Gates and Portals

By
Julia Hollander

You may have heard about ‘Gates and Portals’, the show currently going on at Modern Art Oxford.  I say ‘show’ rather than ‘exhibition’ because it was conceived by self-confessed ‘grandmother of performance art’, Marina Abramović. Unlike a conventional gallery experi-ence, it entails very little looking; in fact (spoiler alert) you will find the whitewashed walls entirely bare. With the help of a handful of props, your sensory activity is radically reduced and your focus turned inwards. In my case, I spent a surprisingly fruitful half hour paying attention to my own heartbeat. Whenever my mind wandered from this novel activity, it busied itself with my expectations as a punter. I tussled with ideas about how much Abramović should be serving me: what the relationship between audience and performer really is.

I’ve spent much of my life performing in churches: as a young child in our local parish choir, as a student in my college chapel and then in all sorts of Christian ceremonies throughout my adult life. But when people ask me whether I am also a worshipper, my response is never straightforward. The truth is that I have not always felt at one with the reli-gious contexts in which I sing. There have been occasions (though never at SMV) when it felt so at odds with my personal belief that I spent the sermon with my fingers planted firmly in my ears. 

You could ask, in that case what was I doing there? Just earning a living? Putting on an act for an audience far more devout than me? Or was it the other way around? Were my songs so powerful in and of themselves that they transcended any ordinary, mortal activity, including a dodgy sermon? This notion is not unusual. Indeed, over the years musicologists have found it to be so universal that some concluded it to be song’s main evolutionary purpose: for humans to reach out to God. In performing music with nothing but our own bodies, we singers are making a direct act of spiritual engagement that is in itself a form of worship. In which case, what do I offer the congregation? 

I have often been a member of the SMV congregation; in fact I did so for many years before I joined the choir. If I cast my mind back to that time, I can remember feeling awed by the music. But not in an entirely passive way. The experience of listening was somehow an active one; indeed it made me feel more spiritual alive. 

Coming out of the show at Modern Art Oxford, I realised something something similar had happened in the silent gallery. As I headed towards Bonn Square, my eyes were struck by the exceptional vibrancy of the autumn leaves strewn on the flagstones. I lingered to listen to a busker’s rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’; never had it sounded so heartfelt, nor so prescient. And it wasn’t just my eyes and ears that were experiencing heightened sensitivity. I found myself beaming empathy at the pair of students hunched on the bench opposite, nursing what looked like the biggest hangovers of their lives. There was something about ‘Gates and Portals’ that had increased my ability to offer the best of myself to the world. Something I couldn’t recall ever having gained from an art show before. 

In retrospect, what I think Abramović had done was force me to shift my role from observer to performer. By being thrown in on myself, I had become the show itself. Church does something similar - by offering the congregation a space to listen, they find themselves reaching for God. Those of us who perform there enhance this activity, whilst also getting an opportunity to listen to the beating of our own hearts. And when the show is over, the liturgy completed, we all go away better able to enact the love voiced by our songs. We become performers in our own lives.