Angles on angels

A millennial exhibition of contemporary art at the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome

In this tumultous year of the Jubilee, Rome inevitably moves forwards by looking backwards. Venerable buildings have been rejuvenated, ancient marbles are restored to view, and once-sleeping museums rise to reassert their cultural richness. In this predominantly retrospective context, it is striking that a structure deeply redolent of the Classical and Christian pasts of the Holy City should he hosting a subtly subversive exhibition of experimental art that (among other things) places new technologies in the forefront of image-making.

The Castel Sant'Angelo, assertively militant in its squat and bulbous mass, possesses an extraordinary history, embodying the essence of Rome. Gigantically constructed as Hadrian's imperial mausoleum, it was spectacularly recast and adorned by successive popes to serve the ballistic science of holy war — with bastions incongruously named after the Evangelists.

Within its stony bowels and sunlit terraces, it now houses “L'Assenza Invadente del Divino” (“The Pervasive Absence of the Divine”), curated by Franco Speroni and Luisa Valeriani, with site-specific works by Haim Steinbach, Joseph Kosuth, Studio Azzurro (a Milan-based group), Grazia Toderi and Ciriaco Campus.

The premise of the show is the presence (or otherwise) of the unknowable, the ineffable, the divine, in an age of scientific certainties and technological mastery. The core resides in a dialectic between the statement attributed to Saint Augustine that “God is better known by not knowing him” and Nietzsche's iconoclastic declaration that “God is dead”.

The resolution lies in understanding how and what we are able to see from our constrained perspectives, and what we cannot see or even visualize through our outer and inner faculties of vision. The father-figures of the exhibition are those great inverters of conventional viewpoints, John Cage, one of whose anarchic musical compositions plays in a vaulted space enclosing a large grain mill, and Marcel Duchamp, who ‘lectures’ us in a cavernous chamber housing a mighty machine for grinding cannon shot.

Grazia Toderi's La Via Mistica della Tecnologia, rotating aerial video projection of the Castel Sant'Angelo and its environs.

High on the bright terraces, two coupled works, La Via Mistica della Tecnologia, by the 37-year-old Italian artist Grazia Toderi speak eloquently of the issue of perceptual and conceptual perspectives, earthly and heavenly, in complex interplay with the Castello itself. The tone is set by her linear installation of blue lights demarcating the perimeter of the castellations, as if denoting a landing zone at an airport.

The implications are elaborated in a video of a rotating aerial view of the Castello and its environs, subtly manipulated by computer. In the former, we are invited to look upwards, from Earth to heaven, while in the other we stare downwards, courtesy of scientific technologies, from the former perspective of God and his attendant angels. An apparent ‘runway’ of lights is formed by the illuminations on the bridge over the Tiber. The great bronze angel looming over us at the summit of the fortifications implicitly lands and takes off from the papal aerodrome under the guidance of high-tech control systems.

It is all a question of points of view. From below we see the order of the heavens; from the elevated viewpoint now granted to us by our technologies, we directly see (angel-like) the stellate plan and hidden orders of the city as organism. Toderi's insight is eternally valid, whether in an age of faith or an age of reason. We see what we want to see and can see from our particular viewpoint. The hardest of all perceptual and conceptual tasks is to see the whole picture from another visual and mental place — which is what religions have required of us over the ages.

“L'Assenza Invadente del Divino” remains at the Castel Sant'Angelo until 31 December.