From the outset, the current raging debate over the contents of the March issue of The Insurgent has been off-base. From the tenor of the public outcry, it is clear that a lot of people took the publication of that issue as a personal affront, an attack on their religious beliefs and, therefore, on themselves. The “discussion” in the campus, local and national media has been resoundingly one-sided, representing only the point-of-view of those who find the March issue offensive.
I am the artist who created the painting that was reproduced as the centerfold of the issue in question. I did not create the work as a personal (or even group) attack on anyone. I did not even create the work specifically for the March issue.
Instead, I created the work for a painting course in my BFA program here at the University. My goal in creating this work was threefold:
First, I wanted to comment on the eroticism inherent in the traditional imagery of the Crucifixion of Christ – a tradition in which a mostly naked male body is splayed out for the all the world to see. Although the idea must be repugnant to many Christians, for whom the imagery is sacred, the point I am making is that the eroticism is there whether Christians like it or not.
The Crucifixion imagery tradition (in art and popular representation) is a morbid, sadistic (maybe sadomasochistic) obsession with the physicality of the sacrifice that Jesus made. He allowed his body to be tortured, as Christian doctrine goes, for all of us. There is a clear message of eros, of love, in this sacrificial act. Christian doctrine also clarifies that Jesus was, although the Son of God, embodied in a human male physique.
Some people seem to want to think that Jesus was in a human form but is still somehow to be held above everything that being in a human body means. Yet the tasteless wafers given out in churches during Communion are intended to symbolize the physicality of Jesus, the very human nature of his sacrifice. To paraphrase the old saying, you cannot have your wafer and eat it, too. Either this body of Christ is or is not a human body – and if it is, it is subject to the same erotic gaze as all human bodies.
Second, I also wanted to challenge the homophobia of Christian doctrine. I knew, of course, that depicting Christ in an erotic encounter with another male figure would offend many people. But not all forms of offense are a personal attack. Christians were not made less safe in our society or on our campus by my use of this imagery. We need to be very careful not to allow our important laws and rules intended to protect diversity to be abused in order to protect powerful majorities – like Christians – from any reproach or commentary. When we are no longer allowed to criticize the majority culture, religion, racial group, etc., then we are living under Fascism.
Instead of taking my use of homoeroticism in the painting as an offense, I would hope that people could see it as I intended it: As a commentary on the hypocrisy of Christianity’s stance on queerness. Although there are exceptions, the leaders of most Christian denominations, including the very powerful Vatican, still teach their followers that queerness is a sin against God. Many of these leaders also try to influence social policy and legislation to disadvantage queer people in many areas of basic human rights.
I am queer. In my view queerness is a natural part of the human experience. Therefore, for me, it follows that Christ – who, remember, lived the human experience – could just as easily have experienced queerness as any other human being. This is a heartwarming notion for me and many other queers since it poses a direct challenge to conservative Christian doctrine and exposes it for what it is: the bigoted rules of the heterosexist majority and not divine decree at all.
The idea that queerness is simply a part of the human reality (like eye color, intellectual ability, or temperament) is a problem for conservative Christians who insist on seeing queerness as evil. Since Conservatives insist on declaring queerness so profoundly evil, I decided to portray it as profoundly good: Christlike.
What’s really surprising is that all of the responses to my painting have mentioned the queerness it depicts as the offending aspect of the painting. No one yet has mentioned that the other male figure with Jesus is a red-skinned demon. It may not always be clear that this is the case when the reproduced image of the painting is reproduced again in television broadcasts, but the coloring is pretty clear in The Insurgent’s full-color centerfold spread.
Why is it that queerness between men is even more offensive than sex with a demon? Clearly, in the popular hierarchy of “evil,” queerness ranks fairly near the top.
Which leads to my third task in the painting: to challenge the good/evil dichotomy on which Christianity has built its immense social and political power. Christianity, like certain other of the world’s major religions, draws fairly absolute distinctions between “good” and “evil,” as if the human experience were a series of clearly discernible choices and not the confused mess of ethical, personal, social, cultural and political dilemmas that it is.
This moral absolutism has led Christianity (and Islam – herein lies the connection to the images of Mohammed to which The Insurgent issue responded) to cause a lot of damage.
For the student official who claims that my painting is pornographic, I say: Pornography is in the eye of the beholder. My painting was not created to sexually stimulate onlookers; it was created to intellectually and emotionally stimulate onlookers. In fact, this same official has also said that the entirety of the March issue was meant only to garner emotional response and not intellectual, as if the two are mutually exclusive. Research in education has shown that the two forms of stimulation may be inseparable; that we may need to have emotive response in order to truly learn and develop new ideas.
Art has long held the title as the field of inquiry most apt to help people understand the interwoven nature of emotional and intellectual inquiry. Many, many of the greatest works of art in western and other traditions depict nude human figures of various genders and sexualities. Are we to believe, then, that all nudity is pornographic? Perhaps pornography is best defined by its utility, and I hardly imagine that there is anyone out there gaining much, um, “utility” from my painting, or, indeed any of the images published in the March issue.
Let us also put to rest the ridiculous claim that the March issue fails to contribute to the cultural and intellectual environment of the University. If you’re reading this statement, and you’ve caught even a small fraction of the commentary on this incident that has appeared in print, on televised programs, or online, then you have experienced one of the most intellectually and culturally engaging conversations that has happened at the University in the decade that I have lived in Eugene. This sort of debate is exactly what our educational forebears had in mind when they founded this and other institutions of higher education.
Let me also address perhaps the biggest hypocrisy of the Conservative response to this incident: The fact that none of these people who are horribly disturbed by images that challenge the hegemony of a religious doctrine had any problem whatsoever with the publication of images that challenge the hegemony of Islam in the Oregon Commentator earlier this year – the very images to which The Insurgent decided to respond.
I am not making this statement – and did not paint my work – simply to piss people off. However, if pissing people off leads to a debate about what’s wrong or right about hegemonic structures of power, then it may be well worth it for both the pissers and the pissees.
What needs to be clarified, too, is that nothing in the March issue of The Insurgent (which is full of brilliant commenta
ry, by the way, none of which has made it into any of the news reports or online discussions of the issue’s publication) is in any way a personal attack on any individual. No one’s life, liberty or livelihood is threatened. The Insurgent did not say that Christians should be killed, maimed, or even discriminated against (even though some Christians happily call for such actions toward people in other groups, to several of which I belong).
The fact is, in the end, as long as we are to live in a land in which the freedom of speech and of the press are held in the highest regard, you simply do not have a right to be guaranteed that you will never be pissed off. Nor can you claim that being pissed off is equivalent to being killed, maimed or even discriminated against. The law does not protect you from being offended and, if it did, we would live in a very poor state indeed.
Johnny Correa lives in Eugene