From The Sunday Times
May 17, 2009
Credit crunch art at East End galleries
In Richard Grayson and Last Days of Jack Sheppard exhibitions, recession seems to provide inspiration and need to reflect

Waldemar Januszsak

[...]

Grayson?s new display is unsettling from the off. Ushered into a dark space by a man with a torch, you are plonked onto a plastic chair of the sort village halls keep stacked in the corner in preparation for council meetings. At the far end of the hall, a film is playing on a large screen. It seems to show a church choir that has gathered to sing for you. From the look of them ? overweight, T-shirted, mixed-race, mad-eyed ? they seem to be American. And their song is an insistent choral lament in which a gospel melody has been combined with a modernist drone. It takes a while to tune into the words. Then, slowly, you do. And the creepy realisation dawns on you that you have stumbled into a musical event mounted by an obscure religious cult.

Their song begins with a description of what you recognise to be the world today: ?Because of war in the Middle East and a crisis in oil/Dollar-based currencies will become worthless and banks will fail.? It?s a song about the credit crunch. Nothing too outrageous yet. Then the sopranos chime in: ?Hungry mobs will rampage through the cities of the world plundering supermarkets/They will ransack food stores and there will be a Great Confusion.? It?s nasty. But not yet chilling. The real horror begins when the baritones pipe up: ?There will be the greatest famine the world has ever seen, and war, terror and turmoil/And then we will see a new political genius emerge/Helped by UFOs he will propose and launch revolutionary economic global changes/ He is the Biblical Antichrist come to confirm the Holy Covenant.? Reader, I do not want to frighten you unduly, but according to my understanding of these doomy foretellings, President Obama is almost certainly the Antichrist. The credit crunch is the beginning of the Tribulation. And the end of the world is nigh.

Of course, Grayson believes none of this. The words to his creepy gospel oratorio were taken, I read, from a website run by a religious cult that used to be called the Children of God, but prefers now?adays to be known as The Family International. Started in 1968 in Huntington Beach, California, by David Brandt Berg, known to his followers as ?Father David?, the cult pioneered a method of evangelism called Flirty Fishing, in which sex was used as religious bait to gain converts. Basing his oratorio on predictions found on the Family?s website (thefamily.org), Grayson commissioned Leo Chadburn to write the music and assembled a choir in Texas to sing it. The results are startling, shocking, distressing, unforgettable.

Grayson?s piece works as well as it does because everything is revealed so unassumingly. At first the choir seems merely eccentric: dressed down in mom-next-door sweaters and faded denims, they seem quintessentially small-town and ordinary. The camera moves, too, have been modelled on the leisurely camerawork of a genuine choir recording. The artist does nothing obvious to force the horror. Instead, he leaves it to grow, Exorcist style, quietly and inexorably, as you slowly realise that these insane predictions bear a scary resemblance to world events. Close the book on the 2009 Turner prize. Grayson should be a shoo-in.