- Venue
- The National Gallery
- Location
- London
In Michael Landy’s Saints Alive the viewer is confronted with the opportunity to interact with several mechanised saints. I say interact, when what I really mean is, prod, bash and beat them up, so that one is left in no doubt about who is responsible for their pain and suffering. It kind of works against the idea of self-flagellation, but then it gives away a sense of momentary power; like dunking your dad at a fairground does.
Landy’s saints are closer to Disney’s animatronics than to the spiritual plane, and I think it is fair to say that you don’t get further from the supernatural than a mechanised object.
It is a curious thing pitting medieval anxiety against modern day cynicism – one does not necessary preclude the other. It is still an obsession with the material body that is in question: on the one hand the body is invaded, wounded, dissected, scourged in a fleshly kind of way; on the other, it becomes truly embodied in a rational, enclosed, cybernetic system and completely alienated from any necessity for spiritual connection.
The title, Saints Alive should have an exclamation mark next to it. As if Landy was surprised by his own discovery of the Saints in the National Gallery. It would be an ironic exaltation, but it would also capture very well the irony of him landing such a prestigious commission. As he says himself, in the film that runs alongside the exhibition, he has never made a painting in his life. He hasn’t got a religious bone in his body and he is not one for revering the establishment. The National must have taken a very deep breath to let him loose with their collection.
What he has done though, is extraordinarily brave and insightful. Being very sensitive to social conventions and hierarchies he has turned the normally sacrosanct gallery room into a noisy, fairground junkyard. His sculptures are a mass of cobbled together cogs, wheels, levers, plastic, fibre-glass, cranks and metal springs that prod, pound, poke and beat the Saints with all the violent muster expected from medieval Catholicism.
He is animating painting to a literal point of realisation, but also encouraging the viewer to discover the original works for themselves. It is almost like a treasure hunt. Wandering through the Sainsbury Wings’ iconic paintings, with all their gold, and the wonderful colour palette of the early Renaissance, is really quite dazzling. It is also very surreal to find Crivelli’s Saint Lucy holding her eyes on a plate and Saint Michael slaying a reptilian devil, while a miniature Adam and Eve hang on a scale balance from his waist. This is what I love about the medieval mind, apart from its propensity for the punitive: its imagery is so fantastical but without any hint of irony.
Landy started his commission by drawing many of the Masters. He is a good draughtsman and it is interesting that his way in was to copy familiar images like Cezanne’s Bathers. He is reminding the viewer that most art at some level is a matter of copying. He does not shy away from this fact, directly, or should I say, faithfully referencing the paintings in his sculptures.
His collages, on the other hand, are, ‘as close as he can get to cutting up the collection’, he says, at one point in the film. They show the body, fragmented; a Frankensteinian obsession with anatomy. The same old anxiety about our lack of understanding into what or who makes us material. Are we in some giant, self-replicating universe or the products of a divine spark?
Something to consider is that one day our bodies will become mechanised. Electronics and plastics will be used to interact with our cells, blurring the boundary between what makes us and what we make. It still leaves the question of our origins open though.
The idea central to this show however, is not so much origins as stigmata. In Christianity stigmata is a sign of greater humanity; an identification with the suffering of Christ. Sassetta’s The Stigmatisation of Saint Francis shows him receiving the wounds of Christ from a winged Seraph. The Seraph is an ambiguous figure: on the one hand, a heavenly body and on the other, a ‘burning one’ or serpent. An appropriate image perhaps since our future will be marked by a technological ability to self-medicate and heal our own wounds. Whether this will lead to a greater humanity is another question.
