10. Blasphemy and the art of the political and devotional

The beginning of the twenty-first century has brought into focus issues of right-wing religious fundamentalism (be it Islamic or Christian) even more sharply. The dangers and dilemmas of essentialist religious paradigms have joined a list of vitally important global issues to be reckoned with, arguably as important as global poverty and global warming. It is in this light that bearing-witness to blasphemy becomes part of a debate about tolerance within a pluralistic society.

As Kyla McFarlane described in the catalogue for the exhibition Votive: Sacred and ecstatic bodies, ^[2] in the last decade, Australia and New Zealand bore witness to artwork seemingly crossing the boundaries that constitute blasphemy:

Serrano’s work is a photographic enlargement of a small commercially produced crucifix immersed in Serrano’s own urine. Without the title of the work to indicate the substance of piss used to create the image, the viewer might revel in the sublimely romantic connotations of a misty atmospheric sky at sunset striking at the heart of the crucifixion story with its hope of resurrection after death. But Serrano’s titling ensures that the viewer has to confront the dilemma that this is a vat of urine.

A severing of the unity of state and church has reinforced the freedoms of the individual to roam across boundaries making a question of ownership of religious symbols and their employment difficult to answer. The Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Dr. George Pell, who considered Piss Christ blasphemous, applied unsuccessfully for a Supreme Court injunction to prevent the National Gallery of Victoria from exhibiting the work. Justice Harper cast doubt on the need for the common law of blasphemous libel in Victoria, saying that Australia ‘need not bother with [it]’ because contemporary Australia is a pluralist, tolerant society.^[5] Justice Harper distinguished the Victorian position from the English law stating that blasphemous libel is ‘an anachronism of English history from a time when the State was intrinsically linked with the Church, through the Ecclesiastical courts, and the unity of State and Church was not transported to the Australian Colony. This position is supported by the fact that Victoria does not recognise an established Church under section 116 of the Australian Constitution’.^[6] Now that the state and the church are no longer inseparable, the question of authority and how religious iconography is employed appears to shift to wider concerns of freedom and artistic expression as constrained by the laws of defamation and obscenity. A calculation of the level of offence experienced by the viewer moved to centre-stage.

McFarlane points to a similar reaction of public outrage with respect to Tania Kovat’s Virgin in a Condom:

Virgin in a Condom is a strikingly polemical work. On the one hand, the seven and a half centimetres tall mass-produced statuette is a religious object made for the purpose of evoking the Virgin Mary’s divine intercession and has been covered with an object used, more or less exclusively, for covering erect penises or a variety of sex toys, such as ‘butt-plugs’. Clearly, many viewers understood the work as presenting an analogy to the Virgin Mary as a dildo. As I will argue, a reappraisal of these binary interpretations might suggest that, on the other hand, the statuette is religiously shrouded or concealed, visually resembling a work such as Piero della Francesca’s Madonna della Misericordia (circa 1445) , in which the Madonna protects the people with her mantle. This condom as shroud evokes notions of the polarised role models for women within Catholicism: that women are unfairly torn between virgin and whore in the archetypal models of Mary, the Mother of God, and Mary Magdalene, the redeemed whore. As well as this, the sculpture strategically provokes discussion about the Catholic Church’s prohibition of contraception by the use of condoms. Neither of these issues, by the way, had any prominence whatsoever in the New Zealand media coverage surrounding the controversy over Virgin in a Condom’s presence in Te Papa. The lack of media coverage on these key issues highlights an assumption that artists intend to shock rather than engage in public debate. Such an assumption overlooks the possibility that artist’s may intend to provoke public discussion on these issues, or to explore unconventional views on religion within a museum context. I will return to this point in discussing the role of the museum as providing a space for unconventional views of religion below.

The perceived polemical nature of the work contributed to Virgin in a Condom becoming, arguably, the most publicised work of art in the history of New Zealand, Tania Kovats would not reply to any invitation to participate in the exhibition Votive: Sacred and ecstatic bodies that I curated in Wellington in 2002. Her Australasian experience, which included receiving abusive mail and death threats, had been so traumatic that she wanted nothing more to do with us. Her representative, the London-based Asprey Jacque Gallery, indicated that the direction of her work was changing to the extent that another inclusion in a religious project would misrepresent the artist.

Arguments surrounding the accountability of public expenditure in public institutions such as galleries form strong undercurrents to these debates about the control and use of religious symbols. In contrast with the National Gallery of Victoria, Te Papa Tongerewa Museum of New Zealand stood their ground. They refused to remove Virgin in a Condom from the Pictura Britannica exhibition and backed their right to be an artistic conscience of society. In the words of the concept curator, Ian Wedde, the museum had to be a free space for several kinds of expression. It had to be available ‘for the expression of divergent and controversial views’.^[8] Some of these controversial views may be unorthodox religious or theological perspectives.

Serrano contends that Piss Christ stems from his religious upbringing, and that the work upholds his religious conviction that the body can be seen as a means for obtaining religious redemption. As Serrano puts it:

Who then, should decide whether something is blasphemous? The church or religious group who claims ownership and control, or the artists themselves?

One standard model for the interpretation of art involves consideration of the artist’s intentions. Within a context of the divide between state and church and the concomitant freedom of the individual, such a model seems apt. Our knowing that Serrano sees himself as working within the parameters of his own faith seems to alter our immediate impression that this is a case of blasphemy. It is as though, given his Christian upbringing, Serrano feels entitled to use the religious images as he pleases, and that, as a Christian, he was incapable of blaspheming. This idea of membership giving entitlement to use images however you like raises questions about how ‘membership’ is determined, and whether there can be levels of membership and entitlement.

A conflicting position about how we should interpret a work of art appeals to the conventional meaning of the symbols. If we read the image at face value, it is still his piss, a human by-product of waste not normally associated with the reverence of God. The media recently condemned American soldiers for the blasphemy of urinating on the Koran during the military campaign in Iraq. If this is clearly an act of blasphemy in relation to what is held sacred to Muslims, and was correctly interpreted as an attack on the sentiments of the Muslim prisoners they had captured, we would not expect a Christian to engage in a similar act with respect to their own faith. This raises the question of what role the gallery plays in providing a context for interpreting a work of art, and its appreciation.