The Catholic Weekly

Sydney
29 June 2003

‘Unethical’ to kill an embryo

Roll on, Cologne

And they’re racing ... to help Vinnies

‘Renewal of my faith’

Seminar ‘rekindles Bible fire’

Year 9 - May the force be with you

‘Appoint acting judges’ to solve visa backlog

Charity race day

Society needs to ‘share pain of others’

Bombs found at Mass site

Movement seeks inquiry on Iraqi conflict

Cambridge choir in Sydney visit

China visitors

The Catholic Weekly- Spiritual tension

Letters

Moral values ‘a major role’ for the Church

Challenge to your neighbourhood?

Jesus Christ, the ultimate healer

Parents’ acts inspired Sr Huyen

Religion, art ‘a very powerful mix’

Classic rite controversial, but ‘a jewel’

Real feelings of life and faith

Bishop Peter Ingham’s message

Clergy-principals’ conference day

Students share justice issues

New team looks at needs

New director of vocations

Vocation Awareness Diocesan Poster Competition

Diocesan catechists train

Gothic paradise - the legacy of Pugin

The Catholic Weekly - Spiritual tension

Art truly is an alternative form of expression. Indeed, many artists have been famously inarticulate and can only express themselves visually. Perhaps the most famous example was Vincent Van Gogh, who had difficulty expressing himself other than in paint and once cut his ear off in passion. Thankfully, he mostly stuck to paintings, many of which are sublime.

Even those artists who can talk articulately about art and life cannot convey in words all that their art conveys.

This is certainly the case with the work of Carl Coxall, the Year 12 student who has won first prize in this year’s Catholic Secondary Schools Religious Art Exhibition.

Carl’s work is conceptual - which is what makes it art, not craft, a trap many ‘artists’ fall into. Carl’s work deals with ideas and in the work that won this year’s competition (see pages 12-13), he deals with modern mental imprisonment. The work consists of several twig-framed picture boxes, holding spindly creatures made of wood, metal, plastic and computer components, trying vainly to escape their box prisons.

The work is a visual metaphor for life in a modern world, in which we turn to computers to help improve our lives, but find this often doesn’t happen.

Carl uses a visual ‘collision’ of old wood and the newer plastics and metals that computers are made of as a metaphor for the modern-day collision between old wisdom and modern invention, a collision that calls for a new enlightenment and a new spiritual code. Carl sees his work as the
physical embodiment of the need for such a code.

The spiritual tension Carl’s work evokes is nothing new to Christianity, which has always been as much a religion of the city as the village. Indeed, the mettle of the early Church was tempered in Rome, the major city of the day, quite as inventive a place as modern cities. So Carl is right on the
money here, so to speak.

The images Carl has created are not beautiful. They are spiky and uncomfortable - much like modern life. But beauty is not the point of modern art; ideas and questions are. And the question Carl poses is profound: How do we develop a spiritual life in these modern technological times?
This question underlies the new moral issues that have been forced on us by technological development, development that has, for instance, made embryonic stem cell research possible. But because it is possible doesn’t mean we have to do it. Our lives are dominated by technology. We cannot escape it; our religious and spiritual development must take it into account or risk becoming irrelevant.