November 2008

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Now that summer is officially over and the Olympics hooplah seems like the dim and distant past, we can return to dwelling on religious imagery in contemporary art . Or at least that’s what appears to be currently happening in Essex, Newcastle, Bolzano and Rome.

Back in January, an offended citizen requested a police investigation into the display of Terence Koh’s statuette of Christ with an erection at the Baltic Centre, Gateshead. After receiving little satisfaction, Emily Mapfuwa from Brentwood, Essex, is bringing a private case against the gallery with the financial help of the Christian Legal Centre.

Similar outrage is boiling in Rome where exhibits at the Museion museum in Bolzano, northern Italy, include Martin Kippenberger’s Zuerst die Füsse (Feet First), a 4ft sculpture of a cartoonish and lurid green frog wearing a loin cloth and crucified on a brown cross in the manner of Christ (above). This has not prompted legal action, as in the Koh case, but there are calls for the removal of the work and the museum is currently defending its stance on continuing the display.

Although this is an arts, and not a politics, religion or legal blog, it is interesting to reflect on the reactions of the complainants and what it might say about the cultural and national preoccupations of the respective countries they are in.

In the UK, Mafpuwa has made the claim that the sculpture offends public decency and that the Baltic would not have dared depict the prophet Mohammed in such a manner, saying, ‘I don’t think this gallery would insult Muslims in this way, so why Christians?’. By that logic you could say that Mafpuwa might therefore be placated if Muslims, Jews and all other faiths from Adventists to Zoroastrians were similarly insulted. It is more likely, however, that her statement comes from a suspicion – widely encouraged by the popular press – that pervades the UK that Islamism and its followers are the beneficiaries of political correctness, particularly in matters overseen by local government and therefore as a consequence traditional faiths and customs i.e. Christianity, are marginalised and otherwise threatened.

In Italy, they do things their way. Franz Pahl, the president of the Trentino-Alto Adige region that includes Bolzano, feels he speaks for all Italians when he says ‘Surely this is not a work of art but a blasphemy and a disgusting piece of trash that upsets many people.’ And given that Italy is a Catholic country and home to the Vatican, he’s got grounds, I suppose, to feel that he represents everyone else. The Pope has joined in, writing to Pahl (but why not the museum itself, one wonders?) to denounce the statue and to stress the number of followers that it offends, saying, that it ‘wounds the religious sentiments of so many people’.

But the most telling part of this story is Pahl’s hunger strike in protest to the display which consequently saw him hospitalised earlier this year. Surely the ultimate way an Italian can communicate his disgust is to refuse his food.

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