by Jerome du Bois
Two days ago, Artforum ran two short news bulletins which, side by side, serendipitously highlight the notion of forbidden images. One was a British brouhaha over a purported depiction, by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Valentine Presnip, of one of Mohammed’s wives, at the Tate in London; the other was the installation of Maurizio Cattelan’s perverse, wise, and disturbing Him, in a museum that Hitler built in Munich, a city in a country that harbors a cultural taboo against images of . . . him.
In the first story, "many" British Muslims looked at the painting's explanatory wall label and complained, loudly and officially; in the second, Germans and others observed the Cattelan sculpture's uncanny moral osciillation and presumably thought about it, but there’s been no controversy about it, at least none that's made the news. Let's take a closer look at both of these stories . . .
The Guardian online reports on the Presnip:
First, the picture's caption described it as depicting one of the wives of the prophet Mohammed. It was a concept that many Muslim visitors condemned as an act of blasphemy -- since the Muslim faith prohibits human representations of the prophet, his wives or relatives.
But when, having rebuffed a number of complaints, the gallery conducted some historical research, it discovered a second gaffe: the painting of Ayesha was never intended to show one of Mohammed's wives at all. [My emphasis.] The woman was more likely to have been Queen Ayesha, a character from She, the classic 1887 novel by H. Rider Haggard.[!]
So then the first gaffe, I suppose, was the "act of blasphemy," by Presnip originally by painting Ayesha (Mohammed's child bride, wasn't she?), and then those cultural ignoramuses, the British art gallerists and historians at the Tate, furthered the horrible transgression by actually displaying the evil image.
[Allow me to telegraph my point: Muslims, get used to it. This is just the beginning of all kinds of "depictions." The two artists who run this weblog, for example, are working on a "Polytheism" installation which includes such themes as monotheism requires misogyny and Mecca's Cave before Mohammed.What may be blasphemy to you may mean nothing at all to others; indeed, your indignation itself may be offensive to millions; and, by the rule of law, you simply have to deal with it.
After all, the British have to put up with the Turner Prize, especially this year, with the Chapman brothers [think -- think! -- before clicking] and Grayson Perry. And Christians worldwide, of which I am emphatically not one, must put up with this brand-new Crucifixion by Rachel Feinstein -- one of many recent talentless Yalies given an undeserved boost by Charlie Finch, who has finally dropped his jug. (He thought it was "easily the greatest piece created and shown last season in Chelsea.") As for the Jews -- well, Muslims of all people should know better than others the kind of "blasphemy" the Jews have to put up with: they just have to pick up one of their own racist newspapers.]
Back to our story . . .
Aaffreen Khan, speaking for the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, said that the campaign was a good example of the Muslim community in Britain being pro-active: "We are delighted that our campaign against the false label of the painting has borne success. The idea of a painting of the prophet Mohammed's wife was absurd. It just shows the level of ignorance there is about Islam and its practice.”
Questions: Why didn’t Mr. Khan and the MPAC, knowing that “the idea of a painting of the prophet Mohammed's wife was absurd,” figure out therefore that the label was a mistake? Why didn’t they do their own research, find the facts, and take a nice civilized package of correct information to the Tate? But then they couldn't have had a pro-active campaign, could they? They didn’t take an investigative route; and they, like everyone else, had already previously accepted the original false labeling as bona fide.
Mr. Khan’s kicker bears repeating:
It just shows the level of ignorance there is about Islam and its practice.
Mr. Khan can be sure that since 9/11 the level of ignorance about Islam and all of its practices has been shrinking at electronic speed. It's just that people have been examining other areas, probably with higher priority than sleuthing out inaccuracies in art for the benefit of Muslims worldwide. For example, I know that the very week Mr. Khan and his group were congratulating themselves, a British Court was sentencing one of their co-religionists to prison for life for one of those practices -- for stabbing his own daughter seventeen times, one for each year of her life I guess, killing her in the name of his "honor." It was not the only such murder in Britain this year.
[Aside: in the Fox News Report of this sentencing, the normally-intrepid Amy Kellogg folded to some producer and did not say the words "Islam" or "Muslim" in her piece; instead, she referred to "certain cultures."]
And the Ayesha flap was not the only such Muslim art scandal in Britain this week. Three days ago Charles Johnson at littlegreenfootballs ran this piece under the title "MPAC Seethes, Threatens." [It's LGF, with all its comments; be patient, it will appear.] The opener:
The Muslim Public Affairs Council in Britain is blowing a gasket over a painting of Mohammed illustrating the topic of shari'a in a book called The History of Punishment, because it shows some barely visible naked women in the background. [The piece has a photo of the painting, and lots of extended quotes from MPAC.]
Since 9/11, many pundits and scholars (e.g., Bernard Lewis) have pointed out that Islam needs to go through a Reformation, a schooling in the harsh realities of unforgiving, natural life, just as Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism have had to, just to survive into the future. Otherwise it will be crushed. Its intractable arrogance, then, I say to the faces of a billion believers, is both offensive and pitiful. I live in the 21st Century United States. Science, reason, imagination and political freedom bear our future's burden, not Islam. Islam hasn't taken us past Jupiter or opened the door to stem-cell research. The sole contribution of Islamic science in the modern era is the Saudi's development of freeze-dried sperm, not exactly an endangered substance -- but wait: we're talking about Saudi sperm. . .
And submission -- despite all the kneeling hallelujahs -- is not in American blood. There is not now and will never be a dhimmitude -- not here anyway.
As for Presnip's painting: as you can see, it is competently beautiful but innocuous, with its glowing golden vessel and luxurious red drapery. The woman -- whoever Presnip had in mind -- looks less like a queen than a weary servant: where do you want the wine?
The second Artforum bulletin referred to this Nov. 7th Washington Post/Reuters story:
MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - In a life-like sculpture, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler kneels in an empty room in a Munich art museum.
It is a striking piece of art for Germany, where the horrors of the country's Nazi past have made it taboo to display Hitler in any form except in documentary films.
The exhibition with the depiction of Hitler opened on Friday at a neo-classical museum, which the Nazi leader ordered built in 1937.
The sculpture by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, entitled "Him," shows a sad-looking Hitler wearing a modest suit and kneeling in an empty room with his hands folded together.
The artist's name should bring to mind his earlier sculpture La Nona Ora, which did create a scandal for some Roman Catholics when it was shown in Poland. Here he describes it himself to Massimilliano Gioni in Flash Art, May/June 2001, page 117:
Last December I exhibited La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) in a show curated by Harold Szeemann to commemorate the centenary of the Warsaw Gallery of Modern Art. In an official visit two Catholic representatives attacked the statue and tried to liberate the Pope from the weight of the meteorite. It was a premeditated scheme, accompanied by a manifesto, which was immediately published in the Polish newspapers. The case then got dragged into parliament, where La Nona Ora became a pretext for asking the director of the museum to stand down: she was attacked for her Jewish origins and accused of offending the symbols of Catholicism.
. . . Gioni then asked:What do you think will happen to your Adolph Hitler?
Cattelan: This time I wanted to destroy it myself. I changed my mind a thousand times, every day. Hiter is pure fear; it’s an image of terrible pain. It even hurts to pronounce his name. And yet that name has conquered my memory, it lives in my head, even if it remains taboo. Hitler is everywhere, haunting the specter of history; and yet he is unmentionable, irreproducible, wrapped in a blanket of silence. I’m not trying to offend anyone. I don’t want to raise a new conflict or create some publicity; I would just like that image to become a territory for negotiation or a test for our psychoses.
I myself am somewhat surprised -- pleasantly -- by the absence of irrational behavior surrounding Him, a timebomb that summons forth strong emotions. To me, it reactivates the old resolutions: never again, never forget, and never forgive. And it reminds me of Jewish theologian Saul Fackenheim's "614th Commandment," which I read about in Ron Rosenbaum's peerless Explaining Hitler, a book which discusses many "forbidden" images:
It was that year [1967, in the run-up to the Six-Day War] that he formulated the now widely known "614th commandment," the single sentence for which he has become most famous, the "post-Holocaust commandment" regarding Hitler, which Fackenheim felt compelled to add to the traditional 613 rules of worship and conduct in the Orthodox Jewish canon. He phrased it this way: "Jews are forbidden to grant posthumous victories to Hitler."
I think Maurizio Cattelan, a gentile like me, created something which makes this commandment easier to keep, for everyone. And the Munich visitors, many and varied, since this was a major show by the inimitable Ydessa Hendeles, acted like civilized people, like people with a cosmopolitain awareness of history: they confronted the piece, and then confronted whatever the piece summoned up in them. Unlike the two angry Poles and the many angry British Muslims, they seemed to know that reality is greater than the sum of its parts, and that we are at least the same size as the images that confront us.
Posted by Jerome at November 13, 2003 09:08 AM | TrackBack