SAINTS ALIVE
Artist Michael Landy
National Gallery until November 22
The Bible’s view of saints as ordinary Christian believers called by grace to a divine inheritance has no bearing on this exhibition.
Its subject is the centuries-old cult of ‘Saints’ — with its concomitant visions, relics, shrines and pilgrimages. For artist Michael Landy their histories are ancient fables, long-discarded by all but a few art historians and theologians. By nature charitable and optimistic, he laughingly identifies with the saints: like them he rejects the values of consumerism and he parallels his artistic wrestlings with their self-flagellation. His exhibition assumes the secular mindset that now prevails in British popular culture. Nevertheless, superstition runs deep in human nature: many people still dread ‘unlucky’ omens or calendar dates, and in Roman Catholic countries the saints are hardly forgotten relics.
