Naked Christ
by Michele Coxon
You so seldom comment on anything to do with art in your leader column, that it is a pity you were so damning about Michele Coxon’s Naked Christ figure in the Abbey.
I would have thought most people would describe crucifixion as a “tasteless and grisly” business.
An artist who conveys this can hardly be criticised for misrepresentation.
Your comparison with “something dug up from a mass grave in Bosnia” is also interesting – you intend to disgust us, but it made me think that the work has prompted a relevant modern reference.
You pronounce yourself an authority on the state of Christ’s crucified body and the way it should be represented. No doubt you would have been equally scathing about Michelangelo, Dali and all the other artists, who in their time have given us original and unconventional responses to this most horrific, yet culturally important event.
Coxon’s method of using materials found in the countryside where she lives is not original, but you seem to find this contemptible.
She has taken these scattered and disparate materials and with considerable skill, blended and honed them to fit a clear and conventional structure ’ the human body.
How you can describe this as “an incoherent piece of modem art” escapes me – unless you are suggesting that “modem art”, a phrase which you use twice, is always incoherent and provocative and mostly rubbish.
The Comments book in the Abbey shows that many more people have admired the work than have disliked it.
I would have thought you might at least have taken a neutral line and congratulated the Abbey and the Visual Arts Festival for displaying a range of local work appropriate to its setting.
Andrew Bannerman
Shrewsbury