In an article in Quadrant (September 2006), Tim Pemble-Smith reviews Crisis, Catharsis and Contemplation, an exhibition of contemporary art held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He sets the exhibition within the cultural wars that "bedevil the Catholic Church".
His own judgment of the exhibition was that its advertised themes "have been used in a Catholic cathedral as a masking device for mockery of Christ and the Virgin Mary and covert promotion of the Goddess and the ‘sacred feminine’." He concludes by reminding the reader that a bishop and a religious sister have not given an explanation of their support for the exhibition, and that the curator is still employed by the Church.
His judgment, it must be said, was not shared by those who wrote public comments on the exhibition. Many, like myself, thought that the exhibition offered an opportunity to reflect more deeply both on the artworks, and on faith, than would have been the case in a more conventional setting. Those who criticised the exhibition generally believed that it is inappropriate to show secular art in a Church.
Mr Pemble-Smith supports his claim by offering interpretations of six of the twenty two works of art exhibited. I argue in the extended form of this article that his interpretations are idiosyncratic. Nor, where they can be consulted, do the artists themselves endorse them. It will be sufficient here to allow the reader to see a representation of James Waller’s Icon Chamber (The Visitation), and to compare the critic’s and the painter’s interpretation.
Mr Pemble-Smith claims this work represents the visit of the pregnant Virgin Mary to Elizabeth. "The womb of the Virgin is presented in the form of a tabernacle covered in soft black cloth parted in front as a lighted vertical slit. This serves as a mocking reference to the Virgin…Around the icon chamber on the floor are place four gold squares. Four feathers can be seen inside the chamber. Numerologically, this is four squared by four squared… Four cubed is a reference to the goddess and particularly to her genitals." The cockatoo feather lying in front of Icon Chamber is "a simple, common and uniquely Australian wordplay—‘cock or two’—the cock or two being a clear reference to one or two males: the Child Jesus and whoever impregnated the Virgin."
To me and to other viewers I consulted, the opening seems more like a window than a slit, and the