CHAPTER THREE: BLASPHEMING THE GODS OF MODERNITY

FROM S. BRENT PLATE,

BLASPHEMY: ART THAT OFFENDS.

LONDON: BLACK DOG PRESS, 1996.

I think that there is an interesting subject of investigation, for the

student of traditions, in the history of Blasphemy, and the

anomalous position of that term in the modern world. It is a curious

survival in a society which has for the most part ceased to be

capable of exercising that activity or of recognizing it.

-TS Eliot, After Strange Gods

In 1627, Dutch religious and political authorities physically tortured the painter Johannes

Torrentius for creating blasphemous images – mostly pornographic renderings of

mythological subjects. They then condemned him to 20 years imprisonment and publicly

burned many of his paintings. In 1989, US Senator Jesse Helms decried Andres

Serrano's Piss Christ – a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine – calling it

'blasphemy and insensitivity toward the religious community'. In a reversal of Torrentius'

artistic fate, Helms' accusations, backed up by Senator Alphonse D'Amato's tearing up a

copy of Serrano's picture, helped raise Serrano's status as a photographer, prompting

both international visibility and an increase in sales of his work. Meanwhile, the

Senators' accusations also helped reduce NEA funding to artists. These two historical

incidents – and the centuries, differences, and similarities between them – point towards

several of the issues raised in this concluding chapter concerning blasphemy in the

modern age. Charges of, and punishment for, blasphemy over the centuries have

changed; religious and political authorities are often intertwined and confused; despite

all the advances of secularism in modern society, artworks are still condemned as

blasphemous; and, finally, we run into a confrontation between blasphemy and one of

modernity's most sacred values: freedom of expression.

Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987

Speaking in the 1930s, modernist poet and essayist TS Eliot bemoaned a society

with nothing left to blaspheme against (i.e. nothing more held sacred): 'I am reproaching

a world in which blasphemy is impossible'i. Clearly, he was looking in the wrong

direction. We have seen plenty of examples in which blasphemy has continued to be an

issue among religious revivalists seeking to purge society from its evil images and

‘return’ to a purified olden time. Yet, there is another way in which Eliot was looking in
the wrong direction: blasphemy has also moved from the realm of traditional religion into

modern, secular society and the targets of blasphemy have been redirected.

Around the same time Torrentius was having his works of art burned in Holland,

the English philosopher Francis Bacon was championing the empirical sciences. Bacon

put great value in education, coining the aphorism 'knowledge is power', and was

instrumental in ushering in a modern, scientific worldview, a mode of existence that

became increasingly sceptical toward the older religious outlooks, including the power of

representational images. Along with these newfound sacred values came a new

potential for profanity, even claiming that the Roman statesman Cato 'was well punished

for his blasphemy against learning'ii. And in the nineteenth century, the writer Philip G

Hamerton continued the advocacy for an intellectual life, though he was writing after the

Enlightenment, had seen the limits of rationality alone, and was hence influenced by a

Romantic streak. He writes on the value of friendship and suggests that a purely

intellectual relationship will not last long but needs a good dose of 'feeling'. If one wants

solely intellectual relations, then one should 'arrange a succession of friendships'. He

stops himself with this arrangement and surmises that 'This doctrine sounds like

blasphemy against friendship; but it is not intended to apply to the sacred friendship of

the heart[.]'iii. In the modern age, newer liberal values begin to complement the older

religiously-based ones. The Rational and Romantic worldviews both hold up their own

sense of the sacred, just as the postmodern age has continued with its fair share of

sacred values, rituals, symbols, and myths.

As we continue to sift through the detritus left over from modernity, there remain

at least two ways in which blasphemy continues to be a notable topic into the twenty-

first century's postmodern challenges and promises (postmodernity here being

understood as an extension of modernity, a condition that arises at the tail end of

modernity's exhaustion, and not something wholly separable). The first stems from

modernity's current and future orientation: it has believed in and is mainly founded upon

progress. The term ‘modern’ itself stems from the Latin modo, meaning ‘just now’, and

has taken on the connotation of being antithetical to that which is ‘ancient’ or has gone

on before.iv The advances in technology, philosophy, and the arts that ushered in the

modern age have made for a way of thinking and being that tends to denigrate the past.

In the midst of this, conservative religious revival groups (fundamentalists and others)

have reasserted claims to traditional lines between the sacred and the profane, even if

that ‘tradition’ has had to be reinvented. The simple fact is that blasphemous images,

and accusations thereof, have not disappeared in recent times. Thus, the first section

below briefly discusses the use of blasphemy in the midst of debates between

modernists and traditionalists around the role of science.

The final sections of this chapter are then devoted to a second, more subtle way

in which blasphemy continues to surface in the modern age. Modern liberal societies

redefine rather than banish the sacred, in spite of their best wishes. Many of these

redefinitions spring from the appearance of the nation-state and its ideological enforcer,

nationalism, as a major factor in the social construction of the world. Monarchs may no

longer hold power over people as they once did (except as celebrities) as God's
spokespeople on earth, but nationalism emerges in the modern age as its own religious

system. As sociologist Josep Llobera suggests, 'nationalism has become a religion – a

secular religion where god is the nation'v. The sacred status of the nation is bolstered by

foundational myths (e.g. the ‘founders of the country’), rituals (annual national holidays,

World Cup football), symbols (most importantly for this chapter: flags), and by its own

sets of proper, ethical behavior (usually composed as variations on ‘human rights’). The

sections below will look at the ways Socialist Realist artwork in the Soviet Union

contributed to a national ideology, as well as the dissident work of other artists

challenging these ideological creations. Then, turning to the United States, we will look

towards the national symbolic significance of the flag and the debates surrounding its

display. In parallel with the Soviet dissident artists, a number of US artists have

challenged the religious aura that enfolds the flag today. Finally, I conclude with some

comments on the ways in which freedom of expression is held up as a sacred value in

modern Western societies and how this comes into conflict with blasphemy.

Modernity's Repression

Modernity can roughly be understood as a post-medieval social movement that reached

its full expression in the mid-nineteenth century. It is, by and large, a European invention

that has been exported to a number of other regions – most prominently, North America

– and the term ‘developing nation’ is synonymous with that of ‘modernising nation’.

Modernity came about through several interlocking social, political, technological, and
philosophical developments, including: the Enlightenment and its triumphing of scientific

worldviews, the Industrial Revolution, and the European colonisation of much of the

world. With so many natural and intellectual resources at the fingertips of the colonial

powers, with so many new wonders of the world being produced by human sovereignty,

it became difficult to remain attached to a past in which God seemed to ordain

governmental structures, decide who fell ill with the plague, or speak to people in their

dreams. Science can now answer to many of these.

Yet, modernity can only move toward the future by repressing the past, at least in

part, and we all know what happens then: the repressed eventually returns. In this case,

modernity's progressive orientation simultaneously unearthed its other: religious revival

movements that sought their identity in a perceived past in which God still controlled the

events of the world. Amongst a plethora of examples, we see this in the Jewish

Orthodox response to the modernising tendencies of the nineteenth century Reform

movement; in Christianity in the emergence of Evangelicalism and its more radical

nineteenth century offshoot, fundamentalism; and in Islam with groups like the Wahhabi

or Salafi that gained momentum at the same time as the Middle East was being re-

organised by European colonisers. Each of these conservative, tradition-oriented

groups grew out of specific modern environments in which the ‘old ways’ were under

threat, in one way or other. As a result, these religious revivalists had to reinvent the

past, to re-mythologise their origins and to claim that the advances of science,

technology, and philosophy, not to mention liberal theology and consumer capitalism,

were headed in the wrong direction.

A number of art movements arose from the modern-traditional debate that

erupted in Western societies in the nineteenth century, many of them seeming to

advocate ‘shock for shock's sake’, or at least doing all they could to leave the past

behind. The writer Anthony Julius renames modern art as the 'transgressive period', in

which the making of transgressive art 'itself contributed to the definition of the project of

art-making'vi. Manet stands at the origins of the period, and in varying ways one can

include Kandinsky and Malevich's early experiments in non-figural painting – which

were deeply tied to a spiritual optimism based on progressive theosophical views of

religion – to the Dadaists and Surrealists turning the perceived world upside-down, and

back to the abstract figuration of the likes of Edvard Munch and later Francis Bacon.

Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944

Certainly, with such figures in the background, blasphemy has become an easy thing to

achieve in the contemporary art world, whether the artists intend to be blasphemous or

not. And so Gilbert and George put on a show called SonofaGod Pictures with one

image called Was Jesus Heterosexual? and displaying the text: 'Jesus Says Forgive
Yourself. God Loves Fucking! Enjoy!' The exhibition prompted Conservative Minister of

Parliament Ann Widdecombe to label the pictures 'blasphemous in the extreme'.

(Nonetheless, the artists did not consider their own work to be blasphemous and

refused to have any images reproduced in this book.) Or, utilising the multimedia

capabilities of the internet, the webmasters at www.christonthecrapper.com make it

possible to send a 'blasphemy card' that encourages the sender to choose a caption of

adolescent humor to accompany images appropriated from children's bibles and other

devotional printed matter, and send them to friends.

While webmasters and artists like Gilbert and George find easy targets among

institutional religion, other recent artworks have continued in a transgressive mode while

simultaneously taking a more critical stance on the modern-traditional divide. Some of

these works remain quite serious even when appearing tongue-in-cheek, or simply

aimed at to shock. Most affirm a progressive view of the world in which the past is

indeed left behind and we have nowhere to go but the future, though not at all costs.

Many issues in the debates over modernity have been bolstered by a scientific

view of the world, beginning with empirical philosophers like Bacon, John Locke, David

Hume, and on into the writings of Charles Darwin. The debate between science and

religion (from evolution vs. ‘intelligent design’ to euthanasia and genetic engineering)

continues to occupy a good deal of political and religious energy into the twenty-first

century, and we find artists toying with this debate in their work. To take a couple of

examples: contemporary British artists Damien Hirst and Jake and Dinos Chapman

seem to work against traditional Western religious outlooks in their art and have often
been deemed 'shock artists'. Yet, when exploring more closely their curiously repellent

installations on the human/animal body in relation to death and genetic engineering, we

find a deeper exploration of the convergence of the scientific and the religious. Of note

are Hirst's works such as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone

Living (i.e., the 'shark in a tank' from 1991) and Away from the Flock (the 'sheep in a

tank' from 1994; a piece vandalised when someone poured black ink into the tank).

Damien Hirst, Away from the Flock, 1994

On one level, they are just dead animals in tanks of formaldehyde, but what vexes

viewers is precisely a confrontation with death, something that modernity notoriously

keeps out of sight. Hirst ultimately offers a meditation on death 'in the mind of someone

living' in ways deeply congruent with the traditional contemplative Christian imagery of

vanitas still life paintings, passion plays, and Crucifixion images. In a different vein, Jake
and Dinos Chapman work uncomfortably within a scientific worldview and show the

limits of modern science. The disturbing Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic de-

subliminated libidinal model (enlarged x 1000), and their apocalyptic sculpture Hell,

could both be said to be incisive critiques of modernity: the first by pointing toward a

horrific future of genetic engineering, the second by allegorising the end of modernity,

the Holocaust.

I note these works especially because they were created around the same time

that Dolly the Scottish sheep was cloned in 1996, causing a great uproar. The

enterprise of cloning was itself called the 'ultimate blasphemy' by religious (especially

conservative Christian) and other groups.vii And an op-ed piece in Montreal's Gazette

borrowed the language as it began by discussing an international treaty that outlawed

human cloning, suggesting how 'we may desperately want that ban to hold the line

against what seems like a blasphemy against the spirit and the flesh'viii. Here again,

blasphemy is about transgression, about stepping over a line that some believe is the

province of God. In the rhetoric of ‘intelligent design’, scientific work can transgress the

sacred in ways oddly parallel to the Islamic Hadith that forbids image making because

this would be a challenge to God's sole creative activities. Biology then becomes a kind

of graven image that mimics the natural world. While no Christian zealots, Hirst and the

Chapman brothers offer a way back into the very design of the animal makeup itself, in

an almost reverent and scientific way, even when portrayed in apocalyptic fashion. The

final twist in this story is that Dolly died prematurely, in 2003, and her body was

preserved and put on display in the National Museum of Scotland, looking very much
like Hirst's Away from the Flock. The Dolly display is particularly targeted toward

children who can learn about genetic engineering through interactive tools.

Dolly the Sheep in the National Museum of Scotland.

Throughout this book, we have already seen many examples of the ways in

which contemporary conservative religious groups brandish the terms ‘blasphemy’ and

‘sacrilege’, and lash out in iconoclastic ways. There is no space for a comprehensive

overview here, but one final development in the twentieth century is worth mentioning:

the rise of film and television have offered image-makers brand new ways of challenging

the accepted social and religious norms, and new ways for people to claim to be

offended. The development of new media is never simply about putting the old content

into a new format; rather, the media itself can be the message, as Marshall McLuhan

suggested, stirring up new passions and leading to newer levels of offense. A short list

of films that have provoked the ire of religious conservatives include the already

mentioned Submission by van Gogh, The Miracle by Rossellini, and Life of Brian by
Monty Python. There is a much longer list that includes Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary,

Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Gospel According to

Saint Matthew, Kevin Smith's Dogma, and, more recently, The Da Vinci Code (which

has even been banned in Islamic countries since Muslim's have a high regard for Jesus

Christ). Each of these prompted conservative religious groups to rise up and condemn

the seeming profanations on screen.

Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ

Like its precursors, caricature and cartoons, animation is also a shrewd medium

that offers a kind of distance through its drawn or digitised images. Through that

distance, animation can actually play with the sacred-profane division head-on.

Speaking of caricature, and implying how the Danish cartoons of Muhammad were quite

poor, comic artist Art Spiegelman suggests that 'Caricature is by definition a charged or
loaded image; its wit lies in the visual concision of using a few deft strokes to make its

point'ix. (The problem with the Danish cartoons from a technical stance is that most of

them had no point.) A little abstract distance, and the lines between the sacred and

profane can become blurry. Sacrilegious cartoons are not the ire strictly of Islamists

either, as many animated television comedies display. Today, shows like South Park,

The Simpsons, and the puppetry of Spitting Image have all offered hilarious strikes on

religious traditions in recent years, prompting plenty of outrage by from religious

leaders. This will, no doubt, continue.

Blasphemous Images and Nationalism

On US Independence Day, 2006, the World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church in

Memphis, Tennessee unveiled the Statue of Liberation Through Christ, a rendition of

the Statue of Liberty except the hand-held torch was replaced by a cross, and a pair of

tablets (conjuring images of the Ten Commandments) are cradled in her other arm (the

‘tablets’ simply bear the inscription 'The Law of Liberty, James 1.25').
Statue of Liberation Through Christ, Memphis, TN

The 72 foot (22 metre) statue was the inspiration of the African-American mega-

church's pastor, Apostle Alton R Williams, who wrote an accompanying pamphlet, 'The

Meaning of the Statue of Liberation Through Christ: Reconnecting Patriotism With

Christianity' Mr Williams was concerned about a number of current problems in the

United States, such as legalised abortion, a lack of prayer in schools, as well as

manifestations of New Age, Wicca, secularism and humanism. The statue was to serve

as a symbolic reminder of the links between US nationalism and Christianity. Hundreds

of people turned out for the unveiling (the church boasts a membership of 12,000)

though many others living and working nearby were not so inspired and described the

merging of Christianity and the Statue of Liberty in such a way as 'ridiculous'x.

While contemporary US culture may be experiencing some odd manifestations of

it, the fact is: nations and religions have never been far apart. The corollary is that to
blaspheme against one is also often to blaspheme against the other. At the point in the

narrative of the Hebrew scriptures when the Ten Commandments are unveiled, we read

the injunction, 'You must not revile God, nor curse a chief of your own people' (Exodus

22.27), and the Psalms suggest 'Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord' (33.12).

Much later, speaking of blasphemy law in 1676, England's Lord Chief Justice Hale

declared, 'Christianity is parcel of the laws of England … therefore to reproach the

Christian religion is to speak in subversion of the law'xi. Religiously oriented blasphemy

is wrong because it harms secular social stability.

The founders of the United States tried to keep its governance separate from

religious moorings. Built into its Constitution is the clause, 'Congress shall make no law

respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof … ' a

phrase from the First Amendment that is usually interpreted as 'separation of church

and state' (though that phrasing is a reinterpretation of the original). The United States

prides itself on such a radical separation, and yet it is precisely this Constitutional

language that has been repeatedly challenged for over two centuries now. The example

of the Memphis mega-church's Statue of Liberation through Christ begins to suggest

that there are a number of conservative, especially Protestant, churches working in a

revivalist mode, pointing back to some mythical foundation of the country that murkily

fuses with religious foundations. Before going further with the United States, however,

let us turn to another rendition of nationalism as religion.

If the United States has worked to separate religion and government, the

establishment of the Soviet Union worked even harder. Even so, Anatoli Lunacharsky, a
key player in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, would exclaim a decade previously that

'Scientific socialism is the most religious of all religions'xii. And intriguingly, an important

collection of essays from 1949 written by intellectuals around the Western world on the

problems of Soviet communism is entitled The God that Failed. In the midst of a state-

sponsored atheistic nationalism promoted by the Soviet Union, there is obviously

something ironic in discussing the ideologies of the nation in terms of God and religion.

Nowhere is the religiosity of the Soviet system better noted – and critically

commented upon – than in the art movement called 'Sots Art' begun in the 1970s. The

artistic duo Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid coined the phrase and meant it as a kind of

ironic response to Socialist Realism, shot through with the styles of the US-based Pop

Art (‘sots’ being the first syllable of ‘social’ in Russian: Sotsialisticheskiy). 'Irony is the

faithful companion of unbelief and doubt; it vanishes as soon as there appears a faith

that does not tolerate sacrilege,' writes Abram Tertz (the pseudonym of Soviet dissident,

Andrei Siniavsky).xiii Socialist Realism was this faith that did not tolerate sacrilege, as it

symbolically propped up the religious system of Soviet Communism. It was a kind of

hyper-idealism of larger than life proportions: straightforward, leaving little space for

second-guessing, and certainly no room for irony. Especially championed by Josef

Stalin's regime (Stalin himself actually had little interest in art), its aim was, in the words

of Andrey Zhdanov, one of Stalin's cultural spokesmen, 'to depict reality in its

revolutionary development'.xiv Yet even with its supposedly progressive interests,

Socialist Realism borrowed on Russia's painterly past, and lighted on the rich tradition of

Christian Orthodox icons as a way to praise the worker and Soviet leader as hero/saint.
J Hoberman paraphrases this mode, suggesting, 'The saint is axiomatic in Socialist

Realism; the figure of the so-called positive hero or heroine is the brave, steadfast,

selfless, and allegorical personification of Bolshevik ideals, the embodiment of history's

"'forward" trajectory"'xv. During Stalin's reign, even more than Lenin's before him, the

leader's own visage became a national icon, postered ubiquitously, with giant statues in

public spaces to remind the workers how they got there and what they should aspire to;

a desire not unlike the functions of the rituals and symbols of religions.

Komar and Melamid worked alongside – even if underground – Eric Bulatov,

Alexander Kosolapov, and Leonid Sokov, as Socialist Realism operated above the

surface, in the government-sanctioned art spaces. In the shadow of Socialist Realism,

Marc Chagall, who had initially been appointed Commissar of Fine Arts in Vitebsk 1918,

was removed from his post, and by 1922 was in exile. Throughout Soviet rule, several of

Chagall's works were destroyed or censored, just as they were in Nazi Germany. Fellow

artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich were particularly rough on Chagall,

though their work, too, would eventually cease to fare well in the Socialist Realist-

dominated artistic culture of Soviet Russia.

In response to the stifling mode of this official art, the work of so-called 'non-

conformist' artists (including the Sots artists) wedged irony into the literalness of

Socialist Realism, attempting to prove how nothing really is as it seems. It was precisely

the sacred status of Soviet nationalist ideologies ('that do not tolerate sacrilege') that

made it possible for artists to work against the system, and produce what became

another instance of blasphemy as a form of resistance. The works of these 'non-

conformist' artists did not go unchecked by Soviet authorities and a number of well-

noted exhibitions were shut down. Perhaps the most famous was the Bulldozer

Exhibition in 1974, which 'was held on a deserted street in Moscow for as long as it took

the police to hose down, bulldoze, and destroy as many works as possible'xvi. Alongside

this, artists from the 1950s–1980s were regularly suppressed, had their jobs taken

away, were sent to labour camps, or made to leave their country.

Komar and Melamid, Origins of Socialist Realism

Among the various works of Sots Art, Komar and Melamid's Origins of Socialist

Realism plays on the iconic – or, depending on your point of view, idolatrous – status of

Stalin, while mocking the ‘spiritual’ processes of idol-making: the muse traces a literal

silhouette of Stalin's profile, thereby proffering the ‘origins’ of Socialist Realism. As with
much of Sots Art, 'In its ironic over-eagerness, it undermines what it purportedly

celebrates'xvii. Meanwhile, Bulatov paints photorealistic images of landscapes, and then

overlays them with Soviet political slogans, thus taking two ‘realistic’ images and

juxtaposing them to create an ambiguous, highly-charged meaning – a method not

unlike that used by the great Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s: Eisenstein, Vertov, and

Kuleshov. Within the works of Bulatov, Komar and Melamid, the so-called ‘reality’ of

Socialist Realism is deconstructed. As Bulatov says, art is 'a rebellion of man against

the everyday reality of life … A picture interests me as some kind of system, not

hermetically sealed, but opening into the space of my everyday existence'xviii. The works

of the non-conformists take literalist (even ‘fundamentalist’) images to their extremes,

showing the strange situations of excessive glorification of an ideological system that

poses as reality.

Alas, as the Soviet Union has disbanded, we come to yet more ironies in the

struggle for freedom of expression. The Sots artists were sometimes called 'dissident

artists', along with one of the most famous Soviet dissidents, the physicist Andrei

Sakharov, who had been sent into exile for his critical views of the Soviet Union. When

the Communists were ousted from power, a new wave of artistic expression became

possible, and tolerance levels even allowed for a new museum to be named after

Sakharov. The Andrei Sakharov Museum was opened in 1996 as something of a

memorial to the victims of the repressive Soviet regime, as its permanent exhibits

include a history of repression in the Soviet Union. In 2003, the museum mounted an

exhibition called Caution! Religion! Several of the artists adopted a Sots Art style, but
instead of being directed toward Socialist Realism, they reapplied their irony to the two

most imposing, social-constraining voices in post-Soviet Russian life: Orthodox

Christianity and capitalism. As Komar and Melamid compared the production of

consumer goods in the United States with the production of ideology in the Soviet

Union, artists like Alexander Kosolapov followed through in the post-Soviet age,

juxtaposing the icons of Soviet Communism with the icons of consumer capitalism, the

McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and Marlboro cigarettes that came rushing into Moscow with

the fall of Communism. For Kosolapov, Lenin is a hero in his subconscious, just as the

Marlboro man represents for him the 'last American hero'xix. And his work, My Blood,

situates the offerings of Coca-Cola alongside the Eucharistic offerings of the Christian

church.

Alexandar Kosolapov, This is My Blood, 2001

As if attempting a bad parody of the former Soviet system, government

authorities, prompted by the Orthodox church, shut down the Caution! Religion! exhibit

after only four days, and members of a local Orthodox church vandalised many of the
artworks. More importantly, charges of blasphemy were eventually carried out brought

by a Moscow court against the director of the museum and curator of the show, Yuri

Samodurov and Ludmila Vasilovskaia. The prosecutors worked to have them each

imprisoned for a few years, but the courts ultimately decided on a hefty fine, and it

seems the chances are seem slim that they will be able to work in Moscow's art world

again. None of the individual artists were charged, even though some of their works

were destroyed.

A Nation Wrapped up in a Flag

Nations, like religions, do not develop, reform, and sustain themselves by abstract

doctrine alone. Rather, they construct myths, symbols, and rituals to buttress the

system. With regard to nationalism, one of the strongest symbols is that of the flag. In

the United States in particular, the flag has become what anthropologist Sherry Ortner

labels a 'summarizing symbol' that 'sums up', just as it 'stands in for' the whole system.

Summarising symbols represent for the participants,

in an emotionally powerful and relatively undifferentiated way, what the system

means to them. Among other examples is the flag, particularly that of the United

States: the American flag, for example, for certain Americans, stands for

something called 'the American way', a conglomerate of ideas and feelings

including (theoretically) democracy, free enterprise, hard work, competition,

progress, national superiority, freedom, etc.. And it stands for them all at once. It

does not encourage reflection on the logical relations among these ideas, nor on

the logical consequences of them as they are played out in social actuality, over

time and history. On the contrary, the flag encourages a sort of all-or-nothing

allegiance to the whole package[.]xx

Stemming from the Civil War era, factions within US politics have worked to

enact laws prohibiting desecration of the flag. The current language attempting to get a

constitutional amendment for such a prohibition reads: 'The Congress shall have power

to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States' The Oxford English

Dictionary defines desecrate as: 'To take away its consecrated or sacred character from

(anything); to treat as not sacred or hallowed; to profane' Here, of course, we are

looking at a national symbol, a political entity, that is considered by many to be sacred.

From the late nineteenth-century politicking of Colonel George T Balch and

Charles Kingsbury Miller, to the late twentieth-century congressional debates over

adding a new Constitutional amendment that would make flag desecration a punishable

offence, the US flag has been raised, burned, scorned, prayed to, argued over, and

turned into what can only be called a 'national icon'xxi. Making the religious connotations

even more apparent, in an address in 1898, Miller claimed the flag 'should be kept as

inviolate as was the Holy of Holies in King Solomon's temple'xxii. And in almost every

scholarly book on the subject, authors note the religious nature of adherence to the flag

in the United States.

Artists working in the United States from the 1950s to the present day have, like

their Soviet non-conformist counterparts, challenged the symbolism of a monolithic

national image. Jasper Johns' 'flag' series in the 1950s began, in a subtly postmodern

way, to query the representational status of the image of the flag. Is it still a ‘flag’ if it is

just an oil-on-canvas painting? What if I took my child's red, white, and blue crayons and

drew a flag on a piece of scrap paper: would it be illegal for me to crumple it up and

throw it away?

Issues raised have ranged from the theoretical to the economic, as the US flag

has been pasted, printed, and stamped onto all manner of sellable items. As with the

post-Soviet challenges of free-market capitalism, the United States too is awash in an

admixture of the iconic flag with consumer product icons. There is an extensive US

Federal 'Code' (i.e. not a 'law' and therefore not enforceable by punishment) that lists a

number of guidelines regarding the proper display of the flag. Like anything sacred,

there are proper ways to care for and be in relationship with it. Within the code are

general guidelines such as not flying the flag at night without a light, and that no other

flag should be flown above it. Along with these ritualistic codes of display are others:

'The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever' and

'The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing'. Indeed, akin

to Talmudic proscriptions regarding the life of a Torah scroll, the flag, when no longer

usable, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning. Burning in a

dignified way (though what this means is ambiguous) deconsecrates the material of the

flag, ritualistically carrying it from the realm of the sacred to the realm of the profane.
Burning the flag in an ‘undignified’ way would be mere desecration, an improper

crossing from the sacred to the profane.

To think about this modern, nationalistic confusion of the sacred and the profane,

compare Alan Schechner's juxtapositions between Holocaust icons and consumer items

such as Diet Coke, Alexander Kosolapov's merging of Soviet and Christian icons with

the McDonalds logo, and post-September 11 advertisements by companies that

capitalised on a feverish need to display flags and ended up creating flag-bedecked

underwear, bikinis, key chains, lighters, and every manner of profane, sellable object.

Profane displays of the US Flag

Schechner and Kosolapov were accused of profaning the sanctity of the

Holocaust and the Christian sacrament, respectively, while, in a strange reversal of the

sacred and the profane, companies have attempted to sanctify their goods through the

inclusion of a flag on their products or in their advertisements. Even so, in the wake of

the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, nationalist lines between the sacred and
the profane have been redrawn. A Coca-Cola spokesman acknowledged that

'sensitivities have changed', and an article in the marketing publication American

Demographics stated, 'Coke was caught in the same bind that constricts many of the

advertisers these days, especially those as iconic as the beverage industry leader: how

to touch on Americans' newly awakened patriotism to promote their products, without

seeming to exploit a national crisis'xxiii. Here we find advertising firms tip-toeing around

the border that keeps the sacred what it is in all societies: separate from quotidian life,

full of power, and only capable of being touched through strictly set rituals.

A number of controversial art exhibits have been at the heart of recent debates

regarding the sanctity of the flag. In 1966, in the midst of the Vietnam War, former

Marine Marc Morrel exhibited several flag sculptures in a New York gallery. As a result,

the gallery owner, Stephen Radich, was charged with 'casting contempt' and fined $500,

and the trials and appeals went on for several years. He was eventually vindicated, but

not without the trials going all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1970, as if in response

to Morrel's works and Radich's woes, Faith Ringgold, Jon Hendricks, and Jean Toche

organised The People's Flag Show at Judson Memorial Church in New York City, in

which artists were invited to create works in response to the flag. Over two hundred

works were displayed, a flag was burned, a symposium held, and the three organisers

were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to a fine of $100. Not much in relation to the

floggings and assassinations of other artists convicted of blasphemy, but telling

nonetheless.
Two decades later, when Dread Scott's installation, What is the Proper Way to

Display a U.S. Flag? was exhibited at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989,

more protests and congressional debates began. President George HW Bush called it

'disgraceful', but more importantly it set off a new round of US congressional debate

over a constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration. The work consists of a

photomontage on the wall composed of various images containing flags – some being

burned, some draping over caskets. Below the photo is a register book and a pen on a

shelf. Finally, a US flag is spread on the ground in front of the book and image. The idea

is for the spectators to become participants by signing and making comments in the

book. Of course, to do so, one must seemingly (in physical reality, one could have

leaned over) stand on the flag. Even those who wanted to protest the display were

encouraged to stand on the flag to do so. By laying the flag down on the floor, Scott re-

creates the gallery space, separating sacred space from profane: stepping here is

permissible, there is not. One space is charged with power, the other is not. Connected

with this was an interesting ritual that developed in the display of the flag. As Steven

Dubin relates it,

Veterans developed a protocol which fused artwork and audience into a

symbiotic relationship. Each day they entered the gallery, picked up the flag from

the floor, ceremoniously folded it, and placed it upon the shelf. This was a

remarkable ritualized effort to restore order to a situation where the vets felt a

sacred object had been profaned by breaking the customary rules for its display.
But the attempt to avert pollution was foiled: just as predictably, gallery personnel

or other observers would reposition it on the floor, only for the cycle to repeat

again and again.xxiv

Dred Scott, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? 1988

I shall end this section with Dubin's account of Scott's display, since it touches so

well on the various issues that arise from accusations of blasphemy in the context of

modern national symbols like the flag. The flag and the rituals surrounding its display

are charged with social power that transcends the material realm. These meanings are

then contested, re-appropriated and re-ritualised in an ongoing struggle for social

stability, and sometimes instability.

Freedom of Expression versus Blasphemy?

In earlier times only heretics and blasphemers had dared challenge

traditional claims of authority over expression. The last five centuries have

finally established powerful claims of expression against authority.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr 'Preface' to Censorship: 500 Years of Conflict

At the end of this book, we come back to the point from which we began: the Danish

cartoon controversy. If the controversy revealed what some Muslims find authoritative

and sacred – that is, the Prophet Muhammad and his representation – it also proved

what many Moderns hold authoritative and sacred – freedom of expression. If

Muhammad can be blasphemed against, then, it seems, so can expressive freedom.

Modern human rights charters, from the US Declaration of Independence to the

European Commission on Human Rights, have authorised individuals to partake in the

freedom of expression through speech and religion: to not be coerced or censored by

governments or by other social groups. Paradoxically, the individual human now has

authority, and taking away the freedom of the individual's expression is tantamount to

blaspheming against the religious and political authorities of olden times, in whose place

the individual now stands.

The twentieth-century feminist author Dame Rebecca West argues against

censorship, which prevents the freedom of expression: 'There is a point, and it is

reached much more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of art and
literature becomes an attack on the life of society. This freedom is as necessary to the

mental survival of a society as a satisfactory sanitary system is to its physical

survival'xxv. West's comments, however agreeable to the modern mind, must

nonetheless be noted for their parallel to the relation between the religious and social

dimensions of blasphemy. Recall Justice Hale's comments in the seventeenth century:

'Christianity is parcel of the laws of England … therefore to reproach the Christian

religion is to speak in subversion of the law' An attack on the freedom of artistic

expression, in West's view, is an attack on society itself, just as Justice Hale notes that

blasphemy against Christian religion is also bad for society. Before modernity and its

accompanying liberal, Enlightenment values, blasphemous images were often

censored: burned, scratched, painted over, removed from the public eye. In the modern

world, it paradoxically also becomes blasphemous to censor an image. This does not

mean it used to be one way only, and is now is completely the complete opposite.

Instead, both responses are now in operation, side-by-side, and this constitutes the

current, postmodern dilemma.

Criticising the extremities to which freedom of expression has gone in the

postmodern world, Stanley Fish, law professor and cultural critic, suggests that the

journalists and editors of Jyllands-Posten, and most journalists for that matter, see

themselves as objective reporters, neutral in regard to religion. And yet, Fish continues,

they adhere to 'the religion we call liberalism'. In that religion are basic tenets, the first is

that everything 'is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously'; respect all

manner of belief, just don't take it seriously enough to be bothered, changed, or moved
by it. In other words, everyone should have their own religion, as long as it is a matter of

the heart, of private, internal beliefs. But when these are manifested in the public realm,

in ongoing dialogue, then one must tread lightly, not talking too loudly, since others

might take offence. To the contrary, Fish concludes, 'a firm adherent of a

comprehensive religion doesn't want dialogue about his beliefs; he wants those beliefs

to prevail. Dialogue is not a tenet in his creed, and invoking it is unlikely to do anything

but further persuade him that you have missed the point – as, indeed, you are pledged

to do, so long as liberalism is the name of your faith'xxvi. Historian Arthur Schlesinger

conspires, 'The true believer is always an incipient censor' But Schlesinger, a truer

liberal than Fish, opines by quickly equating such firm belief with 'fanaticism' and

concludes that 'we fortunate ones on this side of the moon' must celebrate those who

'affirm the rights of expression against the tyranny of authority'xxvii. Implicit on both

accounts is the fact that, as long as there are true believers/firm adherents, and as long

as there are authorities, there will always be charges of blasphemy, and activities of

iconoclasm and censorship.

'Imagine there's no heaven', 'nothing to kill or die for'. John Lennon summed up

many liberal ideals. But if there really is nothing worth living or dying for, then where are

we? Is nothing special, sacred, held above others? If there is no authority, then can the

human individual mean anything? If everything is on a level playing field, then we say

good-bye to religion, but also to art, government, and civilisation in general. And if we do

think freedom is worth killing and dying for, as contemporary nations embroiled in wars

on Middle Eastern countries proclaim (even if many of us don't believe it), are we not at
the same place as religious fanaticism? So, is freedom really the end of all that we seek

to ‘spread’ to all nations?

I am not suggesting definitive answers here and, in the end, blasphemy will

continue, because societies will continue to hold certain values, objects, and ideas

sacred (or, hold them as 'self-evident truths'). This book has attempted to demonstrate

some of the myriad ways in which words, ideas, and especially images have broken a

particular society's established boundary between the sacred and the profane, and

challenged people to rethink their supposedly universally-held beliefs and practices. If

'we' imagine that it is 'they' (whoever that may be) who are still hung up on issues of

blasphemy, then perhaps 'we' need to rethink what it is we continue to hold dear and

sacred beyond reproach, even if we must go beyond the traditional religious

authoritative structures.

i
Eliot, TS, After Strange Gods, London: Faber and Faber, 1934, p. 52.
ii
Bacon, Francis, The Advancement of Learning, ed., Arthur Johnston, Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1974, p. 15 [1. II. §9].

iii
Hamerton, Philip G, The Intellectual Life, New York: John B. Alden, 1885, p.p. 376 – 377.
iv
See notes on "Modern" in the American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition, Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 2000.
v
Llobera, Josep R, The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe,

Oxford: Berg, 1994, p. 143. Also key here are the works Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities, rev. ed., London: Verson, 1991, and Eric Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism

Since 1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

vi
Julius, Anthony, Transgressions: The Offences of Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2002, p. 53.
vii
Claiming cloning as blasphemy was quite widespread. One Christian publication called Bible

Class went so far to make a link between Dolly the sheep and the two-horned lamb of Revelation

13, going on to say that cloning was the "ultimate blasphemy". Accessed at:

http://www.ensignmessage.com/archives/bang.html
viii
"Human Cloning Goes Too Far", Op-Ed, Montreal Gazette, 14 January 1998, B2.
ix
Spiegelman, Art, "Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage", Harpers

Magazine, June 2006, p. 45.

x
See Shaila Dewan, "Lady Liberty Trades in Some Trappings", The New York Times, 5 July

2006. Accessed online, 5 July 2006, at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/us/05liberty.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.
xi
Quoted in Levy, Treason Against God, p.p. 313–314.
xii
Quoted in J Hoberman, "Socialist Realism: from Stalin to Sots. (Joseph Stalin)", Artforum

International 32.2, Oct 1993: 72(8). Expanded Academic ASAP, Thomson Gale. Accessed 6

July 2006.
xiii
Quoted in Hoberman, "Socialist Realism".
xiv
Quoted in David Elliott, "Sots Art", Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, accessed 7

July 2006, at: http://www.groveart.com.ezproxy.tcu.edu/

xv
Hoberman, "Socialist Realism".
xvi
"Introduction," Soviet Dissident Artists, Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell, eds., New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995, p. 5.

xvii
Julius, Anthony, Idolizing Pictures, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000, p. 23. Many ideas

for this section come from Julius' book.

xviii
Bulatov, Erik, quoted in the "Introduction", Soviet Dissident Artists, p. 11.
xix
Kosolapov, Alexander, in Soviet Dissident Artists, p. 261 261.
xx
Ortner, Sherry B, "On Key Symbols," in A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, ed.,

Michael Lambek, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, p. 161.

xxi
This is the title of David Morgan's chapter on the topic in The Sacred Gaze, Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2005. He notes the iconic status of the flag alongside the bible

and the cross.

xxii
From a report to the Daughters of the American Revolution Flag Committee, printed in

American Monthly Magazine, April 1899, p. 903; reprinted in Robert Justin Goldstein, ed.,

Desecrating the American Flag, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Presss, 1996, p. 21. Quoted

in Morgan, Sacred Gaze, p. 237.

xxiii
Whelan, David, "Wrapped in the Flag: How Can Brands Respond to America's Resurgent

Patriotism?", American Demographics, December, 2001, p. 37.

xxiv
Dubin, Steven, Arresting Images, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 109. In his chapter in this

book, "Rally 'Round the Flag," Dubin provides a much more detailed and cogent account of the

Dread Scott case than I can provide here.

xxv
West, Rebecca, preface to Bernard Causton and G Gordon Young, Keeping it dark; Or, The

Censor's Handbook, London, Mandrake Press, ltd., 1930, p. 7.

xxvi
Fish, Stanley, "Our Faith in Letting It All Hang Out", The New York Times, Op-Ed, 12

February 2006.
xxvii
Schlesinger, Arthur, "Preface", Censorship: 500 Years of Conflict, New York: Oxford

University Press, 1994, p.p. 7 and 8.