Michael Smith's Religious Agony and Ecstasy in the Shifts of Christian Ideologies

BUSINESS DAY
BY Chris Thurman

Details of Michael Smith's Ecstasy II

SOUTH AFRICA---Christians who adopt a conservative hard line usually do so based on shaky theology and an outdated world view. It often starts at school, where religion is associated with the compulsory and the authoritarian. Certainly, this was the case with Michael Smith. In the artist’s statement about his latest exhibition, "Shift" (at Res Gallery in Parkwood, Joburg, until August 17), Smith recalls being "herded into the school hall" for an hour-long tirade by a visiting minister about how "rock ’n’ roll is the Devil’s music". Smith’s experience of the shift in church attitudes towards rock music led him to "ask whether ideologies should ever be believed, given how interchangeable their moralities are". [link]