuscripts and carvings; small shoulders, small breasts, big hips and stomach – given an unusually realistic treatment, but it’s hard to believe that even in the 15th century the first reaction of viewers – especially given the realism of the picture – wouldn’t have been to assume she was pregnant. Culture and society has changed a lot in the intervening centuries, but biology hasn’t.

For subsequent generations, the status of women and the perils of childbirth and childhood gave pregnant women and babies a strange presence in secular art. While there’s no reason to assume that people were less caring or sentimental about their partners or their children, portraits were rarely about sentiments, but status. Portraits of women, with the rare exception of Queens, were generally portraits of wives or potential wives, and pregnancy was of crucial dynastic importance. But in times when childbirth was almost as likely to end in death as life for both mother and child, it was presumably a risky thing to record; there are not very many pregnant portraits. Maybe – I should probably have investigated this before writing it – the time a portrait took from commission to completion was also a factor that made it risky? A portrait wasn’t a particularly inexpensive thing, possibly commissioning a portrait of someone who would quite likely be dead within the next nine months felt like an iffy investment, or (to be less mercenary about it) courting bad luck? In the generations that followed, female artists – such as Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun – could celebrate motherhood in self-portraits, but for the kind of reasons mentioned above – and because of contemporary ideas of ‘decency’ – they were hardly likely to portray themselves as obviously pregnant.

As time went on and connoiseurship and ‘art history’ became a thing I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that the arbiters of high culture in the paternalistic (at best, misogynistic at worst) society of Europe were intimidated by the female power inherent in the creation of the human race. The other side of that coin is the (slightly titillating) sense of the beauty, magic and wonder of pregnancy that the pro-female (philogynist? There must be a word) Austrian Gustav Klimt brought to art with Hope I. Beautiful though that is, Klimt’s vision isn’t really so far from the pure virgin/corrupt whore binary of medieval times, especially when you see his beautiful female figure of hope and renewal glowing against a background of death and peril. It really only when women enter the art world in greater numbers that the symbolic and magical aspects of motherhood are reconciled with the more sombre, earthly spirituality that Christianity preferred to represent in a dying man and that pregnant women can just be pregnant women.

For me, Paula Modersohn-Becker – one of my favourite painters – is the artist of pregnancy and childbirth and a painting like her Reclining Mother and Child II (1907) shows all of the human aspects that were embodied in the contorted Christian images of the Virgin Mary, crucifixion and Christ’s rebirth. In her self-portraits, the magic of Klimt without the titillating overtones, the fragility and peril of the older periods and the prosaic facts of pregnancy and what it does, good and bad, to the body, are all acknowledged. For once, it doesn’t seem ironic, only tragic, that Modersohn-Becker would be one of the many thousands of women of her era to die from complications shortly after giving birth.

Paula Modersohn-Becker – Reclining Mother & Child II (1906)

But once the reality had been captured, where to go from there? Anywhere, essentially; after Paula Modersohn-Becker pregnancy becomes just a subject, if a special one; art as creation representing creation. That’s a lofty way of putting it, but for the generation of German artists that followed, ‘realism’ was the whole point, some of the time at least. If Paula Modersohn-Becker represented pregnancy from the point of view of experience, capturing both its beauty and discomfort, Otto Dix the arch-realist gives us just the discomfort. His pregnant mothers are almost all exhausted working class women, heavy, swollen, weighed down by their burden. It’s a beautifully-observed point of view, and an empathetic one, but possibly a very male one too. Although Dix claimed, possibly sincerely, “I’m not that obsessed with making representations of ugliness. Everything I’ve seen is beautiful.” he nevertheless took a definite pride in shocking viewers with his art. As he also said; “All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.” By the time Dix painted these pictures he was a father himself, but although his paintings of his family reveal a more tender, if just as incisive, aspect to his art. When he paints these mothers-to-be, with their hard lives in the terminally unstable Weimar Republic, he paints as a pitiless observer, knowing that his work was challenging and confrontational to the generally conservative audience of his time; a time when, like ours, forces of intolerance and conservatism were closing in on the freedom embodied in art this truthful. It’s notable that, while dealing in the same harsh realities as Dix, but with a socially conscious, rather than clinical eye, the artist Käthe Kollwitz gives her women a more studiedly pitiable, though no less ‘realistic’ aura.

But the fact that Dix’s realism, though ‘objective’ was dramatically heightened is highlighted by a comparison between two paintings, one by Dix and the other by his female student Gussy Hippold-Ahnet, painted in 1931/2 and of – I think – the same model. In Dix’s painting, his most famous painting of a pregnant woman, the mother-to-be’s face is averted, hidden in darkness and it’s her almost painful roundness and heaviness that is the focus of the picture. In Hippold-Ahnet’s painting, far less dramatically, the mother sits more or less neatly, looking big but not unhappy. It’s a less dynamic and less assured piece of work – but is it any less real? In Dix’s realism, reality is generally harsh and pitiless, with no veneer of politeness or sentimentality. But although that represents a kind of underlying truth, especially about nature, people are often savage and cruel are nevertheless just as often also polite and sentimental. Gussy’s painting seems less powerful, but she is not showing us, as Dix seems to be, a faceless being representing the eternal, but rarely-remarked-on hardship involved in the joyous business of continuing the human species. Instead, sh3 shows us a woman who happens to be pregnant; both paintings are realistic, both are objective and, as with the symbolic sacrifice of Christ and the eternally recurring Easter bunny, both display different aspects of the truth.

Otto Dix – Pregnant Woman (1931) & Gussy Hippold-Ahnert – Pregnant Woman (1932)

Since the 1920s, attitudes towards pregnancy and women have fluctuated but female artists are no longer the exception within the art world and so women in art can be women in art and not women as a symbols in art. And although male artists have continued – and why not? – to paint pregnant sitters (Lucian Freud’s Pregnant Girl is a beautiful, not uncomplicated example), not surprisingly women do it better. And while I’m not sure if my favourites – Alice Neel and Paula Rego spring to mind – add anything in terms of content and meaning to Paula Modersohn-Becker’s example, what they do add is more experience, wider experience and therefore bring a truer reflection of the source and the central experience of humanity to the world. Regardless of whether or not one believes in a god, everyone believes in that creation story; which is kind of more important than an old, bearded man, a young, sacrificed man and a bird; but it doesn’t matter, there’s room in art for everything. Anyway, enjoy your chocolate eggs.