We might not logically associate modernism with Catholicism but there was a moment in the early 1960s when the Church found itself suddenly, and perhaps unexpectedly, in the vanguard. Among the radical changes instituted by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was a rethinking of how the physical church should be arranged. The priest was to face the people and the altar was brought into the body of the building; what had once been a profoundly hierarchical space was made accessible, and the congregation found itself at the centre of the mass rather than just on the receiving end.
This coincided with a period of urban revival, a recovery from wartime privations and, in the UK, an explosion in numbers of Catholics that was engendered by fast-growing families and by immigration — from Ireland, Italy and beyond. This sudden proliferation of Catholic churches, which were mostly modern in style, often striking and occasionally astonishing, forms the subject of Here We Are, a new film by artist Elizabeth Price showing at the Liverpool Biennial, the UK’s largest free festival of contemporary art.
I visit Price at her south-east London studio, where she greets me wearing a chic brown boiler suit and makes a few excuses about the broken, gaffer-taped chairs we sit on. Otherwise, it’s all pretty neat for a studio. Most of her work takes place at a desktop with two big screens. Price appears extremely modest and, for an artist who won the Turner Prize (in 2012), is still oddly unsung. Her winning entry was “The Woolworths Choir of 1979”, a haunting video work that mixed music and tragedy: images of a deadly fire in a Woolworths store in Manchester that killed 10 people; grainy film of 1960s girl group The Shangri-Las doing their synchronised song-and-dance routines; people singing in church. The barely perceptible thing that subtly connected all three was a kind of twist of the wrist, a little hand motion that provides a kinetic thread through the seemingly disparate moving images.
In her work for Liverpool, the church is very much back, but this time the thread is postwar architecture rather than that delicate wrist-flick. What, I ask, inspired this particular work? “It was triggered by a visit to St Bride’s Church in East Kilbride,” she says, “this incredible church by [architects] Gillespie, Kidd & Coia. You feel how the building folds you into it and inside, like you’re at the bottom of a well.”
The church, a blocky brick monument, embraced elements of Scottish castles, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art, brutalism and Swedish modernism, and was among the fiercest expressions of the new spirit in Catholic architecture. It is characteristic of the revered (but also perhaps still underrated) architects, who also designed St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, one of the era’s most influential ruins: a dark, charged space now riddled with graffiti and the paraphernalia of headbangers, satanists and junkies. But St Bride’s is still an active church and a place of community. “It’s in my own background,” Price says. “I’m originally from an Irish Catholic family, and religion had a very profound impact on me.” She adds that she is no longer a practising Catholic.
“I thought a lot about the relationship between modernism and Catholicism,” she says, “and they don’t quite map on to each other. There are these incongruities between modernism and conservatism and the role, the subservience of women. This was about finding a niche which gives you a purchase point to start picking away at these inconsistencies, about the way Catholicism and modernism were able to reveal things about each other.”
Price was born in Yorkshire in the north of England but grew up in Luton, just north of London. “Our church was a bit art deco,” she says, “not that much to look at. But as a child I remember being bored in mass and you begin to play in your mind with the sculpted images, the sounds, the music. It becomes a whole imaginative realm, part of the seduction of religion, part of your education. And the images are hugely important.”
She might have been inspired by the stark power of St Bride’s but as she scrolls through a rough early cut of the film on her screens, the first few churches (a mix of historic photos from the Royal Institute of British Architects’ collection and others newly commissioned from Andrew Lee) are modest affairs, ordinary architecture.
“They’re very much embedded in their communities — a part of them,” she says. The boxy 1960s churches look nothing if not suburban. “As I was going round photographing the churches I realised I understood it all,” she says. “I spoke Catholic, I knew what all the bits of churches were called. It was familiar. I have a fascination for the gothic but also those threads of goth that run through modernism. It looks simple but it has these complicated memories running through it . . . both a joyful togetherness and something darker and more mysterious.”
More than a thousand Catholic churches were built in Britain between 1955 and 1975. As the film progresses, the architecture becomes starker, more expressive. The buildings evolve from the cheery suburban modern to a more monumental, moody feel. The images too are dark, beginning as negatives and moving through to positive and then colour-restored, which gives the film an eerie, dreamlike quality. Providing a kind of happy ending is HS Goodhart-Rendel’s Most Holy Trinity in Bermondsey (1957-60), south London, which looks as if it belongs to another age, exuding a dark expressionism.
Likely to be particularly resonant at the biennial are the churches of FX Velarde, a Liverpool local who built eccentric hybrids of Gothic, Romanesque, modernism and art deco. Liverpool has its own Catholic landmark, of course: the great cathedral with its crown of thorns, designed by Frederick Gibberd, which was last week listed at Grade I, the highest form of protection. I ask if it too is included, but Price tells me she concentrated on parish churches, situated in communities.
“There are always other things going on in these churches,” Price says. “There are the legible histories of migration, postwar reconstruction, often traumatised or homesick communities. In this country this is a church of immigrants. They are places where poorer migrants can say ‘Here we are.’ They are about more than Catholicism.”
To September 14, biennial.com