![[IMAGE] Cox's Last Supper](supper_smblur.jpg)
Renée Cox's Yo Mama's Last Supper is made up of five photographs. A naked, standing Cox, arms outstretched, fills the center panel.
|
These five large color photographs show a naked black woman (the artist's self-portrait), with her arms raised to heaven, with the twelve disciples, all black, seated behind a long table. The shock is not that they are black, or that Christ is naked and a woman; the shock, for me, is that each face is vivid and intense. Each disciple has a weight and presence that is disturbing. The shock is that this simple, old form -- figures seated at a table -- based on one of the most famous, most copied paintings in western art, can still reach out and grab us.
It is a tribute to Renée Cox's Yo Mama's Last Supper that Mayor Giuliani is so upset by it that, once again, he must go to the newspapers, condemn the museum that shows the work, and call for a "decency commission" to monitor the morals of that particular institution, the Brooklyn Museum of Art. What is sad is the loss of a "teachable moment," a chance to focus on the function of art in society. The role of the artist is not necessarily, not always, to reassure us, to allow us to cling to our old ways of thinking, but to confront us, to force us to make room for the new.
This has been called the Mithridatic function of art. The ancient king, Mithridates, took a little bit of poison every day, to immunize himself from genuine attempts at assassination. In the same way, we can face death, pain, loss of family and friends, cruelty, and desecration, all of what life offers, in works of art every day, we get used to these realities in the relatively safe arena of the painting or the play, so that we are strengthened and made more able to face the real thing when it occurs.
I don't know what upsets the Mayor most about Cox's work -- the fact that the figures are black, or that Christ is a woman, and nude. Frankly, I suspect it is something he is hardly aware of: the artist has taken an old and beloved form, Leonardo's Last Supper, something that is Art, with a capital A, solid and safe, and has made us look at it with fresh eyes. She has taken a cliché and made it real again. If this can happen with Leonardo, what's next?
So the Mayor's pain and outrage, whether real or simulated, could be taken as a sign of growth, as a door in his mind being wedged open just a little. In a way, the best thing about all this is that there is any controversy at all. Don Marquis once said that publishing a poem in this country is like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo; at least, Renée Cox is getting an echo. It's a pity that it always seems to happen in the context of screaming headlines, but still, it's a reminder that art matters.
Frank Robinson is the director of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.
Note: Ms. Cox, a 1979 graduate of Syracuse University, has spoken at the Johnson Museum; one print of her Yo Mama's Last Supper was purchased by the Museum for its permanent collection and has been shown several times there, without protest.