BEAUTY and the BEHOLDER

In London’s Trafalgar Square around Nelson’s column stand four plinths, intended for statues of suitable “worthies”. Three of them are filled but the fourth, for whatever reason, has always been empty. However, on occasion it is used for temporary sculpture displays and on 15th September this year a new one was unveiled - it will sit on the plinth for eighteen months. If you are in London, go and see it.

It’s by the sculptor Marc Quinn and is a depiction of the artist Alison Lapper. She was born without arms, and with very short legs, and her life story is a testimony to the overcoming of disability. The sculpture shows her sitting, nude and eight months pregnant. Though not technically the finest piece of public statuary it is striking and significant.

Responses so far in the media have been either positive, critically supportive, or non-committal (no artist would expect otherwise), but one of the “Broadsheet” newspapers decided to canvass wider opinion and sought the newspaper equivalent of a sound-bite. Perhaps mischievously, they asked a pressure group called “Christian Voice” for a response to the sculpture (You may recall that this group came to prominence over the screening of “Jerry Springer - the Opera”). A spokesman for the Group was recorded as describing it as “indecent” .

Now, it may be that there was a lot of qualification of the statement which wasn't printed, but as it stands, I have to say it makes me almost despair. This is not simply because one could hope that spokespersons were a little more “savvy” in making comments to the media, but because of basic principle.

As far as once can ascertain the speaker regards the display of a statue of a nude, pregnant, disabled woman as improper. This worries me greatly. For a start it seems to imply that there is something indecent and improper, even unspiritual, about the human body. This feels very odd indeed, not least because the Genesis story of Adam and Eve (which gives us the “poetry” of the act of creation) speaks of the goodness of what God has made and speaks of the representative man and woman in the Garden “naked and without shame” (Genesis 2:25) Their later shame and resultant clothing comes as a result of the Fall and their estrangement from God, the source of their being, and from each other (See Genesis 3:7)

Furthermore, Christians of all people should have a positive appreciation of the goodness of the body, since at the heart of our faith is the conviction that God has become flesh in Jesus Christ. Paul, writing to Timothy, quotes an early Creed about Christ “appearing in a body” (I Tim. 2:16). In contrast to the cults and sects who regarded the physical and fleshly as being an impediment to true spirituality, Incarnational Christianity proclaims the goodness of the physical and the embodied. Unlike the angels, we are not pure spirit - we are embodied, and our spirituality entails the physical and fleshly and its healing, wholeness and resurrection. This needs to be said and proclaimed again and again when, as so often, Christians are thought to believe that the physical and the sexual are somehow improper. Reading the Scriptures, and the Marriage Service, tells us that is not so.

There is surely nothing “indecent” about the sculpture of Alison Lapper, since it is not intended to be erotic or pornographic in any sense of those words - statuary of the classical tradition (in which this stands, like the ancient “Venus de Milo” or Michelangelo’s “David”) rarely is. It is a celebration of the human form, which we believe is given and hallowed by God.

What about the fact that the subject of the sculpture is disabled? To be fair, there is nothing in the response of “Christian Voice” that suggests that this is part of the “indecency” they find there, but the sculpture should make us think again about our attitudes (sometimes very deep-seated) to disablement, and about what constitutes beauty. Perhaps the statue is a challenge to false and superficial media values and cultural attitudes to supposed “perfection” . In any case, as Christians we believe that the presence of God is fully revealed in the self-giving love of Jesus , not beautiful and perfect, but marred and disfigured (see Isaiah 52:14 & 53:2).

I discover from Marc Quinn’s Website that in creating this sculpture he was concerned to demonstrate the ability of the human spirit to overcome physical difficulty and prejudice and false perception. In shaping this work he has created a figure expectant and full of possibility, in every sense of the world, and paid tribute to another human being’s strength and resilience. Surely there is something there which a Christian can and ought to identify with and affirm ? Can the Churches once again be patrons of the arts, of the exciting and evocative, the challenging and the life affirming? (Actually, in many places they are, but not enough !)

I suspect that “Christian Voice” may regret their hasty comments (which may, of course, be entirely out of context) - I know as yet very little about them and their work but I have to say that, on the strength of what was reported, they are not the voice on this matter for this particular Christian.

Roger Clarke

October 2005