Words Made Flesh: Depictions of Christ in Modern and Contemporary Art by Emily Leader

Words Made Flesh Images of Christ in Modern and Contemporary Art

Words Made Flesh Images of Christ in Modern and Contemporary Art Division III Project by Emily Leader

Committee

Karen Koehler Alan Hodder

Hampshire College Spring 2012

Contents 6

Acknowledgements

Introduction

How Should Jesus Look?

Uses and Abuses: The Image of Christ and Political Propaganda

62 78

War, Suffering, and the Image of Christ Part One: The First World War Part Two: The Holocaust

100

Recontextualization and Readymades

124

Christ in the Gay Community: Depictions of Christ by Gay Catholic Artists

146

Conclusion

148

Catalogue List

154

Relevant Exhibitions

155

Bibliography 5

Acknowledgements Karen Koehler, Alan Hodder, Sura Levine, Justin Griswold, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Courtney Crosby, Rachel Beckwith, Summer Hirtzel, Katie Klein, Wendy Bloom, Tom Leader, Hampshire College Student Diagnostic Center, Harold F. Johnson Library, Smith College Hillyer Art Library, Jesus Christ

Introduction Some scholars have argued that there is no place for religion in art today—that modernism did away with it.1 It is true that since the late nineteenth century, the art world has been relatively secular, compared to the previous centuries of church-dominated art. However, while religious imagery may have receded in art, it has not gone away. The image of Christ, in particular, has maintained a persistent presence in modern and contemporary art. So what does this continued presence mean? Clearly, this image has continued to have relevance for artists. It is more than just a vestige of a bygone era. It is more than an object of devotion. The image of Christ has extended beyond its religious context. The image of Christ is a powerful and widely recognized symbol that has often been appropriated for secular purposes. It has also provided a valuable tool for reinterpretations of Christianity and criticism of the Church. This symbol cannot be separated from its original religious meaning, but in this process of appropriation and reinterpretation, it has acquired a host of new meanings as well. This project is an exploration of some the various uses and meanings of the image of Christ in Western visual art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This project was initially conceived as a catalog for a hypothetical exhibition of images of Christ in modern and contemporary art. What would be in this exhibition? What common themes would be explored in the catalog’s essays? I chose to limit myself to works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries simply because I had to draw the line somewhere. I began by compiling a long list of images, and in the process, certain topics began to emerge. With the exhibition catalog format in mind, I envisioned the essays not as a singular, comprehensive, linear narrative, but as collection of independent investigations, perhaps even by different writers. These essays do not cover the entire history of visual depictions of Christ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. That would be an impossible task for one person to carry out in less than a year. There is also some overlap between some essays. Even if the essays are independent of one other, their topics are not. There is a great deal of intersection between these topics—so much so that the linear organization of the texts and images was a challenge—and consequently some works appear in more than one essay, for different reasons. For example, Ludwig Gies’s Kruzifixus (Crucified Christ) is discussed in one essay (“Uses and Abuses”) as a prominently featured work 1 See: James Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).

in the 1937 Entarte Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, and in another as a response to the First World War. Apart from my own personal interests, there were two major influences on my selection of images. The first was existing catalogs from similarly themed exhibitions. Particularly influential were Gabriele Finaldi’s The Image of Christ, which accompanied the Seeing Salvation exhibition at the National Gallery in London in 2000, and Nissan N. Perez’s catalog for the 2003 exhibition, Revelation: Representations of Christ in Photography, at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. These catalogs provided a valuable starting point for my research, and many of the images I selected were culled from these volumes. The second major influence was a course on “Visual Culture and the Holocaust,” which I was taking as I began this project. I did not expect there to be much overlap between this course and my project, so I was surprised and excited to learn about the strange role of depictions of Christ in the Degenerate Art exhibition, and about the prevalence of symbolism of the Crucifixion in Jewish artists’ responses to the Holocaust. Due to this overlap, I became quite immersed in these particular subjects. However, the relatively large amount of attention given to Jewish artists and Holocaust art in this project is not entirely due to circumstance. Being a secular Jew who studies representations of Christ, the relationship between Jews and Jesus has particular personal interest for me. The questions raised by the use of Christian symbolism in the works of Marc Chagall and Samuel Bak are similar to the questions I have asked myself in the course of this project. What does it mean for a Jewish artist to use a Christian symbol? What does it mean for a Jewish student to study a Christian symbol? The same question applies to any non-Christian in these pursuits. Does our appropriation and interest reinforce the dominance of Christianity in Western visual culture? This is a question worth keeping in mind when looking at non-Christian applications of the image of Christ. The issue of non-Christian appropriation of the image of Christ is one of two overarching themes that I explore throughout this project. The second theme is the reinterpretation of the image of Christ by artists who identify as Christian, or who have some personal connection to Christianity. For many of these artists, the image of Christ provides a powerful tool for criticism of the church and popular religious practice. Though many have interpreted the works of artists such as Renee Cox and David Wojnarowicz as anti-Christian diatribes, their criticisms are more complex. These artists criticize Christianity as an institution, but they also reinterpret the image of Christ in ways that address contemporary concerns, such as racism and drug addiction. These two themes of nonChristian appropriation and Christian reinterpretation appear throughout the following essays, sometimes together and sometimes separately. The individual essays each deal with their own particular theme, and discuss a 8

number of relevant works. The first essay, “How Should Jesus Look?” deals with cultural notions of Christ’s physical appearance, and aesthetic issues in depicting Him: Why do we say that a certain representation looks like (or does not look like) Jesus? Why do we say that certain people look like Jesus? Should depictions of Christ emphasize transcendent beauty or ugly suffering? The second essay, “Uses and Abuses,” discusses the use of the image of Christ in political propaganda, specifically in Nazi Germany. This essay looks at the role of images of Christ in the Degenerate Art exhibition and in the work of anti-Nazi artists such as John Heartfield. The third essay, “War, Suffering, and the Image of Christ,” which is divided into two parts, deals with images of Christ in representations of war and mass suffering. The first part looks at the role of images of Christ in World War One, as both a consoling image for the bereaved and as means of expressing experience on the battlefield for veteran artists. The second part looks at the use of symbolism of the Crucifixion in Jewish artists’ responses to the Holocaust. This section compares the approaches of Marc Chagall and Samuel Bak in their use of this symbol. The fourth essay, “Recontextualization and Readymades,” uses Boris Groys’s essay, “On the New,” as a framework for looking at representations of Christ in contemporary art. This essay applies Groys’s notion of recontextualization to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) and Andy Warhol’s Last Supper series (1985-1986). This essay also looks at Groys’s interpretation of Kierkegaard’s Christology, and his comparison of the Incarnation to Duchamp’s readymades, in relation to Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo (1999). The fifth essay, “Christ in the Gay Community,” looks at how Christ is depicted in works by gay artists who were raised Catholic. This essay focuses on the 1980s, when the Catholic Church officially condemned homosexuality. In the context of this conflict between these artists’ sexual orientation and religious upbringing, this essay looks at these artists’ personal relationships with Catholicism and their approaches to depicting Christ. These essays cover only a few aspects of the massive subject that is twentieth and twenty-first century depictions of Christ. However, I believe that they can provide some insight into the range of meanings and uses of the image of Christ, and help to illuminate some of the problems that these images can present.

David Mach, Die Harder, 2011

George Bolster Jesus, 2008

Evergon (Al Lunt), The Deposition from the Cross, 1985 12

Vik Muniz, The Doubting of Thomas, 2000 13

Graham Sutherland, Christ in Glory in the Tetromorph (First Cartoon), 1953 14

Salvador Dali, Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), 1954 15

How Should Jesus Look?

The question of what Jesus looked like is one of those epistemic debates that tends to reveal a lot more about the parties engaged in discussion than about the answer to the question itself. However, despite the fact that we have no actual historical record of Jesus Christ’s physical appearance, it is not at all uncommon to hear somebody say that someone or something looks like Jesus. What do people mean when they say this? Unless one is declaring that the person or thing in question looks like the Word made flesh, simultaneously divine and human, there is probably some sort of concept, whether personal or cultural, of what Jesus looked like. For someone or something to look like Jesus, there must be some notion of what Jesus looked like. More often than not, in Western culture, this notion involves long hair and a beard, and a skin tone on the lighter side of the spectrum. Whether we believe in its accuracy or not, the conception of Jesus as a white man with long hair and a beard plays a dominant role in Western visual culture. In popular visual media, Christ is often instantly recognizable even without a cross or any other scriptural symbols, simply because he conforms to the standard cultural expectations. Nancy Burson observed this phenomenon in a couple of close friends; Burson describes one as a “healer” who “wants to look like Jesus”, and the other cut off his long hair and beard once “someone told him he looked like Jesus.”1 In 2000, “curious about how we make assumptions about what one of the most powerful figures in the history of world looks like”, Burson put an ad in the Village Voice, soliciting “Jesus lookalikes” and began a series of portraits titled Guys Who Look Like Jesus. The series shows a significant range of faces, featuring both men who more closely resemble the traditional depictions of Jesus, and men of color. However, despite the variations Burson exhibits, there are certain obvious traits that these people all have in common: they are all male, they all have long hair, and they all have beards. These would seem to be the criteria for resembling Jesus; however, what happens when a depiction of Christ does not conform to these standards? Another work created for the new millennium, Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo, would look out of place even among Burson’s varied assortment of Jesus lookalikes. Wall16

Nancy Burson, Seeing and Believing: The Art of Nancy Burson (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2002), 150.

inger’s Christ is a life-size figure, cast in marble resin from a young, clean-shaven man, with his eyes shut, and hands tied behind his back.2 Wallinger’s Christ is not only beardless but also bald.3 The figure wears a crown of gold-plated barbed wire on his head, and his only garment is a loincloth wrapped around his waist.4 Wallinger’s sculpture was conceived for a plinth in Trafalgar Square, left empty when William IV failed to leave enough money in his will for the planned equestrian statue of him to be erected.5 Wallinger’s Christ, the first of a series of sculptures designed for the plinth, stood in Trafalgar Square from July 1999 to February 2000.6 Wallinger’s Christ was conceived for a very specific location, and the sculpture’s power and significance are fundamentally contextual. The plinth was intended to house a monumental statue, on the scale of the others that occupy Trafalgar Square. Wallinger’s Christ, literally life size, is dwarfed by his own plinth (at whose edge he stands) and by his “triumphal overscale” neighbors.7 This striking contrast in scale “makes the sheer bombast of the traditional sculptures nearby cruelly apparent.”8 This contrast also carries an “implicit criticism of the ‘heroic’ sculptures around it,” raising “the issue of Christ’s sacrifice as an act of heroism.”9 Wallinger conceived this Christ as a political prisoner—“whether or not he thinks he’s the son of God or if you see him as a religious leader or not, he’s someone that has been betrayed.”10 David Burrows notes that the work could be viewed as an “allegory for persecution of all kinds, particularly when surrounding by the trappings of colonialism, nationalism, religion and commerce in the form of public monuments and grand buildings.”11 The history of the square itself plays a part in Wallinger’s political message here. Wallinger comments that the “square is and has been for centuries the place of protest and celebration—public meetings and public execution. As such, to have Christ before the multitude was to implicate us, the people in the square…We are all responsible—looking at him, what singles you out from the crowd? From the mob? How would you react?”12 2 Neil MacGregor and Erika Langmuir, Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 115. 3 Ibid., 115. The model wore a rubber bathing cap during casting. 4 Ibid., 115. 5 James Hall, “Short of Statue,” Artforum International 38, no.3 (1999): 47. 6 Yve Alain Bois, Guy Brett, Margaret Iversen, and Julian Stallabrass, “An Interview with Mark Wallinger,” October 123 (2008): 194. 7 MacGregor and Langmuir, 115. 8 Tony Godfrey, “Recent Public Sculpture. Salisbury, London, West Bretton,” The Burlington Magazine 141, no. 1161 (1999): 764. 9 Ibid., 764. 10 Bois et al, 197. 11 David Burrows, “Beyond Belief: Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo,” in Mark Wallinger: Credo, (London: Tate Gallery Publishing Limited, 2000), 34. 12 Bois et al, 197.

This implication of guilt applies not only to the suffering of Christ, but also to specific atrocities at the time. Wallinger cites the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo as a major influence, raising the deeply disturbing question, “how could genocide happen again in Europe while we looked on?”13 Wallinger’s Christ, praised by some critics for its pathos without sentimentality,”14 and even by some clergymen as “profoundly moving,”15 particularly in its “very human scale among all this grandeur,”16 nevertheless received harsh public criticism during its tenure in Trafalgar Square, due to its unconventional appearance: ’If that’s Jesus Christ, it’s a bloody miracle,’ a man is reported to have said… ’You couldn’t put your faith in someone like that, he’s as weak as a kitten.’ ‘You can’t have a Christ figure like this,’ said another. ‘Where is his robe? Where is his beard? Where is his cross?’ An ice cream seller pointed out, ‘He doesn’t have long hair.’17 To many viewers, this figure did not look like Christ; clearly, there was a certain conception of Christ’s physical appearance to which this work did not conform. As far as what it means to look like Christ is concerned, some of these comments are more telling than others, particularly those about the absence of long hair and a beard—the uniting features in Burson’s Guys Who Look Like Jesus series. It would seem that long hair, and, perhaps to an even greater extent, beards, play a fundamental role in contemporary Western cultural conceptions of what Christ looked like. Beards and Also Not Beards The most striking break from traditional representations of Christ in Wallinger’s Ecce Homo is arguably the absence of a beard. Though there is considerable variation among popular depictions of Christ, the beard seems to be something of a constant. There are, of course, notable exceptions—both Michelangelo and Caravaggio painted a beardless Christ.18 However, more often than not, Christ is shown with a beard. What makes the ubiquity of the beard noteworthy is the fact that there is no historical record of Christ’s physical appearance, nor was the standardization of depictions of Christ dictated by the Church.19 The Church, in fact, seems to have been thoroughly disinterested in the issue of Christ’s physical appearance—much less representations of his facial hair. Rather, the Church was more concerned with the nature of the Incarnation. Consequently, the

13 Ibid., 197. 14 Godfrey, 764. 15 MacGregor and Langmuir, 115. 16 Ibid., 115. 17 Ibid., 115. 18 Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel, “Popular Belief and the Image of the Beardless Christ,” Visual Resources 19, no. 1 (2003): 35. 19 Ibid., 38.

Church “offered no guidelines as to what Christ had looked like.”20 What makes the dominance of the bearded Christ even more curious is that it was not always the norm. Beardless depictions of Christ were in fact quite common up until the sixth century in the East, and the twelfth century in the West.21 In early Christian art, as some scholars have asserted, “Christ was depicted as barefaced since he had explicitly androgynous traits.”22 Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel also notes that beginning in the early Christian period and continuing for several centuries, two traditions of depicting Christ—one with a beard and one without—co-existed. These two traditions, Chavannes-Mazel argues, were derived from “antique prototypes which were once used to visualize the Roman gods.”23 The first of these two traditions is “the Hellenistic type of Jesus Christ, extant since the third century, in which Christ is the eternal youth”24; this type “can be paralleled to Apollo and Dionysios, both deities untouched by time because they exist in a cosmic cycle.”25 The “second type is more historical and represents Christ as an adult man with a full beard. This figure is also based on a Classical type, the philosopher or theios aner. The beard stands for wisdom and also for status, comparable to the one Jupiter is gifted with.”26 One explanation that has been proposed for the use of these two types is that they connect to Christ’s two natures: “The beardless Christ represents him as the eternal youth, in existence before Creation and before time—the Logos nonincarnate—whereas the bearded Christ is the Savior, the Word made flesh. The beard here is the sign not only of maturity, but also of wisdom and of historical authenticity.”27 However, Chavannes-Mazel remains skeptical of this conclusion, arguing that “images with and without a beard, in every phase of Christ’s life on earth and in every picture of his timeless existence, are almost totally unpredictable.”28 Ultimately, however, the bearded tradition prevailed, first in the East, and later in the West. In the case of the East, Chavannes-Mazel attributes this to a growing preference for the bearded type, which became fixed post-Iconoclasm: “…once the portrayal of Christ was permitted, icon-loving Christians sought recognizable features in their Savior, as in the portraits of saints they venerated.”29 Similarly, Chavannes-Mazel explains the ultimate dominance of beards in West as the result of a popular desire for a god with a more 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 28. Chavannes-Mazel, 28. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 31. Chavannes-Mazel, 32.

immediately and universally recognizable face, particularly along pilgrim routes.30 Though Chavannes-Mazel’s argument does not fully explain why the bearded type was preferred in either the West or the East, it does offer a reasonable explanation for the origins of the increased uniformity in depictions of Christ, despite the prevailing type not necessarily being any more valid than the other. Perhaps beards were simply more fashionable at those times. As David Morgan points out, “artists and their patrons throughout the history of Christianity have understood the physical likeness of Jesus to conform to their own race, nationality, and local customs…In every instance, his likeness is coded to resemble the interests of those who depicted him.”31 So what happens when the artist depicting Christ, according to their own interests and identity, is not part of the dominant group—when the artist is a woman or a person of color, and depicts Christ as such? What do the responses to these works say about the viewer? Black Jesus, Female Jesus In 2001, Renee Cox elicited the wrath of New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani when her five-panel photographic work titled Yo Mama’s Last Supper was featured in an exhibition of Black photography at the Brooklyn Museum. The piece “recreates Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper with an all black cast,” with Cox herself in the center, nude, playing the part of Christ. Cox’s aim, with the work, was “to challenge the way that both women and people of color have been written out of both the visual representations and the power structure of the Catholic Church” and with the ensuing controversy, these issues were certainly raised. Giuliani called the work “’outrageous,’ ‘disgusting,’ and ‘anti-Catholic,’”32 and was joined by “William Donahue’s Catholic League and local officials of the Catholic Church…in condemning the work as ‘a vulgar display of anti-Christian sentiment.’”33 Raised as a Catholic, the artist defended her work, noting that “there are plenty of images of a nude Christ…My guess after all of this hoopla is that it is a question of race. People have a problem with the fact that it’s an African American woman at the head of the dinner table.”34 Indeed, another photographic work modeled after Leonardo’s Last Supper, by Sam Taylor-Wood was exhibited the previous year at the Brooklyn Museum in a show titled “Sensations”. Taylor-Wood’s piece also features the female artist, nude, standing in for

30 Ibid., 38. 31 David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 124. 32 S. Brent Plate, Religion, Art, and Visual Culture: A Cross-Cultural Reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 53; Eleanor Heartney, Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2004), 154. 33 Heartney, 154. 34 Ibid., 154-155

Christ. In contrast to Cox’s dignified composition, this work, titled Wrecked, “presented Leonardo’s tableau as a drunken revel.”35 This work would seem ripe for the same attacks leveled at Cox’s piece, especially considering the fact that another work in the “Sensations” show (Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary) drew similar criticisms of anti-Catholicism from Giuliani. However, Wrecked, which features a white female Christ figure, managed to fly under the mayor’s radar. Additionally, Cox’s work sparked no controversy when it was first shown as part of the 1999 Venice Biennale, in the Oratorio di San Ludovico, a seventeenth-century Catholic Church, despite being in close proximity to the Vatican.36 Considering the significance of race (likely more than coincidence) in the response to Yo Mama’s Last Supper, Cox’s statement (in this and other works), about “the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, whose message of love and mercy is belied by its treatment of women and people of color, and…American culture’s puritanical attitude toward the female body, especially when that body is black,”37 is very apt. In Yo Mama’s Last Supper, and in her remarks in defense of the work, Cox addresses the apparent disconnect between the Bible’s claim that “we are created in the image of God”38 and the overwhelmingly white, patriarchal tradition of western Christian art. Cox recalls: Christ on the crucifix and the Virgin Mary were the first images I saw. But I never found them inclusive of who I was as an African American woman of Jamaican descent. Mary is always about purity and trust, about the powerlessness of woman. So I wondered, how do I flip that? How do I inject what I want to say?39 This problem of lack of inclusiveness in these images has been raised by many, particularly with regard to the issue of race in depictions of Christ. Kelly Brown Douglas points out, “If you aren’t able to see God in yourself and yourself in God, then you can’t see yourself as a child of God…What does it do to a person’s self-esteem when Christ is pictured as your oppressor? The message is, ‘You’re worth nothing.’ This society tells little black children that every day.”40 Though Douglas makes a valid point about the social impact of these images, her argument tends to be dismissed (sometimes rather patronizingly) by many when it comes to depicting a black Christ, on the basis of historical inauthenticity.41 While the debate over the physical appearance of the historical Jesus may be something of a lost cause either way, given the lack of historical evidence, there is certainly a case to be made, on theological grounds, for depicting Christ as black or female. Arthur C. Danto, discuss35 Ibid., 154 36 Heartney, 155. 37 Ibid., 155. 38 Plate, 53. 39 Heartney, 155. 40 Laurie Goodstein, “Religion’s Changing Face; More Churches Depicting Christ as Black.” The Washington Post (Washington DC), Mar. 28, 1994. 41 Goodstein.

ing Yo Mama’s Last Supper, makes a strong argument for the suitability of a female representation of Christ, which can easily be applied to depictions of a black Jesus as well. According to Danto, the important question is not whether Jesus was female, but whether Jesus could have been female: “…once the decision is made [for God] to take on human form, the question of gender immediately arises…Humans are sexually bimorphic, so the question cannot be avoided. Could God have chosen to be incarnate in a female body? To say that God could not have is inconsistent with God’s power.”42 Danto acknowledges that “a male body would have recommended itself at that moment in history, in order to make sure that Jesus would have a respect and authority not ordinarily accorded females,”43 but argues that this does not exclude the possibility of Christ being represented as female: while a female representation of Christ “might have been difficult for worshippers to deal with during certain stages of iconography…it should hardly be an insuperable problem, once we appreciate that pictures may be regarded as symbols rather than mere likenesses.”44 In light of the common use of a fish or lamb to represent Christ, Danto argues that “there is iconographic room for him to be shown in many different ways,” adding, “Showing God as male is…a historical contingency. It could be a metaphor, through which once conveys Christ’s absolute authority, males traditionally having that in patriarchal societies.” However, showing Christ as female also provides a metaphor for other characteristics of His, traditionally or biologically associated with women. Long before Cox, there was a tradition of describing Christ in feminine—specifically maternal—terms, popular in the writings of twelfth-century Cistercian monks, such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Guerric of Igny. In these writings, maternal characteristics such as breasts or the womb are symbolically ascribed to Christ. For Bernard, breasts represent a source of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual nourishment, and the act of breastfeeding is compared to preaching.45 In Guerric’s writing, the symbolic womb of Christ is a place of protection and spiritual union.46 There are Biblical precedents for these maternal associations. In the Old Testament, God speaks of himself in maternal terms on several occasions, “bearing the Israelites in his bosom, conceiving them in his womb,” and the wisdom of God, explicitly personified as female, identifies as a mother in some versions of Sirach.47 While the New Testament does not use the same sort of feminine language and

42 Arthur C. Danto, “In the Bosom of Jesus: Yo Mama’s Last Supper,” The Nation 272, no. 21 (2001): 31. 43 Ibid., 31. 44 Danto, 31. 45 Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Sprituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 115-118. 46 Bynum, 120-122. 47 Bynum, 125. See: Isaiah 49.1, 49.15, and 66.11-13; Sirach 24.18, “I am the mother of beautiful love, of fear, of knowledge, and of holy hope; being eternal, I am given to all my children, to those who are named by him,” is included in some versions. See: “The Apocrypha,” The New Oxford Annotated Bible: Augmented

imagery of the female body, Christ likens Himself to a mother hen in Matthew 23.37.48 This tradition of describing Christ in maternal terms makes Yo Mama’s Last Supper seem much less radical; in fact, Cox’s work could even be seen as an extension of this tradition. The title of Cox’s piece explicitly identifies the female Christ figure as a mother and connects it to Cox’s previous Yo Mama series, a series of nude self-portraits of the artist pregnant or with her son.49 Through this maternal lens, the bare breasts of Cox’s Christ figure are not unlike the breasts referenced by Bernard and his ilk. Perhaps Cox’s breasts are exposed not as a gesture of eroticism or exhibitionism, but rather as an offering of nourishment and love. The tradition of maternal descriptions of Christ also illustrates Danto’s point. The twelfth-century Cistercian writers were not claiming that Christ literally had breasts and a womb, just as Christ was not literally claiming to be a hen. These were representations of a particular theological—not historical—aspect of Christ, and in representing this aspect, maternal imagery was appropriate symbolically. In a similar vein, if one wishes to represent the suffering and injustice of the Passion, it seems quite appropriate to depict Christ as a member of an oppressed group. As Danto points out, “the whole message of Christianity is that God took on a human form in order redeem us through his suffering…In view of the profound suffering both women and blacks have undergone through history, it would be entirely suitable that Christ be represented as either of these, or both.”50 Obviously, Danto’s argument would not satisfy either side of the historical debate over Christ’s race, but that is an entirely separate issue. What is important here, in relation to Cox’s work and Douglas’s argument about lack of inclusive images, is representation, and Danto makes a strong argument, on theological grounds, for the compatibility of images like Yo Mama’s Last Supper and Christian faith. To argue that Yo Mama’s Last Supper is anti-Catholic is to miss the point of both. Beauty and Suffering When it comes to depicting Christ, another major consideration in terms of appearance is the aesthetics of how to approach a subject characterized by both brutal suffering and divine power and love. How the artist balances the two can vary considerably, even in depictions of the Passion. The emphasis on gruesome, ugly suffering that we see throughout the twentieth century owes a great deal to Mathis Grunewald’s Crucifixion from the Isenheim altarpiece. The altarpiece, painted between 1510 and 1516, was commissioned by the Antonines for a hospital where they treated patients suffering from ergotism, a painful condition caused by moldy rye, “in which the skin of those affected itched and burned, then turned black

Third Edition, Ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 134 n.c. 48 Bynum, 125. 49 Danto, 30. 50 Danto, 31.

and gangrenous until limbs were literally detached from body.”51 Grunewald does not hold back in showing the ugliness of Christ’s suffering: “Christ’s limbs are distended; his skin is torn, raked with wounds and splinters; and his flesh is discolored, as if already rotting.”52 So powerful was Grunewald’s depiction of Christ’s suffering that it became the paradigm for depictions not only of the suffering of Christ but also of the suffering of humanity. Grunewald’s Christ is evoked frequently in Holocaust art (including Leonard Mathis Grunewald, The Crucifixion, from the Isenheim AltarBaskin’s European Child piece, 1510-16 53 and Tormented Man, 1953; Gabor Peterdi’s Still Life in Germany, 1945;54 Rico Lebrun, Grunewald series, 1961;55 and Ygael Tumarkin’s Little Monument, 1959, Crucifixions, 1960-62, and Homage to Mathais Grunewald, 196156), due to its iconic status as well as its resemblance to actual bodies in the concentration camps.57 In the case of Graham Sutherland, this visual connection between Grunewald’s Crucifixion and the Holocaust inspired him “not to deal with the Holocaust itself, but to create a Crucifixion for a church, which he finished in 1946.”58 While the Grunewald model remained quite popular during a century marked by World Wars and genocide, some artists chose to focus instead on qualities of transcendence and beauty

51 MacGregor and Langmuir, 129. 52 James H. Marrow, “Inventing the Passion in the Late Middle Ages,” in The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama, ed. Marcia Kupfer (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 23. 53 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts (Oxford; New York: Pergamon Press, 1993), 85. 54 Ibid., 125. 55 Ibid., 192. 56 Ibid., 281. 57 Ibid., 188. 58 Ibid., 188.

in their depictions of Christ, even in Crucifixions. Salvador Dali had Grunewald’s Crucifixion in mind when he conceived his Christ of St. John of the Cross (1951), insofar as he wanted to paint its polar opposite. Dali wrote of his desire “to paint a Christ that is a painting with more beauty and joy than have ever been painted before…to paint a Christ that is the absolute opposite of Grunewald’s materialistic, savagely anti-mystical one.”59 The painting (and its title) was inspired by a drawing of Christ on the cross, attributed to Saint John of the Cross, which Dali had seen. Dali claimed to have been so impressed by the drawing that it later appeared to him in a dream, in which he “saw Christ in the same position, but in the landscape of Port Lligat, and I heard voices which told me, ‘Dali you must paint this Christ.’”60 The drawing served as a loose structural basis for Dali’s composition, specifically “cross suspended in mid air and Christ’s head tilted so that his face is hidden from the viewer.”61 However, while Saint John’s drawing depicted torture and suffering, and was intended to elicit compassion, Dali’s was an image of beauty, transcendence and perfection. Dali stated, My aesthetic ambition…was completely the opposite of all the Christs painted by most of the modern painters, who have all interpreted him in the expressionistic and contortionistic sense, thus obtaining emotion through ugliness. My principal preoccupation was that my Christ would be beautiful as the God that he is.62 However, many critics viewed Dali’s attempt to obtain emotion through beauty rather than ugliness as a cheap, schmaltzy ploy. The work was variously described as “a piece of skilled sensationalist trickery,”63 “calculated melodrama,”64 and having “about as much religious feeling as ‘Through the night of doubt and sorrow’ played on a Wurlitzer in the interval of a leg show.”65 However, despite the negative critical reception, the piece had tremendous popular appeal when it was displayed by the Glasgow Art Gallery in 1952. In the first two months, it was seen by fifty thousand people, a socially varied audience comprised of “shop-girls, and students from the nearby University”.66 Reports, while often apprehensive about the work itself, noted the painting’s visible effect on its viewers: Salvador Dali’s painting of the Crucifixion may or may not be a masterpiece. But it is having a profound effect on the people who see it at Glasgow Art Galleries. Men entering the room where the picture is hung instinctively 59 Salvador Dali, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1976), 217. 60 Gabriele Finaldi, The Image of Christ (London: National Gallery Company Limited, 2000), 198. 61 Ibid., 198. 62 Ibid., 198. 63 “Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross,” The Scottish Art Review 6, no. 4 (1958), 14. 64 Ibid., 14. 65 Finaldi, 198 66 “Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross”, 15.

take off their hats. Crowds of chattering, high-spirited school children are hushed into awed silence when they see it.67 Dali’s “sensationalist trickery” and “calculated melodrama” were clearly effective. Even Dr. Honeyman, the man largely responsible for the Glasgow Art Gallery’s decision to purchase the painting, found himself taken in: I was strangely moved by it, and began immediately to suspect my reactions. To be taken in by a trick is an affront to one’s self respect, and there is little enough reassurance in observing that others are being fooled at the same time. Thus heading for the detached attitude of the ‘experienced observer’ I was pulled up by the effect the painting appeared to have on the steady stream of spectators.68 Even if Dali’s beautiful crucifixion relied on visual trickery and melodrama to elicit an emotional response, the same can be said of other representations of Christ’s suffering. Mel Gibson’s 2004 film, “The Passion of the Christ” occupies the opposite end of spectrum, in its excesses of grisly violence. Like Dali, Gibson’s depiction of Christ was a reaction against a particular popular type, in this case the “costume pageantry in biblical films”69 and the idealized beauty (and perceived effeminacy) of popular images like Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ (1940). Gibson stated, “I didn’t want to see Jesus looking really pretty. I wanted to mess up one of his eyes, destroy it.”70 Gibson sought to distance his Jesus from this “pretty” tradition “by violating the body of Jesus through a virtually pornographic display of pain.”71 However, as David Morgan notes, “A close look at the Jesus in Gibson’s film before his bruWarner Sallman, Head of Christ, talization and especially at the end of the film, when Jesus has been resurrected, confirms that he is not really 1940 different from most Jesuses before him. Gibson’s Jesus bears a resemblance to Sallman’s picture and to the dozens of others in films going back to the late nineteenth century.”72

67 Ibid., 15. 68 Ibid., 14. 69 David Morgan, “Images of the Passion and the History of Protestant Visual Piety in America,” in The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama, ed. Marcia Kupfer (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 143. 70 Ibid., 143. 71 Ibid., 143. 72 Ibid., 143.

Indeed, the pre-brutalization Jesus that we see in Gibson’s film is an extremely attractive man (the actor who plays Jesus in the film, Jim Caviezel, made People magazine’s “fifty most beautiful people in the world” list in 2004), and unlike Sallman in Head of Christ, Gibson gives the viewer a very good look at Jesus’ muscular physique.73 Not only does this contrast between beautiful masculine ideal and bloody pulp make the horrific violence even more Stills from The Passion of the Christ, showing Jesus dramatic, but it also lends a certain before (above) and after (below) eroticism to the violence inflicted upon Jesus: One is reminded, again and again, that Christ had a body— indeed, not just any body but a beautiful young masculine body, which presumably made its destruction more tragic— and that it was flayed square inch by square inch, until almost nothing was left but raw nerves and muscles. The fetishization of that body’s destruction is what the film is all about and it is made visible through hyperrealism.74 This fetishization of bodily destruction becomes particularly problematic in the context of Gibson’s film, as it strips Christ’s suffering and death of their transcendent and sacrificial elements, which is essential to the story’s—and Christ’s—religious meaning.75 However, Gibson’s thrashing all transcendent meaning out of Christ’s body raises an important issue—the role of the body in the doctrine of the Incarnation. While it would be easy to say that the strong responses generated by these works are a matter of taste, the fact that, in each case, these responses center around how the body is presented points to a larger issue. Christ’s body is more than just a body; it forms 73 William G. Little, “Jesus’s Extreme Makeover,” in Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and The Passion of the Christ, ed. Timothy K. Beal and Tod Linafelt (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 176. 74 Steven C. Caton, “Coetzee, Agamben, and the Passion of Abu Ghraib,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (2006): 117. 75 Ibid., 119.

the center of Christian doctrine. As Eleanor Heartney points out, “The entire drama of Christian history hinges on the moment when the ‘Word was made Flesh’”.76 This flesh, this specific body, is the means by which Christians encounter and understand the divine. Thus it stands to reason that the physical appearance of this body would be a major concern. These issues of race, gender, beauty, and beards all center around the body. However, while this provides a reasonable explanation for why the way in which Christ’s body is depicted is such a touchy issue, it also highlights the importance of controversial works like Cox’s. To say that Christ could not have appeared (and should not be represented) a certain way—in the case of Cox’s work, black or female—is to make a major exclusion from this important point of identification. St. Bernard states, “I think the chief reason why the Invisible God wished to become visible in the flesh…was manifestly this—that he might first win back the affections of fleshly creatures who could not love otherwise than in the flesh.”77 To narrow this definition of flesh is to narrow the definition of who can fully experience this relationship. The poignancy of Cox’s statement against this practice is magnified in being communicated by means of the flesh itself, in Cox’s use of her own flesh to depict the flesh of Christ. Indeed, as all these works show, messages carry a great deal of power when inscribed on the body of Christ.

76 77

Heartney, 6. Heartney, 6.

Nancy Burson, Guys Who Look Like Jesus, 2000 30

Nancy Burson, Guys Who Look Like Jesus, 2000 31

Nancy Burson, Guys Who Look Like Jesus, 2000 32

Nancy Burson, Guys Who Look Like Jesus, 2000 33

Nancy Burson, Guys Who Look Like Jesus, 2000 34

Nancy Burson, Guys Who Look Like Jesus, 2000 35

Nancy Burson, Guys Who Look Like Jesus, 2000 36

Nancy Burson, Guys Who Look Like Jesus, 2000 37

Mark Wallinger, Ecce Homo, 1999 38

Edwina Sandys, Christa, 1974 39

Renee Cox, Yo Mamaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Last Supper, 1996 40

Sam Taylor-Wood, Wrecked, 1996 41

Renee Cox, It Shall Be Named, 1994 42

Andres Serrano, The Interpretation of Dreams (The Other Christ), 2001 43

Salvador Dali, Christ of St. John of the Cross, 1955 44

Graham Sutherland, Crucifixion, 1946 45

Uses and Abuses

The Image of Christ and Political Propaganda The image of Christ is a powerful vehicle for conveying a social or political message. The first reason for this is the dominance of Christianity in Western culture. This ubiquity is such that most people, regardless of religious affiliation or lack thereof, have at least some basic visual image in their minds of the figure of Christ: a reference to Christ is one that can be widely understood. Secondly, the predominance of depictions of Christ in the canon of Western art lends a level of legitimacy to a visual reference to Christ. Thirdly, and perhaps most obviously, Christ is a religious figure, specifically the center of Christianity. The image of Christ taps into the feelings of faith and devotion of a very large number of people. However, this also means that these images tend to elicit strong reactions from a Christian audience, and can be quite polarizing. Religious feeling is a powerful force, and it is consequently a natural target for exploitation. However, the image of Christ is not only powerful, but also flexible. It can be interpreted and used in many ways, and has been used by opposing parties for their contrasting messages. The power, adaptability, and popularity of this image in political visual culture can be effectively illustrated in an analysis of the propaganda used by both proand anti-Nazi groups, in 1930s Germany.

“Insolent Mockery of the God-Experience” In July 1937 in Munich, two major art exhibitions opened within a day of one another: the first was the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) at the new Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art); second was the Entarte Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition at the Archaeological Institute. These exhibitions represented two sides of Nazi cultural policy. Great German Art was to display examples of the German artistic ideal, according to Hitler’s standards, delineated in his speech inaugurating the exhibition and the newly constructed museum building. According to Hitler, [art] must develop from the collective soul of the people and express its identity; it must be national, not international; it must be comprehensible to the people; it must not be a passing fad, but strive to be eternal; it must be

positive, not critical of society; it must be elevating, and represent the good, the beautiful, and the healthy.1 If Great German Art was everything that German art should be, then Degenerate Art was everything that was wrong in the German art world. The Degenerate Art exhibition was a furious, publicly displayed attack on modern art, and all things supposedly Jewish or Bolshevist in the art world. The exhibition, assembled quickly and haphazardly, was intended to outrage and disgust, thereby justifying art censorship. The works were shown in a deliberately unappealing manner, alongside inflammatory text and the supposed prices paid for them, all in a concerted effort to turn the audience against them. The exhibition’s organizers—Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste (Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts) and his associates—made a big show of encouraging the German public to come and judge the works for themselves, while stacking the deck heavily in favor of a negative judgment, in an attempt to draw them to the side of anti-modernism and censorship, seemingly of their own free will.2 While most of the Degenerate Art exhibition was “a composite of subjects and styles that were anathema to the National Socialists, including abstraction, antimilitarism, and art that seemed to be (or at least to be related to) the work of the mentally ill,” the first three rooms were organized thematically: Jewish artists, negative portrayals of women, and in the very first room, religion.3 To enter the exhibition, which began on the upper floor of the building, visitors climbed a narrow staircase, at the top of which they were greeted by the imposing figure of Ludwig Gies’ Kruzifixus (Crucified Christ), a largerthan-life-sized wooden sculpture of Christ, displayed against a red cloth, “theatrically endowed with a quality of menace.”4 Peter Guenther, who visited the exhibition at the age of seventeen, recounts his experience of Gies’ sculpture: 1 Mary-Margaret Goggin, “’Decent’ vs. ‘Degenerate’ Art: The National Socialist Case,” Art Journal 50, no.4, Censorship II (Winter, 1991): 84. 2 Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 52; Mario-Andreas von Lüttichau, “Entarte Kunst, Munich 1937,” in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avante-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1991), 45. Ziegler, a painter dubbed “the master of the German pubic hair,” was appointed president of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and was tasked with seizing “degenerate” works from museums, which would be displayed in the Degenerate Art exhibition. Ziegler was aided by a committee comprised of Count Klaus von Baudissin, “the Nazi-appointed successor to Ernst Gosebruch, the suspended director of the Museum Folkwang in Essen;” Wolfgang Willrich, “a painter and writer on art, whose pamphlet Säuberung des Kunsttempels (Cleansing of the temple of art) had not only given the Nazis the idea for an exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ but had convincingly defined its form;” Hans Schweitzer, Reich commissioner for artistic design; art theoretician Robert Scholz; and Walter Hansen, drawing teacher, journalist, and “another noted author of ideological polemics.” 3 Stephanie Barron, “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991), 20. 4 Lüttichau, 49.

I cannot recall how I entered the exhibition, but I do remember well the impact of the frightening Kruzifixus (Crucified Christ) by Ludwig Gies, which filled the wall beside the entrance on the upper level. To me, as shocking as the first impression was, this modern work echoed the pathos of Mathias Grunewald’s great sixteenth century Isenheim Altar in Colmar. What had brought tears to my eyes in Colmar could easily have caused a similar reaction here, but the way in which the work was displayed caused it to lose its impact.5 Beneath Gies’ sculpture was a “cloth-covered plinth onto which was tacked a photograph of the interior of Lübeck Cathedral, showing the work in place after its installation in 1921.”6 Next to the photo was attached a text that read, “This horror hung as a war memorial in the cathedral of Lübeck.”7 On the wall next to the sculpture was an excerpt from a favorable review of Gies’ work, Ludwig Gies, Kruzifixus (Crucified Christ), which read: 1921 Marvel! The concentrated simplification of all the motifs is not meant as a halting primitivism but is a deliberate effort to convey aesthetic stimuli…The spiritual values too are so profound and individual that they would in themselves make the work one of the richest documents of modern religious experience…It would be hard to find a symbol that would convey to posterity with greater power and depth the significance of the Great War and its fallen heroes.8 The Nazis’ rebuttal was a large black question mark scrawled over the text, obscuring its legibility. “Did no one recognize,” wondered the seventeen-year-old Guenther, “that here war was likened to Christ’s Passion and that the inhumanity of war was paralleled by the

5 Peter Guenther, “Three Days in Munich, July 1937,” in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the AvantGarde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991), 36. 6 Lüttichau, 49. The sculpture had previously been removed from the Cathedral and placed on loan by Gies to the museum in Lübeck, due to the artist’s fear that the work might be damaged, after public protests. 7 Ibid., 51. 8 Ibid., 51.

inhumanity of the Crucifixion?”9 However, Guenther had “grown up exposed to modern art” and he acknowledges that his response may not have been typical: At the same time I could easily understand that many visitors, if not most, would react negatively, either because they could not accept the unconventional figure of Christ or because they felt that war memorials ought to present only the idealized heroism of those who died.10 Many felt that the exaggerated grotesqueness of this figure was completely inappropriate for a depiction of Christ, and the fact that the work was supposed to commemorate fallen German soldiers offended them even more. This dramatic encounter with Gies’ Kruzifixus at the top of the stairs would lead the visitor into the first room of the exhibition, which housed paintings of religious subjects. With the sole of exception of Emil Nolde’s Lost Paradise (displayed as Adam and Eve), all of the works in the first room depicted scenes from the Christian Gospels, and more often than not, Christ himself.11 Emil Nolde’s “Life of Christ” series, which took up almost an entire wall of the room, was displayed next to the inscription, “Unter der Herrschaft des Zentrums frecher Verhöhnung des Gotterlebens,” which translates (albeit somewhat awkwardly) to “under Centrist rule, insolent mockery of the Godexperience.”12 Guenther recalls entering the first Emil Nolde, Life of Christ, 1911-1912 room and 9 Guenther, 36. 10 Ibid., 33, 36. Guenther’s father was an art and literature critic for a newspaper in Dresden, and contemporary artists and writers were often guests in their home. 11 Neil Levi, “’Judge for Yourselves!’ – The ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition as Political Spectacle,” October 85 (Summer, 1998): 51-52; for complete list of works in Room 1, see Lüttichau, 49. 12 I have combined the translations of Lüttichau (51) and Levi (53). Lüttichau uses more typical translation, “Insolent mockery of the Divine under Centrist rule”, while Levi translates it as “Under the Catholic Center’s rule, impudent mockery of the God-experience.” While Levi’s translation is somewhat awkward, his follows the structure of the original more literally, and he makes a strong case for “God-experience” being a more accurate translation of the German neologism, Gotterlebens (see Levi, 53-54). However, I do not see how Levi got “Catholic Center”, so I used Lüttichau’s “Centrist” instead. I cannot say whether “impudent” or “insolent” is a more accurate translation of frecher, so I chose the latter simply on the basis of personal preference.

being “overwhelmed by the brilliant colors of several paintings by Nolde,” including “Life of Christ”: Again it was obvious to me that the artist, by his choice of these flaming colors and the deformation of the figures, had tried to remove the events of Christ’s life from the standard, accepted depictions and force the viewer to gain a new insight into these events. Nolde’s works displayed the same intensity as the Kruzifixus at the entrance. I remembered my own confirmation and realized that my good, sensible pastor might not have liked these representations but at least would have recognized the artist’s attempts to break away from the sweetness and sentimentality that had been adopted for so much of Christian art.13 Again, however, many other visitors were not as impressed as Guenther, who recalls “some very angry words by visitors in this room, the mildest of which was ‘blasphemy.’”14 The fact that these works of religious—and almost exclusively Christian—art were distinguished as a group and prominently placed first in the exhibition would indicate that the subject matter was of particular importance to the Nazis. This raises a couple of questions: why was such heavy emphasis put on these works, and, if these works exemplified the wrong way (according to Nazi standards) to depict Christ or other religious subjects, then what was the right way? As previously mentioned, the Degenerate Art and Great German Art exhibitions existed as foils for one another, presenting examples of bad art and good art, according to Nazi standards.15 Nearly all categories in the Degenerate Art exhibition had some correlate in Great German Art: [W]henever something ‘holy to every decent German’ is displayed as besmirched or polluted in the Degenerate Art exhibition, ‘cleansed’ versions of the same icons appear in the Great German Art exhibition. Where Degenerate Art displays images labeled ‘Mockery of the German Woman Ideal: Cretin and Whore,’ the House of German Art rescues the ‘woman ideal’ through innumerable idealized mothers and countless allegorical nudes. Similarly, ‘degenerate’ works deemed ‘Insulting of German Heroes of the World War’ find their counterpart in the Great German Art exhibition’s images of soldiers and pilots preparing for battle and SS and SA men on the march. ‘German Farmers—Seen Yiddishly’ are seen ‘properly’ in Great German Art…

13 Guenther, 36. 14 Ibid., 36. 15 Though the two exhibitions were organized by different individuals—Ziegler was responsible for Degenerate Art and Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s photographer, was put in charge of Great German Art— Zieger and Goebbels were involved in both, and it is likely that other members of the Nazi art bureaucracy were as well. Thus, it seems probable that there was some level of communication between the two projects. See: Petropoulos, 58-59 and Barron, 17-20.

and landscapes in Degenerate Art labeled ‘thus sick minds saw nature’ are ‘cleansed’ by the landscapes that constituted the majority of the images displayed in the House of German Art.16 Naturally, one would therefore expect to see “cleansed” religious works in the Great German Art exhibition. However, there were no religious works to be found. What, then, was the correct alternative to the “mockery” of Gies and Nolde? Neil Levi argues that the portraits of Hitler were the closest correlate to the degenerate Christs in Great German Art. The Führer was the Nazis’ “central object of devotion.”17 According to Levi: These representations of Hitler correspond to, even necessitate, the counterexhibition’s preoccupation with sacred experience and authority, and the proper attitude toward that authority. The Nazi investment in the symbolism of Christianity in Degenerate Art follows from the way the Nazis stage political power, and in particular, how they produce the Führerkult. Sacred symbolism is important to Nazism in a way that Christianity is not.18 The comparison is apt, considering the frequent positioning of Hitler as a messianic figure in Nazi rhetoric.19 In fact, one painting in the Great German Art exhibition, by Hermann Otto Hoyer, which depicts “a young Adolf Hitler addressing an assembly in a small, dark room,” is titled In the Beginning Was the Word.20 According to Levi, Hoyer’s work, which shows “the direct experience of Hitler’s presence as enjoyed by devoted party disciples, who mingle about Herman Otto Hoyer, In the Beginning Was the Word, 1937 him in the party meeting room unobstructed by crowds, platforms, technology, or SS guards,” exemplifies the “notion of unmediated, holy experience embodied in the Hitler myth.”21 This combination of messianic imagery and sense of “unmediated holy experience” 16 Levi, 50-51. 17 Levi, 52. 18 Ibid., 52. 19 Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 9, 283-285. 20 Levi, 53. 21 Ibid., 54.

is recurrent in Nazi propaganda. The opening scene of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, shows Hitler “descending, Messiah-like, to earth from the heavens.” However, once on Earth, Hitler is continually shown in ways that emphasize a sense of immediacy and access. Not only does Riefenstahl show Hitler interacting directly (and affably) with others in the film, but she also gives the viewer this sense of immediacy and direct access through camerawork. The film includes frequent close-ups of Hitler as well as scenes shot from the perspective of someone riding along with Hitler in the same vehicle.22 Here, as in other Nazi films, radio broadcasts, and party rallies, there is a sense of “direct experience of Hitler’s presence,” despite the fact that “Hitler’s presence was always, quite literally, mediated, channeled through various media.”23 In fact, at the 1936 Nuremberg party rally, Hitler declared: “Not all of you can see me, and I cannot see all of you. But I feel you, and you feel me!’”24 Much like the Incarnation, the “A bouquet for the Fuhrer” - still from Triumph of the Hitler of propaganda is both holy and directly accessible. However, while this Will messianic notion of Hitler does complete the symmetry of the Degenerate Art and Great German Art exhibitions, it still leaves the question of why the “insolent mockery” of Christ was given such importance in the Degenerate Art exhibition—after all, it was Christ, not Hitler, who had been depicted in such an unacceptable manner by Gies and Nolde. The relationship between Nazism and Christianity was complicated.25 The Nazi view of Christianity is generally characterized as ambivalent, and often antagonistic, and indeed, Christianity and National Socialism do appear to have been at odds on some level. Even if one ignores the question of how one reconciles the message of Christ with genocide, there is still the fact that Jesus was a Jew, and while some Nazi Christians tried to argue that Jesus was in fact an Aryan who had fought against Judaism, the issue still

22 Levi, 54. 23 Ibid., 54. 24 Ibid., 54. 25 Christianity in Germany was not monolithic. Beyond the Catholic/Protestant divide, there was further diversity within the German Protestant population. However, this is beyond the scope of this essay. See: Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.

presented them with a sizable can of worms.26 Additionally, the church was viewed by some within the Reich as “competition and a potential threat to be ultimately eliminated after the war.”27 However, there was still at least one area in which National Socialism and Christianity could find common ground: antisemitism. This formed the basis for a relationship that superficially may have resembled some sort of alliance, but in reality was more a case of National Socialism using Christianity for its own benefit, “incorporating its key teachings into its own, more elevated political ideology, exploiting its language and ideational framework rather than trying to destroy it.”28 Given that the vast majority of Germans belonged to a Christian church of some sort, Christianity was a powerful tool to wield.29 If the overall tendency was to exploit Christianity, it is easy to see how this extended to the Degenerate Art exhibition. If most Germans were Christian, the “degenerate” depictions of their Lord and Savior would have been a safe bet for the most likely to offend. By placing these works at the very beginning of the exhibition, the Nazis could appeal to visitors’ religious beliefs, and put them in a negative disposition from the getgo, conceivably making them more inclined to respond negatively to the rest of the works exhibited. Whether or not this worked is hard to determine, but it does make the decision to begin with Christian subject seem quite logical, given the intent of the exhibition. The Passion of the Dissenters The Nazis were not the only ones to use the image of Christ as a propagandistic tool. In fact, the image of Christ (specifically Crucifixion and Passion imagery) was used in a number of anti-Nazi works by German artists, as well as in anti-fascist works by artists in other parts of Europe. The anti-fascist use of this symbolism took two distinct forms. The first, and less common, involved visually connecting Christ with the fascist oppressors, in an attack on both fascism and the church. This approach was used most notably by John Heartfield. One of Heartfield’s photomontages, published in ArbeiterIllustrierte-Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated Paper) in June 1933, shows Christ (taken from a photograph of a painting by the Danish artist Bertel Thorvaldsen) holding a cross to which Gestapo founder Rudolf Diehls is attaching additional segments, transforming it into the shape of a swastika; the text at the top and bottom reads, “On the foundation of the German state church, the cross was not yet heavy enough.”30 Heartfield’s statement was 26 Heschel, 1; Levi, 52. 27 Heschel, 9. 28 Ibid., 23 29 Doris L. Bergen, “Nazism and Christianity: Partners and Rivals? A Response to Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich. Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 1 (Jan 2007): 29. 30 Richard Bonney, Confronting the Nazi war on Christianity: the Kulturkampf newsletters, 1936-1939 (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2009), v; David Evans and Sylvia Gohl, Photomontage: a political weapon, (London: Gordon Fraser Gallery Ltd, 1986), 57.

a response to the increasing Nazification of the Protestant church.31 In later works, Heartfield “used the swastika instead of the cross as an instrument on which men are tortured and killed,” continuing to play on the “visual similarity between the cross and swastika.”32 The second and more common approach was to depict Christ as the victim of fascism. This theme was widely used by anti-Nazi artists in Germany, including George Grosz, Rudolf von Ripper, Otto Pankok, Franz Frank, Otto Dix, and Lea Grundig, as well as by antifascist artists throughout Europe. In a cover illustration for an underground publication in 1943, Polish artist Andrzej Will drew Christ being taken to Golgotha by a Nazi guard and Hitler. The illustration was captioned, “Gott mit Uns” (God with us).33 Thomas Benton, in a work titled Again from his 1941 “Year of Peril” series, showed the crucified Christ being “shot by an Axis plane and speared by three demonic figures, identified by their flags as Germany, Japan and Italy.”34 This identification of Christ with the innocent victims of fascism was taken further by artists like Marc Chagall and Samuel Bak, who used the crucifixion as a symbol for Andrzej Will, “Gott mit uns!” 1943 the Holocaust.35 The Flexible Christ While the Nazi organizers of the Degenerate Art exhibition and anti-fascist artists used the image of Christ in completely different ways and for opposing purposes, they illustrate the tremendous flexibility in how Christ can be interpreted and used, while still retaining the power of such a charged symbol. The fact that the image of Christ was employed for both pro- and anti-Nazi messages shows the malleability and wide range of uses for this symbol—by no means limited to WWII Europe. This flexibility, combined with the breadth and depth of Christ’s cultural significance, makes Christ’s image a valuable and useful tool for conveying political and social messages in an easily understandable manner. However, these examples also show how a powerful visual tool with a such a wide range of usability can be dangerous—its flexibility allows it to be used by almost anyone, for whatever purpose, to exploit the religious feelings and beliefs of a very large number

31 Evans and Gohl, 57. 32 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts (Oxford; New York: Pergamon Press, 1993), 179-180. 33 Amishai-Maisels, 181. 34 Ibid., 182. 35 See the third essay in this volume, “War, Suffering, and the Image of Christ.”

of people. However, if one is trying to create an effective political message, that might just make it all the more desirable.

Paul Strand, Skeleton/Swastika, Connecticut, 1936 56

John Heartfield, The Cross Was Not Heavy Enough, 1933 57

Thomas Benton, Again (from “Year of Peril” series), 1941 58

George Grosz, Christ with a Gas Mask, 1928 59

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s our pleasure to disgust you), 1990 60

Duane Michals, Salvation, 1984 61

War, Suffering, and the Image of Christ Part One: The First World War In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag notes that “the spectacular is very much part of the religious narratives by which suffering, throughout most of Western history, has been understood. To feel the pulse of Christian iconography in certain wartime or disaster-time photographs is not a sentimental projection.”1 The Christian narrative, in which suffering is so central, is a common lens through which war has been viewed and understood. During the twentieth century, many artists used the image of Christ in their responses to unfathomable suffering and violence. This tendency, particularly prevalent during and after the First and Second World Wars, manifested in a few different ways, expressing different attitudes toward the suffering being addressed. Some artists used the image of Christ to convey a redemptive message, some used it to express judgment of society, and others used it to convey the magnitude and horror of suffering on a large scale. The meaning of the First World War has been a subject of growing debate over the years among scholars.2 The realities of WWI were certainly more complicated than the picture of suffering, alienation, and futility that has come to dominate popular perceptions, and the war may or may not have been the defining cultural rupture as it has often been portrayed. However, the war still had a profound impact in its scale, duration, and death toll. According to Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, WWI has become a paradigm for thinking about “the weight of the dead on the living.”3 This loss of life on such an unprecedented scale was something that people were struggling to come to terms with. For many, religion provided a means of understanding the war, both for those

1 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 80. 2 For a survey of this debate, see Stephen Heathorn, “The Mnemonic Turn in the Cultural Historiography of Britain’s Great War,” The Historical Journal 48, no. 4 (Dec., 2005): 1103-1124. 3 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14-18: Understanding the Great War, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 1.

at home and on the front. For bereaved civilians, religion provided justification for the war and a means of coping with loss; for soldiers on the battlefield, religious material objects provided comfort and reassurance in the face of mortal danger; and for some writers and artists, religious imagery provided a means of expressing their war experience. The link between wartime religious revival and nationalism and patriotism was common throughout the belligerent nations.4 As Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker note, “In all the countries, the catchphrase was the same: ‘God is with us’, ‘Dieu est de notre côté’, ‘Gott ist mit uns’.”5 According to Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, even though not everyone was a churchgoer or even a believer, “spiritual values and their related vocabulary—god and evil, the mystique of combat, sacred union—sustained people and their ideas about the war, their beliefs that they were taking part in a true crusade.”6 This religious way of thinking about the war affirmed, for each side, that they were fighting a war that was legitimate and just.7 Christ on the Home Front In Britain, like in all the belligerent nations, many of those who had lost loved ones were drawn to the comforting notion of Christlike sacrifice--just as Christ had died on the cross for their sins, these men were dying in the battlefield for their countrymen.8 The idea of noble sacrifice gave these deaths a sense of purpose and offered solace to the bereaved. This theme was popular in wartime sermons, which often referenced “vast sacrifice”, the “harvest of freedom”, and “heroes of sacrifice”.9 In August 1915, at Harrogate Baptist Church, the Reverend J.R. Walker echoed this sentiment when he spoke of the dead: I find as I go about, that people are disturbed by the spiritual problems raised by the passing of so many souls, and are asking what has become of the brave men who have died in such numbers...my dear friends, I do not think there is any need to be disturbed about that...and the moral quality of the deed by which a soldier or sailor lays down his life for his country is the same kind as that of the greatest deed in history--the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ upon the cross of Calvary.10 This theme was taken up by numerous visual artists, including James Clark, Charles Sims, 4 This link between religion and patriotism was, of course, not unique to WWI. This link is quite apparent even in recent memory—religion (specifically Christianity) was frequently invoked during the US “War on Terror,” and “God bless America” was a common catchphrase after 9/11. 5 Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 114-115. 6 Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 115. 7 Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 116. 8 Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 123. 9 Peter Harrington, “Religious and spiritual themes in British academic art during the Great War,” First World War Studies 2, no. 2 (October 2011): 146. 10 Ibid., 146.

and Stanley Spencer. While this visual linkage between fallen soldiers and religious notions of sacrifice and redemption was not a new phenomenon, “the Great War resulted in a multiplicity of images in response to a growing preoccupation with spiritualism that at times bordered on obsession.”11 These images circulated not only in the art world, but also in postcards, prints, and posters. The circulation of these images in popular media was intended to reassure the population and inspire patriotism and nationalism among citizens. In Britain, the image of St. George was initially used in art and newspaper illustrations to “inspire the last full measure of patriotism”; however, when “the newly inspired recruits ended up as statistics, images of the saint were replaced by those of the crucified or risen Christ,” which served to console: “Many sought comfort from grief and sorrow, and this found expression in a steady stream of religious iconography providing visual reassurance and security.”12 However, these images, while reassuring for those at home, depicted death on the battlefield in a sanitized and misleading manner. A prime example of the prettyingup of death, to console at the expense of truth, is James Clark’s The Great Sacrifice (1914). Clark’s painting depicts a dead soldier (who would appear to only be asleep, were it not for the single bullet hole in his head, emitting a small amount of blood) lying at the foot of the cross, with the crucified Christ looking down at him. The soldier looks peaceful, and appears to have died with relatively little suffering. Peter Harrington argues that Clark’s work engages the viewer “by placing him at the front amid the earth--the pain and the suffering creating a visual dialogue, a trinity between Christ, the dead soldier and the observer,” and that “[s]tanding before the image brought the war a little closer to home, creating a connection between the public and the soldiers.”13 However, as Harrington acknowledges, viewers were James Clark, The Great Sacrifice, 1914

11 12 13

Ibid., 146. Harrington, 146. Ibid., 149.

being engaged in a myth--a romantic vision of peaceful death in battle. Furthermore, the emphasis in this and other contemporaneous works on the redemptive aspect of the imagery of Christ is morally problematic. In the late 1990s, a print of Clark’s work was removed from the wall of St. Mary’s Church, Alsager, near Crewe, Chesire, where it had hung since 1917, by the new vicar who objected to the elision of John 3:16 (a voluntary divine act) with the death of a soldier (a human act--portrayed in the picture without any pain, gore or squalor which characterized the Western Front--which, if voluntary at all, had been brought about by manipulation and the deployment of the kind of propaganda of which this poster itself is a particularly objectionable example).14 While comparing the deaths of soldiers to the death of Christ elevated the importance and magnitude of their suffering--saying that the soldiers’ suffering was as horrific as that of Christ--it also gave their suffering a sense of purpose that rationalized and justified their deaths. Their suffering and death becomes less of a source of outrage or despair. In reference to depictions of the suffering of Christ, Christian martyrs, and Laocoön and his sons, Susan Sontag writes, “The viewer may commiserate with the sufferer’s pain...but these are destinies beyond deploring or contesting.”15 Visually equating the suffering of soldiers with that of Christ seems to imply that their destinies, too, are “beyond deploring or contesting,” that soldiers suffer but there is nothing we can or should do about it. As Werner Hofmann writes, there is a danger in this Christological representation “because it invites us to admit war…as a cruel, but deserved and inevitable punishment…in as much as the artists create works with the authenticity of a document and raise victims and victimizers to a symbolic level, they offer a certain metaphysical justification for war.”16 This precludes any questioning of the necessity of their deaths and or of the war itself. This helped to rationalize and renew support for a war which many had come to view as a mistake, and which had undermined the moral authority of the state (as well as basic tenets of Christianity). The revived religious sensibility of these images served to console the bereaved, and to legitimize the wartime government.17 However, this romanticized vision of the war also undermined acknowledgement and understanding of the actual experience of the soldiers. These images were produced for the civilian population, and many returning veterans were critical of them.18 This imagery may have honored the dead, but it also seemed to say

14 Harrington, 150. 15 Sontag, 40-41. 16 Werner Hofmann, “Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ in Its Historical Context,” Artibus et Historae 4, no. 7 (1983), 151-152. 17 Laura Brandon, Art and War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 47. 18 The disconnect between the realities of war and the myth of redemptive sacrifice, perpetuated by artists like Clark, was addressed in Charles Sims’ Greater Love Hath No Man (1917). Sims’ work depicts a

that theirs was a fate sealed and beyond questioning or protesting. Christ on the War Front The image of Christ did have significance for those on the battlefield, though not in quite the way that James Clark had envisioned: Imagery suggestive of Christ’s crucifixion was everywhere during the war, from actual calvaries and bombed-out churches to shell-blasted corpses hanging from trees, from ‘flying crosses’ formed by biplanes silhouetted against the sky to the self-inflicted hand wounds which replicated Christ’s stigmata.19 Calvaries—“wayside shrines which contain images of Christ on the cross”— formed a part of the landscape on the Western Front.20 Initially, some Protestant British soldiers were put off by these ubiquitous public crucifixes. One private was reported as having said, “What I don’t like about this ‘ere Bloody Europe is all these Bloody pictures of Jesus Christ an’ ‘is Relatives, be’ind Bloody bits of glawss.”21 However, these skeptical attitudes changed for many soldiers, “as crucifixes and calvaries had their already dense meanings transformed by the conflict. The wayside calvary now commemorated not only Christ’s sacrifice, but the sacrifice through woundings and deaths of countless soldiers as well.”22 The calvaries were notable not only in their ubiquity but also in their durability. The fact that many of these calvaries survived the onslaught of German shells struck many

wounded soldier in hospital patient attire, propped up against a cruciform structure. The soldier’s family is grouped around him--his parents on the right and his wife and children on the left. His family, gathered around him in support, displays “virtually no expression of grief beyond one of accepting the price that had to be paid.” The soldier’s face, on the other hand, “almost smirking, looks askance with an air of contempt, as though to imply that his family has little understanding of the war” and “his left hand...seemingly beckons in a Christ-like gesture, as if to question ‘why?’” The tension between the soldier and his family in the work reflects the gulf in understanding between those at the front and those at home. Though Sims did not experience the suffering of these soldiers firsthand, his eldest son was killed on the Western Front in 1915, and his grief permeated his subsequent works. Harrington, 152-155. 19 Nicholas J. Saunders, “Crucifix, Calvary, and Cross: Materiality and Spirituality in Great War Landscapes,” World Archaeology 35, no. 1 (Jun. 2003): 11. British soldiers were also visually reminded of the Crucifixion by “Field Punishment No. 1” incurred for minor infractions: “This consisted of being strapped or tied spread-eagled to some immobile object: a favorite was the large spoked wheel of a General Service Wagon.” Witnessing this, writer Max Plowman asked, “Wouldn’t the army do well to avoid punishments which remind men of the Crucifixion?” Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and London: 1975), 118. 20 In northern France and Belgium, calvaries “are located at the junctions of roads or tracks, and function both as navigational devices and objects of veneration.” Saunders, 9. 21 Rupert Brooke qtd. in Fussell, 118. 22 Saunders, 11.

soldiers as miraculous. In the minds of both Protestants and Catholics, these observations seemed to form “a talismanic connection of form and belief between landscape and human body through large and small cruciform objects.”23 Many believed that by wearing or carrying a small crucifix, the protection granted the calvaries could be transferred to them. This belief was at least partly responsible for the popularity of crucifixes in trench art.24 Under the psychological and physical pressures of war, “the power of such miniaturized crosses overcame the Protestant iconophobia of many British soldiers, some of whom asked “the nuns of Albert, on the Somme, for medals and crucifixes,” and it “became common knowledge that Tommies who may never before have seen crucifixes were attracted to the wayside calvaries they came across in France and Belgium.”25 Given the ubiquity of images of the Crucifixion on the front, and the physical suffering endured and witnessed by soldiers, it is hardly surprising that comparisons to Christ were common in artistic and poetic expressions of the war experience. Numerous war poems, such as Robert Nichols’ “Battery Moving Up to a New Position from Rest Camp: Dawn,” and Siegfried Sassoon’s “The Redeemer,” center around the “sacrificial theme, in which each soldier becomes a type of the crucified Christ.”26 In a letter to Osbert Sitwell in July 1918, Wilfred Owen described training new troops in these terms: For 14 hours yesterday I was at work—teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands at attention before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.27 Here, the comparison of the experience of war to the Passion of Christ does not convey a redemptive message of resurrection and salvation; rather, it functions as a framework for understanding suffering. There was nothing uniquely British about this. This same theme was expressed in the postwar work of artists throughout the belligerent nations.28 23 Saunders, 13-14. 24 Particularly popular were “’bullet-crucifixes’ typically made from several rifle bullet cartridges joined together to make the ‘cross, with a figure of a (usually commercially made) crucified Christ soldered on to the front…The popularity of this form extended beyond the French army, and outlived the war years to become a common souvenir for battlefield pilgrims and tourists between 1919 and 1939.” Saunders, 14. 25 Saunders, 14; K. Inglis qtd. in Saunders, 14. 26 Fussell, 119. 27 Fussell, 119. 28 Though no French artists are discussed here, Georges Rouault is one example of a French artist who used the image of Christ to express his view of the war, particularly in Miserere, his war cycle, painted from 1916 to 1928, and published and exhibited after WWII. See: Winter, 171-177.

Ludwig Gies One of the most prominent works displayed in the 1937 Entarte Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, Ludwig Gies’s Kruzifixus (Crucified Christ), was also an explicit comparison between the suffering of Christ and the suffering of soldiers.29 Suffering caused by war was a dominant theme in Gies’s work, particularly after he returned from military service.30 Kruzifixus, a depiction of Christ in exaggerated, Grünewald-esque suffering, was also a war memorial, installed in Lübeck Cathedral in 1921.31 Though the sculpture itself makes no explicit reference to war, its intended function as a war memorial makes this connection very clear. Some viewers found the work deeply moving, both as a depiction of the Crucifixion and as a representation of the suffering of soldiers in WWI. However, others found it offensive to both their religious and patriotic sensibilities. Public protests ensued and Gies, fearing the work might be damaged, had it removed from the Cathedral and placed on loan to the museum in Lübeck. Unfortunately, Gies’s protective efforts did not stop the work from later being seized by Adolf Ziegler of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts, and displayed in the Degenerate Art exhibition alongside the text, “This horror hung as a war memorial in the cathedral of Lübeck.” Peter Guenther, recalling the experience of seeing the work in Degenerate Art exhibition, writes: Did no one recognize, I wondered, that here war was likened to Christ’s Passion and that the inhumanity of war was paralleled by the inhumanity of the Crucifixion? At the same time, I could easily understand that many visitors, if not most, would react negatively, either because they could not accept the unconventional figure of Christ or because they felt that war memorials ought to present only the idealized heroism of those who had died.32 Otto Dix Gies’s Kruzifixus was not the only work depicting this theme that elicited the wrath of the Nazi regime. Otto Dix also used Christian iconography to express the suffering of

29 For more on this work and the Degenerate Art exhibition, see the second essay in this volume, “Uses and Abuses: the Image of Christ in Political Propaganda”. 30 Unfortunately, there is not much biographical information about Gies available in English, so the nature and duration of his military service are unclear. Other war-related works of Gies’s include The Bomb (1916), The Lusitania (1916), Refugees (1915), and Dance of Death (1917). Philip Attwood, “Gies, Ludwig,” in Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T032153 (accessed April 18, 2012). 31 Mario-Andreas von Lüttichau, “Entarte Kunst, Munich 1937,” in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avante-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1991), 49. 32 Peter Guenther, “Three Days in Munich, July 1937,” in “Degenerate Art”: The fate of the AvanteGarde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1991), 36.

soldiers in his War Triptych (1932). Dix had been a professor at Dresden’s Art Academy since 1927, but upon Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, he was promptly fired without notice and banned from exhibiting his art; the primary reason for this was his War Triptych. Otto Dix volunteered for the army in 1914, bringing along copies of Nietzsche and the Bible.33 “I had to go to war,” Dix stated. “I had to see it all with my own eyes…the hunger, the fleas, the mud, the shitting in one’s pants with fear…To be crucified, to experience the deepest abyss of life…”34 Between November 1915 and December 1916, Dix served as an artilleryman and machine-gunner in Artois, in Champagne, and on the Somme. During this time, Dix was involved in two major battles.35 In his diary, Dix wrote of his experience, “Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, gas, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: that is what war is! It is all the work of the Devil!”36 Dix depicted this vision of war in his 1932 War Triptych: The painting began life ten years after the First World War. In the meantime, I had done a lot of preliminary studies, looking at ways of dealing with the war in my paintings. In 1928, after I had been working on the subject for several years, I finally felt ready to tackle it properly. At that point, incidentally, there were a lot of books circulating in the Weimar Republic, promoting a notion of heroism which, in the trenches, had long since been rejected as an absurdity. People were already beginning to forget the terrible suffering the war had caused. That was the situation in which I painted the triptych.37 Though not a literal depiction of Christ, War Triptych borrows heavily from Christian iconography. The pock-marked legs of the upside-down soldier in the center panel resemble those of Christ in Grunewald’s Crucifixion, and the sleeping soldiers in the predella recall Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ (1521). Additionally, just barely visible in the lower left-hand corner of the center panel is a severed head, buried in the mud, wearing a crown of barbed wire.38 Neil MacGregor and Erika Langmuir compare the soldiers carrying their heavy rifles (in the left panel) to images of Christ carrying his Cross on the way to Calvary. This association is strengthened, according to MacGregor and Langmuir, “through the gun-carriage wheel, an earthbound Chi Rho wreathed in cold steel.”39 MacGregor and 33 Neil MacGregor and Erika Langmuir, Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 219, 222. 34 MacGregor and Langmuir, 222. 35 MacGregor and Langmuir, 222; Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, sites of mourning: The Great War in European cultural history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 161. 36 MacGregor and Langmuir, 222. 37 MacGregor and Langmuir, 222. 38 MacGregor and Langmuir, 223. 39 MacGregor and Langmuir, 223.

Langmuir also note the resemblance between the scene in the right panel—in which a soldier with Dix’s own features lifts a wounded comrade out of the trench—and images of the Deposition from the Cross.40 However, as Jay Winter notes, the clear presence of religious iconography “does not imply the presence of God or salvation.”41 In this work, Dix draws on two of the most notoriously grim depictions of Christ’s suffering and death. The application of Holbein’s Dead Christ to the sleeping soldiers adds a particular bleakness to the image. According to Winter, “The sheer horizontality of Holbein’s masterpiece challenges conventional Christian faith.”42 Winter notes that artists designing war memorials often considered pure horizontality too austere for a work that was intended to convey a message of hope. This sense of horizontal hopelessness was felt by Prince Mishkin in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, who said that he almost lost his faith when viewing Holbein’s work. “Dix’s painting goes one step further,” writes Winter. “The ‘almost’ is gone. Human decency is affirmed, but faith in God is absent.”43 MacGregor and Langmuir, however, have a less pessimistic take on the absence of God in the work: If Nietzsche’s is a world without God, and this is a Crucifixion without Christ, the Passion not of one man but of many, this image—like any traditional Crucifixion—still confronts the spectator with the centuries-old questions: how far is this unspeakable suffering my fault? And will I have the courage and generosity to make it less by picking up my fallen comrade?44 Far from the fatalistic comfort of works like The Great Sacrifice, Dix’s War Triptych uses religious iconography to convey God’s absence, rather than His presence; in the absence of God, responsibility is put on the human. Jacob Epstein British artist Jacob Epstein also used the image of Christ to confront human responsibility. Unlike Gies and Dix (and further still from the redemptive image of Clark), Epstein used the image of Christ in response to the war to accuse, rather than to allegorize. Epstein’s Christ (1917-1920) “stands and accuses the world for its grossness, inhumanity, cruelty, and beastliness--for the World War and for the new wars in Abyssinia, China, Spain, and now our new Great War.”45 “I should like to remodel this ‘Christ,’” wrote Epstein in his autobiography, published in 1940. “I should like to make it hundreds of feet high, and set it up on some high place where all could see it, and where it would

40 41 42 43 44 45

MagGregor and Langmuir, 223, 225. Winter, 163. Winter, 163. Winter, 163. MacGregor and Langmuir, 225. Jacob Epstein, Let There Be Sculpture (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 95-96.

give out its warning, its mighty symbolic warning, to all lands. The Jew--the Galilean-condemns our wars, and warns us that ‘Shalom, Shalom’ must be still the watchword between man and man.”46 Epstein had just begun the work when he was called up to serve in the 38th Royal Fusiliers, Jewish regiment in Plymouth.47 Epstein had always been deeply opposed to war, and at this point in his artistic career, military service was not only morally distasteful, but also a major interruption in his work.48 He tried repeatedly to be granted exemption from military service, but he was ultimately unsuccessful.49 If Epstein already detested war, his time in the military certainly did not endear him to it. In March 1918, the day his regiment was to leave for Palestine, Epstein went AWOL and was found wandering around Dartmoor, having suffered “a complete mental breakdown.”50 After several months in the hospital, he was discharged.51 It is easy to see why Epstein’s sculpture, having been interrupted by this experience, was made to convey a strongly anti-war message. The question of why Epstein chose to use Christ to convey this message can be answered, to some extent, by his religious background. Epstein came from a Jewish family of Eastern European origin, and his childhood was spent in a largely Jewish area of New York.52 However, Epstein did not personally subscribe to any organized religion. Instead, he explored both Jewish and Christian scripture in his own independent search for meaning. Not being tied to any particular dogma, Epstein was able to form is own interpretation of Christ, which “emphasized ‘intellect as well as sentiment; power and a rare sense of justice as well as compassion and forgiveness’.” He “felt that Christ’s weakness and passivity had been exaggerated and the ‘sterner elements’ repressed or passed over.” For Epstein, “Jesus, the Jew, assumed the guise of an imperious rabbi who led his people with stern love.” Here, in “the ‘wrath and pity of the Son of Man’, he found a potent warning against the horror and slaughter of war.”53 Epstein’s Christ was very different from that of Clark. This Christ was not one to reassure and comfort; rather he stood in direct opposition to the romantic illusion propagated by so many other wartime depictions of Christ. This was a Christ against war but for confrontation. However, Epstein’s interpretation seems to focus more on Christ’s life than on his death. Though the 46 Ibid., 96. 47 June Rose, Daemons and Angels: A Life of Jacob Epstein (London: Constable, 2002), 108, 117. 48 Ibid., 92, 99. 49 Ibid., 105-108. 50 Ibid., 111; Juliet Steyn, “Jacob Epstein: ‘the Artist who desires to épater.‘“ Third Text 19, no. 6 (November 2005): 674. 51 Rose, 111-113. 52 Though Epstein was American by birth, he moved to London in 1905 and became a naturalized British citizen in 1910, thus making him eligible for military service in Britain. Ibid., 37, 62. 53 Rose, 118-119.

gaunt figure, whose face was cast from a friend of Epstein’s who was seriously ill, seems to indicate some degree of suffering, this is not a representation of the Passion.54 Epstein’s Christ looks more haggard than beaten or wounded. He looks tired and frustrated with the world’s “grossness, inhumanity, cruelty, and beastliness.” While this Christ rang true for Epstein, many objected to this portrayal, and it was the subject of considerable controversy at the time. In an article in the Graphic on February 14, 1920, Father Bernard Vaughn wrote: I felt ready to cry out with indignation that in this Christian England there should be exhibited the figure of a Christ with suggested to me some degraded Chaldean or African, which wore the appearance of an Asiatic, American or Hun, which reminded me of some emaciated Hindu or badly grown Egyptian...Someone has observed that if a hero were to come into a room, we should stand up and acclaim him, and if Christ should cross the threshold we should kneel down and revere Him; but let me add, if Mr. Epstein’s horror in bronze were to spring into life and appear in a room, I for one should fly from it in dread and disgust, lest perhaps he might pick my pockets, or worse, do some deed of violence in keeping with his Bolshevik appearance.55 A newspaper correspondent, identifying herself as “‘An American woman and an English officer’s wife’ deplored ‘the wild deformity of the skull, the deliberate defiling of Christ’s characteristics by a degenerated imagination...If this monstrosity were alive it would be in an asylum for mental and moral degradation.’”56 Another critic, identified as an “artist” in the Daily Graphic, objected to the work on the grounds of Epstein’s American birth and Jewish background: “Is Mr Epstein of British blood and is he by faith a Christian?...The name Epstein suggests that the sculptor is addressing an audience of British Christians without the necessary psychic equipment. He has indeed made a terrible mess of it.”57 It is difficult to know where to begin with statements such as these. For one thing, Vaughn’s racist remarks and the correspondent’s comments about degeneracy foreshadow Nazi cultural policy, specifically and obviously in regard to “Degenerate Art.” Similarly, while the Daily Graphic critic’s point that a non-Christian does not have the same understanding of Christ as someone of the Christian faith is legitimate to a degree--and in fact, Epstein had a particularly unique interpretation of Christ--he states it in a distinctly antisemitic (and

54 Epstein’s Christ began as a study of his friend, Bernard Van Dieren, who was suffering from kidney stones at the time: “Watching his head, so spiritual and worn with suffering, I thought I would like to make a mask of him. I hurried home and returned with clay, and made a mask which I immediately recognized as the Christ head, with its short beard, its pitying, accusing eyes, and the lofty and broad brow, denoting great intellectual strength.” Epstein, 94; Rose, 118. 55 Epstein, 278-280. 56 Rose, 119. 57 Ibid., 119.

nationalistic) manner. The nature of these attacks on Epstein’s sculpture underscore the importance of the work’s message; these detractors present further examples of the “grossness, inhumanity, cruelty, and beastliness” which the work was made to protest.58 While Epstein’s Christ was controversial, it was also influential. It almost appears to be something of a prototype for Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo, eight decades later. Like Epstein’s Christ, Wallinger’s sculpture was a nontraditional depiction of Christ (Wallinger’s was small, bald, and beardless), cast from a regular person. The messages of the two works are also similar--like Epstein’s, Wallinger’s Christ stands to confront humanity for its atrocities (in this case the violence and genocide of Bosnia and Kosovo). And like Epstein, Wallinger was also heavily criticized for depicting Christ in manner which many deemed unacceptable. However, perhaps the discomfort that these sculptures caused in viewers was more appropriate than the reassurance of works like Clark’s. These works are not meant to console. They are meant to inspire outrage and grief, to confront us with horror and injustice. Even if Christ’s fate is “beyond deploring or contesting,” human atrocities are not. While the suffering of Christ is well beyond our control, the Christs of Epstein and Wallinger are here to remind us not to repeat it. While in 1920, a Jewish artist depicting Christ as a visual condemnation of war and atrocity was an unusual phenomenon, this became common practice during WWII, in works responding to the Holocaust. It is here that we really see the image of Christ break out of its religious boundaries, being treated as a universal symbol of suffering. However, the use of this symbol in this context raises further ethical questions about the appropriateness of using Christian visual language to communicate distinctly non-Christian subject matter.

58 Epstein’s Christ was not entirely unappreciated at the time. Articles in defense of Epstein’s modern interpretation of Christ were written by George Bernard Shaw, John Middleton Murry, and Rev. Edward Shillito. Bernard Shaw’s article was a direct response to Vaughn’s criticisms. See Epstein, 280-287.

Stanley Spencer, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1920 74

Jacob Epstein, Christ, 1917-1919 75

Ludwig Gies, Kruzifixus (Crucified Christ), 1921 76

Otto Dix, War Triptych, 1932 77

War, Suffering, and the Image of Christ Part Two: The Holocaust

Passion and Crucifixion images abound in artists’ responses to the Holocaust, both during and after the war, and the most prominent examples were created by Jewish artists, such as Marc Chagall, Barnett Newman, and Samuel Bak. There are a number of logical reasons for the widespread use of this symbolism in relation to the Holocaust, as Ziva Amishai-Maisels points out: the theological and scholarly reclamation of Jesus as a Jew in the nineteenth century, the use of Christ and the Crucifixion to symbolize suffering (particularly in the context of war), the visual parallels drawn between the Crucifixion and bodies in the concentration camps, and the fact that this saturated symbolism could be easily used to both address and criticize the Christian world.1 Starting as early as the eighteenth century, there was a scholarly and theological trend of reclaiming Jesus in Jewish history, emphasizing the historical context in which he lived. Notable figures in this movement include eighteenthcentury German rabbi Jacob Amden, Joseph Salvador (JesusChrist et sa doctrine, 1838), Moses Mendelssohn (Jerusalem, Mark Antokolsky, Ecce Homo, 1873 1838), Heinrich Graetz (History of the Jews, 1853-1875), Abraham Geiger (Judaism and Its History, 1866), and numerous others in the twentieth century.2 These writings provided the theological foundation for late-nineteenth century

1 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993), 178, 197. 2 Daphna Arbel, “’Ben-Yosef Is a Jewish Son,’” in Jesus in Twentieth Century Literature, Art, and

depictions of Jesus as a Jew by Mark Antokolsky (Ecce Homo, 1873) and Moses Ezekiel (Israel, 1873).3 As we have seen, World War I and its devastation resulted in surge of works in which “elements of Christ’s passion are removed from a biblical context to symbolize the sufferings of humanity, especially in times of war.”4 Examples include George Grosz’s 1928 cartoon of a crucified Christ wearing a gas mask and soldier’s boots, symbolizing “the martyrdom of soldiers in World War I;”5 Jacob Epstein’s Christ (1917-1919)6; and Ludwig Gies’s Kruzifixus (1921).7 This use of crucifixion symbolism was continued in anti-Fascist art. A few left-wing artists, such as John Heartfield, identified Christ and the Church with the Fascist oppressor, but most anti-Fascist artists identified Christ as the victim of Fascism.8 Comparisons between the bodies of concentration camp victims and depictions of the crucified Christ were not made until the end of the war, “when Jesus had already been accepted as a major Holocaust symbol through his identification as a Jew.”9 Visual parallels were observed in barbed wire (as crown of thorns), cruciform poses, and emaciated corpses (with their resemblance to British Combine, Ecce Homo - Bergen-Belsen, 1945 Grünewald’s Christ). 10 Crucifixion symbolism was also used both during and after the war (often with a significant amount of bitter visual irony) to condemn the church for its lack of action during the war.11 Mathias Goerirtz also uses symbolism of the Crucifixion to make an ironic statement about the role of Christianity in the Holocaust, albeit in a slightly different way. In a series of skeletal metal crucifixion sculptures titled Redeemer of Auschwitz, Goeritz “makes it clear that Jesus is not only a skeletal inmate, but that he was cremated along with Movies, ed. Paul C. Burns (New York: Continuum, 2007), 140-141. 3 Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, 178-179. 4 Ibid., 179. 5 Ibid., 179. 6 Gabriele Finaldi, The Image of Christ (London: National Gallery Company Limited, 2000), 194. 7 Stephanie Barron, “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1991), 36. 8 Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, 179-80. 9 Ibid., 187. 10 Ibid., 187-88. 11 Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, 196.

his fellow Jews. Yet the title has a double sting of irony to it: Auschwitz had no redeemer, for in killing Christ the Nazis forfeited their own salvation.”12 These trends provide the context in which Chagall reinterpreted the crucifixion as a symbol of Jewish martyrdom, and the symbolic background that Bak drew upon and critically examined in his Warsaw boy paintings. However, despite being a logical artistic tool for these reasons, the use of this symbolism has drawn criticism and raised significant ethical questions—does it subordinate Jewishness and reinforce visual and cultural Christian hegemony? Can one ethically use a symbol with such redemptive connotations in this context? Is this representation an oversimplification? As AmishaiMathias Goertiz , Redeemer of Maisels states, “Both the portrayal of the innocent victim Auschwtiz XII, ca. 1954 in the guise of the religious symbol of his persecutor and the choice of the Crucifixion itself, the historical event for which the Jews were blamed and because of which they were repeatedly persecuted, strikes many as nothing short of sacrilege.”13 Carol Zemel criticizes this symbolism for generalizing Jewish experience, diluting “its Jewishness for a more ecumenical frame”, and “sealing…a murdered Jewish population as a martyred people timelessly, essentially, and reverentially into another’s sacralized space.”14 Yvonne Sherwood argues that even within Holocaust art, there is a privileging of Christian, rather than Jewish, symbolism, and that inherent in the symbolism of the Crucifixion is the danger of salvific interpretation.15 The question thus arises, can crucifixion symbolism be appropriate in artistic responses to the Holocaust? To examine these problems, let us turn to the work of Marc Chagall and Samuel Bak, and their use of symbolism of the Crucifixion. Bak, specifically his works featuring the boy from the Warsaw ghetto shown in the photograph from the Stroop report, provides us with an example of how crucifixion symbolism can be used in a critical manner, in such a way that its very use addresses the problems associated with it, while still retaining symbolic meaning. Comparing the approaches of Bak and Chagall can help shed light

12 Ibid., 196-97. 13 Ibid., 178. 14 Carol Zemel, “Emblems of Atrocity: Holocaust Liberation Photographs,” in Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 217. 15 Yvonne Sherwood, “Iconoclash and Akedah: Holocaust and Sacrifice in the Art of Samuel Bak,” in Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak, ed. Danna Nolan Fewell, Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2008), 138.

on how Bak walks this line, as well as how these problems arise, and how they can be addressed. Chagall’s Crucifixions Marc Chagall is almost always the first artist to be mentioned (as well as the first to be criticized) in discussions of crucifixion symbolism in Holocaust art.16 In Chagall’s crucifixion paintings, the theological reclamation of Jesus as part of Jewish cultural history is merged with the crucifixion as universal symbol of suffering and martyrdom to form a unique interpretation of the figure of Christ and iconography of the crucifixion. Chagall’s Christ is unmistakably Jewish—Christ’s loincloth is in fact a tallith, he wears tefillim (or sometimes a yarmulke), and he is surrounded by various other explicitly Jewish symbols, such as a Torah scroll or a menorah. This Jesus is then situated within contemporary events of Jewish suffering. Chagall, explaining his use of this symbolism, stated: For me, Christ has always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr. That is how I understood him in 1908, when I used this figure for the first time…It was under the influence of the pogroms. Then I painted and drew him in pictures about ghettos, surrounded by Jewish troubles, by Jewish mothers, running terrified and holding little Children in their arms.17 This understanding of Christ as a Jewish martyr is illustrated in Chagall’s White Crucifixion (1938). Here Christ’s Jewishness is stressed by the characteristic talltih loincloth, a menorah at his feet, and on the INRI sign above him, the inscription in Aramaic, “Jesus the Nazarene (the Christian), king of the Jews”.18 “Familiar images of terror in Eastern Europe” surround the figure of Christ. Jews flee from pogroms by boat and on foot as their homes and synagogue burn. Overturned chairs and papers are strewn about the chaotic scene. Figures in the foreground appear terrified and confused. Floating above Christ, figures identified by Amishai-Maisels as Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs weep.19 The Christ seen here differs significantly from that of Christian images of the Crucifixion. In the Christian representation, “all suffering is concentrated in Christ, transferred to him in order that he may overcome it by his sacrifice. Here instead, though all the suffering of the world is mirrored in the Crucifixion, suffering remains man’s lasting fate and is not abolished by Christ’s death.”20 Rather than abolishing suffering, Chagall’s Christ “represents the Jewish people, whose pain is not redeemed. In this chaotic world 16 See Nissan N. Perez, Revelation : Representations of Christ in Photography (London: Merrell Publishers Limited, 2003), 24-25; Zemel, 217; Fishbane, 16; Raskin, 150. 17 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, “The Jewish Jesus,” Journal of Jewish Art 9 (1982): 102-103. 18 Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, 178. 19 Arbel, 146. 20 Franz Meyer, qtd. in Arbel, 146.

Jesus, alongside all the Jews, is crucified as both victim and martyr, a casualty of brutality and destruction.”21 According to Amishai-Maisels, the surrounding scenes of terror, violence, and suffering allude to specific real-life events.22 The Jews fleeing pogroms and deportations reference “the German Aktion of June 15, 1938, in which 1,500 Jews were taken to concentration camps, the deportation of Polish Jews at the end of October, 1938, and the outbreak of pogroms in November including Kristallnacht.”23 The Nazi breaking into the burning ark represents the destruction of synagogues in Munich and Nuremberg (June 9 and August 10, 1938), and the figures waving a red flag symbolize the hope that the Jews would be saved from Hitler by the Russians.24 David G. Roskies points to an additional theme of abandonment, in the way that the objects surrounding Christ all move away from him, and the ladder leaning against the cross “does not rest on anything, so that Christ cannot be taken down”, as well as in the incomplete Trinity formed by Christ and the “spiritlike” figure above him: …we have Christ and the Holy Ghost. What is really missing, therefore, is the Father in the Trinity, the Father who is the God of Israel. The real intimation of loss in this tableau of Jewish suffering is not the loss of life, property, or community but of God, the Old Testament Father who once protected all His sons and daughters.25 This theme of abandonment by God the Father (as well as literal abandonment by earthly parents), and the use of crucifixion symbolism to convey it, also appears in Bak’s interpretation of the image of the boy from the Warsaw ghetto. Though the artist’s intention is clear, what does the viewer see in Chagall’s Jewish crucifixions? For the Jewish viewer who does not share Chagall’s unique personal fascination with Christ, does it carry the same meaning? “What Jew could see himself reflected in this central symbol?” asks Michael Fishbane. “Perhaps Chagall; but hardly, I think, any

21 Arbel, 146-147. 22 Sander L. Gilman seems to take the opposite viewpoint, criticizing the work “with all its contemporary references (German quotes, swastikas) effaced by Chagall to make the image yet more ‘universal’” and dismissing it as contrived and anachronistic, “the product of the Chagall of the eastern ghettos, by 1938 long vanished into the maw of history. Indeed, they had already begun to vanish when Chagall left Russia in 1922 for Berlin and then Paris. But ‘Marc Chagall’ had spiritually left his hometown of Vitebsk…substantially earlier when he was transformed from Moses Segal to Marc Chagall.” See: Sander L. Gilman, “R. B. Kitaj’s ‘Good Bad’ Diasporism,” in Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, ed. Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 230. 23 Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, 182-83. 24 Ibid., 183. 25 David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 286.

of the villagers whose blood ran at the point of a cross.”26 According to Amishai-Maisels, it was not intended for Jews at all: after a few years of using Jewish iconography to depict the plight of the European Jews (The Falling Angel, 1933; Solitude, 1933; Sacrifice of Isaac, 1938), Chagall “decided that Jewish and biblical themes were not reaching the right audience. He did not have to explain to the Jews what was happening—they already knew. He needed to explain the deeper meaning of events in Germany to Christians, and to do so he decided to address them in their own symbolic language.”27 Regardless of whether one sees this as pandering or as trying to communicate an important message effectively, this presents a problem in that, for a Christian audience, Christ is a symbol not only of suffering and martyrdom, but also of resurrection and salvation. Even though Chagall’s intended message of suffering is quite clear, he seems to be operating on the assumption that his audience, whose understanding of Christ and the crucifixion is religious and not simply literary, can neatly compartmentalize certain aspects of the symbol’s meaning and set them aside. Chagall’s effort to have his message better understood seems to run the risk of something significant being lost (or added) in translation. Additionally, Chagall’s move from Jewish to Christian iconography illustrates Sherwood’s point that the crucifixion’s overshadowing of the Sacrifice of Isaac, or Akedah, in Holocaust art is indicative of “lingering perceptions of ‘the Christian’ (as universal) and ‘the Jew’ (as parochial)”.28 Sherwood refutes the arguments of Matthew Baigell and Amishai-Maisels, “that ‘The story of Abraham and Isaac was not really appropriate as Holocaust subject matter since for Jews it symbolizes the end of human sacrifice,” or that the Akedah does not work as a ‘basic alternate symbol’ because art on the sacrifice focuses on ‘the dramatic moment of reprieve’”: Could not the very same points be made of crucifixion? Does not crucifixion, even more than the Akedah, represent the end of sacrifice and even the end of all death? Does not the death of Jesus tend even more dramatically towards the coda of resurrection? And does not Jewish tradition have its 26 Michael Fishbane, “Myth, Midrash, and Mysticism: The Painting of Samuel Bak,” in Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak, ed. Danna Nolan Fewell, Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood (Boston: Pucker Gallery, 2008), 16. 27 Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, 182-183. This was not Chagall’s first use of Christian imagery to depict contemporary Jewish issues. Chagall painted a number of crucifixion images from 1908-12. Golgotha (1912) shows “Jesus as a crucified child mourned by his Jewish parents.” According to Amishai-Maisels, the work was “Chagall’s reaction to the 1911 trial of Beillis, who was accused of killing a Christian child to use his blood in Jewish rituals. Chagall portrayed Christ as a child, and in the sketch where the child bleeds profusely the spectators at the foot of the cross are not his Jewish parents, but a Russian bishop-saint and a nun. Thus Chagall reversed the blood libel: it is the Jewish child who is killed by the Christians.” ( Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, 179) 28 Sherwood, 138.

own traditions of Isaacs who actually die?29 The persistence of crucifixion as Holocaust icon in spite of these issues, Sherwood argues, implies “that, at least unconsciously, the crucifixion is being regarded as more malleable and universal, and that the Akedah is being seen (like Christian images of the Jewish ‘Law’ and the ‘Old’) as more specific, local, and inflexibly fixed.”30 This would seem to be, quite literally, Chagall’s perception, though in his case it was a conscious one. Even if Chagall’s choice to use the crucifixion rather than the Akedah was an issue of effectively communicating a particular message to a particular audience, the fact that he felt the need to reframe a Jewish issue in Christian terms at all is in itself indicative of a larger problem of Christian hegemony in Western visual culture. Crucifixion of the Warsaw Boy

Samuel Bak describes the famous 1943 photograph from the Stroop Report (compiled by Jürgen Stroop, the man chosen by Heinrich Himmler to clear the Warsaw ghetto of its 60,000 inhabitants, as a documentation of his progress) of the boy in the Warsaw ghetto, held at gunpoint, arms raised and palms turned outward, isolated and unprotected, as “the most poignant image of Jewish Crucifixion.”31 The Photograph from the Stroop Report, 1943 Boy’s raised arms reminded Bak of Crucifixion images of the 17th and 18th centuries, when there was a move away from positioning Christ’s arms horizontally to fit the shape of the cross. In these images, Christ’s arms tend to be raised upward, “As if the artists are trying to render a more realis-

29 Sherwood, 138. 30 Ibid., 138. 31 Richard Raskin, A Child At Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2004), 25-26, 149. The Stroop Report, officially titled Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr! (The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!), was submitted to Himmler as a birthday present. (Raskin, 27; Fewell and Philliips, “Bak’s Impossible Memorials,” 95)

tic image of a victim actually suspended from a cross.”32 According to Bak, “This painful suspension gives the arms a gesture of reaching out to God. Jesus is dying on the cross, and crying out Lama Sabachthani, why did you sacrifice me? It is an image of incredible poignancy.”33 Bak also notes that the meaning of the boy’s raised arms is twofold: “A man’s arms that reach for the sky are also a gesture of surrender, of giving up. When you superimpose the image of a crucified Son on the image of the little Warsaw boy with his uplifted arms, you wonder where is God the Father?” or more literally, “where is anyone who would play the part of God the Father?”34 This superimposition of the Crucifixion upon the image of the Warsaw boy occurs throughout Bak’s work. In Bak’s paintings of the Warsaw boy, there is often some sort of cruciform structure, and the boy’s hands almost always shown with stigmata-like wounds.35 Fewell and Phillips argue that in Elegy III, Samuel Bak’s “allusion to the biblical flood story and his exploitation of the crucifixion motif disrupt traditional understanding of these icons as salvific and redemptive.”36 A large body of water (which Fewell and Philips interpret as flood waters) sets the backdrop for Elegy III, in which the Warsaw boy, pieced together from a multicolored assortment metal, wood, and paper, is crucified against a “colorless rainbow”, constructed from “scrap metal, wood, and stone”, and a crumbling brick structure “reminiscent of both crematorium chimney and executioner’s wall.”37 Fewell and Phillips discuss the Christian view of the biblical flood as a “prefigurement of Christological salvation” and subsequent iconographic association between the flood and Christ’s crucifixion, and identification of Christians with the “rescued righteous of the Flood,” noting that “metaphorical comparisons between Noah’s family and the Church oblige us to consider what the metaphor leaves out. If Christians are the rescued righteous, who are the non-rescued? All those who are not Christian.”38 However, Bak’s juxtaposition of flood and crucifixion in Elegy III creates an “’unseamly’ reading” that “disrupts this reductive binary thinking”. Instead: Our focus is shifted away from the rescued righteous to the devastation 32 Raskin, 150. 33 Ibid., 150. 34 Ibid., 150; Fewell and Phillips, “Bak’s Impossible Memorials,” 95. 35 For examples of works containing one or both of these elements, see: Study I (1995), Study D (1995), Study B (1995), Self-Portrait (1995-1996), Elegy III (1997), Absence (1997), Self-Portrait with Friends (1997), For Josée (1997), Group (1997), Into the Trees (1997), In His Own Image (1997), Children’s Corner (1997), Little Green Trees (1997). 36 Fewell and Phillips, Bak’s Impossible Memorials, 94. 37 Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Phillips, “Genesis, Genocide, and the Art of Samuel Bak: ‘Unseamly’ Reading After the Holocaust,” in Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak, ed. Danna Nolan Fewell, Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2008), 76-77. 38 Ibid., 83-84.

of the deluge itself. In Elegy III there is no ark, no rescue, no “god of grace.” Rather, there is the residue of the destruction and the figure of an executed child who disquiets the viewer, rendering void all easy identifications with Noah and his family as the recipients of divine grace, all constructions of God as a one-dimensional savior, all universal pronouncements about sin and retribution, all absolute promises of redemption, in short, all attempts to make sense of undeserved suffering.39 This juxtaposition of symbols, in disrupting a redemptive reading, also clarifies the magnitude of the suffering, devastation, and injustice conveyed. The interplay of symbols forces us to think critically about their meaning, as well what it means to even use them at all. Of course, Fewell and Philips’ analysis hinges upon the (questionable) conviction that the body of water in the background of Elegy III appears floodlike. Regardless of the flood issue, however, Bak has acknowledged and expressed his views on both the redemptive implications of the crucifixion motif, and the seeming incongruity of this symbol in a Jewish context. “A Crucifixion evokes for a great number of people the idea of redemption,” says Bak. “Personally I do not believe in a world that is beyond the one in which we live, and in a possible redemption ‘over there.’ But I accept the possibility of redemption in this life.”40 Regarding the appropriateness of Crucifixion symbolism to Jewish subject matter, Bak states that he is “aware that a regular Jewish identity and the worship of a Crucifixion are not supposed to go together. They are perceived as a contradiction in terms. But the fact remains that contradictions are very human.”41 For Bak, these contradictions are what make us who we are: “I think that basically people are made of what is good and what is bad in human nature, they are bundles of contradictions, and I fear situations in which absolutism and religious fanaticism take over.” Bak’s crucified Warsaw boy is certainly a bundle of contradictions, as well as a warning against the dangers of absolutism and fanaticism. And for all the contradictions of these images, it was absolutism and fanaticism that drove both Christ and the Warsaw boy to their similar pose. The ethical problems inherent in employing the crucifixion motif, especially in the context of Holocaust art are raised in another aspect of Bak’s work: his “plundering” of Dürer.42 Elegy III features the angel of Dürer’s Melancolia I, and Bak perhaps alludes to Dürer’s merging of his self-portrait with the image of Christ, by merging the Warsaw boy with the image of Christ and his own self-portrait.43 What makes Dürer’s presence in

39 Fewell and Phillips, “Genesis, Genocide, and the Art of Samuel Bak”, 84. 40 Bak also states that he sees a move toward this sort of worldly redemption in Germany, “in its effort to come to terms with the Holocaust, and its eager Pacifism.” If Bak means for us to view his Warsaw boy works with this in mind, it raises a lot more questions. (Raskin, 149-50) 41 Raskin, 150. 42 Fewell and Philips, “Bak’s Impossible Memorials,” 94. 43 Ibid., 99, 103; Given the fact that Dürer is already being referenced in the work by Bak’s inclusion

a work using Crucifixion imagery in reference to the Holocaust problematic is that, in Dürer’s time, Christian identity “was at least partially constructed in distinction from and hostility toward Jews,” this hostility being based on the view of Jews as Christ-killers: Any emphasis on Christ’s suffering and crucifixion, then, served to incite antiJewish sentiment, especially during the Passion season when pogroms could well be anticipated. When Christ’s suffering was presented as a focal point for penitential reflection, a common practice in Christian piety, it simultaneously became the occasion and justification for hating Jews.44 It was in this context that Dürer produced numerous passion scenes, showing a particular affinity for the subject. Naturally, in these works, Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia I, 1514 Dürer depicted Jews as the killers of Christ, “rendering their faces, dress, and behaviors with distortion and caricature to indicate their villainous character.”45 Additionally, Dürer was further connected to antisemitism posthumously, during the Third Reich, when he was “hailed as that most ‘German of German masters’ from Nuremberg, Hitler’s ‘most German of German cities.’”46 Dürer’s works, including SelfPortrait (1493) and Knight, Death and Devil (1515), were used in Nazi publications and propaganda; Knight, Death and Devil was even transformed into an image of Hitler in Huof the angel, it seems quite plausible that Bak’s merging of self-portrait, Warsaw boy, and Christ is also alluding to Dürer’s similar practice. However, Dürer was certainly not the only artist to merge self-portraiture with depictions of Christ. In Christ in the Garden of Olive-Trees (1889), Paul Gauguin depicts himself as Christ , in order to express his own personal suffering and belief that he was the Messiah of modern painting. (See: Wladyslawa Jaworska, “‘Christ in the Garden of Olive-Trees’ by Gauguin. The Sacred or the Profane?” Artibus et Historiae 19, no. 37 (1998): 77-102.) The practice of artists depicting themselves as Christ also continues in contemporary photography, with artists like Renee Cox and Sam Taylor-Wood playing the part of Christ in their photographic tableaux. (See Chapter 1) 44 Fewell and Phillips, “Bak’s Impossible Memorials,” 102. 45 See: Christ Among the Doctors (1506), Christ Crowned with Thorns (1508-10), Christ as Man of Sorrows (1510), and their accompanying texts. (Fewell and Phillips, “Bak’s Impossible Memorials,” 102.) 46 Fewell and Philips, “Bak’s Impossible Memorials,” 103.

bert Lanzinger’s Der Bannerträger (1938), turning Dürer’s engraving into “the very symbol of the Volkish hero.”47 The Nazi appropriation of Dürer cannot be ignored in Bak’s work, in which allusions to Dürer are juxtaposed with an icon of the Holocaust. Dürer’s presence in Elegy III presents further iconographic incongruity, beyond that of the Crucifixion motif. Bak has certainly painted a “bundle of contradictions.” It is quite possible that his Warsaw boy paintings were a reflection upon the use of crucifixion symbolism in the work Albrecht Durer, Christ Among the Doctors, 1506 of Chagall and others. Working in the 1990s, Bak was well aware of the Crucifixion paintings of Chagall, and the role that this symbol had acquired in Holocaust art. “The idea of a crucified Jew is not new,” states Bak. “Chagall painted him on many of his canvases. Possibly the photograph we speak of, because here the crucified victim is a child, is more powerful than all the crucified Jews of Chagall put together.”48 It may be true that one is more horrified by the sight of a crucified child than an adult, but there is another major difference here that does in fact give Bak’s paintings featuring the Warsaw boy a power that does not exist in Chagall’s works--Bak’s works incorporate an image of real human suffering. Though Bak alters this image and transposes it into imagined settings, the figure in these paintings is still fully recognizable as the real boy who was really held at gunpoint in the Warsaw ghetto. According to Sontag, “Something becomes real--to those who are elsewhere, following it as ‘news’--by being photographed.”49 For many viewers who, unlike Bak, do not have direct experience of the Holocaust, the photograph of the Warsaw boy is part of what makes it real to them. While in Bak’s works, the body being crucified is that of a particular, recognizable person, the body in Chagall’s Crucifixions is an abstract amalgamation of Christ and Eastern European Jewish identity, an all-encompassing figure, rather than an individual representative. Sontag writes: Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to ‘care’ more. It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention. With a subject conceived on this scale, compas-

47 48 49

Ibid., 103. Raskin, 150. Sontag, 21.

sion can only flounder--and make abstract. But all politics, like all of history, is concrete.50 In contrast to Chagall’s conceptual Crucifixions, which present events in the abstract, Bak’s works ground the viewer in reality, while interpreting it through a surreal landscape. Personal History and Points of Encounter Obviously, as a Holocaust survivor, Bak has a very different perspective from Chagall. They did, however, both develop a particular personal interest in the figure of Christ during their formative years. In both cases, the way in which they encountered Christ seems to have impacted their approach to crucifixion symbolism later in life. For Chagall, this fascination with Christ began when he was studying in St. Petersburg, from 1907-1910, with Leon Bakst (a Jew who had converted to Christianity in 1903).51 Bakst’s school also happened to be “located on the first floor of Vyacheslav Ivanov’s ‘ivory tower,’ the symbolic stronghold of Symbolist poetry.”52 During this time, Chagall was influenced by the poetry of Aleksander Blok in particular. The figure of Christ was an important image in Blok’s poetry at this time, which seems to have had an impact on Chagall’s conception of Christ, as evidenced in his own poetry.53 In several of Chagall’s poems, he identifies himself with Christ. In one, he writes: “I walk toward you [my beloved]/Through the thread of [your] yesterday’s silence/ On the path of momentary hesitations/ Here I am sad.// The blue cupolas [of the sky]/ As above Christ/ I am his high pupil/ [Hanging] in tandem, we are alone/ Forever;” and in another, “From the morning I was assigned/ My early destiny on the Cross.”54 Bak was exposed to Christ at age nine, in the Benedictine cloister in which he and his family hid. In his memoir, Bak writes of his interest in the new religious figures and concepts: “And above all there was the Almighty Jesus, master of miracles, who particularly loved children and who, with his red and bleeding heart crowned by a wreath of thorns and placed on the immaculate palms of his hands, smilingly asked them to come to him. A small glossy postcard of his figure is always hidden in the pocket of my pants, even in the ghetto.”55 Bak’s interest in Christ and Catholicism continued even after returning to Vilna. Bak writes of his “fascination with churches and with Jesus”56 and his appreciation for Catholic ritual and aesthetics, particularly the dramatic visual representations of suffering and sacrifice: 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Ibid., 79. Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World (New York: Rizzoli, 2006), 62. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 86. Samuel Bak, Painted in Words (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 302. Ibid., 374.

The churches were full of huge dark paintings that looked at me. They depicted fascinating scenes. Evil executioners tortured or put to death beautiful maidens. Sometimes they sacrificed elderly men with long white beards. But the victims, with their eyes turned to God, had expressions of ecstatic bliss, as if they had reached the high point of their existence. I liked the sense of fulfillment that the Christian faith ascribed to suffering.57 Bak was especially drawn to representations of the crucifixion: His ordeal was like Isaac’s; he too was sacrificed by a powerful and determined father. In some ways I felt luckier than Jesus. My dead father, a miserable prisoner of a Nazi camp, never pretended to be all-powerful. He was no master capable of creating worlds! Yet he saved me in the direst of circumstances from certain, whereas Jesus’ father, willing to see his son suffer, ignored the plea “Why have you forsaken me?” and let him die on the cross.58 Even here, at age ten or eleven, Bak was already concerned with the idea of the suffering son, forsaken by the father, which would later become a major theme in his paintings of the Warsaw boy.59 Even just the circumstances of their introductions to Christ seem to prefigure the ways in which Chagall and Bak would later approach crucifixion symbolism. For Chagall, whose introduction to the figure of Christ was almost exclusively literary and artistic, not to mention later in life (in his early twenties), Christ appears to be more of a poetic, symbolic ideal, malleable, and capable of being removed from his historical and religious context. As another secular Jew whose first real introduction to Christ was in her early twenties, through artistic and literary means, and who subsequently became fascinated by the figure of Christ, I can certainly understand how Chagall would have come to perceive Christ in an idealized manner, not necessarily reflective of the reality of religious interpretation. For the more theologically-minded Bak, on the other hand, Christ (and Christianity in general) seems to take on a more profound and serious role, which makes sense, given that he was introduced to Christ when he was still a child, by way of an actual religious education, not to mention the fact that he was literally saved by the Church (insofar as it gave him and his family a temporary place to hide). Between his Catholic education (however brief) and the amount of trauma suffered around the same time that he was grappling with religious concepts, it is easy to see how questions of theodicy (or lack thereof) and the role of religion in the face of the Holocaust would come to dominate Bak’s work. Bak’s childhood interest in Catholic architecture, iconography, and ritual, and awareness of their

57 Ibid., 375. 58 Bak, 375. 59 Assuming this is true and not just Bak taking creative license and projecting onto his younger self. Either way, there is probably some truth to it. See: Bak, 373.

religious context and significance (at least to whatever degree a ten-year-old is actually capable of this) seems to come across in his consciousness of how religious symbols are read, and how to force the viewer to critically engage with them. We return now to the looming question: can symbolism of the Crucifixion be appropriate in representations of the Holocaust? Or more specifically, can it be used in a way that neither diminishes nor degrades its Jewishness, nor diminishes the magnitude of its tragedy, nor suggests any redemptive aspect? Samuel Bakâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paintings of the Warsaw boy indicate a possibility, but part of the strength of these works is that rather than simply stating a message, the dynamic interplay of symbolic meanings raises questions and engages the viewer in its discourse. Looking at symbols such as crucifixion though Bakâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s critical lens may not fix the problems, but at least it helps us identify and keep an eye on them.

Marc Chagall, White Crucifixion, 1938 92

Marc Chagall, The Martyr, 1940 93

Marc Chagall, Resistance,1937-48 94

Mar Chagall, Resurrection, 1937-52 95

Samuel Bak, Elegy III, 1997 96

Samuel Bak, Study B, 1995 97

Samuel Bak, Study I, 1995 98

Samuel Bak, Study C, 1995 99

Recontextualization and Readymades What does it mean for a work of art to be new or innovative? Boris Groys explores this question in his essay, “On the New.” The conclusions that Groys draws about what newness means in contemporary art provide some insight into the meanings of three more recent representations of Christ—Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987),Andy Warhol’s Last Supper series (1985-86), and Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo(1999). According to Boris Groys, the difference between what innovation meant in modernist art and what it means in contemporary art revolves around context: In the modernist tradition, the art context was regarded as stable—it was the idealized context of the museum. Innovation consisted in putting new form, a new thing, into this stable context. In our time, the context is seen as changing and unstable. So the strategy of contemporary art consists in creating a specific context that can make a certain form or thing look other, new and interesting—even if this form has already been collected.1 Rather than working on the level of form, “Contemporary art works on the level of context, framework, background, or of a new theoretical interpretation.”2 While traditional modernist art was about new form, contemporary art is about new context. The way in which recontextualization can establish new meaning is apparent in Serrano’s Piss Christ and Warhol’s Last Supper series. Additionally, Groys’s application of Kierkegaard’s Christology to Duchamp’s readymades provides a way of reading Wallinger’s Ecce Homo. Serrano’s Piss Christ: Urinary Transubstantiation One of the most controversial contemporary depictions of Jesus is Andres Serrano’s 1987 Piss Christ, a photograph of crucifix figurine made of plastic and wood, submerged in a four-gallon tank of the artist’s own urine, described by one writer as a fusion

100

1 2

Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), 40. Ibid., 40.

of “the eschatological and the scatological.”3 Piss Christ was exponentially more controversial because the work was featured in an exhibition funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).4 Piss Christ subsequently became a primary target in attacks against the NEA by conservative politicians and pundits. Reverend Donald E. Wildmon—Methodist minister, founder of the American Family Association (formerly the National Federation for Decency), and co-founder (with Jerry Falwell, then Moral Majority leader) of the Coalition for Better Television—in mailings intended to incite action against the NEA, wrote, “I would never, ever have dreamed that I would live to see such demeaning disrespect and desecration of Christ…Maybe, before the physical persecution of Christians begins, we will gain the courage to stand against such bigotry,” and also admonished his followers not to “let Congress give your hard-earned tax dollars to people who will produce hatefilled, bigoted, anti-Christian and obscene art.”5 New York senator Alphonse M. D’Amato called the work “shocking, abhorrent, and completely undeserving of any recognition whatsoever.”6 Conservative writer and commentator Pat Buchanan denounced artists like Serrano “as paradigms of a secular culture which was ‘anti-Christian, anti-American, and nihilistic.’”7 These condemnations of the work as blasphemous or anti-Chrisitan, however, are missing the point. In fact, the work is very much in keeping with Christianity, in multiple ways. Serrano’s Religious Background Like several other artists (such as Renee Cox and David Wojnarowicz) whose use of Christ’s image generated considerable controversy, Serrano was raised Catholic. Though Serrano felt that the Church was “oppressive, as far as dealing with women, blacks, minorities, gays, lesbians, and anyone else who doesn’t go along with their program,” and distanced himself from the Church shortly after his confirmation, his Catholic upbringing had a lasting impact on his life.8 Serrano first became interested in photography while

3 Robert Hobbs, “Andres Serrano: The Body Politic,” in Andres Serrano: Works 1983-1993 )Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1994), 29; Jerry D. Meyer, “Profane and Sacred: Religious Imagery and Prophetic Expression in Postmodern Art,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 24. 4 Eleanor Heartney, Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2004), 3. 5 Hobbs, 32; Wildmon qtd. in Robert Atkins “Stream of Conscience,” The Village Voice (May 30, 1989):87, qtd. in Hobbs, 32; Wilmon qtd. in Bruce Selcraig, “Reverand Wildmon’s War on the Arts,” The New York Times Magazine (September 2, 1990):24, qtd. in Hobbs, 32. 6 William H. Honan, “Artist Who Outraged Congress Lives amid Christian Symbols,” The New York Times (August 16, 1989): C13, qtd. in Hobbs, 32. 7 Heartney, 5. 8 Hobbs, 18.

101

studying at the Brooklyn Museum School, but after two years, drug addiction caused him to abandon art. After breaking his drug habit and returning to photography, Serrano “developed a preference for elaborate tableaux that took on the quality of surrealist film stills,” many of which, according to Serrano, dealt with “unresolved feelings about my Catholic upbringing which help me redefine and personalize my relationship with God.”9 Though critical of the Church, Serrano did not renounce his belief entirely, and has stated that he “would not be adverse [sic] to being called a Christian.”10 Due to his unresolved feelings about the Church, “Serrano has surrounded himself with the symbols of Catholicism, choosing to mix the sacred and the secular in such a way that one cannot tell if he is profaning the sacred or raising the parochial to a divine level.”11 His apartment is decorated with a bishop’s throne, a bust of Christ, and over a hundred crucifixes (many of which are in the bathroom). These items are displayed alongside animal skulls, a human brain preserved in formaldehyde, and taxidermied animals. The juxtaposition of Catholicism and body specimens in Serrano’s interior decorating also permeates much of his work, including his works with bodily fluids. Bodily Fluids and Religious Symbolism Serrano had dealt with both bodily fluids and religious themes in numerous works prior to Piss Christ. The Passion (1984) showed the unsettling image of “a weeping plaster Jesus wearing a wreath of dripping blood and peering over the flayed carcass of a large animal,” and in Pieta (1985), Serrano photographed artist Julie Ault cradling a very large fish “that transforms her into an absurd Virgin embracing a literalized symbol Andres Serrano, Pieta, 1985 of Christ, who was sometimes represented by the rebus ICHTHUS.”12 For Blood Cross (photographed on Good Friday, 1985), the artist filled a cross-shaped Plexiglas tank with cow’s blood; the tank began to leak as

102

9 Lucy R. Lippard, “Andres Serrano: The Spirit and the Letter,” Art in America (April 1990): 239, qtd. in Hobbs, 18. 10 Karin Lipson, “The Now-Notorious Andres Serrano,” New York Newsday (May 21, 1990): 38, qtd. in Hobbs, 18. 11 Hobbs, 18. 12 Hobbs, 24.

it was being filled, and consequently the cross appears to be dripping blood. Milk, Blood (1985) was a photograph of two Plexiglas tanks, side by side, each containing one of the titular fluids. Milk and blood appeared again in Bloodstream (1987), in which Serrano poured blood into a Plexiglas tank filled with milk and photographed the two liquids mixing together, and Andres Serrano, Blood Cross, 1985 in Milk Cross (1987), in which he submerged a cross-shaped tank filled with milk within a larger tank filled with blood. Serrano added urine to his palette of bodily fluids in works such as Piss (1987) and Piss and Blood (1987).13 Even in the more abstract works, there is a strong religious component to Serrano’s use of bodily fluids. Bodily fluids, especially blood, are prominently referenced in the Bible and are central to the Eucharist, as well as being “an important aspect of mystical experience throughout the late Middle Ages.”14 Additionally, when juxtaposed, blood and milk can simultaneously represent nourishment and sacrifice, both of which are important elements associated with Christianity, theologically and historically. According to Meyer, “Christ was sometimes described in the Middle Ages as a lactating and birthing mother, the blood flowing from his wounded side echoing in some imagery the milk flowing from a mother’s breast.”15 Regarding the use of blood in his work, Serrano has stated: The Church is obsessed with the body and blood of Christ. At the same time, there is the impulse to repress and deny the physical nature of the Church’s membership. There is a real ambivalence there. It’s one thing to idealize the body and it’s another to deal with it realistically…In my work, I attempt to personalize this tension in institutional religion by revising the way in which body fluids are idealized.16

13 Other pre-Piss Christ works by Serrano containing bodily fluids: Circle of Blood (1987), Blood and Soil (1987). Ibid., 24-26. 14 Meyer, 29. In addition to its religious significance, blood had become highly politicized in the mid1980s, due to the growing AIDS crisis, and increasing public awareness of blood as a medium for transmission of the virus. (Hobbs, 27) 15 Meyer, 30. 16 Patrick Finnegan, “Bearing the Cross,” Contemporanea (November 1990): 32ff qtd. in Hobbs, 25.

103

Urine, unlike milk and blood, has distinctly profane connotations. Though not as culturally offensive as feces, urine is still excrement. Not only is it regarded with disgust, but unlike blood or milk, it is not a source of nourishment or lifeforce—rather, it is what needs to be jettisoned from the body. Blood (and to some extent, milk) being inside the body is vital to its survival; urine must be sent out in order for the body to survive. Urine being the body’s refuse, regarded with disgust, urinating on someone or something is typically considered an act of degradation and contempt.17 The profane qualities of urine are further highlighted in a word like “piss.” As many, including Serrano himself, have noted, Piss Christ would not have been nearly as controversial, if at all, were it not for the title.18 Aesthetically, the work is quite beautiful, and without the title, one might not even guess that the radiant, yellow-orange glow was provided by urine. Not only does the work’s title inform the viewer that the substance in which the crucifix is bathed is urine, it also uses a particularly vulgar term to describe it. A word like “urine,” or even “pee,” does not have the same crude, aggressive quality as “piss.” As Robert Hobbs notes, the word “piss” is not only considered vulgar, but is also “commonly used to indicate displeasure—as when someone is pissed off,” and consequently, many viewers did not like this word being associated with Christ. However, the vulgar, degrading connotations of the word “piss” and the substance to which it refers are central to the work’s meaning on more than one level. Firstly, the degradation of submerging Christ in urine—pissing on Christ, in a sense—can easily be related to the humiliation and degradation endured by Christ in the gospels. Danto sees Piss Christ as a vivid depiction of “the way in which Christ was ‘despised and rejected’...jeered, spat upon, hit. Pissing on someone is conspicuously humiliating and degrading. Urine and spit are heavily laden with contempt, as feces or vomit would be, or menses. In my view, Serrano was seeking to restore the way Jesus was humiliated as he carried the cross to Golgotha.” 19 Sister Wendy Beckett, a cloistered Carmelite nun and consecrated virgin, famous for her “populist commentaries on art and art history,” expressed a similar view in an interview with journalist Bill Moyers.20 When Moyers asked if she was offended by Piss Christ, claiming that it “denigrates the central figure of your faith,” Beckett replied that she did not view the work as blasphemous, but rather “as an admonitionary work that attempts to say ‘this is what we are doing to Christ.’”21

104

17 Danto cites the practice of urinating on another person in S&M rituals as evidence of its degrading aspect. Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 176. 18 Hobbs, 30; Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box, 175. 19 Arthur C. Danto, Andy Warhol (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 140. 20 Heartney, p. 8 21 “Bill Moyers in conversation with Sister Wendy” WGBH Boston, Mass. Air date October 6, 1997 at 10 pm, qtd. in Heartney, 8.

Secondly, the way in which Piss Christ aestheticizes urine—a substance typically regarded with disgust—can be read as a celebration of physicality and the human body. Serrano has commented on society’s negative attitude towards urine, stating: It’s waste, and I think it’s seen as something repugnant, but I think this aversion to piss probably has more to do with the aversion that we have to our own bodies than it actually has to do with piss—because it’s very difficult to me, personally, to think of putting a value system on these fluids and saying that they’re either good or bad.22 However, in Piss Christ, as Serrano states, “I’ve completely aestheticized this very base material and in my pictures, piss is not something repugnant, it’s something very beautiful, it’s a beautiful glowing light.”23 Discomfort with the human body and its processes is something that has sometimes been expressed in relation to Christ’s human body. Danto writes, “People talk about Christ’s perfect body, but truly bodies are messy, smelly things…Still Christ was man under an aspect, even if God under another, and flesh had to be flesh if there were to be the instrumental sufferings of redemption.”24 If we accept the doctrine of the Incarnation, we should also accept the possibility that this body urinated. “Baptizing a cheap crucifix in urine,” writes Wendy Steiner, “reminds us that it was Christ’s body that died on the cross—a body that bled and contained other fluids.”25 And Piss Christ, in using urine to surround the Christ figure with a beautiful, glowing radiance, seems to tell us that this is nothing to be ashamed of. There is a strong element of transformation in this work. Not only is urine aestheticized, but this in turn transforms a “cheap dime store crucifix” into something beautiful and radiant.26 Serrano stated that his “intent was to aestheticize Christ. Beautiful light, I think, aestheticizes the picture. Visually, it doesn’t denigrate Christ in any way.”27 According to Steiner, “bodily fluid ennobles a degraded, plastic reproduction. An amber glow warms a crucifix in Piss Christ…rendering it mysterious again through a glorious haze of bubbles.”28 Furthermore, regarding the reddish-golden hue, Meyer points out that gold “was the traditional signifier in medieval and early Renaissance art of the saintly and divine,” and the reddish tint “might suggest the historical context of suffering and 22 Derek Guthrie, “Taboo Artist: Serrano Speaks.” New Art Examiner (September 1989): 45, qtd. in Hobbs, 30. 23 Heartney, 116. 24 Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box, 176. 25 Wendy Steiner, “Introduction: Below Skin-deep,” in Andres Serrano: Works 1983-1993 (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1994), 30. 26 Heartney, 116. 27 William Niederkorn, “Artist Defends Depiction of Christ.” Boston Sunday Globe (August 20, 1989): 89, qtd. in Hobbs, 30. 28 Steiner, 14.

105

sacrifice.”29 When surrounding the figure of Christ, the urine’s beautiful light perhaps also becomes divine light. The way in which the work ennobles the base and degraded—urine and cheap crucifix—can also be connected to the “Catholic emphasis on transformation, transfiguration and transubstantiation,” as Heartney notes: “As the mortal body is glorified at the end of time, and the simple substances of bread and wine changed into the body and blood of Christ in the Catholic mass, so Serrano takes raw materials normally considered vile…and consecrates and ennobles them by the beauty of art. As a result, his works have an almost sacramental quality.”30 However, in order to appreciate these transformations, we need to be able to recognize the raw materials for what they are. The provocative title, Piss Christ, is crucial for this recognition—we must be aware that this is urine, and we must have in mind its status as something vile and crude. It is not simply urine, but piss that is undergoing transformation, and in turn transforming, and that is what makes the work’s beauty so much more remarkable. Warhol’s Last Supper: Making the Old New On January 22, 1987, twenty works by Andy Warhol, all featuring silkscreened reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (1498), were exhibited in Milan, in a gallery across from Santa Maria delle Grazie, home to Leonardo’s original mural. The exhibition’s opening, which was hugely popular (reportedly, the gallery expected an audience of five or six hundred,” but five or six thousand came”) was also Warhol’s last public appearance—he died one month later in New York following gall bladder surgery.31 The Last Supper series produced for the Milan exhibition was not the first appearance of Leonardo’s famous work in Warhol’s work, or in his life. Warhol had been commissioned to do the series for the Milan exhibition by his friend Alexandre Iolas (who had also been one of Warhol’s first art dealers), after Iolas had seen some of the works from his previous Last Supper series, in which he also used Leonardo’s depiction of the event.32 Leonardo’s Last Supper was present early in Warhol’s life, as well as at the end of it. According to his brother, John Warhola, a reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper hung on the kitchen wall in the family’s home in Pittsburgh. Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola, a devout Byzantine Catholic, had a small reproduction of the work in her well-worn Old Slavonic prayer book.33 When Warhol painted his Last Supper series, his model was not

106

29 30 31 102. 32 33

Meyer, 30. Heartney, 117. Jane Dagget Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol (New York: Continuum, 1998), 101Dillenberger, 101. Ibid., 80.

the Leonardo mural itself, but rather a line drawing of the piece, printed in a nineteenthcentury encyclopedia of famous paintings. It was this outline image that Warhol copied, with great precision, in his hand-painted Last Suppers. Comparing one of these paintings to the book illustration, Jane Dagget Dillenberger notes, “Not only are the facial features and gestures the same, but details such as the shadows are composed of parallel hatchings that are similar.”34 Similarly, for the silkscreened works, Warhol used a photograph of Leonardo’s Last Supper that his studio assistant, Rupert Smith, had bought from “a Korean religious store next to the Factory.” Smith describes the photograph as “one of those copies of the 19th century version that had been re-done, like you’d buy in Woolworth’s.”35 It was the Last Supper as it existed in cultural consciousness—known largely through reproductions, cheapened and commercialized—that Warhol proceeded to recontextualize and transform in these works. The commercialization and commodification of Leonardo’s image seems to be alluded to in a number of works from Warhol’s earlier Last Supper series, in which the outlined painting of the scene is overlaid with corporate logos and price tags (for small amounts). The logo for Wise potato chips—a circular black and blue abstraction of an owl head—appears in at least two paintings. In The Last Supper (Wise Potato Chips) (1986), the large, bold, brightly colored logo contrasts strikingly with the black-and-white outline of the scene, and obscures some of the figures at the table. In The Last Supper (The Big C) (ca. 1985), the Wise potato chip logo is joined by paintings of motorcycles, a large price tag for $6.99, and part of the heading for an newspaper article titled “THE BIG C: Can the Mind Act as a Cancer Cure?”36 These additions to the repeated images (in various sizes) of Christ and the group of Thomas, James, and Philip, suggest a kind of marketing of Christ, trying to appeal to a hip demographic. The large, red and yellow price tag is at the very center of the canvas, and is framed on either side by images of Christ; the price tag also surrounds the smallest image of Christ, Thomas, James, Philip, and John, with the colored portion of the price tag covering Christ. If Christ is the product being advertised, a price of $6.99 seems quite reasonable. The text, in large bold letters, reading “THE BIG C” (the rest of the headline is omitted) is placed under the price tag, and next to the largest image of Christ in the painting—the big C may originally have referred to cancer, but here it appears to refer to Christ. Referring to Christ as “the big C” seems like a rebranding of Christ—more colloquial, bolder, edgier, not that stuffy old Christ your parents talk about! It also emphasizes Christ’s importance—THE BIG C—which, juxtaposed to the price tag, makes this offer seem like a pretty good value. The hip and edgy rebranding of Christ is also suggested by the several motorcycles—the official mode of transport of the archetypal 34 35 36

Ibid., 81. Ibid., 103. Dillenberger, 88-92.

107

rebel, or, as Dillenberger describes it, “our age’s symbol of untrammeled freedom, power, and sexuality.”37 Of course, Warhol’s entire series of Last Suppers can be seen as a rebranding of Leonardo’s original. Price tags and corporate logos appear again in The Last Supper (Dove) (1986), in which the outlined scene is overlaid with a price tag for 59¢ (anyone who already paid $6.99 for Christ must be kicking themselves), and the logos for Dove soap and General Electric. The dove of the Dove soap logo hovers above Christ’s head, which, as Dillenberger observes, seems to allude to the biblical description of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, in which “the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.”38 Given Warhol’s heavily religious upbringing, it is likely that he would have been aware of this passage. Dillenberger also sees the GE logo as a symbol for God the creator, interpreting the slogan, “we bring good things to light,” as “a metaphor for creation, when God separated light and darkness and found his creation to be ‘good’: God brings good things to light.”39 According to Dillenberger, the Dove and GE logos, together with Christ of the Last Supper, thus form the Holy Trinity, with Dove as the Holy Spirit and GE as the Father.40 Of course, this still leaves the 59¢ price tag: One is left to wonder, does this last element signify the conflict between money and religion, the use of kitschified religious imagery to ‘sell’ the church, or the incommensurability of human and divine standards of value? (After all, even in 1986, 59 cents wouldn’t buy very much). Or is its effect to downplay the religious implications of the underlying imagery? Is it meant to be read as an interjection that says ‘just kidding!’ and warns us not to take the spiritual clichés of the work too seriously?41 Given the use of corporate logos in the work (and their formation of the Holy Trinity), the commercialization and commodification of Christ and the church seems to be the most plausible explanation, but, as Eleanor Heartney points out, “In the face of Warhol’s resolute refusal to explain himself…it is possible that the work contains all these meanings at once. And it is precisely this ability to allow ordinary objects to encompass multiple meanings which recurs again and again in the work of artists raised as Catholics.”42 Another particularly notable work in this series, especially in the context of Catholicism, is the double painting, Be Somebody with a Body (With Christ of Last Supper)

108

37 Ibid., 92. 38 Luke 3:21-22, The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, Augmented Third Edition, College Edition, ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Dillenberger, 92-93. 39 Dillenberger, 93. 40 Ibid., 93. 41 Heartney, 30. 42 Heartney, 30.

(ca. 1985-86). On the left side is the outline of Christ (again, from the encyclopedia illustration); on the right side is the image of a smiling, barechested, fit young man with his arms crossed, and the text, “Be somebody with a body,” both of which are taken from a bodybuilding advertisement.43 The two sides are divided by the contrasting white background behind Jesus, and black background behind the bodybuilder, whose head is surroundAndy Warhol, Be Somebody with a Body (With Christ ed by a white halo-like aura. Despite of Last Supper), ca. 1985-86 the clear spatial division between them, there is a strong sense of engagement between the two figures. Christ appears to be gazing down benevolently at the bodybuilder, who gazes upward, seemingly at Christ. Christ’s left hand also reaches out toward the bodybuilder, one of his fingers just touching the edge of the back background. The focus on Christ’s outstretched hand, according to Heartney, highlights the moment in which “he is saying ‘This is my body,’ thereby transforming the bread of the meal into his mystical flesh.”44 This, juxtaposed with the bodybuilder and slogan, puts a heavy emphasis on physicality. For Heartney, the work could be an advertisement for what she calls “Incarnational consciousness,” her term for the “essential carnality” of Catholicism, and its emphasis on the body.45 According to Heartney, the slogan, “Be somebody with a body,” could be a “Pop restatement” of Leo Steinberg’s controversial thesis that Renaissance artists deliberately emphasized Christ’s genitals, and by extension his physical humanity, as a way of visually supporting the doctrine of the Incarnation.46 The slogan, Heartney writes, “If applied to the body builder…can be seen as a celebration of the physical experiences so often denied Warhol by his critics.”47 There is some evidence, as Dillenberger notes, that Warhol may have identified with the bodybuilder—at the time, 43 The image of the young bodybuilder appears in several of Warhol’s other works, some of which also feature the image of Christ from the Last Supper; Dillenberger, 87. 44 Heartney, 38. 45 Ibid., 6ff, 38. 46 Ibid., 38; see: Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). 47 Heartney is referring here to the frequent references to Warhol’s alleged asexuality, which has, in recent years, been called into question, particularly by Queer Theorists who have argued that “mainstream criticism has deliberately ‘dehomosexualized’ Warhol in order to make him acceptable to mainstream taste.” Heartney, 36-37.

109

Warhol was involved in a bodybuilding program, and Dillenberger also observes a resemblance between the bodybuilder and a photograph of Warhol “as a young man smiling and looking upward.”48 “If applied to the Christ figure,” Heartney continues, “it could be taken as a confirmation of Christ’s human status.”49 However, Heartney proposes that the slogan could also serve as a link between Christ and the bodybuilder, suggesting a level of sexuality in their relationship: “The aura around the body builder’s head suggests that he has been transformed through an encounter which, the slogan suggest, has physical as well as spiritual aspects. The notion of Christ as lover is…a time honored Catholic theme. Applying it to a same sex context is more unorthodox, though not unheard of in the writings of male and female mystics.”50 Whether or not this sexual component is present, the slogan and the importance of physicality definitely connects the two figures. Warhol’s sexuality, specifically in relation to the church, has also been discussed in relation to Camouflage Last Supper (1986), from the Milan series. The large canvas contains two Andy Warhol, Camouflage Last Supper, 1986 silkscreened images of The Last Supper, partially obscured by an overlaid camouflage pattern. The purpose of camouflage is to hide, to conceal. What is being concealed here? Arthur C. Danto suggests that “the hiddenness implied by camouflage belongs with the idea that confidences were disclosed at the Last Supper. What meaning could be more secret than that the wine and bread are Christ’s flesh and blood, and that in partaking of these Jesus becomes part of the blood and flesh of the partakers?”51 Dillenberger echoes this explanation, but she also suggests that perhaps the camouflage’s implication of concealment refers to Warhol position in the church. Though Warhol regularly attended Mass throughout his life, as an adult he stopped participating in the Eucharist. According to the prior of St. Vincent Ferrer, the church Warhol attended toward the end of his life, Warhol often came alone into the church but he never went to confession or communion.” The church’s priest, Father Sam Matarazzo, recalled that Warhol “came not only on Sunday but several times a week, sitting or kneeling in the shadows at the back of the church, and leaving without speaking to anyone.” Father Matarazzo also

110

48 Dillenberger, 88. 49 Heartney, 38. 50 Heartney, 38-39. The notion of Christ as lover can be seen in Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647-1652). 51 Danto, Andy Warhol, 145.

“said that he preached regularly against homosexuality, and that whatever Warhol’s sexual life was, his life-style might be in conflict with the teachings of the church.”52 Rather than leave the church in light of this tension, Warhol chose to worship discretely, in the shadows: “Thus the camouflage, which functions as a cover-up and a protection, is symbolic of Warhol’s own relationship to the church.”53 In each of these works—only a small sampling of Warhol’s series—the old is recontextualized to make something new. The old which is being transformed is both Leonardo’s famous work and its commercial reproductions (already, a sort of recontextualization of Leonardo’s original), as well as the narrative it depicts, and consequently, the meaning endowed by Warhol’s alterations and juxtapositions operates on a number of levels. The juxtaposition of corporate logos and price tags degrades and commodifies a revered work of art, as well as Christianity itself, while simultaneously elevating the cheap, commercialized reproductions to the status of high art. And in each of these works, depending on what is juxtaposed with the same scene, the meaning is vastly different. The context into which Warhol places the familiar image makes all the difference. Christ as Readymade If there is any artist, apart from Marcel Duchamp, who exemplifies the importance of context over form in contemporary art, it is Andy Warhol. Warhol’s Brillo Box is Arthur C. Danto’s classic example of how two outwardly identical objects can in fact be vastly different. According to Danto, “Its significance for the philosophy of art was that we can be in the presence of art without realizing it, wrongly expecting that its being art must make some immense visual difference.”54 Something similar can be said of Christ. Søren Kierkegaard’s idea of the new as difference without or beyond difference—that is, difference that is imperceptible—is the tool that Groys uses to compare Christ to the readymades of Duchamp. According to Kierkegaard (as summarized by Groys), being new and being different are not the same. Rather, they are at odds, in that “a certain difference is recognized as such only because we already have the capability to recognize and identify this difference as difference. So no difference can ever be new—because if it were really new it could not be recognized as difference.”55 For Kierkegaard, to be new is to be different without being different—that is, to be different in a way that cannot be recognized. Kierkegaard uses Christ as an example of this sort of imperceptible difference. According to Kierkegaard (again summarized by 52 Dillenberger, 109-112. 53 Ibid., 112. 54 Danto, Andy Warhol, .136; see also: Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 55 Groys, 28.

111

Groys), Christ looked like just any other ordinary man of that time and place—an objective viewer, standing before Christ, would not be able to find “any visible, concrete difference between Christ and an ordinary human being”—that is, a perceptible difference that would indicate that Christ was not just an ordinary human, but the son of God.56 “Thus, for Kierkegaard, Christianity is based on the impossibility of recognizing Christ as God— the impossibility of recognizing Christ as different. Further, this implies that Christ is really new and not merely different—and that Christianity is a manifestation of difference without difference, or, of difference beyond difference.”57 This raises the question of how the new—this difference beyond difference—can manifest itself. Groys answers this question by comparing Christ to Duchamp’s readymades. With Duchamp’s readymades, “we are also dealing with difference beyond difference—now understood as difference between the artwork and the ordinary, profane object.”58 Thus, according to Groys, we can say that Duchamp’s Fountain is a kind of Christ among things, and the art of the readymade a kind of Christianity of the art world. Christianity takes the figure of a human being and puts it, unchanged, in the context of religion, the Pantheon of the pagan gods. The museum—an art space or the whole art system—also functions as a place where difference beyond difference, between artwork and mere thing, can be produced or staged.59 This difference beyond difference, Groys explains, “is a difference not in form, but in time—namely, it is a difference in the life expectancy of individual things, as well as in their historical assignment.”60 In the case of Christ, “the difference between Christ and an ordinary human being of his time was not a difference in form which could be re-presented by art and law but a nonperceptible difference between the short time of ordinary human life and the eternity of divine existence.”61 Similarly: If I move a certain ordinary thing as a readymade from outside of the museum to its inner space, I don’t change the form of the thing but I do change its life expectancy and assign to it a certain historical date. The artwork lives longer and keeps its original form longer in the museum than an ordinary object does in ‘reality.’ That is why an ordinary thing looks more ‘alive’ and more ‘real’ in the museum than in reality itself. If I see a certain ordinary thing in reality I immediately anticipate its death—as when it is broken or

112

56 57 58 59 60 61

Ibid., 29. Ibid., 29. Groys, 29. Ibid., 29-30. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 36.

thrown away. A finite life expectancy is, in fact, the definition of an ordinary life. So if I change the life expectancy of an ordinary thing, I change everything without, in a way, changing anything.62 This idea of difference beyond difference in terms of life expectancy, as it pertains to both Christ and art, is something that Mark Wallinger plays with in Ecce Homo. Wallinger’s Ecce Homo Compared to traditional representations of Christ, Mark Walliinger’s Ecce Homo (1999) is very perceptibly different. The figure is young, bald, and clean-shaven, cast from the body of an art student; apart from his loincloth and crown of thorns, made of barbed wire, there is nothing conventional-looking about this depiction of Christ. Even in Trafalgar Square, where the sculpture stood, it stuck out like sore thumb. Wallinger’s life-sized Christ was dwarfed by the plinth on which it stood, and by its neighboring sculptures— grandiose, overscale statues. However, in these very differences, Wallinger’s Christ is very much like the Christ described by Groys and Kierkegaard. Physically, Wallinger’s Christ looks just like an ordinary person—ignoring, of course, the fact that the work is cast in white marble resin and would obviously not be mistaken for an actual living human being. The figure is life-size, and rather average looking, with the features of a regular, contemporary person, and without the long hair and beard that have become so strongly associated with Christ. Thought the barbed-wire crown and loincloth serve to identify the figure as Christ, these are external objects— nothing about this Christ’s physical body suggests his identity. David Burrows compares Ecce Homo to another work of Wallinger’s, A Real Work of Art, a race horse part-owned by the artist, and “given the status of an authentic work of art that raced in the Sport of Kings.”63 According to Burrows, both Ecce Homo and A Real Work of Art were investigations of beliefs and values: “What would we do if a real work of art bit us on the nose; what would we do if we really stood before Christ. Would we know them if we Mark Wallinger, Ecce Homo, 1999 On its plinth in Traflagar Square

62 Groys, 36. 63 David Burrows, “Beyond Belief: Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo,” in Credo: Mark Wallinger (London: Tate Gallery Publishing Limited, 2000), 36.

113

saw them? Would we believe it?”64 The work’s position as a public sculpture also raises questions about the issue of longevity, as it pertains to a work of art, as well as Christ. Though not literally inside a museum, displaying something on top of a plinth designated for sculpture, surrounded by other such plinths with public sculpture on display, is effectively the same as putting something in a museum. It’s life expectancy is changed. The life of a public sculpture is perhaps expected to last even longer than that of an object in a museum. Exhibitions change, and collections rotate—even if a piece is only in storage, or being displayed in another location, public sculptures tend to carry a sense of solidity and stillness; we don’t expect them to go anywhere. “Public sculptures,” writes David Burrows, “for the main part repress any notion that the ideas and values that they have been cast from could, or even should, become obsolete or disappear. The public sculpture hopes to live beyond the time of mortals.”65 Wallinger’s sculpture challenges this notion of immortality through “depiction of an ordinary man about to die, but whom one may or may not believe will live forever (in Spirit at least),” as well as through its decidedly un-monumental scale.66 The figure hardly appears immortal, in its ordinariness and its small stature, and in fact, the end of its life in Trafalgar Square was predetermined—the work was just the first of a series of sculptures planned for the previously empty plinth, and it only stood there from July 1999 to January 2000.67 In challenging the notion of the immortal public sculpture, the work questions the legitimacy of its sculptural neighbors and the values that they represent. Conclusion According to Groys, “A new artwork looks really new and alive only if it resembles, in a certain sense, every other ordinary, profane thing, or every other ordinary product of popular culture.”68 In all of the aforementioned works, this is true to some degree. For Warhol and Serrano, it is the recontextualization of a popular image, or a base material. For Wallinger, it is presenting a public sculpture of Christ as an ordinary man on an ordinary scale. Context, juxtaposition, and the elevation of the ordinary are what give these works their power.

114

64 65 66 67 68

Burrows, 36. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 36. Gabriele Finaldi, The Image of Christ (London: National Gallery Company Limited, 2000), 195. Groys, 30.

115

Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987 116

Andres Serrano, Black Supper, 1990 117

Andres Serrano, White Christ, 1989 118

Andres Serrano, Black Jesus, 1990 119

Andy Warhol, Last Supper (The Big C), ca. 1985 120

Andy Warhol, Last Supper (Dove), 1986 121

122

Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ten Punching Bags (with Christ from Last Supper), 1985-86

Andy Warhol, Be Somebody with a Body (with Christ of Last Supper), 1986 123

Christ in the Gay Community Depictions of Christ by Gay Catholic Artists in the 1980s Introduction On October 31 1986, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released a “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” effectively condemning homosexuality, albeit in as gentle a way as possible. Since the mid-1970s, homosexuality had been a major source of concern for the Catholic Church who felt increasing need to formulate an official stance on the issue. Compared to the homophobic acts and statements of today’s conservative Christian organizations, such as the Westboro Baptist Church, the Catholic Church’s stance on homosexuality, as articulated in the letter, seems relatively tame—it even condemns violence and hate speech against homosexuals.1 However, the letter still clearly classifies homosexuality as a “disorder,” and argues that while sexual orientation may not be a matter of choice, engagement in homosexual activity is morally unacceptable: “Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”2 This conflict was a very personal one for non-heterosexual Catholics. A number of prominent gay artists in the 1980s came from Catholic upbringings, and dealt with this conflict in different ways in their work.3 Artists such as Andy Warhol, Duane Michals, Robert

124

1 “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” in The Vatican and Homosexuality, ed. Jeannine Gramick and Pat Furey (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1988), 5-6. 2 “Letter to the Bishops,” 2. 3 I am using the word “gay,” rather than a more inclusive umbrella term like “queer” or “LGBT,” because I am specifically referring to homosexual men. Additionally, I think that this word is appropriate to the historical period being discussed.

Mapplethorpe, and David Wojnarowicz each had a different relationship with Catholicism, but were undeniably influenced by their religious upbringings. The influence of and relationship with Catholicism for these artists comes across in their different approaches to the image of Christ in their work. Robert Mapplethorpe Robert Mapplethorpe once commented that his two most vivid childhood memories were the Catholic Church and Coney Island. The simultaneous appeal of the two, especially for a child, is understandable—“visual stimulus, pageantry, and display” are major elements of both.4 Attending Mass, which, during Mapplethorpe’s childhood, was held in Latin and involved burning incense and ringing bells, he would watch the priest transforming wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ. “A church has a certain magic and mystery for a child,” Mapplethorpe recalled. “It still shows in how I arrange things. It’s always little altars. It’s always been this way—whenever I’d put something together I’d notice it was symmetrical.”5 Up until the age of twelve, when he began visiting museums in Manhattan, Mapplethorpe’s exposure to art had been limited to Catholic iconography. After discovering Picasso, Mapplethorpe began drawing Cubist Madonnas, which his childhood friend, Jim Cassidy, described as “not beautiful Botticelli-type madonnas…but grotesque creatures with split profiles.”6 Catholic aesthetics, combined with occult symbolism and later emblems of sadomasochism, pervaded the altar-like assemblages that Mapplethorpe created after art school.7 Despite whatever bitterness Mapplethorpe had over the Church’s condemnation of homosexuality, Catholicism provided him with a major artistic resource. Rather than rejecting Catholicism, Mapplethorpe “equally embraced the sacred and the profane, and even found a biblical alter ego in the fallen angel Lucifer.”8 In addition to general Catholic aesthetics and altar constructions, the image of Christ also appears in two of Mapplethorpe’s works which bookend his career. It should of course be noted that these two works, Jesus (1971) and Christ (1988), are in no way the extent of Mapplethorpe’s use of Christian iconography and they are certainly not the best known. References to Christian iconography tend to appear more subtly in the erotic portraits for which Mapplethorpe is known. Dennis Speight with Calla Lilies (1983) appears to reference the theme of the Risen Christ. As Eleanor Heartney notes, in traditional representations of the Risen Christ, “he carries a lily as a symbol of his triumph over death and his body is so purified and perfected that he must warn Mary 4 5 6 7 8

Sylvia Wolf, Polaroids: Mapplethorpe (New York: Prestel, 2007), 23. Wolf, 23; Morrisroe, 17-18. Morrisroe, 20-21. Morrisroe, 53. Wolf, 25.

125

Magdalene at the tomb—‘Noli me tangere’—‘Do not touch me.’”9 The nude man in this photograph is clearly holding lilies and he certainly has a beautiful body. He also appears rather guarded in his expression and body language, as if he is thinking, “Do not touch me.” Other works that evoke Christological symbolism include Self-portrait (1975), Eliot and Dominik (1979), and Untitled (Michael) (1973/75). In the early 1970s, before Mapplethorpe had begun taking his own photographs, he was still working with found materials, in this case pages from books and magazines, which he spray-painted. Most of these magazine works were homoerotic (such as the untitled piece showing two men kissing from 1972) or showed fetishized male stereotypes, such as cowboys (Julius of Robert Mapplethorpe, Dennis Speight California, 1971) with Calla Lilies, 1983 and leather-clad bikers (Leatherman II, 1970). However, one of these pieces showed a very different sort of man. For Jesus (1971), Mapplethorpe used an image from a magazine depicting Christ as salvator mundi (savior of the world), with a halo and crown of thorns, holding an orb in one hand and raising the other in a gesture of benediction.10 As in his other magazine works, Mapplethorpe has masked out some areas and spray-painted the remaining space.11 Here, spray-painted blocks of yellow and white veil Christ’s head and arm. Partially obscuring Christ’s face and hand gesture gives the figure a sense of mystery. Additionally, the partially transparent yellow area Robert Mapplethorpe, Julius of that covers his face seems to mirror the golden halo that California, 1971 backlights his head; the aura that was only behind him

126

9 Heartney, 85. 10 “Salvator mundi” refers to “a type of devotional image showing Christ holding a globe…Christ may be making the sign of benediction, pointing above to the divine, wearing a Crown of Thorns, or any combination of these.” Sarah Carr-Gomm, The Hutchinson Dictionary of Symbols in Art (Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 2005), 197. 11 Richard Marshall, Robert Mapplethorpe (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, in association with New York Graphic Society Books and Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1988), 8.

in the original magazine image now surrounds his head in Mapplethorpe’s work. While the yellow block acts like a highlighter, drawing attention to Christ’s face and raised arm, the unobscured portion of Christ’s body—the torso and the arm holding the orb—is also emphasized. It can be safely assumed that the orb is meant to be seen as a globe. Traditionally, the globe is a “symbol of dominion when held in the hand of a deity or monarch,” and with his halo and very regal looking crown of thorns, this Christ is certainly both.12 The emphasis on the globe thus emphasizes Christ’s dominion. It would not be too great a stretch to assume that Mapplethorpe had some familiarity with this symbolism, given that Christian iconography dominated his vision of art until age twelve, and his interest in this iconography continued throughout his life. If this was a conscious attempt to highlight the meaning of this symbol, what then was Mapplethorpe saying about Christ’s power and dominion in this work? The fact that Christ’s gesture of benediction is obscured seems significant. The combination of the globe and the blessing hand suggests a god and ruler who is both powerful and benevolent. Stripping him of this benevolence makes for a harsher interpretation of Christ’s power. This would be less noticeable were the hand gesture wholly absent, but the fact that it is only partially obscured makes its diminishment more apparent. Additionally, the grittiness of the speckling of black spray paint that covers Christ’s body from the neck down seems to add to this darker representation of Christ’s power. Is this work a statement about Christian hegemony? Or perhaps a representation of the disconnect between Christ’s message of love and the type of Christianity practiced by many American conservatives? It is also worth considering Jesus in the context of Mapplethorpe’s other magazine works from the same period. There is a certain visual unity to Mapplethorpe’s magazine works, Jesus included, in terms of color palette, and masking/spray-painting technique. However, this technique generally used in an eroticizing way, to draw attention to certain parts of the male bodies depicted. With this in mind, one could perhaps read a certain eroticism into Jesus. For one thing, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the relatively unobscured torso and arm holding the orb. There is arguably something erotic about the male torso. Though Christ’s torso is concealed here by his robe, the v-neck of his garment provides a decent glimpse of bare chest. It leaves quite a bit to the imagination, but perhaps that is the appeal. Additionally, though iconography indicates that the orb is a globe, it could just as easily be a ball for some sort of sport. Looking at Christ’s torso and orb in isolation, he almost looks like an athlete playing some ancient form of soccer. Perhaps Mapplethorpe did not intend to show Christ as an athlete teasing us with a bit of skin, but looking at Jesus alongside his other magazine works, there is still some lingering sense of fetishization of this image. Jesus is also somewhat reminiscent of another early work of Mapplethorpe’s, Tie

Carr-Gomm, 108.

127

Rack (1969) in which a painting of the Madonna is enshrined in black neckties. The top of the frame is marked with an X, “as if it were a Station of the Cross,” and the Virgin’s halo is outlined with a thin yellow line piercing her neck. Sparkles are added over her lungs and chest, and a painted triangle veils her eyes. As in many depictions of the Madonna, she holds her robe open to reveal her heart. Here however, this gesture, according to Wolf, “seems more like an erotic invitation, in part because of his alterations to the painting, which make it more a fetish object than a devotional image.”13 Besides a general aesthetic similarity in composition between Jesus and Tie Rack, both figures seem to have faint reddish areas painted on their chests, and both exhibit Robert Mapplethorpe, Tie a certain openness in their body language. If Mapplethorpe’s Rack, 1969 alterations to the Virgin in Tie Rack make her open gesture seem like an “erotic invitation,” could the same be said of Jesus? The image of Christ appears again in Mapplethorpe’s work, toward the end of his life, in Christ (1988). Christ was one of a series of photographs that Mapplethorpe produced using small casts of classical male figures, when AIDS had taken such a huge toll on his health that strenuous studio work had become difficult. Most of these works showed idealized male bodies, with the seemingly strange exception of Christ. Not unlike Jesus, Christ seems somewhat incongruous at first, in relation to the technically and visually similar works produced around the same time. However, while Christ does not exhibit the same focus on male bodily perfection as the other works in the series, there is still a strong emphasis on the body. Rather than beauty or eroticism, the focus here is on mortality, and the vulnerability of the human body. The composition is very simple, with the figurine of the crucified Christ (missing his cross) photographed against a dark pebbled surface. Isobel Crombie identifies this surface as asphalt, but in the absence of any other objects by which to determine scale, it also looks quite a bit like gravel.14 These two materials impart very different meanings on the photograph. A crucified Christ laying on the pavement implies abjection (dropped in the street like litter and forgotten), or the ignoble death of road kill (their gruesomely mutilated bodies spread out on display by the side of the road); whereas if the surface is gravel, it would seem as though Christ is sunbathing on a pebbly beach, his mostly nude body stretched out, illuminated by the warm glow of sunlight. However, either way, the figure of Christ is lying on the ground, which seems to indicate a sort of casual rejection and throwing away. Crombie identifies the physical suffering of

128

13 Wolf, 23-24. 14 Isobel Crombie, “Robert Mapplethorpe,” Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination, Ed. Rosemary Crumlin (Victoria: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998), p. 156

this Christ with Mapplethorpe’s own physical deterioration and impending death from AIDS. “At a time when Mapplethorpe’s own sense of mortality was ever present,” writes Crombie, “Christ is a moving reminder of the frailty of the body—and the power of the spirit.”15 However, the fact that Christ is lying on the ground, as if carelessly dropped or cast aside, may also indicate the rejection and stigmatization experienced by many people suffering from AIDS. The contrast between Mapplethorpe’s two Christ figures is striking. One shows a Christ dominating the world, while the other shows a Christ being dominated by the world. Something worth noting about Mapplethorpe’s images of Christ is that he did not use human models for the figure of Christ, but rather found objects. It has also been quite common for photographers to not only use a human model to play the role of Christ, but even to play that role themselves. Though Mapplethorpe did not photograph himself as Christ (apart from some very subtle symbolic posing), he did very clearly photograph himself as Satan on more than one occasion, with a tail-like bull whip coming out of his anus in one self-portrait, and with goat-like horns in another. According to Heartney, these images specifically reference Lucifer (“who was the most beautiful Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait and beloved of all the angels until his prideful chal- wtih Horns, 1985 lenge to God’s authority caused him to be cast from heaven”) with whom Mapplethorpe identified: “Like Lucifer, Mapplethorpe saw himself as the outcast, dedicated to recreating in inverted detail the kingdom from which he had been exiled.”16 In comparison to these self-portraits, Mapplethorpe’s images of Christ seem much less personal. Duane Michals Like Andy Warhol, Duane Michals was raised in an Eastern European Catholic household near Pittsburgh. However, unlike Warhol, Michals grew up to resent and reject his religious upbringing: “The Catholic Church programmed me to be a perfect Catholic, totally. That’s why I had to unlearn the first twenty years of my life…I questioned my way out of the Catholic Church, simply asked questions, and found their answers ridiculous.”17 For Michals, Catholicism was incompatible with his belief in questioning authority: 15 Crombie, 156. 16 Heartney, 86. 17 Karl Peter Gottschalk, “Duane Michals: Asking Questions Without Answers,” (1994), http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~karlpeter/zeugma/inters/michals.htm.

129

You can’t go through life bowing your head and accepting what someone in supposed authority tells you. That’s being an automaton. The great marvel of being alive is that one does have the right to ask questions and be audacious in the questions. But, authority does not like anybody to ask questions.18 Michals’ challenging of authority, and frustration with those content to accept the status quo, comes across in his more political works, including the photo-sequence Christ In New York (1981), as well as Salvation (1984), C.L.E.A.N. (1981), and Pat Buchanan (1992). Michals’ political statements tend to be directed toward those who attempt to undermine the rights and individuality of others. The main target of Michals’ political diatribes has been the religious right, especially the Moral Majority. Michals’ anger at the repressive efforts of the religious right is expressed quite clearly in Salvation, a photograph which shows a priest holding a crucifix like a gun to a man’s head. Here, salvation, as Marco Livingstone writes, “is presented as such by bigots not as a subtle theological matter of choice but as a threat, a gun pointed at our heads to warn of the untimely end we are likely to meet if we do not conform.”19 This is expressed even more explicitly in the photograph’s accompanying handwritten text, characteristic of Michals’ work, in which he states, “No American citizen has the right to impose his private morality on any other American citizen, which is exactly the political agenda of some organized religions today.”20 The text cites the efforts of religious groups to undermine women’s reproductive rights and LGBT anti-discrimination legislation as examples of their imposition of so-called morality. The incongruity of the repressive agenda of the religious right and Christ’s message of love and compassion is addressed in Christ in New York. This photo-sequence depicts a bleak Second Coming. The six black-and-white photographs with handwritten captions show a Christ who looks very ordinary and very depressed, in a series of disturbing contemporary situations. He is “sold” by a televangelist; he cries witnessing a young woman die from an illegal abortion; he is beaten by thugs for defending a gay man; he eats dog food with an impoverished old Ukrainian woman in her apartment; he sees a woman being sexually assaulted; finally, he is shot and killed by a mugger. Despite the faint glow surrounding Christ’s head, everyone else in these scenes appears oblivious to his identity. As the last line of the final caption reads, “The second coming had occurred and no one noticed.” Michals has remarked that these scenes of hypocrisy, callousness, and violence were driven by anger. “Anger is a legitimate emotion,” states Michals. “When I did Christ in New York, that was anger…It deals with religious hypocrisy, and abortion, and homosexuality, all the buzzwords in American culture. Everything should be subject to photog-

130

18 Gottschalk, 5. 19 Marco Livingstone, The Essential Duane Michals (Boston, New York, Toronto, and London: Bulfinch Press, 1997), 140. 20 Duane Michals, Salvation, 1984.

raphy, not just the polite things like moonrise and sunsets and tits and ass.”21 However, despite the anger that created these powerful images, Michals has expressed feelings of powerlessness in regard to politics. Michals has limited his political messages to a small audience through books and exhibitions, explaining, I feel the political aspirations are impotent. They can never be seen. If they are, it will only be by a limited audience. If one is to act politically, one simply puts down the camera and goes out and does something…Power is not with the artist. Artists are little pilot fish swimming around a great shark. We have to understand the nature of power.22 This feeling of impotence seems to be reflected in Christ’s helplessness in the face of injustice in Christ in New York. However, despite whatever feelings of political impotence Michals may have felt, Christ in New York certainly had an impact. In a 1985 review of an exhibition of Michals’ work, critic John Sturman praises Christ in New York as “a forceful plea for compassion and tolerance” and “a timely political statement” that is “unusually resonant and provocative.” He also comments on the way in which the work’s “emotional intensity” overpowered the rest of the show.23 Though Sturman attributes the work’s power to its “combination of understated photos and equally spare descriptive text,” there is an additional poignancy in the fact that Michals is using Christ against the religious right. There is a bitter humor in the work’s question of what would happen if Christ were to witness the bigotry espoused in his name. It would seem that although Michals rejected the Church, he differentiated this institution from the figure of Christ himself and his message of love and compassion that the religious right had seemingly forgotten. While Michals may have been at odds with the church as a result of his beliefs and identity, it would seem that he had no particular beef with Christ. David Wojnarowicz Duane Michals was certainly angry at the Catholic Church, but David Wojnarowicz was arguably even angrier. While Michals found his Catholic upbringing to be repressive and intellectually unsatisfactory, Wojnarowicz was physically abused in a “sadistic Catholic school where he was beaten and forced to kneel on a bag of marbles,” and was told by the Mother Superior that he was “in the devil’s wings and would go to hell.”24 With these traumatic early experiences, Wojnarowicz’s relationship with Catholicism only grew 21 Gottsschalk, 5-6. 22 David Seidner and Duane Michals, “Duane Michals,” BOMB, 20 (Summer, 1987), 27. 23 John Sturman, “New York Reviews: Duane Michals, Sidney Janis,” ARTnews 84 (April, 1985), 138. 24 Lucy Lippard, “Out of the Safety Zone,” Art in America, 78, no. 12 (December 1990), 6 [in printout from website; how do I cite the page number here?]; Lucy Lippard, “Passenger on the Shadows,” in David Wojnarowicz: Brush Fires in the Social Landscape (New York: Aperture, 1994), 18.

131

more hostile with the church’s condemnation of homosexuality. Wojnarowicz also blamed the Catholic Church, in part, for the AIDS epidemic, due its refusal to promote safe-sex practices. “The Vatican and the catholic church ignore scientific research that shows that if latex condoms are used properly they can prevent the transmission of HIV and other diseases,” wrote Wojnarowicz. They make prehistoric statements such as: ‘Morality is the only prevention for AIDS…’ and ‘Anyone who ignores the teachings of the catholic church and contracts AIDS have only themselves to blame’…Denying all people information that could protect them in an epidemic is nothing more than wholesale murder regardless of the ‘moral’ content of those actions.25 Having been diagnosed himself, AIDS was a major concern for Wojnarowicz, who was one of the most prominent artists whose work responded to the epidemic. The church’s stance on AIDS and safe sex was an unforgivable offense for Wojnarowicz. However, despite his loathing of the church, Wojnarowicz had a deep interest in spirituality and mythology, and explored the theme of western culture’s loss of spirituality in much of his work, both written and visual. He argued that Spirituality has become a dirty word in this society because of the destructive nature of organized religion and the control exerted by its human structure. Myths get played out only in pop culture, in the forms of toys and cartoons, animals, monsters, and fantastic creation.26 Wojnarowicz’s exploration of these themes often involved religious imagery, even sometimes of the Catholic variety. Despite his hatred of the church, the image of Christ appeared in a number of Wojnarowicz’s works, and some have suggested that he identified with the suffering Christ.27 Untitled (Genet) (1979) shows a gothic church populated by images of soldiers, “angels appropriated from fifteenth-century Flemish art,” a haloed portrait of Jean Genet, and “Christ as the suffering Man of Sorrows transformed into a drug addict complete with syringe and makeshift tourniquet.”28 Many viewers, however, focused exclusively on the image of Christ as a drug addict, deeming it blasphemous. In the ensuing controversy, Wojnarowicz explained his intent:

132

25 David Wojnarowicz, “Post Cards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” originally published in Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (NYC: Artists Space, 1989), reprinted in David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame, ed. Barry Blinderman (Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University, 1990), 111. 26 Lippard, 1990, 7. 27 Heartney, 96. 28 Heartney, 96; Jerry D. Meyer, “Profane and Sacred: Religious Imagery and Prophetic Expression in Postmodern Art,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 65, no. 1 (Spring, 1997), 40.

…I thought about my upbringing. I thought about what I had been taught about Jesus Christ when I was young, and how he took on the suffering of all the people in the world and I wanted to create a modern image of that, if he were alive physically before me in the streets of the lower East side, I wanted to make a symbol that would show that he would take on the suffering of the vast amounts of addiction that I saw on the street.29 This explanation was echoed by Barry Blinderman, curator of the exhibition in which the piece was shown, in his response to the barrage of criticism of this depiction of Christ: If Christ came nearly two thousand years ago to cleanse us of our sins and share our pain through his sacrifice, depicting him today with a needle in his arm is merely updating the story. These days he’d have to deal with one of our most widespread sins—addiction. And not just addiction to drugs, but addiction to power, greed, commodities, control—not to mention addiction to outdated mystical rulings that are part of the problem, not the solution. Jesus was a reformer who, like artists fond of sing metaphors, conveyed his philosophies in the form of parables. A literal interpretation of the Bible or an artwork will not afford much meaning.30 The suffering Christ also appears in Wojnarowicz’s 1988 Spirituality (for Paul Thek), a photographic composite with “a close-up of a glory crucifix with ants crawling on Christ’s face balanced by six smaller squares of classic Wojnarowiczian images (clock, men dancing, money, kid with mask, the Futurists’ machine-as-god and a photograph of an early victim of AIDS with cigarette smoke pouring from his mouth like the spirit leaving the body.)”31 According to Jerry D. Meyer, the smaller images suggest Wojnarowicz’s interpretation of a cycle of life: the young child whose mask may hide from parents the awareness of incipient desires labeled perverse by society; money, a signifier of capitalist greed; a machine, portent of the manner by which technology has come to dominate modern life; men dancing with each other, and acknowledgement of sexual preference; a clock, symbol of the passage of time; and the reclining figure of a man, perhaps dying of AIDS, whose exhaled cigarette smoke suggests a metaphor for transcendental release. 32 29 30 31 32

Lippard 1994 qtd. in Heartney, 96. Barry Blinderman, “Speakeasy,” New Art Examiner 18, no. 3 (November 1990), 15. Lippard, 1990, 5. Meyer, 42.

133

Additionally, Myer notes that the small images of human figures form a triangle over the crucified Christ. The triangle has a dual meaning here, as both the traditional iconographic representation of the Holy Trinity, and as a major symbol in the LGBT communities of the 1980s, “equating silence with death, in memoria of those homosexual individuals imprinted with triangles and disfranchised by the Nazis during the Third Reich.”33 Wojnarowicz has stated that he “used the ants as a metaphor for society because the social structure of the ant world is parallel to ours. They have queens, they create wars, they keep pets, they keep slaves; there’s this whole social structure that isn’t that far different from our own.”34 Wojnarowicz also points out that the ants in the photograph are fire ants— “very venomous—they can inflict damage or even kill other animals if they give them enough bites.”35 What makes Wojnarowicz’s images of Christ interesting, in light of hatred of Catholicism and organized religion in general, is the extent to which he seems to identify with Christ in these works. Wojnarowicz produced his image of the drug-addicted Christ during in period when he was “hanging out in abandoned warehouses along the Hudson River, exploring the world of underground sex and drugs and experimenting with film.”36 Even if Wojnarowicz was not personally addicted to drugs, addiction was still a significant part of his personal experience, in so far as it was a part of the scene into which Wojnarowicz became immersed. In Spirituality (for Paul Thek) Christ’s suffering is linked with AIDS and with the viciousness and inhumanity of society, both of which were directly experienced by Wojnarowicz. The suffering Christ does seem to be a logical symbol to be associated with the AIDS crisis. There is the obvious connection of physical suffering and mortality, but the stigmatization of AIDS and those who had contracted it could also be seen in terms of the scorn and humiliation endured by Christ. Each of these artists had some sort of conflict with Catholicism as a result of the Church’s condemnation of their sexual orientation. For Michals and Wojnarowicz, this conflict manifested as externalized, political anger; for Mapplethorpe, this conflict was personal and internalized. However, this conflict did stop any of them from depicting Christ in their own particular reverent way.

134

33 Meyer, 42. 34 Barry Blinderman, “The Compression of Time: An Interview with David Wojnarowicz,” in David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame (Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University, 1990), 58. 35 Blinderman, “Compression of Time,” 58. 36 Meyer, 40.

135

Robert Mapplethorpe, Jesus, 1971 136

Robert Mapplethorpe, Christ, 1988 137

Duane Michals, Christ in New York, 1981 138

Duane Michals, Christ in New York, 1981 139

Duane Michals, Christ in New York, 1981 140

Duane Michals, Christ in New York, 1981 141

Duane Michals, Christ in New York, 1981 142

Duane Michals, Christ in New York, 1981 143

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Genet), 1979 144

David Wojnarowicz, Spirituality (for Paul Thek), 1988 145

Conclusion The image of Christ has become more than just a religious symbol. In its varied uses in twentieth and twenty-first century art, this image has acquired a multitude of new meanings and functions, through reinterpretation and appropriation. The image of Christ has been used to challenge our expectations, address social and political issues, draw support for political causes, express suffering and injustice, and explore personal feelings about religion and faith. These are only a few of the myriad uses and meanings of this image, but they provide a glimpse of the range and variation. Even today, the image of Christ continues to be a powerful symbol and a subject of controversy. In November 2011, history seemed to repeat itself when the late David Wojnarowicz was at the center of another Christ-related controversy. Wojnarowicz’s video work, A Fire in My Belly (1986-87) was shown at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC in an exhibition titled Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. Conservative Christians fixated on a short scene in the video of ants crawling over a crucifix (much like the image in Spirituality: For Paul Thek). The work received the now familiar accusations of being anti-Christian, and was used by Catholic League president Bill Donahue as an example of why the Smithsonian Institution should not receive federal funding. It was effectively a rehashing of the same controversies regarding representations of Christ that had been going on since the 1980s. One would think that some progress would have been made since then. However, despite being defended by numerous museums and arts organizations, Wojnarowicz’s video was ultimately pulled from the exhibition.1 Clearly, unconventional representations of Christ in art continue to have impact, and there remains a need for deeper engagement with such works. There are numerous topics and works that are beyond the scope of this project that still warrant further exploration. Though the issue of race in representations of Christ is discussed in relation to Renee Cox’s work, it is a much larger subject, and a thorough investigation would require its own large-scale research project. The same could be said of representations of Christ in film. Though Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is touched on, there is much more to be said about that film and its reception.2 There are many other

146

1 See: Robin Cembalest, “Between a Cross and a Hard Place,” ARTnews 110, no. 2 (February 2011): 98-101. 2 The Passion of the Christ was the subject of a previous research paper of mine, in which I exam-

films whose representations of Christ are worthy of discussion, such as Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Norman Jewison’s 1973 film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar, and numerous Biblical epics. A comparative study—or exhibition—of depictions of Christ by Catholic and Protestant artists may also be fruitful. The possibilities for further research are extensive. The subject of modern and contemporary images of Christ encompasses so much more than the image itself. Through new uses and interpretations, the image of Christ has broken through the boundaries of Christianity, and transcended its original symbolism.

ined the film in the context of post-9/11 culture and the War on Terror, and its reception in both the United States and the Middle East.

147

Catalogue List Samuel Bak

Thomas Benton

Study B, 1995 Oil on canvas 65.1 x 53.7 cm http://www.imj.org.il/artcenter/pics1. asp?artist=271883&list= Pg. 97

George Bolster

Israeli, b. Lithuania, 1933 Elegy III, 1997 Oil on canvas 47.5 x 51.5 in http://www.arted4life.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Elegy-III-samuel-bak.jpg Pg. 96

Study C, 1995 Oil on canvas 22 5/8 x 21 1/8 in http://www.imj.org.il/artcenter/pics1. asp?artist=271883&list= Pg. 99 Study I, 1995 Oil on linen 45.7 x 55.2 cm http://www.imj.org.il/artcenter/pics1. asp?artist=271883&list= Pg. 98 148

American, 1889-1975 Again (from â&#x20AC;&#x153;Year of Perilâ&#x20AC;? series), 1941 Oil and tempera on canvas mounted on panel 47 x 56 in http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2011/12/07/photo-gallery-thomas-hartbentons-year-peril-series/ Pg. 58

Irish, b. 1972, works in New York Jesus, 2008 Ink, customized jewelry and paint 21 x 26 cm http://www.georgebolster.net/Drawings.htm Pg. 11

Nancy Burson

American, b. 1948 Guys Who Look Like Jesus, 2001 Eight digital photographs outputted as Iris prints on vellum Each 16 x 13 in http://www.clampart.com/artists/burson/ bursonj.htm Pp. 30-37

Marc Chagall

http://www.reneecox.net/series02/series02_11.html Pg. 42

Russian-French, b. Belarus, 1887 - 1985 Resistance, 1937-48 Oil on canvas Yo Mama’s Last Supper, 1996 168 x 103 cm http://library.artstor.org/library/secure/View Five Ilfochrome prints 30 x 150 in Images?id=8CJfdzIoMloyLyw4ejl8Qn8t http://ericreber.files.wordpress. Pg. 94 com/2009/06/09d-284-004.jpg Pg. 40 Resurrection, 1937-52 Oil on canvas 168 x 108 cm http://www.spartacusartgallery. com/2011/09/marc-chagall-revolution-resurrection.html Pg. 95

The Martyr, 1940 Oil on canvas 164.5 x 114 cm http://www.angel-art-house.com/oil_paintings_artists/c/Chagall_Marc/The_Martyr_1940.htm Pg. 93

Salvador Dalí

Spanish, 1904-1989 Christ of St. John of the Cross, 1951 Oil on canvas 204.8 x 115.9 cm http://sherryx.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/ dali-christ-of-st-john-of-the-cross1.jpg Pg. 45 Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), 1954 Oil on canvas 76 3/8 x 48 7/8 in http://www.scottzagar.com/arthistory/images_gallery/Salvador%20Dali%20-%20 Crucifixion%20Corpus%20Hypercubus%20 -%201954.jpg Pg. 15

White Crucifixion, 1938 Oil on canvas 154.3 x 139.7 cm http://library.artstor.org/library/secure/View Images?id=8D1Efjk2Nj8yJiw8cy0URXorX3 Otto Dix 0ueV97 German, 1891-1969 Pg. 92 War Triptych, 1932 Tempera on wood Renée Cox Central panel 204 x 204 cm, side panels 204 Jamaican-American, b. Jamaica, 1960 x 102 cm each It Shall Be Named, 1994 http://artist-daily.blogspot.com/2011/01/otCollage

149

to-dix-december-2-1891-july-25-1969.html German, 1893-1959 Pg. 77 Christ with a Gas Mask, 1928 Crayon 44 x 55 cm Jacob Epstein http://library.artstor.org/library/secure/View British, b. America, 1880 - 1959 Images?id=8CJGczI9NzldLS1WEDhzTnkrX Christ, 1917-1919 3ogdF99cyw%3D Bronze Pg. 59 218.5 x 56 cm http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/subjects/Politics%20and%20philoso- John Heartfield phy/502947/artistName/Sir%20Jacob%20 German, 1891-1968 Epstein/recordId/276 The Cross Was Not Heavy Enough, 1933 Pg. 75 Collage http://www.snpcultura.org/vol_museu_judaico_exposicao_Crucificado.html Evergon (Al Lunt) Pg. 57 Canadian, b. 1946 Deposition from the Cross, 1985 Polaroid prints Barbara Kruger 244.1 x 230 cm American, b. 1945 http://notredamephoto.blogspot. Untitled (Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s our pleasure to disgust you), com/2010/04/passion-of-christ-in-photogra- 1990 phy.html Photographic screenprint on vinyl Pg. 12 90 x 77 in http://www.denverpost.com/portlet/article/ html/imageDisplay.jsp?contentItemRelations Ludwig Gies hipId=2069967 German, 1887 - 1966 Pg. 60 Kruzifixus (Crucified Christ), 1921 Wood Dimensions unknown (destroyed) David Mach http://library.artstor.org/library/secure/View Scottish, b. 1956 Images?id=8CJGczI9NzldLS1WEDhzTnkrX Die Harder, 2011 3kue1p5eCM%3D Coathanger sculpture Pg. 76 Approx. 3 x 2.5 m http://www.davidmach.com/coathangers/ Pg. 10

George Grosz 150

Robert Mapplethorpe

The Doubting of Thomas, 2000 Cibachrome print American, 1946-1989 30 x 40 in Christ, 1988 http://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/ Gelatin silver print Doubting-Thomas--from-Pictures-of51 x 61 cm Image courtesy of the Robert Mapplethorpe Chocol/504CEE0F7F9F66A7 Pg. 13 Foundation Pg. 137

Jesus, 1971 Spray paint on magazine page 15 7/8 x 11 3/4 in Image courtesy of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Pg. 136

Duane Michals

Edwina Sandys

British, b. 1938, works in New York Christa, 1974 Bronze 4 x 5 ft http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/ feminist_art_base/gallery/EdwinaSandys. php?i=2206 Pg. 39

American, b. 1932 Christ in New York, 1981 Andres Serrano Six gelatin silver prints with hand applied American, b. 1950 text Black Jesus, 1990 Each 8 x 10 in Cibachrome, silicone, plexiglas, wood frame http://mobius.wellesley.edu/info.php?page=0 60 x 40 in &v=1&s=Michals%2C+Duane&type=brows http://library.artstor.org/library/secure/View e&t=objects&f=maker&d= Images?id=8CJGczI9NzldLS1WEDhzTnkrX Pp. 138-143 3oofll6eyU%3D Pg. 119 Salvation, 1984 Silver gelatin print with hand applied text Black Supper, 1990 20 x 16 in Five cibachrome prints, silicone, plexiglas, http://www.faheykleingallery.com/photogra- wood frame phers/michals/personal/michals_pp_07.htm Each 45 x 32 3/4 in Pg. 61 http://www.artnet.com/artwork/426144361/425931784/andres-serrano-black-supper.html Vik Muniz Pg. 117 Brazilian, b. 1961, works in New York 151

Skeleton/Swastika, Connecticut, c. 1936 Gelatin silver print Piss Christ, 1987 Cibachrome, silicone, plexiglas, wood frame 9.25 x 7.5 in http://berinson.de/exhibitions/strand/ 60 x 40 in http://library.artstor.org/library/secure/View Pg. 56 Images?id=8D5LZi8%2BLCIjNDxUej54RXo vUnUpfg%3D%3D Graham Sutherland Pg. 116 British, 1903 - 1980 Christ in Glory in the Tetromorph (First CarThe Interpretation of Dreams (The Other toon), 1953 Christ), 2001 Oil on gouache on board Cibachrome print, wood frame 201.9 x 110.5 cm 29 1/2 x 24 3/4 in http://inscrutablebeing.blogspot. http://dirty-mag.com/v2/?p=234 com/2011/09/christ-in-glory-in-tetramorphPg. 43 graham.html Pg. 14 White Christ, 1989 Cibachrome print Crucifixion, 1946 60 x 40 in Oil on board http://library.artstor.org/library/secure/View Support: 908 x 1016 mm, frame: 1168 x 1472 Images?id=8D5LZi8%2BLCIjNDxUej54RXo x 83 mm vUnYkdg%3D%3D http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sutherPg. 118 land-crucifixion-n05774 Pg. 45

Stanley Spencer

British, 1891-1959 Sam Taylor-Wood Christ Carrying the Cross, 1920 English, b. 1967 Oil on canvas Wrecked, 1996 153 x 143 cm Chromogenic print http://library.artstor.org/library/secure/View 60 x 156 in Images?id=8CJGczI9NzldLS1WEDhzTnkrX http://arttattler.com/commentaryrcrumb. 3kjcF58fiI%3D html Pg. 43 Pg. 41

Paul Strand

American, 1890 - 1976 152

Mark Wallinger British, b. 1959

Ecce Homo, 1999 White marbleized resin, gold leaf, barbed wire Life size http://www.terminartors.com/artworkprofile/Wallinger_Mark-Ecce_Homo Pg. 38

Andy Warhol

American, 1928-1987 Be Somebody with a Body (With Christ of Last Supper), 1986 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas 23 x 23 in http://www.phillipsdepury.com/xigen/ lotimg.aspx?salenum=NY010011&lotn um=15&height=600 Pg. 123

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) and JeanMichel Basquiat (American, 1960-1988)

Ten Punching Bags (With Christ from Last Supper), 1985-86 Acrylic and oil stick on punching bags 42 x 14 x 14 in http://www.warhol.org/collection/aboutandy/biography/lastsupper/1998-1-791a-j/ Pg. 122

David Wojnarowicz

American, 1954 - 1992 Spirituality (for Paul Thek), 1988 Gelatin silver prints on museum board 41 x 32 1/2 in http://library.artstor.org/library/secure/ViewImag es?id=8CJGczI9NzldLS1WEDhzTnkrX3gvflh8eS A%3D Pg. 145

Last Supper (Dove), 1986 Untitled (Genet), 1979 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Photocopy collage 119 x 263 in http://library.artstor.org/library/secure/ 8.5 x 11 in ViewImages?id=8D1Cdjk4RDUwLi07e http://library.artstor.org/library/secure/ViewImag es?id=8CJGczI9NzldLS1WEDhzTnkrX3ooeVp7e DR6SHU%3D ic%3D Pg. 121 Pg. 144 Last Supper (The Big C), ca. 1985 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas 116 x 390 in http://cl-bloggers.blogspot. com/2010/09/last-supper-and-motorcycles.html Pg. 120 153

Relevant Exhibitions David Mach-Precious Light, City Arts Centre, Edinburgh, UK, July - October 2011 These Days: Elegies for Modern Times, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA, April 4, 2009 - February 28, 2010 Revelation: Representations of Christ in Photography, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, May 22 – September 6, 2003 Like a Prayer: A Jewish and Christian Presence in Contemporary Art, Tryon Center for Visual Art, Charlotte, NC, January 31 – June 1 2001 Seeing Salvation, The National Gallery, London, February 26 – May 7 2000 Faith: The Impact of Judeo-Christian Religion on Art at the Milennium, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, January 23 – May 29, 2000 Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, April 24 – July 26 1998

154

Bibliography “Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross.” The Scottish Art Review 6.4 (1958): 14-17. “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons.” In The Vatican and Homosexuality, edited by Jeannine Gramick and Pat Furey, 1-10. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1988. Amishai-Maisels, Ziva. “The Jewish Jesus”. Journal of Jewish Art 9 (1982): 84-104. Amishai-Maisels, Ziva. Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1993. Arbel, Daphna. “’Ben-Yosef Is a Jewish Son.’” In Jesus in Twentieth Century Literature, Art, and Movies, edited by Paul C. Burns, 139-154. New York: Continuum, 2007. Attwood, Philip. “Gies, Ludwig.” In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T032153 (accessed April 18, 2012). Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane and Annette Becker. 14-18: Understanding the Great War. Translated by Catherine Temerson. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002. Bak, Samuel. Painted in Words. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Barron, Stephanie. “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1991. Bergen, Doris L. “Nazism and Christianity: Partners and Rivals? A Response to Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich. Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945.” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 1 (Jan 2007): 25-33. Blinderman, Barry. “Speakeasy.” New Art Examiner 18, no. 3 (November 1990): 15-16. Blinderman, Barry. “The Compression of Time: An Interview with David Wojnarowicz.” In David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame, edited by Barry Blinderman, 49-63. Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University, 1990. Bois, Yve Alain, Guy Brett, Margaret Iversen, and Julian Stallabrass. “An Interview with Mark Wallinger.” October 123 (2008): 185-204. Bonney, Richard. Confronting the Nazi war on Christianity: the Kulturkampf newsletters, 1936-1939. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2009. Brandon, Laura. Art and War. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006. Burrows, David. “Beyond Belief: Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo.” In Mark Wallinger: Credo. London: Tate Gallery Publishing Limited, 2000. Burson, Nancy. Seeing and Believing: The Art of Nancy Burson. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms,

155

2002. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Carr-Gomm, Sarah. The Hutchinson Dictionary of Symbols in Art. Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 2005. Caton, Steven C. “Coetzee, Agamben, and the Passion of Abu Ghraib.” American Anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 114-123. Chavannes-Mazel, Claudine A. “Popular Belief and the Image of the Beardless Christ.” Visual Resources 19.1 (2003): 27-42. Crombie, Isobel. “Robert Mapplethorpe.” Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination, edited by Rosemary Crumlin, 156. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998. Dali, Salvador. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1976. Danto, Arthur C. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Danto, Arthur C. “In the Bosom of Jesus: Yo Mama’s Last Supper.” The Nation 272.21 (2001): 30-34. Danto, Arthur C. Andy Warhol. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009. Danto, Arthur C. Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Dillenberger, Jane Dagget. The Religious Art of Andy Warhol. New York: Continuum, 1998. Epstein, Jacob. Let There Be Sculpture. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940. Evans, David and Sylvia Gohl. Photomontage: a political weapon. London: Gordon Fraser Gallery Ltd, 1986. Fewell, Danna Nolan and Gary A. Phillips. “Bak’s Impossible Memorials: Giving Face to the Children.” In Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak, edited by Danna Nolan Fewell, Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood, 93-110. Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2008. Fewell, Danna Nolan and Gary A. Phillips. “Genesis, Genocide, and the Art of Samuel Bak: ‘Unseamly’ Reading After the Holocaust.” In Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak, edited by Danna Nolan Fewell, Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood, 75-87. Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2008. Finaldi, Gabriele. The Image of Christ. London: National Gallery Company Limited, 2000. Fishbane, Michael. “Myth, Midrash, and Mysticism: The Painting of Samuel Bak.” In Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak, edited by Danna Nolan Fewell, Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood, 15-21. Boston: 156

Pucker Gallery, 2008. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Gilman, Sander L. “R. B. Kitaj’s ‘Good Bad’ Diasporism.” In Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, edited by Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd, 223-237. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Godfrey, Tony. “Recent Public Sculpture. Salisbury, London, West Bretton.” The Burlington Magazine 141.1161 (1999): 764-765. Goggin, Mary-Margaret. “’Decent’ vs. ‘Degenerate’ Art: The National Socialist Case.” Art Journal 50, no. 4, Censorship II (Winter ,1991): pp. 84-92. Goodstein, Laurie. “Religion’s Changing Face; More Churches Depicting Christ as Black.” The Washington Post 28 March 1994, Final Edition. A1. Gottschalk, Karl Peter. “Duane Michals: Asking Questions Without Answers.” 1994. http:// easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~karlpeter/zeugma/inters/michals.htm. Groys, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008. Guenther, Peter. “Three Days in Munich, July 1937.” In “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, edited by Stephanie Barron, 33-43. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991. Hall, James. “Short of Statue.” Artforum International 38.3 (1999): 47. Harrington, Peter. “Religious and spiritual themes in British academic art during the Great War.” First World War Studies 2, no. 2 (October 2011): 145-165. Harshav, Benjamin. Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World. New York: Rizzoli, 2006. Heartney, Eleanor. Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2004. Heathorn, Stephen. “The Mnemonic Turn in the Cultural Historiography of Britain’s Great War.” The Historical Journal 48, no. 4 (Dec., 2005): 1103-1124. Heschel, Susannah. The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008. Hobbs,Robert. “Andres Serrano: The Body Politic.” In Andres Serrano: Works 1983-1993, 17-43. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1994. Hofmann, Werner. “Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ in Its Historical Context.” Artibus et Historae 4, no. 7 (1983): 141-169. Levi, Neil. “’Judge for Yourselves!’ – The ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition as Political Spectacle.” October 85 (Summer, 1998): 41-64. Lippard, Lucy. “Out of the Safety Zone.” Art in America, 78, no. 12 (December 1990). http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/out-of-the-safety-zone/. 157

Lippard, Lucy. “Passenger on the Shadows.” In David Wojnarowicz: Brush Fires in the Social Landscape 6-25. New York: Aperture, 1994. Little, William G. “Jesus’s Extreme Makeover.” Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular culture, and The Passion of the Christ. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Livingstone, Marco. The Essential Duane Michals. Boston, New York, Toronto, and London: Bulfinch Press, 1997. Lüttichau, Mario-Andreas von. “Entarte Kunst, Munich 1937: A Reconstruction.” In “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, edited by Stephanie Barron, 45-81. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991. MacGregor, Neil and Erika Langmuir. Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Marrow, James H. “Inventing the Passion in the Late Middle Ages.” In The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama, edited by Marcia Kupfer. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Marshall, Richard. Robert Mapplethorpe. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, in association with New York Graphic Society Books and Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1988. Meyer, Jerry D. “Profane and Sacred: Religious Imagery and Prophetic Expression in Postmodern Art.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 19-46. Morgan, David. “Images of the Passion and the History of Protestant Visual Piety in America.” In The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama, edited by Marcia Kupfer. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Morgan, David. Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Morrisroe, Patricia. Mapplethorpe: A Biography. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. Petropoulos, Jonathan. Art as Politics in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Plate, S. Brent. Religion, Art, and Visual Culture: A Cross-Cultural Reader. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Raskin, Richard. A Child At Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2004. Rose, June. Daemons and Angels: A Life of Jacob Epstein. London: Constable, 2002. Roskies, David G. Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Saunders, Nicholas J. “Crucifix, Calvary, and Cross: Materiality and Spirituality in Great 158

War Landscapes.” World Archaeology 35, no. 1 (Jun., 2003): 7-21. Seidner, David and Duane Michals. “Duane Michals.” BOMB, 20 (Summer, 1987): 24-29. Sherwood, Yvonne. “Iconoclash and Akedah: Holocaust and Sacrifice in the Art of Samuel Bak.” In Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak, edited by Danna Nolan Fewell, Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood, 125142. Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2008. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Steinberg, Leo. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Steiner, Wendy. “Introduction: Below Skin-deep,” in Andres Serrano: Works 1983-1993, 1116. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1994. Steyn, Juliet. “Jacob Epstein: ‘the Artist who desires to épater.‘“ Third Text 19, no. 6 (November 2005): 661-676. Sturman, John. “New York Reviews: Duane Michals, Sidney Janis.” ARTnews 84 (April, 1985): 137-138. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, Augmented Third Edition, College Edition. Edited by Michael D. Coogan. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Winter, Jay. Sites of memory, sites of mourning: The Great War in European cultural history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Wojnarowicz, David. “Post Cards from America: X-Rays from Hell.” In David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame, edited by Barry Blinderman, 105-111. Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University, 1990. Wolf, Sylvia. Polaroids: Mapplethorpe. New York: Prestel, 2007. Zemel, Carol. “Emblems of Atrocity: Holocaust Liberation Photographs.” In Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, edited by Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz, 200-219. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.

159