Submission by Adam Rudolphi, TNG contributor

Symbols are tricky, constantly shifting things whose meaning is, by and large, dependent on their context. Take, for example, dogs in art: the famous art historian Ernst Gombrich once wrote that dogs can, at times, be symbols of fidelity and devotion, and, at others, symbols of lust. Gombrich’s aim was to discredit the idea of attributing one fixed meaning to anything that we see represented in a work of art. In light of the current firestorm surrounding Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, it might be sensible to revisit this concept of shifting meaning.

As I understand it, the conflict surrounding this exhibition began when an agent of The Catholic League, a conservative and religiously-affiliated interest group, issued a statement to the National Portrait Gallery expressing its displeasure at an 11-second clip from artist David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly. In this particular instant of celluloid, part of a longer 30 minute video made by the artist to examine and express his feelings of grief at losing his lover and collaborator to AIDS, ants are shown crawling on a crucifix. The Catholic League believes this to be “designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians,” calling it “hate speech.” Leaving aside the fraught issues brought up by Blake Gopnik of The Washington Post regarding the comparison of this tiny instant of film with the static sculptural depictions of Christian figures recently shown to great acclaim by Catholic groups at the National Gallery of Art and the slippery slope of how an organization with “Catholic” in its name seems to speak for all Christian denominations (iconic and aniconic alike), the very question of what’s being shown should be traced back to its roots.

Representations of Christ on the cross begin in Christian iconography sometime in the fifth century. One of the earliest known is a carved panel on a set of wooden doors in an early Christian church in Rome, dated around 422. The careful and curious Christian might ask himself, “Where are the crucified Christs from before, during those intervening five centuries?” The answer he’d be given is that there are none that have come down to us, and likely none were made, because, rather than being viewed as a transcendent symbol of suffering that eventually leads to triumph and hope, the image of Christ on the cross evoked only the ignominious and criminal circumstances of his execution for early Christians, who preferred to symbolize him as a fish rather than a man gruesomely put to death. It was only when Christianity had become firmly entrenched in society and the practice of crucifixion had fallen away, with the dissolution of the Roman Empire, that the symbol of Christ on the cross began, slowly, to come into the visual vocabulary of his followers. Those followers abandoned the old associations of crime, shame, and death in favor of reflections on suffering, salvation, and sacrifice, in order to take the tools of their oppressors and repurpose them for their own ends.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

For me, as a gay Catholic and an aspiring art historian, I find it singularly ironic that there should be this outcry. It smacks of the kind of ignorance of a group’s own history that makes it susceptible to criticism by outsiders who know the tradition better and to the repetition of mistakes that characterized its oppressors rather than its adherents. Worse still, it’s as though Wojnarowicz’s appropriation of the crucifix as part of a meditation on his own grief isn’t okay, which is a direct contradiction of Christianity’s repurposing of the symbol and an odd affirmation that they are the only ones who could engender such a transformation. It’s not as though the crucifix is their intellectual property – they owe the Romans that one. What they lay claim to is its contextual comprehension by Christians as that symbol of hope, triumph, and salvation. Those symbolic meanings are what Catholics like me have been told to cling to in the face of death, especially when it comes before we might expect to those who are young and full of promise.

Maybe it’s the ants that The Catholic League finds objectionable. I suppose they do make the crucifix in A Fire in My Belly seem discarded, fallen to the ground, and forsaken. Taken as a symbol embraced by all Christians, the central one of the faith (I’d argue it was the cross without Christ, but that’s just me), I suppose it would read to them as though Wojnarowicz had abandoned the comforts of Christianity in the face of tragic death, leaving them for insects to explore. I don’t think anything could be further from the truth, to be honest. If Wojnarowicz really found no comfort in the tenets of his faith, why would he even bother introducing the crucifix as an element in his meditation? Why bring it up, just to repudiate it? Who would do such a thing? Let me think…As for the ants, they’re no different than dogs, in a malleable, symbolic context. Are they a legion of troubles that spoil the idyll of a spring picnic and leave what was fresh to spoil in their wake, or are they intrepid survivors who might be forced to go it alone hopefully after everything they know has been trampled by bullies bigger than they are? Aren’t they both? Isn’t that the point?

In the end, as many before me have said, this is becoming another opportunity for oppression. Washington still remembers The Perfect Moment at the Corcoran, the exhibition that demonized Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography and the temporal locus, as the curators for Hide/Seek have written in their exhibition catalogue, for eliding the terms “artist” and “homosexual” with “AIDS” and “un-American” in the American political and social consciousness. Just as that controversy erupted in the frightening days when AIDS was an even more unwieldy juggernaut than it has become, when it was politically expedient to find someone to symbolize everything that was wrong, this controversy is now being fueled, on World AIDS Day, by Republicans who are about to take office, but not before Congress must consider the ramifications of the Pentagon’s findings that repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will not have a negative impact on our military. If we’re not a threat in the foxholes and battlefields by virtue of one stereotype, we remain a threat to religion in national institutions of culture by virtue of myriad others. Stereotypes, too, are symbols. The entire argument rests on the fulcrum of symbols, a tiny apical point with heavy weights positioned to its left and its right. Rather than seeking to exert one ponderous viewpoint or another on that board, it might be worthwhile for its detractors to recognize that Hide/Seek itself is about inspecting the balance point, and for the Smithsonian to turn this instance of criticism into a symbol of its own.

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