Eric Banks
From The Last Temptation of Christ to Piss Christ: Paul Elie’s book traces the 1980s controversies over faith, sexuality, and “crypto-religious” art.
The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s, by Paul Elie, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 486 pages, $33
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The fascinating trajectory Paul Elie traces in The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s is bookended by two moments. In August 1979, Bob Dylan released Slow Train Coming, with the single “Gotta Serve Somebody” serving notice that the master of reinvention, to the vexation of fans and critics, had become born-again. The song would peak at twenty-four on the Billboard charts in November, twenty-three slots behind M’s “Pop Muzik,” a vapid synth confection that seemed more in tune with the coming decade’s zeitgeist. Fast forward thirteen years to the evening of October 3, 1992, when Sinéad O’Connor concluded her cover of Bob Marley’s “War” on Saturday Night Live by ripping apart a photo of Pope John Paul II and saying “Fight the real enemy!” Exactly a month later, Bill Clinton won the presidential election, putting paid to the long Reagan-Bush years encapsulated in the book’s timeline.
For Elie, the dialogue enabled by this pair of pop moments frames an ambitious reading of the decade they bracket and the culture wars that slowly simmered, then exploded, over matters of faith, orthodox and otherwise, and contestations of sexuality. He is tireless in marking the visible and audible tracks of personal and public engagement with religion across related if disparate sites. There is Andy Warhol’s sprawling Last Supper series, his final body of work, commissioned to make its debut in 1986, alongside Leonardo’s newly restored masterpiece, by Warhol’s Milan dealer Alexander Iolas, who would die from AIDS in June of 1987, just after Warhol’s own passing. There are the variously articulated spiritual yearnings of Bono and U2, whose 1988 single “Desire” gives a name to the very public struggle to underpin rock ’n’ roll with a particularly Irish Catholic project of “hymns for the future.” Leonard Cohen’s mix of Talmudic-Buddhist-Catholic inspirations is crossed with Martin Scorsese’s quixotic journey to bring Nikos Kazantzaki’s Last Temptation of Christ, a novel the director saw as reflecting his own Catholic faith and too-human fallibility, to the screen.
Some of Elie’s examples are less cryptic than others. I’d forgotten the uproar over Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach,” which managed to piss off seemingly everyone (except maybe Camille Paglia) in its apparent “keeping my baby” politics. (Like U2 and John Paul II, Madonna went on a world tour in 1987. When she reached Italy, the Vatican urged Italians to boycott the show.) Or the Catholic fury unleashed by her schlock-shock “Like a Prayer” video and its scene of the singer doing something tantalizingly naughty involving a statue of a Black saint (and its maybe avatar?), which cost her a contract with Pepsi-Cola and instigated a boycott of the company.
Across cultural fields in the 1970s and ’80s, Elie sees the emergence of a certain rearticulation of spiritually charged elements, the “crypto-religious,” a term he uses to describe “work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief. It’s work that raises the question of what the person who made it believes, so that the question of what it means to believe is crucial to the work’s effect: as you see it, hear it, read it, listen to it, you wind up reflecting on your own beliefs.” Borrowed from Czesław Miłosz’s late-1950s correspondence with Thomas Merton (“I have always been crypto-religious and in a conflict with the political aspect of Polish Catholicism”), the phrase recalls the furtive practices of the crypt-bound early Christian church but is capacious (and ambiguous) enough to accommodate any number of pop and art-world phenomena—in Elie’s commodious study, from Peter Hujar’s photos of actual Sicilian crypts to Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire to Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
This survey can at times be as exhausting as it is exhaustive, but it is powerful in illuminating the spirit of the second half of Miłosz’s statement—the conflict expressed by the crypto-religious against entrenched church values—in the context of the AIDS crisis and the Catholic hierarchy’s antagonism not just to gay Catholics but to the distribution and use of condoms. ACT-UP’s orchestrated campaign of die-ins, culminating in the December 1989 Stop the Church action to disrupt the Mass service led by Cardinal John O’Connor at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, was the most visible challenge to what Andrew Sullivan at the time called the Vatican’s “creeping obsession with sex.” The Catholic hierarchy could be reliably outraged by matters of the flesh. In the case of The Last Temptation of Christ, it was a fantasy sex scene involving Jesus (Willem Dafoe) and Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey)—a far more tangible offense to moviegoers remains Harvey Keitel’s performance as Judas—that triggered the United States Catholic Conference, which denounced the film as “morally objectionable.” Scorsese’s erstwhile homage to Pasolini was an ecumenically equal-opportunity target—Jerry Falwell called it “Hollywood’s darkest hour,” and protestors projected a caricature of MCA executive Lew Wasserman nailing Jesus to the cross onto a Jewish temple on Wilshire Boulevard in LA. But what most wounded Scorsese were the calls for boycotts by Catholic leaders, like Cardinal Bernard Law in Boston, who hadn’t even previewed the film.
“Crypto-religious art will be decried as not cryptic enough—as too explicit,” Elie writes. It certainly wasn’t cryptic enough in Andres Serrano’s icons photographed through the mediums of various body fluids (breast milk, blood, urine, semen), which had been shown extensively before the furor over Piss Christ erupted; so too was the case with Robert Mapplethorpe’s Catholic Boy S-M self-portraits. The campaign against Mapplethorpe led the Corcoran to cancel the posthumous touring survey of his work out of fear the NEA would be stripped of its funds. On the Senate floor, Alfonse D’Amato ripped apart a catalog featuring an image of Piss Christ. (Serrano read about Senator D’Amato’s “counter-desecration” in Page Six.) The war on catalogs would continue: later, Congress voted against rescinding NEA funding of the AIDS-related Artists Space show Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, curated by Nan Goldin, provided that no federal funds went to paying for the catalog and its incendiary essay by David Wojnarowicz. (The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation picked up the tab.)
Near the end, The Last Supper raises the specter of a more global clash of religion and art—the death sentence issued in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie (to which, Elie notes, Cardinal O’Connor, from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s, cowardly called The Satanic Verses “insulting and insensitive to the Moslem faith” and urged Catholics to use their “mature” judgment to recognize that the novel was an offense to Islam). A new age was afoot, but the roots of the late-’80s culture wars had been established. It’s bracing to recall that not so long ago, the right-wing war against the NEA seemed a dusty relic of that decade. The NEA and the NEH have been gutted, and, as I write this, the presidential spokesperson has just stated that the firing of the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, was due to her “putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” We live in a different era of crypto, but Elie’s ambitious book reminds us that the poisonous roots of the war on culture may run much deeper than we could ever have imagined.
Eric Banks is the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at the NYPL. He is the former president of the National Book Critics Circle. He was previously editor-in-chief of Bookforum and a senior editor at Artforum.