Space Pirates Ltd.

The comics in the campus paper here at the University of Pittsburgh can really, really suck some times. Even the writing can be comicly bad.

Fortunately, there are a handful of good writers. They submit their work to a public with high expectations. They know that anything less than the best will have their heads chopped off and their bodies thrown to the lions. The same lions that haunt frat parties and survive only on canned light beer.

Sometimes, a Russel Crowe type character will emerge from these gladiators of ink and paper. They will bring forth justice, entertainment, and most importantly, the anger of an organized religion. Kondrad Klinkner, I salute you. We salute you.

Chocolate Jesus causes religious groups to melt with anger, rage

The Catholic Church has long accepted the humble cracker as a perfectly acceptable representation of Jesus’ flesh. But what if it actually looked like Jesus and was made of chocolate? Now that’s crazed blasphemy of the worst kind, according to groups like the Catholic League.

A new standoff between the art world and the Christian right has emerged over a massive milk-chocolate sculpture of a naked Jesus, arms spread as if crucified, which was intended to be shown on the week leading up to and including Easter. The piece is entitled “My Sweet Lord,” and it’s the latest in a series of unusual food sculptures by artist Cosimo Cavallero. Enraged conservative Catholic groups managed to put up enough clamor to have the exhibition cancelled before it even began.

Cardinal Edward Egan called it a “sickening display.” Bill Donohue, the head honcho of the Catholic League and America’s pre-eminent voice for conservative Catholics, called the piece “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever.”

What I wonder is, what particular aspect of Cavallero’s piece made it so profoundly offensive to the protesting Catholics? Was it the chocolate or the anatomical correctness? And is the image of Jesus au natural really that horrific?

While it’s not quite on the same level as the Christian right’s vilification of Hollywood, the modern art world has certainly had its fair share of clashes with religious hardliners. In particular, the chocolate Jesus controversy calls to mind Andres Serrano’s famously divisive artwork “Piss Christ,” which was a dramatic photograph of a small, plastic, crucified Jesus submerged glowing brilliantly in a golden glassful of Serrano’s own urine. It was a landmark case, highlighting the very difficult balance of preserving freedom of expression and minding various religious thresholds of blasphemy on the other.

The fury over the chocolate Jesus apparently escalated to the point where the hotel that planned to host the exhibition became the subject of death threats. And understandably, the hotel wasn’t going to risk death for a giant confection.

Being an anti-censorship, art-loving, atheist-leaning agnostic, my default opinion is to side with freedom of expression. I feel that if something offends your metaphysical reality that much, then just put it out of mind. Don’t bother yourself with it and don’t look at it. It’s not like Christians were forced to look at “Piss Christ” or the cocoa-Jesus, or like the Danes took their Mohammad cartoons and mailed them to everyone in the Middle East.

But therein, perhaps, lies my bigotry. I can continue to spout my secular opinions here, but it’s never going to find common ground with the religious viewpoint. I can’t find any way to identify with deeply-held religious views, or the kind of seething passion that evidently comes about in people like Bill Donohue when he sees things like a naked Jesus made of chocolate. I just don’t have a religious bone in my body. I was raised atheist, and the only churches I’ve ever set foot in are cathedrals because I think Gothic architecture looks cool. But being a huge relativist about most things, I do feel somewhat conflicted about being so numb to religious sensitivities.

I’ll even make a na’ve attempt to relate to the angered Catholics in this chocolate-Jesus episode by trying to think of scenarios involving analogous depictions of figures I really admire, and imagining if that could make me anywhere near as mad. Would it enrage me if say, somebody made an exhibit featuring a chocolate, naked rendition of Frank Zappa? A chocolate Bill Watterson? Hmm … well, no, I’m not picking up any angry impulses. I would probably think of it as rather weird, but I can’t get any genuine outrage out of this. Well, I tried.

And so the artistic-freedom and anti-blasphemy camps remain at this unhappy impasse. So it can certainly be argued that I’m beyond identifying very much with devout religious views, but I have to counter, why is it that the religious factions are the ones whose sensibilities are supposedly more important to be mindful of?

From a cynical standpoint, the answer is generally that religious groups put up more of a determined fight than secular groups want to put up with. Extreme measures, like death threats, tend to take the fight out of us non-believers. The faithful get their way by relentlessly caring a lot more - they out-care the opposition, as it were. And because it’s generally accepted that religion can provide a bottomless well of passion for its constituents, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about that. Secularists don’t have that excuse - if we showed that same level of intensity, we would just be crazy.

Chocolate Jesus comparison is weird not offensive

Whoa, my earlier column on the debate surrounding Cosimo Cavallero’s life-size, milk chocolate, nude sculpture of Jesus sure garnered a lot of feedback. In large part, the feedback came from offended readers who sympathized with the outrage of the conservative Catholic groups.

The most common retort among these replies was the proposed analogy that I should imagine having my own mother’s image at the mercy of some unscrupulous chocolate sculptor. And supposedly this would make me identify with the kind of roaring outrage that certain Catholic groups unleashed upon the would-be exhibitors of Cavallero’s chocolate Jesus.

If someone really wants to go to the trouble of designing and crafting a life-size sculpture of my naked mother out of milk chocolate, that person can go right ahead. It would just be a strange thing to do, and wouldn’t really be an apt analogy to the chocolate Jesus at all. The glaring difference is simple: The last time I checked, my mother is not an instantly recognizable, internationally renowned religious icon. If she were, well, then my life would be quite different right now. In that scenario, I would just accept it if people started appropriating her image for whatever means, because that’s simply what tends to happen when you’re as popular as Jesus.

But given that she is indeed not a public figure by any means, if one were to make a naked, chocolaty likeness of her, there would be no universal meaning in such an art piece as there exists in Cavallero’s chocolate Jesus; a sculpture of her would only read as the form of some random naked woman to virtually anyone who saw it.

With Jesus you have a completely different story, because everybody knows Jesus. He is indisputably the biggest icon in the Western World - his image embodies something or other to just about anyone, Christian or non-Christian, and thus he is very much part of the public domain. That is why he is such a temptingly ample subject for artful appropriation.

This brings me to what I really want to say: Jesus Christ and the other big-time prophets - being such universal figures of historical and cultural consequence - are irrevocably public domain, and for the sake of true religious (and irreligious) freedom, should stay that way.

Unfortunately, the backlash over episodes like the chocolate Jesus and (especially) the row over the Danish Mohammed cartoons have bolstered movements in support of anti-blasphemy laws. Earlier this month, the generally worthless U.N. Human Rights Council had its arm twisted enough by the Organization of the Islamic Council that it passed a resolution condemning the “defamation of religion” and voicing support for instituting laws that would protect religious groups from “hurtful” or defamatory remarks of any kind.

All this is really more a matter of numbers than of principle. When it comes down to it, the backing for the demand of respect that major religions claim ultimately comes from their sheer power in numbers. Indeed, when you get down to the level of small religions, you can easily call them “cults,” and they won’t be accorded nearly as much deference as the big boys. Or as the writer Tom Wolfe once quipped, “A cult is a religion with no political power.”

To illustrate this safely, I will use a pretty universally unpopular faith as an example. Consider Scientology, that rather small, though vocal, religious group/cult that is widely regarded as a laughing stock across the United States. Not to say that it isn’t deserving of that status, as goofy and transparently shady as Scientology is. But relatively few people have any qualms about criticizing or mocking Scientology, as opposed to skewering a major religion. That in part has to do with the fact that it doesn’t have a large, established membership, as of yet. If Scientology were to ever gain a following comparable to that of any established major religion (God forbid, figuratively), I can bet you that people would get into so much more hot water for daring to criticize the gospel of Dianetics.

Some religious groups today seem fundamentally confused with what being “tolerant” of a religion is supposed to mean, and will assert that any statement which displeases their religious sensitivities is a breach of religious tolerance ethics. But the real breach is making such anti-blasphemy assertions. Tolerance here simply means that one is OK with allowing whatever religious practices and beliefs people want to follow. It shouldn’t require the silencing of criticisms of said beliefs. Religious people should be likewise free to bitch about secularism whenever they want, and they do. Beside, if right-wing religious groups were ready to defend a high school kid’s right to say “Bong hits 4 Jesus,” surely they can find room in their hearts for a chocolate Christ.

E-mail Konrad at klk27@pitt.edu.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 1:43 am and is filed under Pirate Brew Ha-Ha. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.