on saturday the entrepreneur day with bill bolton went really well. while i was there we noticed an exhibition being set up that looked intriguing. i went back yesterday to have a proper look…
opening tonight and running from 3-7 april duel icnoclast is an exhibition on the ship hms president on the thames just west of blackfriars bridge on the north side of the river. these modern interactive icons by artist oleg ikona led to a furore and oleg being persecuted by sections of the russian orthodox church. the church fails to understand artists once again – surprise surprise! i love them – i think they are playful, trickster like, and duel and juxtapose the tradition with popular culture wonderfully. they are also fun. there are buttons to press, lights that come on, fans that spin, and weird noises that erupt. i have put a few photos in a photo set
These look fascinating and remind me of the Rock Icons produced by my aquaintance the Stuckist artist Peter Murphy [ http://petermurphyicons.com/ ]. He does sacred work too, notably at Tewkesbury Abbey, St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol and a wonderful set of Bede images for the Bede’s World visitors centre in Jarrow.
I guess if your spirituality is Orthodox then icons mean a whole lot more to you than being mere interesting pictures or playful concepts etc, hence the understandable fuss about these secularised images. Sometimes it may just be possible that artists fail to understand the church (or worse, choose to exploit people’s genuine spiritual sensitivities for ‘effect’).