What is offensive?

From time to time, there is controversy over the creation, or the display, or the giving of public subsidies, to art which is considered to be offensive to religious sensibilities.

The textbook example in recent times has been Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix suspended in a jar of urine, by the American artist Andres Serrano.

It was first exhibited in the United States in 1989, where it caused a major scandal. The affair was seen as partly responsible for the National Endowment for the Arts, which part-funded the exhibition, having its budget slashed by nearly half some years later.

"Piss Christ" by Andres Serano

The work has formed part of touring exhibitions from time to time. In 1997 it came to Melbourne, but the exhibition which included it was closed early by the National Gallery of Victoria after two youths attacked the piece with a hammer. The NGV felt that it could not guarantee the safety of staff or visitors.

The hammer attack succeeded where George Pell, then the Archbishop of Melbourne, had failed. Preferring a less violent course, Dr Pell had sought a court order to prevent the exhibition going ahead, arguing that Piss Christ was so offensive, scurrilous and insulting to Christianity that it went beyond a legitimate difference of opinion, and that it was unlawful either because it was a "blasphemous libel" or because it was "indecent or obscene".

He didn't get the order he wanted, in part because the judge was not convinced that exhibiting Piss Christ would risk a breach of the peace. (Ironic, really, when we consider what subsequently happened.)

And similar stories of hurt and outrage can be told from other cities where Piss Christ has been exhibited. Today, it's regularly mentioned as a real-world example of the tension between freedom of speech and expression on the one hand, and the injury done to the community when people perceive that their deepest values are mocked and derided.

All of which tends to eclipse the fact that, within Christianity, there is debate over whether this work should be seen as offensive at all.

But, hang on, isn't the crucifix an "obscene" image?

Is not the images of Jesus depicted in Mel Gibson's film confronting and even obscene?

It is certainly a very shocking image — but "shocking" does not mean "offensive". Christianity, after all, is — or should be — a very shocking religion, challenging the values and assumptions of the world head-on.

The crucifix is, when you think about it, an obscene image. It is a depiction of the corpse of a man tortured and killed in the most degrading and humiliating fashion. One of the reasons, it is speculated, why the cross or the crucifix was not adopted as a symbol by early Christians — they preferred the fish or the lamb — is precisely because it is such a disturbing image.

We would not for an instant regard a photograph of a man hanged, or beheaded, or disembowelled as something fit to show to our children. Yet today the image of a man crucified hangs on the wall of every Catholic primary school classroom.

Why are we not outraged and sickened by this image? Because we're used to it, that's why. We don't see a man crucified, a man degraded and spat upon, murdered flesh hanging on blood-soaked timber. We just see a crucifix. It's a conventional religious artefact, like a candlestick or a holy water font. We even consider a fine crucifix to be a thing of beauty. It's been utterly stripped of the meaning that it once had.

Perhaps Piss Christ restores something of that meaning. Yes, it's sickening, but if you don't feel sickened when you look at a crucifixion, then you're not seeing what's in front of your eyes.

And Piss Christ may also have something to say about the Incarnation. An incarnate God participates fully in our humanity — including the aspects of our humanity that we prefer not to think about. Urine is just one of many human bodily fluids. It is hardly more "obscene" than blood which has been spilt in acts of torture and murder, and yet we have no compunction about depicting blood in connection with Christ.

Was it, in fact, Serrano's intention to call attention to these points? To my mind that question is unimportant. When the controversy blew up Serrano did, in fact, write to the National Endowment for the Arts to explain why he made the piece and what he saw as its significance. But most people who see the piece will not know that, and will have no idea what he said. Their reaction will be to the piece itself, and not to what Serrano thought about it when he created it, or what he said about it subsequently.

The true significance of the piece, therefore, does not depend on what Serrano intended, but on what the viewer takes from it. And the viewer has to acknowledge that he has some responsibility for how he chooses to view any work, and what he chooses to take from it. So, yes, this piece is blasphemous — but only if the viewer wants it to be.

Further examples from the Blake Prize for Religious Art…

Queensland artist Priscilla Bracks denies her entry of Jesus morphing into Osama bin Laden in the Blake Prize was designed to cause offence.

And the same is true of many other pieces of art considered to be offensive to religious sensibilities. Just a couple of months ago, we had a fuss about some entries in the Blake Competition for Religious Art — an image of Christ which, when viewed from certain angles, morphed into an image of Osama bin Laden, and a statue of the Virgin veiled with a hijab.

Again, these are shocking and confronting pieces, but it's not an objection to a piece of art to say that it's confronting, any more than it's an objection to the gospel. We have to look a bit deeper than that.

I could feel confronted by the Jesus/bin Laden image for two reasons:

• "Someone is telling me that Jesus Christ is like Osama bin Laden! That's grossly offensive!"
• "Someone is challenging me to find the image of God in Osama bin Laden! I find that very difficult to do!"

I confess that I do find it very difficult to see the image of God in Osama bin Laden. My faith tells me it is there, and calls me to find it. Indeed, it calls me to love Osama bin Laden — not merely to tolerate him, but to love him, to the point where I would lay down my life for his. Of course I find that challenging; who wouldn't? It is no less challenging when a work of art makes the same point.

The point is that both of the reactions above are confronting, but one confronts me because it contradicts my faith, and the other confronts me because it asserts a truth of my faith that I feel challenged by. And it's my choice which meaning I will take out of, or read into, this work. The artist cannot control this; I can.

We should note here that the conventional depictions of the faces of Jesus and Mary in western art bear no relationship at all to the likely actual faces of Jesus and Mary. We show them, basically, with the faces that we would like to have — with our skin tones, our eye and hair colours, and our conventions of what is wise, loving, noble, etc in the human face. They are entirely symbolic. Furthermore, we only recognise these faces as those of Jesus and Mary because of the context in which they are displayed — the halo, the cut and colour of the robe, the other iconographic signals. If we're trying to identify a holy picture or a holy statue, the face is actually the last thing we look at.

What did Jesus actually look like? Well, it's a disturbing thought, but if you want to pick a contemporary person who is familiar to us, in terms of skin tone and colour, hair type, stature, etc he might have looked something like the young Yassir Arafat. And it's true that he probably resembled Osama bin Laden, if not very closely, then certainly more closely than he resembles the conventional images that we are used to.

So what is being obscured in this Blake Prize entry is not Jesus, or the face of Jesus, but the symbolic face that we have constructed for Jesus, which is of course our own face. In most religious art, we try to make Jesus like ourselves, or an idealized version of ourselves. It's much easier to do that than to make ourselves like Jesus.

So maybe the real reason these pieces offend us is that they call attention to the comfortable complacencies that we substitute for Christianity. Piss Christ doesn't let us sugar-coat the crucifixion; it calls attention both to its sickening reality, and to our reluctance to face that reality. And the Jesus/bin Laden picture insists that we look for Jesus in places that we'd rather not. We may be offended by that, but can we really say that it's blasphemous?

ARTICLE NAVIGATION: PART I | PART II | PART III

Further Links:
Website for the Blake Prize for Religious Art: www.blakeprize.com.au.
Statement by artist Priscilla Bracks on her controversial entry in the Blake Prize:
making-the-empire-cross.com/news/blake_prize_artist_statement.html.
Wikipedia entry on Piss Christ and the artist Andres Serano: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ.

Photo Credits:
Clicking on the images will take you to the original source and or further information.

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Peregrinus can be contacted at: Peregrinus <peregrinus@catholica.com.au>

©2007 Peregrinus

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