At the almost millennium-old Canterbury Cathedral, two aspects of the historic graffiti (which is significant enough to merit a guided tour) might stand out to a reflective visitor. One is the devotional nature of many of the inscriptions: as one study observed, “much of the medieval graffiti in the Crypt is religious in nature.”
Another is the personal and individual nature of the format: whether schoolboys leaving the traces of their hands and feet, initials and dates commemorating a pilgrim’s visit to the shrine of Thomas Becket, or masons’ marks identifying the work of a craftsman, even the non-religious graffiti seems to say in some sense “I was here” and “I am a part of this.” Even if it’s anonymous, most graffiti seems to speak mainly for the individual who made it.
It is something of a paradox, then, whenever graffiti receives any kind of official or corporate sponsorship. In such cases, a format that (even if not permanently defacing a monument) inherently represents an individual as distinct from the community is understood to be somehow endorsed or at least approved by the authorities.
This paradox troubles “Hear Us,” the graffiti exhibition now at the cathedral. While the unsigned texts of the new graffiti derive from responses to the question “What would you ask God?” offered by individual participants in a series of workshops earlier this year, the project as a whole, being an official commission, appears to speak for the cathedral as an institution, and by extension for the Church of England.
Visually, the project reflects the same paradox. While the “graffiti-style displays” try to imitate the look of something painted in a hurry by an individual with a spray can in hand, they appear to in fact use off-the-rack fonts, electronically made up and printed by professional artists, before being “expertly and sensitively fixed to the ancient stone pillars, walls and floors.”
This paradox of “official outsiderdom” tends to hollow out, or at least relativize, the project’s desire to present the “lone voice” or “marginalized,” despite the claims of the artist and curator. Once a piece has been commissioned and approved by the authorities, it is no longer capable of producing the momentary, fleeting thrill of transgression, no matter how ardently the responsible artists wish for it.
A subsequent question also arises: shouldn’t the cathedral be in the business of offering, or at least suggesting, answers to these questions? If I were to enter a cathedral while burdened by some of these (valid, worthy, and understandable) questions, I would be less enthused to simply find my questions reflected from the walls than I would be to find some sort of clue about how I might begin to answer them. The suspicion lurks that those responsible would prefer not to be in the position of offering answers. It is much less of a burden and responsibility simply to offer a space for questioning.
Looking back again at the historical graffiti, it is also striking how few, if any, earlier texts are written in the form of questions. For whatever reason, questioning seems not to have been the highest priority of those earlier visitors. This is all the more so if one looks at officially approved inscriptions (the historical predecessors of “Hear Us”) rather than only the anonymous graffiti.
In funerary memorials, such as the monumental brasses of the medieval period, the text may be memorials and supplications. The post-Reformation decalogue boards place God’s law in the mind of the reader. Generally the sense is that the church is a place where time and eternity meet, and where one confronts both the continuing reality of death and, at the same time, the mystery that death has been defeated by Christ, who offers new life.
The current project at Canterbury seems remote from any such sense of eternity or mystery. The questions could really be placed anywhere, and little about them appears to engage with Christianity. Even for those (perhaps most of us) who have asked similar questions at one point or another, it is hard to say what exactly is gained by the mere repetition of the questions. The claim by the Very Rev. David Monteith, the cathedral’s dean, that the piece creates a “meaningful encounter” is vitiated by the doubt whether one is encountering anything greater than an internal monologue.
Monteith has also defended the work for its “rawness” and “authenticity.” But in the present age, rawness and authenticity are simply ambient features of the culture at large. It is by no means clear why rawness and authenticity, in and of themselves, would make an artwork worth seeing.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The new fresco at St. Mary Magdalen, Coventry, by Aidan Hart is immediately recognizable as belonging to the same ancient traditions from which “Hear Us” departs. The fresco’s text reads: “I am the light and the life.” Despite the claims from Canterbury, that, rather than an unresolved internal monologue, is what we individuals, and our communities, need to hear.
Dr. Ben Lima is an art historian and critic, and a parishioner at the Church of the Incarnation in Dallas.
