Choc shock ... My Sweet Lord by Cosimo Cavallaro. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP
It's a familiar tale: a religious pressure group gets its way, and freedom of expression is the victim. Manhattan's Lab Gallery has cancelled an exhibit after heavy lobbying from the Catholic League. A disgraceful act of censorship in an America overpowered by reactionary religious forces, right? Well, not quite. In truth, this was an argument one would have liked both sides to lose.
Cosimo Cavallaro, a Canadian-born conceptualist known - if he is known at all - for smothering a hotel room in exactly one tonne of melted cheese, has created a chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ, arms outstretched as if suspended on an invisible cross. The best thing about this idea is its title - My Sweet Lord - which at least affords us a brief chuckle. Otherwise it is typical of its genre in being silly, unoriginal, and evidently designed to drum up controversy, which it duly has done.
My Sweet Lord, hysterically characterised by Catholic League head Bill Donohue as "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever" - although let's be frank here, it's no Piss Christ - was due to go on show over the Easter weekend, until the hotel which houses Lab pulled the plug. This prompted gallery director Matt Semler to offer his resignation, along with a claim that the timing of the mooted exhibit was coincidental.
At least Tyneside artist George Heslop, who last Easter capped a decade's worth of chocolate crucifixes with a chocolate Christ on the cross, shown in Wiltshire, was not so disingenuous: "I am actually using chocolate to draw attention to this time of year and the increased amount of commercialism that involves chocolate," he commented at the time. "I'm taking advantage of it to draw attention to this special day in our history which is the murder of Christ and his resurrection." The response from a local Christian group was equally measured: "Whilst we don't judge what people do," said Jeff Cook of the Bradford-on-Avon Christian Fellowship, observing a memorable Biblical injunction, "we perhaps feel that that may be just a little bit too trivial a way of expressing the importance of the cross and Easter to Christians." What - not one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever, then?
Is the difference merely one between British understatement and American melodrama? Not really; it's not as if Britain is short of would-be recruits to that tedious corps known as "shock artists". But any shock artist knows that first you must find an easy and obvious target to shock; and a few vocal hotheads excepted, British Christians simply do not dismay that easily. The American variety, though, are endlessly upsettable, and invariably rise to the bait. So the Catholic League has satisfied its constituents; while the sculptor has got both his publicity (including that allotted him right here) and - in lieu of any actual artistic merit - the moral high ground. Perhaps this was an argument that both sides somehow contrived to win.
