Liberal
supporters of Serrano, such as Casey, draw attention to
the ‘originality' and symbolic significance of his
work, and characterize Christians who oppose it as backward
and philistine. Casey claims that the photograph questions
boundaries between the sacred and the profane, thereby ‘enacting
what it represents;’ this ‘threatens the identity
of conservative Christians' who try to exclude it from the
public. However, to question a central intellectual distinction
a work of art must do something more than use a traditional
gesture for insulting God, attack religion or offend believers.
No critic of stature has suggested this photograph constitutes
a profound intellectual investigation, a realignment of
boundaries, whatever emotions it conjures up and titillates.
Secondly, the work was criticized by Christians of all complexions,
as well as by those of other faiths and people of no faith.
None of these even vaguely registered a threat to their
identity; indeed, one of the work's few good effects was
to clarify believers' sense of identity and common, interdenominational
and interfaith, purpose. Thirdly, this was not religious
people interfering with public debate but the majority of
the community protesting in anger over the mis-use of the
community's public space by a notorious artist and a self-appointed
arts ‘elite.' Casey seems not to have realised that
for believers this was an assault upon their God, their
divine brother, an offence from their perspective at least
as great as offences against persons or property. In calling
for an end to the display of this blasphemy in their public
gallery people were not asking that their fragile sense
of identity or boundaries be left undisturbed, but that
their God be respected, their funds withdrawn from what
they believed to be shameful and corrupting, and an end
to their unwilling collaboration in public invitations to
see what is holy reviled.
Casey's
approach also includes a new slant on the liberal case against
mainstream Christians; he invokes something called the ‘pluralist
Church,' and challenges the Christian community with ‘intolerance'
towards their own. He also criticizes some Church authority(ies)
for usurping Christians' religious symbols. We are not privy
to Casey's peculiar ecclesiology, but surely the claim that
Christian and other religious leaders leading their people
to oppose sacrilege and blasphemy is ‘intolerant'
and ‘authoritarian' towards their flocks is absurd.
If observation of the ‘First Table' of the Decalogue
is not a solemn duty of Christian leaders, calling for clear
and strong leadership, then what is?
Another
claim is that most religious believers have been blinkered
and conditioned and so have not recognized that this photograph
reveals a ‘genuine and insightful religiosity' and
is actually a ‘prophetic' work that only Serrano,
Casey and a few other like-minded observers of Christianity
have realized. Casey even makes the astonishing claim that
Piss Christ is ‘profoundly religious' and ‘speaks
to the very heart of Christianity.' Hyperbole aside, can
he really mean this? As the Serrano affair unfolded, the
artist repudiated his earlier claims that his art is simply
colourful and that it is deliberately shocking asserting
instead that, far from intending to scandalize, his goal
all along had been to increase the devotion of his fellow
Christians by helping them identify more closely with Christ
in his pain, suffering and humiliation. Whether this revisionism
was entirely candid on Serrano's part might be doubted,
but, as some of the artist's defenders observed, Jesus very
likely did lose control of his bladder in the crucifixion
and was probably ‘pissed on' by the Roman soldiers.
The photograph might be said merely to allude to this and
to invite our compassionate engagement with the real man.
But do the sacred and the venerated really work in this
way? This is not the place to explore at length the implications
of works such as Otto on the numinous, Eliade on the sacred
and the profane, Turner on the liminal, Douglas on sacred
symbols, or Gadamer on mimesis and anamnesis in art. But
what can be said briefly is that none of these classic studies
of the anthropology of religious symbols would lend credence
to the kind of ‘restoration' or ‘enhancement'
proposed by Casey in his apologia.
Another
liberal ploy has been to characterize those who disagree
with public display of Serrano's photographs as irrationally
caught up in a ‘dead white male' time warp, prissily
avoiding the confronting insights of modernity. On this
front Casey argues that an exhibition of the work of Rembrandt
taking place at the Victorian National Gallery would have
benefited from the continuation of the Serrano exhibition;
like Serrano, Rembrandt is dealing with ‘the ambiguity
of the abject and its relation to the sacred.' The comparison
between Serrano's photographs and Rembrandt's moving and
human images is comical, if not grotesque; the idea that
Serrano can teach us something important about the relation
between God and man surely both. Pondering the relation
between Christ's human life, suffering and death and his
divine nature, and the meaning of all of this for ourselves,
has been part of Christian tradition and enquiry at least
since Chalcedon; what radical new insights might Serrano
have to offer here? We should recall that at the same time
Piss Christ was exhibited, Melbourne hosted another
Serrano exhibition featuring:
photographs of a woman urinating in a man's mouth, a
woman squatting naked before a horse as she masturbates
it, a clergyman gagged with a studded leather collar
etc. Such a range of professional interests hardly suggest
deep and well-informed theological and philosophical
reflection or the expressive genius of the Old Master.
Nevertheless,
Casey plunges ahead, suggesting this is ‘good religious
art,' an exploration of the theology of icons, and an `Hegelian'
reversal of our expectations about the divine so that God
can more clearly be manifested. It is difficult to know
what to make of this. On the Hegelian point, suffice to
say that doing the ‘rude and unexpected' is a cheap
understanding of that philosopher's dialectic. While making
a Crucifixion scene in which Jesus had lost control of his
bodily functions might not be sacrilege, immersing a crucifix
in urine can only be a profanation according to the standards
of the culture and religion of which it is an artefact,
and photographing and displaying such a deed can only be
a blasphemy in that culture. Hegel would not have treated
the ethical life of a community in so cavalier a fashion,
especially after the community had clearly spoken its preference
in overwhelming numbers. On the point about icons, if this
work is to be regarded as pious and devout, can anything
be impious? If even this work is an icon, what on earth
is not?
However,
some persist in the idea that God and religion need the
honesty and courage of the Serranos of this world. Casey
quotes Serrano's defence of the work as ‘redefining
and personalizing' his own relationship with God. Is this
tongue in cheek? In Melbourne at the time of the controversy
Serrano said:
I
started that work as an attempt to reduce and simplify
a lot of the ideas and images that I had been doing up
until that time. I didn't do it to be provocative, I did
it because damn, the colours would look good, you know.
[clapping and cheering] I mean, sometimes I just feel
like what I do has the simplest answers, but they're not
good enough. People want more of a story and I try to
give them a story, but sometimes I have to say: look,
you're reading too much into this.
This
hardly suggests a humble attempt to convert or ;redefine
and personalize' his relationship to God.
II. Theology
A more serious criticism is that Christians have lost the
dramatic meaning of the central event of Christianity. For
Casey, not the Resurrection but the Crucifixion domesticated
their faith and lost contact with the human suffering which
Christ came to share and redeem.
Casey
believes Christians have sanitized, ‘quarantined,'
their central symbol. However, it is a radical misunderstanding
of the anthropology of symbols and sacramentals to imagine
that by adding ‘grime' to them the artist will help
make them more relevant and so devotional. Ironically, reinventing
the image according to a pattern less ‘sanitized'
than that received in the tradition may do the exact opposite.
A crucifix certainly expresses muck, and will not do so
if worn as costume jewellery; but neither will it do so
if simply smeared with muck.. To think a religious object
can be extracted from its context and ‘purified,'
‘restored' or ‘improved' by doing to it something
unthinkable among adherents of that tradition, is condescension
of the kind we rightly abhor in white Australians, Canadians
or Americans who seek to ‘improve' on Aboriginal artefacts.
In
the second section of his paper, Casey makes it clear he
regards those who object to the Piss Christ as
not only deluded but dishonest: ‘there seems to be
an aura of the disingenuous about any accusation of blasphemy.'
It is a serious charge. A page earlier, however, he admits
that ‘Piss Christ is indeed blasphemous to the extent
that it subverts the sacrificial interpretation of Christ's
death.' But if its critics would just open their eyes and
minds they would discover that it is good-blasphemous not
bad-blasphemous: the blasphemy is acceptable because it
‘prophetically' `calls to mind something perhaps even
more essential and original to Christianity.' Now just what
that prophetic ‘something' is, is never made quite
clear. Instead we read: In accordance with the logic of
sacrifice anything overly ambiguous or permeable that defies
the principle of non-contradiction becomes the excluded
middle. The abject are those things that blur the neat distinction
between subject and object and consequently threaten the
substantiality of identity.
Try
as we may, we cannot make head or tail of such passages,
and there are many of them in Casey's article. The word
‘abject', however, occurs quite a bit here, and seems
to function as a hooray word, as opposed to ‘sacrifice,'
a boo word. On side with ‘the abject' (hooray!) are
`abominations' and ‘mess,' heterology, powerlessness,
permeability, and the ‘many' mediæval mystics
who thought of Jesus as a woman giving birth; on ‘the
sacrificial' side (boo!) are sovereignty, homophobia, ‘ossified'
doctrines and dogmas, the clean and the impermeable. Later
Casey returns to this dichotomy, comparing mainstream Christianity,
which has erroneously made the cross the great symbol of
sacrifice and transcendence, with the more profound Christology
of Serrano. This artist-theologian tries ‘to return
the crucifix to the bodily processes of becoming,' and thereby
‘to retrieve the meaning of the incarnation Serrano
returns to this arche its repressed and forgotten element,
the metonymic as expressed by the biological processes that
have been abjected by the symbolic order.' In its sacrificial
theology mainstream Christianity does not understand its
central symbol, the cross; only Serrano and Casey do, and
‘an elite' who have 'retained and lived' the true
anti-sacrificial interpretation of the crucifixion.
Well,
how does Casey justify this rather grandiose claim? In one
of the few falsifiable propositions in the paper he assures
us that ‘despite common perceptions, the sacrificial
interpretation of the death of Jesus can be found in only
one book of the New Testament, and that book, the Letter
to the Hebrews, is about the end of sacrifice.' Really?
The most recent comprehensive literature reviews by Peter
Head (1995) and Roger Beckwith (1995) demonstrate that the
whole New Testament, and not just the Letter to the Hebrews,
is replete with sacrificial language, imagery and theology.
They demonstrate conclusively that:
in
Mark, in Matthew, in Luke and Acts, and in John and 1
John, the death of Jesus is described, sometimes by himself
and sometimes by others, sometimes explicitly and sometimes
implicitly, as sacrificial. Thus, in the Synoptic Gospels,
he speaks at the Last Supper of ‘my blood of the
covenant' (or ‘the new covenant in my blood') ‘which
is to be shed for many' (or `for you'), Matthew's version
adding ‘for the remission of sins.' He is spoken
of in John (and also, incidentally in 1 Pet 1:19 and Rev
5:6-10; 13:8) a the slain ‘lamb' of God, who by
his precious blood ‘takes away the sin of the world,'
a lamb being an animal used in various sacrifices, in
sin offerings, guilt offerings, burnt offerings and peace
offerings, as well as the Passover sacrifice. In Peter,
again, Christ is said to be a sacrifice ‘without
blemish,' that is, without the moral blemish of sin, not
the physical blemishes which disqualified sacrifices;
and we ourselves are said to be ‘sprinkled; with
his blood (1:2,19). Similarly, in John we are said to
be ‘cleansed' by his blood ‘from sin' (1:7,9),
the language of sprinkling and cleansing being drawn from
the sacrificial ritual, and perhaps from the Covenant
sacrifice of Exodus 24, also alluded to at the Last Supper.
This is to recall only some of the more explicit passages,
from various books of which a sacrificial interpretation
of Christ's death is given.
Yet
like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass Casey
may well believe that ‘when I use a word' or a symbol
like a cross ‘it means just what I choose it to mean,
neither more nor less.' Perhaps he would assert that his
claim about sacrifice in the New Testament was not an exegetical
claim (since texts have no intrinsic meaning) but rather
a creative reading' of the text through the looking glass
of contemporary cultural anthropology. Yet even a scant
acquaintance with the classic studies in the anthropology
of religion by Edward Tylor, William Robertson Smith, James
Frazer, Henri Hubert, Marcel Mauss, E. E. Evans-Pritchard
and Luc de Heusch, or the more recent standard works of
Barth (1961), Chilton (1992), Daly (1978), Hengel (1977),
Yerkes (1952) and Young (1975 & 1979), or even the more
controversial but currently influential work of René
Girard, all suggest very different conclusions to Casey's.
All these writers insist, for instance, upon the centrality
of the sacrifice idea to Christianity and the close relation,
not opposition, of this concept to ‘the abject'. Time
and again one is left wondering: does Casey even know the
standard literature in this area?
Closely
related to Casey's untenable contrast between sacrifice
and abjection is another contrast, between a (true) kenotic
Christ stripped of all power and a (false) concept of Christ
as a divine master. This is not the place to rehearse the
complexities and tensions in ideas like power and service
or divestment and glorification as understood in traditional
and contemporary Christology: suffice it to say that, at
least since J S Whale's classic work in the early 1960s,
no simplistic either-or, such as Casey seems to require,
has featured in serious theology. This is no mere debating
point: Casey's central claim is that Jesus' identification
with ‘the poor and the oppressed and all those we
treat like shit' relies upon the Crucified being imaged
in ignominy, covered in excrement. No Pantocrators here!
We
need not reflect for long on Casey's powerless ‘fellow
sufferer' Christ to realise that this craving represents
a radical distortion of relationship. ‘Misery loves
company,' certainly, but we do not take this observation
as a counsel and set about causing misery to give the miserable
some companions. We look to others to understand and respond
to our pains, to do something to cure or at least palliate
them. We do not want the dentist to feel our toothache with
us: we want him to remove it, kindly, but with a certain
detachment too. We do not want our counsellor to suffer
disorientation, disintegration and despair with us: we want
her to help reorient, reintegrate and give hope to us, again
with some objectivity. In prayer we do not petition a fellow
patient for a cure, but a physician.
III.
Law
Curiously for a writer in a legal journal, Casey seems to
be completely uninterested in the legal action to which
the Serrano controversy gave rise. He recalls that Archbishop
Pell sought an injunction from the Supreme Court of Victoria
to restrain the National Gallery of Victoria from publicly
displaying Piss Christ and says little more about
the law thereafter. However, reflecting upon that legal
action may help clarify just what was at issue in the dispute
as it unfolded.
The Archbishop of Melbourne sought an injunction on the
grounds that the public display of this photograph would
constitute a breach of Victoria's Summary Offences Act,
as well as the common law misdemeanour of blasphemous libel.
The Act makes it an offence for any person to exhibit or
display an indecent or obscene figure or representation
in a public place.
The
common law treats as criminal blasphemy every publication
which, beyond the decent limits of legitimate difference
of opinion, treats Christianity in an offensive, scurrilous
and insulting manner calculated to outrage the feelings
of believers and sympathisers. In making these offences
the grounds of his application, the Archbishop was in effect
seeking to restrain an apprehended breach of the criminal
law with civil remedies. This is something that the courts
are generally very reluctant to countenance, for the reasons
set forth most famously in Peek's Case, and the Archbishop
was no doubt aware his action was `a long shot', but one
he thought worth undertaking.
There
are two elements to the offence of blasphemous libel: a
scurrilous insult to Christians and their beliefs beyond
the bounds of what is generally accepted as decent difference
of opinion, and the publication of that insult. There are
two things which it is important to note here. First, blasphemous
libel does not involve ‘censorship' in the sense of
excluding certain opinions from being expressed in the public
realm. As early as 1840 it was held that the offence of
blasphemy lies not in making rational arguments against
particular religious doctrines but in the incitement of
'wild and improper feelings.' In 1883 it was held that no
offence is committed by the simple profession of a religious
or irreligious opinion: blasphemy required a tendency in
a work 'to shock, outrage, or ridicule' believers or their
faith.
A
decision in 1917 reiterated this, and emphasised 'vilification,
ridicule or irreverence' as the requirement for establishing
blasphemous libel. In the words of Mr Justice Phillimore
from an earlier case, 'a man is free to speak and to teach
what he pleases as to religious matters' but were a person
to make a ‘scurrilous attack' on common religious
doctrines 'in a public place where passers-by may have their
ears offended, and where young persons may come, he will
render himself liable to the law of blasphemous libel.'
Secondly,
blasphemy is an offence of strict liability. The only intention
that has to be established is an intention to publish, and
clearly a decision by an art gallery to publicly exhibit
a blasphemous work manifests such an intention. Just as
we argued above regarding the ethics of blasphemy, the good
or bad intentions of the author are irrelevant in determining
at law whether the impugned publication constitutes a blasphemous
libel. Serrano's intention in producing this photograph
and the National Gallery's intention in displaying it remain
unclear, but in the eyes of the law is does not matter whether
their intention was to shock, to revere or simply to display
some nice colors. The crucial thing, from the law's point
of view, is the effect the publication of this photo has.
As Lord Scarman stated in the most important recent case
in this area, 'the character of the words published matters;
but not the motive of the author or publisher.'
The
long string of blasphemy cases makes this much clear: had
this case proceeded it would have been very difficult for
any judge or jury to conclude that a photograph of a sacred
Christian symbol immersed in excrement was anything other
than objectively blasphemous.
In
the end, however, the case was decided on the principle
that the court should not employ its civil jurisdiction
to provide an injunction as a means of preventing the commission
of a crime. This leaves open the question of the basis,
nature and scope of the offences of blasphemous libel and
obscenity. One thing the Serrano affair made abundantly
clear was that the reasons for such a law remain as compelling
today as at any time in the past. The protection of individual
feelings, civil peace, and commonly accepted standards of
civilized behaviour (which themselves demand respect for
God, religion and morality) necessitate the continuation
of this offence just as surely as they require proper laws
against the vilification of ethnic and religious minorities
even if these reasons fail to exhaust the evil of blasphemy
as understood in ethics and theology. The case of Pell v
National Gallery of Victoria serves to highlight the need
to extend to Christians the anti-discrimination and anti-vilification
protections increasingly being extended to other minorities,
and possibly the need to extend to other religions the protection
of the anti-blasphemy laws.
Some
people have opposed anti-vilification laws as a totalitarian
restriction on their freedom of expression; commentators
such as Casey in the wake of the Serrano affair have been
given to hysterical claims about the spectre of censorship
and declining artistic freedom. In fact, however, the outcome
of this affair represents a triumph for tolerance and mutual
respect in our society. Whereas Christianity and the values
of ordinary people were once considered fair game by the
cultural and artistic arriere-garde, there is now a little
more sensitivity and respect. This can only be a good thing
for all those who sincerely value authentic tolerance and
wish to see the expansion of its realm. Serrano was something
of a turning-point in Australian public affairs. After Serrano
we need high-quality and accessible debate in ethics, theology
and law, not the fashionable but unintelligible responses
of an increasingly irrelevant academic elite.
