Pete Christ: if this isn’t blasphemous, then what is?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/20/what-is-blasphemy-eyes-church-pete-doherty

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Are there any limits to the way Christianity can be depicted in art? Are artists who depict Christ in a less than reverent manner taking a risk? Associated Press seemed to think so when, in the wake of the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in January, it suddenly removed Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ from its image library.

Piss Christ – an image of a sculpture of the Crucifixion, suspended in what appears to be a tank of glowing urine – is one of the few recent works of art that have caused real offence among Christians. It was created in 1987 and became a hate object for cultural and religious conservatives in 1980s America. Serrano even got death threats.

And yet, three decades on, it seems hard for any artist to blaspheme by portraying Christ. Not because anyone will murder them, but because Christians are likely to embrace the outrageous image as they would a lamb strayed from the flock. Jesus, how can you offend these people?

A statue of Pete Doherty posing as Christ on the cross has just gone on view in London. Surely this is blasphemous? The raucous, wild-living pop star as Jesus, his sufferings in the media equated with the passion of Christ, his naked flesh nailed up as if he were the son of God? Come on, Christians! Surely this is too much to take.

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And yet far from being vilified for blasphemy, the artist, Nick Reynolds, has got his statue of Doherty as Jesus exhibited in St Marylebone parish church. In the eyes of the Church of England it is, therefore, presumably not blasphemous at all. On the contrary, it is an exciting contemporary work of religious art.

The church thought the same about David Mach’s Die Harder, a sculpture of Christ on the cross made out of wire coathangers. The wires protruding from Christ’s body look like a sadomasochist costume design from a Clive Barker horror film. But even the Daily Mail struggled to feign outrage when Mach’s bristling Christ was installed at Southwark Cathedral in 2012.

It’s not just the Church of England that is liberal towards graphic, gory, or Pete Doherty-worshipping images of Christ and Christianity. The Vatican has its own gallery of modern art, for which it deliberately collects powerful contemporary religious images, including works by atheists such as Francis Bacon and Picasso.

None of this should surprise us, because if Islam has long had its doubts about the use of images in religious art, Christianity glories in the carnal, bloodstained, horrifying depiction of Christ. How can this representation of Pete Doherty as Jesus be shocking, when such a venerated masterpiece of Christian painting as Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, created in the 16th century, shows Christ covered in sores and turning green, as he not only dies but rots on the cross?

There was a moment in Christian history when it looked as if the image might be banned. The iconoclast movement in early medieval Byzantium thought images unholy. But the iconoclasts were defeated, and western Christian art from the 11th century onwards became ever more fascinated by the humanity of Christ. Art stressed his suffering and humiliation. The more people pitied Christ, the more they would love him.

So there is probably not a single thing artists can do to insult Christ that has not already been done in the name of Christianity itself, to emphasise the humanity and suffering of a god brought down to Earth.

Caravaggio flogged Christ. His 17th-century painting of the flagellation is an image of Christ being tortured. Earlier in the Renaissance, the German artist Hans Holbein the Younger portrayed Christ dead in the tomb – the most outrageous image of all, for it does not offer any clues to the coming resurrection. Jesus is just a dead man. With religious images like these, who needs blasphemers?

This is deeply revealing about why religious artistic depiction has become such a dangerous ground of cultural misunderstanding. Europeans may believe that in defending free speech – including contentious religious cartoons – we are standing up for human rights won since the French Revolution, but this is not strictly true. When it comes to portraying God and Jesus, there never were many restrictions in Europe. When Michelangelo was painting God in the Sistine Chapel he drew a cartoon to amuse his friends in which God is just a ludicrous blobby caricature. No one objected. Artists were not only permitted but encouraged by the Church to depict Jesus in the most shocking ways they could.

Europe’s modern openness about religious images has grown naturally out of the Christian tradition itself. That does not make free speech any less important. It does mean Europeans should recognise, when we rightly defend the right to offend, that for inheritors of the sensational tradition of Christian art, it is actually quite easy to say that artists have the right to do what they want to religion. Even the church agrees on that, as it always has.