The pathetically intimate scrawl of western miniscule trinked-out in pink neon is entirely of a piece with the permanent encampment of the out-of-town shopping center, the fringing sugary sprawl of postmodern business parks. What is presented is hypercapitalism’s transcendence of the contrast between the stable and the ephemeral. This is the magical appearance of market modernity within a sacred space that has perpetuated into the present the nineteenth-century gothic revival. Rather, one senses the uncanny intrusion of the fairground, the disenchanting trailer-park chain of fairy lights with a trailer-park lyric in simultaneous tow. What are we to suppose? Is it just a blush? Is this God blushing, caught out in sending us a Valentine message? It is not what one feels at first, except tacitly. Thus energized and electrified, pink is exposed, simpering and a little tawdry. Pink’s own powdery embarrassment can least of all endure the flushing energy of neon glow. What intervenes, slashed through this space, is rose flushed to the banality of pink. It interrupts the bursting-into-fragments of the kaleidoscopic explosion of the Benedicite window above, and the dark and austere West porch below. Looking back from the East transept, just glimpsing the pink glint under the Nave bridge, but too far away to make out the words, the bright caption almost looks magisterial, a condensation of the window’s eruption.īut as one gets closer, looking up from the Well, Emin’s neon inscription “I felt you and I knew you loved me” begins to shock us. It hovers over the void below, rather like a flash of Islamic script, perhaps the soft fiery writing of God himself, a muted warning, a tinted fiat. From the first distance, it looks like a faintly lurid overspill from the window above, which is full of scattered lights-as if the fragments of rose glass hadn’t quite been able to contain themselves.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |