Speaking of the Last Supper

http://www.counterpunch.com/





Beyond Belief
Holy Week in France


Parisian denim purveyor Marithe et François Girbaud staged Da Vinci's Last Supper in drag last week to mass outrage in Europe. The corporatization of Jesus and the girl Christ was more than the faithful could take. Girbaud's apostles in couture roused first the uproar of Italian bishops and then French judges, who banned the ad and levied a 100,000 fine a day until it disappears. The church's lawyer drew a direct connection between sacrilegious images and violence in schools.

How could this be? Everyone knows that secular Europe is far less stirred by religious controversy than America, and that artists everywhere press buttons for ironic commentary. So why the Holy kafuffle?

In the picture was a glowing male torso that set the Church aflame with rage. Not even facing the viewer, the muscle ripped back punctuates the otherwise iconic tableau that for centuries has represented the mystical supper before Christ's betrayal and execution. Church statements in court identified this lusty pose as the only visual sign they took issue with. But hold on. Is a man's back actually lewd? Shirtless women in Western culture are read as sexual objects, and as such are banned on American television. A man without a shirt in the West rarely conveys the same sexual charge. The issue, of course, is that this shirtless man droops over a woman's shoulder in a pose suggesting either death or sexual exhaustion, and that his limp undress comes surrounded by alert, clothed women. Drooped, shirtless, among women, the man must be not only an object of sexual desire, but also the subject of some perverted sexuality in which women gang up on men.

Even more scandalous, and perhaps the real reason for all the fuss, is that a female Christ would preside over such games, as if a band of mad women had dressed up to mock the Church. It is this figure ­ the girl-Christ -- that has been treated to so many misreadings and misinterpretations in the European press, allowing the Girbaud Last Supper to act like a Rorschach inkblot that reveals the uneasy position of gender in the modern Church. Looking closely at the fallout is cause for worry ­ about judges, about journalists, about the particular Christians who damned the image in the first place.
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the article goes on to say that the journalists missed the real story of gender politics in the church.

personally, I dig the pic

Maybe the one with his back to us?

Looking at the pic longer suggests that he could be feeling remorse and shame.
I don't look at everything in sexual terms. Too little TV I guess.

for everyone who is addicted to being outraged, this is a spoof of a painting. The painting is a work of art, not a holy relic.

The REAL last supper remains untouched until someone spoofs your bible.