mixed media
104 x 71 x 66 cm
41 x 28 x 26 inches
Love is the only shelter, a classicly American church, the front door sandbagged and defended with machine gun, stands high atop a dirt mound, cutaway in profile. Carved into the ground adjoining the church's cellar are a series of tunnels, stairs and secret rooms, leading to a bomb shelter deep beneath the earth. These guns and tunnels reference Father McHugh's "Ethics at the Shelter Doorway", an early nuclear moralist text that argues in defense of the Christian goodliness of shooting those who would force themselves into your family's bomb shelter, come the day of the Apocalypse.
Otherwise known as the Gun thy Neighbour debate, this ethical quandary surfaces repeatedly in Christian Publications of the early 60's, Life magazine and even one episode of the Twilight Zone, "Love is the Only Shelter" references a 1960's Protest Slogan.
[...] Who cares though, if you're going to heaven anyway? Elsewhere, McGill has dwelt repeatedly on the disturbing possible combinations of the Bible's revelatory teachings and moral codes. The sculpture Love is the only shelter (2002), for instance, depicts a typically American white-painted wooden church, built on a rock. Behind its sandbagged front door, a route leads down into the basement and finally into a catacomb built into the stone: a fallout shelter. McGill based it on the writings of Father McHugh, a early nuclear paranoiac who held that it was acceptable to shoot anyone who tried to force entry into your family's bomb shelter. America's permissive approach to gun control runs both deep and wide. The urge to violence can supersede all others. There is another force at work here, which dangerously rolls together Christian eschatology and nuclear Armageddon: Thanatos, the death drive controversially theorised by Freud after the First World War. Raised to hysterical pitch by McGill's relentless amassing of material facts, it's this idea that constitues his evidential work's bone-deep chill - that we may just be built this way, designed to rush endlessly towards precipice. [...]
Extract from
Martin Herbert,
Art Review, n°2
August 2006.
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