Oh, My Sweet Jesus…

A New York gallery’s inclusion of a sculpture by Canadian-born artist Cosimo Cavallaro has riled a Catholic group in the United States (link to BBC story).

The sculpture, entitled “My Sweet Lord,” is of a naked and crucified Jesus Christ.

But it is not the nudity that has got the Catholic League all worked up (Christ is usually depicted with a loincloth). Nor is it the timing of the piece’s exposition, so close to Easter where Christians around the world mark the death of Jesus and his resurrection. It is the material that Cavallaro chose to use.

The sculpture is made entirely out of chocolate.

I’m never quite sure why religious groups get all worked up over religious subjects being portrayed in non-traditional ways: In 1975, Edwina Sandys created a bronze sculpture entitled “Christa” which portrays Christ on the cross as a woman. Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” which won an award sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, is a photograph of a crucifix under an amalgam of urine and cow’s blood. And there was much controversy over the “Sensation” exhibit back in 1999 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art where the piece “Holy Virgin Mary,” a rendering of Mary as a black woman splattered with real elephant dung, was displayed.














If I was to try my inexperienced hand at deconstructing Cavallaro’s symbolic intentions, I might say that he was making a comment on the commodification of Christian holidays: most of us secularists associate Easter with chocolate eggs and the Easter Bunny, not death and resurrection. Cavallaro portrays the preeminent figure in Christianity with the medium that has supplanted all others as the substance with which Easter symbols are made. And I would venture to make the assertion that many Christian groups would agree with his thesis, if they could actually make sense of my last sentence there.

How do you think the Catholic League would react to a performance art piece where people broke off bits of the chocolate Jesus, thus actually eating the body of Christ in a Alterna-Eucharist?!