A Controversy Creates Undeserved Hype

Yes, it’s true. There is a picture hanging in the Brooklyn Museum of Art that shows a naked black woman, arms outstretched, posing as Jesus. In case you haven’t heard, Renee Cox’s photograph, “Yo Mama’s Last Supper,” is part of an exhibition titled “Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers,” which has outraged the Catholic League and drawn threats from Mayor Rudy Giuliani to establish decency requirements for New York museums.

There’s a loopy disjunction between the uproar, which has little to do with art, and the exhibition, which hardly merits the headlines. The mayor’s problem is not with Cox’s photo but with her blunt polemic and feckless comments about the history of Catholicism in America. His outrage has turned a minor show into a major news story. When the din dies down and the posturing is played out, what remains will be a stolid, serviceable exhibition that, without the jockeying of egos and the meddling of the media, would have remained on the periphery of public consciousness.

Not that there isn’t some very good work in it, especially Gerald Cyrus’ funny and casual glimpses of middle-class black life. His candid meal scene, “Untitled (Los Angeles)” (1992), is the functional opposite of Cox’s elaborately staged banquet. Here the attention of the participants is squarely on the food, although the unholy spirit of Captain Kangaroo beams from the luminous TV set in the background. At the table, loaded plates are handed around and the family patriarch looks on with his tongue poking appreciatively and unmajestically through his lips.

A more moving example of full frontal nude self-portraiture occurs in Mfon Essien’s “The Amazon’s New Clothes No. 1” (1999). Essien died of breast cancer at age 35 just days before the exhibit opened Feb. 16, and the picture of her--seated, knees modestly together, head cropped from the frame--flaunts her mastectomy and her musculature but maintains her anonymity.

Cox’s self-glorifying efforts, though, have sucked attention away from the other worthy artists in the show, elevating “Yo Mama’s Last Supper,” her provocative but shallow work, into a scandal. After 30 years of feminism, Cox is hardly radical in pointing out the patriarchy in religion by flipping traditional images. And what’s unseemly about “Yo Mama” isn’t the insertion of a naked black woman into the position of Christ; it’s the monumental vanity of the artist herself. Not that there aren’t precedents for such grandiosity. Albrecht Durer painted himself in the guise of God, and the photographer F. Holland Day photographed his own emaciated body dangling from a cross.

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The crux of the difference between Cox and her precursors is that her Messiah is a naked woman--a black one at that. Whatever the visual merit of her work, she has achieved the agitator’s aim--to expose pockets of racism and sexism that ought to have disappeared long ago. So perhaps, however clumsily proffered, her political statement was warranted after all.

Still, there is something unfair about a tribute to 94 contemporary photographers being reduced to The Renee Cox Show. For that we have to thank the New York Daily News, whose reporters rushed to City Hall, a self-righteous mayor and the heat-seeking artist herself. The newspaper baited Giuliani with evidence of moral degeneracy.

The mayor couldn’t resist, promising to waste piles of taxpayer dollars on a dead-end decency commission and inevitable court battles. Meanwhile, Cox furthered her own cause by throwing out some irresponsible and incendiary remarks about Catholicism and slavery.

For its part, the Brooklyn Museum, which might have been cowed by its last run-in with the mayor over the 1999 “Sensation” show, is chagrined to find itself once again cast as an inflammatory institution. Still, the museum can surely be forgiven for failing to anticipate this flap. It’s hard to know what will offend these days. Cox’s ham-handed commentary was shown in a 17th century church at the 1999 Venice Biennale and in 1996 at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Conn., where it didn’t incite anyone.

Only in New York, it seems, is propriety so fragile. It was here in the erstwhile capital of sin and now center of sanctimony that “Sensation” brought notoriety to Chris Offili, who enhanced his image of a black Virgin Mary with dried elephant dung. Offili had raised few hackles in his native Britain, where the show originated. But here, his intricate and decorative picture accrued the unanticipated power to shock. New Yorkers’ tender sensibilities are only selectively irritated, though. At the same moment that the city’s paladins of decency were roused over Offili’s Virgin, a giant photo called “Wrecked” by the British female artist Sam Taylor Wood hung a few walls away. At its center was a topless white woman, arms outstretched in the guise of--yes, Jesus. Meanwhile, across the East River at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “American Century” show, Andres Serrano’s infamous 1987 “Piss Christ” managed not to draw the mayor’s fire, even though it had riled Congress’ GOP puritans a decade before. The Brooklyn Museum can draw solace from observing how quickly outrage ages.

In any case, “Committed to the Image” is no “Sensation.” No suggestive marketing fanfare accompanied this dutiful ode to contemporary black photographers--none of the warnings about shock, upset or vomiting that accompanied the earlier show. And probably no one would have even noticed Cox if she hadn’t cooperated with the mayor and the media in causing a stupid furor.