God is in the details

In a deconsecrated Liverpudlian church, Will Self discovers a rare moment of joy. Does that mean this year's Biennial festival is providing divine inspiration?

Neal Brown, a lugubrious presence at the best of times, is sitting picking at a vegetarian chow mein in a restaurant on Brook Street in Liverpool's Chinatown. It's pretty unfair of the curator of an exhibition of New Religious Art to insist on dining at this establishment – given that he's a rabid vegetarian. But then Brown, whatever his other foibles, has never been anything but uncompromising, and just as he urges the "white pig skin", which is the restaurant's speciality, on his reluctant guest, so he's prepared to urge his concept of the divine on the visitors to Liverpool's second artistic biennial.

Brown himself is a believer, albeit of a peculiar stripe. "I only think God is joy," he tells me, "that's all, nothing fancy, nothing organised, nothing intellectualised, merely the little moments of joy that we can experience in life." Personally, I find Brown's theology of joy a little difficult to take, as I've known the artist and curator for some 16 years and I've never seen him take much pleasure in anything. If you observe his collapsed soufflé of a countenance with great attention, while relating to him a particularly amusing incident, you might just notice a little moue of wry amusement – but that's about it.

Still, there's nothing that joyful about contemporary Liverpool, so in a sense Brown is the perfect man to bring a concept of the divine down to the ground of this benighted burgh. Like Zeus impregnating a raddled maiden in the form of a shower of gold, Brown's patron for this exhibition has been James Moores, a scion of the Merseyside Pools fortunes. The Moores family are responsible for numerous arts benefactions hereabouts, and through his A Foundation, Moores is one of the prime movers in the Biennial. There's a certain symmetry about this, and symmetry is one of the emergent aspects of contemporary art that Brown is keen to identify as evidence of transcendental preoccupation. After all, the Moores's fortune was, arguably, built on a kind of magical thinking – if I look hard enough into the future I can see those score draws – and now, this levy on credulousness pays, in part, for organised suspensions of disbelief.

Since its inception in 1999, the Biennial has proved another lopsided addition to the topsy-turvy world of Liverpool. Brown told me of an opening speech given by a city councillor for the first Biennial, throughout which he referred to it as the "bi-anal".

But this isn't altogether a malapropism: as far as the Liverpudlians are concerned, most of the exhibitions are a load of shit. Besides, it's taken another three years for this loose agglomeration of artistic events to be staged again, and during that time the city's attitude towards the arty-farty interlopers from down south hasn't by any means improved.

It's difficult to imagine that even the biggest and most socially cohesive of art exhibitions could truly have an impact on the social and economic devastation of inner-city Liverpool. There may be the odd trendy bar and designer emporium, but what strikes the art tourist are the burnt-out hulks of houses and commercial premises abutting even city centre properties. At night, in the shadowy concrete cleavage between the twin peaks of the city's cathedrals, tracksuited wraiths flit hither and thither, emphasising the fact that this is a dark star of a metropolis, winnowed out by the loss of its traditional industries. The population of metropolitan Liverpool has more than halved in the last half century, and you feel this as you wander through its echoing thoroughfares and traverse the scrubby patches where old buildings have been razed, but no new ones raised.

What better place for Brown's menhir of postmodernism to instantiate? Like the creativity-enhancing, monolithic slab in 2001: a Space Odyssey (itself the locus classicus of Modernism), To the Glory of God: New Religious Art is a white, plaster pillar, 30ft high, which fills the crepuscular core of a deconsecrated Georgian Catholic church on Seel Street, just around the corner from where the curator and I face off over the pig skin. Inscribed with "GOD" on one side and "ALLAH" on the other, the pillar is inset with artworks and hollowed out at the base, creating a little cubicular chapel which visitors can enter to view one of Jake and Dinos Chapman's artful subversions of the model-making impulse. In this instance, their elision of 002-scale toy soldiers and Neapolitan presepe takes the form of the Waffen SS staging Golgotha.

Elsewhere, either hanging from the pillar, or leaning against it, or embedded in niches let into its hard hide, are works by Tracey Emin, Mark Wallinger, David Batchelor, Sebastian Horsley and other doyennes of the contemporary scene, while there are also more considered – and downbeat – contributions from Neal Brown himself, together with Colin Self and David Medalla. Personally, I'm not particularly interested in describing these works individually – go and see them yourself. The show is open until the middle of this week, and standing in the abandoned church of St Peter, in the presence of the white pillar full of "religious" art, is a properly transcendent experience.

By taking the formal properties of the gallery space and solidifying the white void, Brown has properly subverted the tendency for contemporary art to place itself in lieu of religious icon. This is what contemporary art would be like if it were properly iconic. The only pieces that fall outside of the pillar are a hut out the back of the church, hung with photographs staged by Kristine Agergaard and Janne Schafer, which purport to be the rituals of a religious cult, and a video installation by Mat Collishaw, which depicts the artist togged up as Christ on the cross. Brown's ambitions for New Religious Art were never less than vaunting. In a vrai naïf press release, he proposed the idea that all the artists in the world should cooperate in the construction of one big artwork, which would reach up to the heavens like a Babel of mixed media. The Liverpool exhibition is merely a maquette of this mondial work.

Yet, in a way, Brown has achieved what he personally espouses about the nature of the divine – namely, created a moment of joy – while leaving the wider issues of belief and theism quite untouched. There has been a certain amount of brouhaha in Liverpool about one piece in the exhibition, a "comments" book concocted by Bill Drummond (the counter-cultural impresario behind the KLF and the K Foundation), and entitled Is God a C***?. The subject of considerable outrage and vilification in the Daily Post, the book, complete with its comments, was eventually stolen from the exhibition. But whether or not the deity has a genital nature is not the real outrage at St Peter's. The real outrage is distinctly material rather than spiritual, and that's that this incomparable church – the oldest Catholic one in Liverpool – is about to be gutted for a new office space.

In a way, Brown's exhibition is a genuine model, not of a universal artwork but of a particular and mundane development: the continual substitution of papery Mammon for solidified spirituality. When New Religious Art disappears at the end of Wednesday, St Peter's itself won't have long left. Which is why I chose to introduce the exhibition's curator himself in the historic present. Let's leave him there, in an eternal now, together with his religious art and the white pig skin.

'To the Glory of God: New Religious Art' is at St Peter's, Liverpool until Wed; the Biennial continues until 24 Nov