"If you can say it... Why paint it?" A review of the key concepts of Contemporary Art

Hello reader! Coming back to the first lines of this blog in November 2007, I made the choice of focusing on the cultural differences that may shake the contemporary art galaxy, rather than writing lines about the last exhibition I did not go to anyway. This covers the viewers, the artists, the intermediaries and all the different media that allows information transfer between them. Today’s post is going to focus on an aspect of this last particular point.
In an attempt of modernisation, to stay in touch with the general mood, the church often commissioned artists to 'communicate'. Sometimes political ideals, sometimes to say "hey!! we went through the middle age to come to meet you!"... But here, I m just being cynical. But contemporary art is more often associated with the idea of Church (the one with a big 'C' which is related to the people, the dogma…etc.) when it comes to architecture. I have seen some stunning things around there and would definitely recommend you to go to see the Liverpool modern cathedral that looks like a nuclear reactor from the outside, or Notre Dame de Ronchamps from Le Corbusier.

What about having a contemporary art exhibition in the church? Well, it is a church not a gallery... But there is the trick: To include the work of art in the decoration features such as the windows. Chagall's windows in St Etienne cathedral in Metz are great examples that come to my mind, a bit dated though...

So is there something really contemporary edgy, happening somewhere at the moment in our churches? Probably not... But look, we've seen so many weird stuffs recently in the art world. First, there is this story of this student with her performance art piece in which she artificially inseminated herself repeatedly and then self-aborted for the sake of art then Guillermo Habacuc Vargas who chained a dog and used it as “art”. He told everyone not to feed the animal which eventually died in the gallery.
Then, are the edgy things, the most simple artworks the one that belongs to a temple? I believe so... and then comes this marvellous artwork commissioned for the St Martin-in-the-Fields Church in London to Shirzeh Houshiary:

The simple idea of a monochrome stained window that mixes the symbols of the cross and the grid to make a powerful statement about the place of races and gender differences within the Church (the one with a big 'C' literally crystallized by a church feature, the one with a little 'c' this time which only describes the construction).
I think it really makes it. The Guardian goes to qualify this artwork as 'gynaecological reworking of Christian symbols'. Do you understand it better? Sure but there is no need to shock anybody by inserting the word 'gynaecological’ in a description of a stained glass in a church. But there again… it s contemporary art and it is traditionally shocking.
Last questions: Does the nationality of the artist (Iranian) adds value to the overall quality of the artwork? What if I tell you that Shirazeh Houshiary was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1994? In the author's death, Barthes criticizes the reader's tendency to consider aspects of the author’s identity—his political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes—to distill meaning from his work.
It seems a good PR operation to me that eventually leads the commissioning team to declare to the press: "The fact that we are standing now in a church, in front of a window designed by an Iranian woman artist, at the beginning of the 21st century, is truly significant". Sure it is but it seems to me that this cosmopolitan attitude towards contemporary art and especially artists becomes another fashion that will soon be outdated. Will people qualify what we should call 'cosmopolitan art' as the art of the years 2000 as 'extreme art' is now sometimes used to qualify the 90's as the last years of the age of 'controversy as a trend'? Controversy for the sake of controversy>>> cosmopolitan for the sake of postmodernism.

It makes sense, doesn't it? ;-)