Today feels weighted in significance of the holy. Good Friday, Passover the feast of the unleavened bread and the angel passing over and Ramadan where fasting occurs from dawn to dusk in observance of the Koran. As if that isn’t enough it is also the twenty-fifth anniversary or the Good Friday Agreement, now at risk.
Also the day we choose to visit the Serpentine and see Steve McQueen’s video of Grenfell.
The spectacle of the toast-charred ruin is visceral. There is to be no escape from this brutal commemoration of the dead.
McQueen uses nothing other than his sacred vision, technical skills, heart and brain and the elevations of a helicopter to assert the transcendent energy of art. Half way through I experience such terror of engulfment that I start being unable to swallow. I noticed that each aisle of the viewing theatre has a box of Kleenex. It could be my consulting room. None of my tears fall to honour the dead. I have morphed into a gasping fish, suffocating and unable to salivate trapped inside of the burning tower. This is not the sacred fire of the Gods but the demonic force of societal neglect. Extinction.