Demon or Christ?
A couple of years ago, an 18-metre statue of a demon holding a bowl for collecting human blood landed on the Greenwich Peninsula in South East London. The bronze, decapitated figure was designed by British artist Damien Hirst. Covered head to foot in barnacles and sprouting trees, it stands on clawed feet, with its free hand forming an ‘okay’ gesture; thumb and forefinger in a circle.
Rio has an enormous Christ figure atop Corcovado Mountain, around 700 metres above sea level, lovingly overlooking the city; Londoners have a headless spirit standing just 2 metres above the sea.
I am yet to visit the statue. I’ll go soon and report back. From the images, it looks spectacular. Symbolically, however, it’s a strange thing to conjure up from the deep and erect in the English capital. You can’t help but wonder how many planning and administrative thresholds this thing had to pass. Hirst is often seen as a transgressive artist, but I wonder whether something like this can even be considered transgressive in our culture, which seems increasingly desensitised.
I often feel a sense of disappointment regarding the contemporary art world. But given that art is a reflection of a culture’s psyche, perhaps it’s rather a disappointment at the state of Western civilisation in general; art is simply the messenger.
At this point, perhaps a truly transgressive and courageous act would be to build and see erected an enormous statue of Jesus Christ in London. Bizarrely, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t get through the planning and administrative loopholes, but I think we could do with some divine energy right now.