"Our country can do without scribblers and agitators like Hrdlicka." So says a guestbook entry at Vienna, Austria's Dommuseum, parked next to a church and owned by the city's archdiocese. The uproar?
Alfred Hrdlicka, is celebrating his 80th birthday this year with a retrospective of his art at the Dommuseum, although various Catholics and censors are outraged that Jesus is depicted in one drawing as having some sort of crudely-rendered orgy after a wine-soaked Last Supper. And here we were thinking that it was usually a Gladiator battle and grapes on a vine that kickstarted a good old-timey sexfest....
(The offending images are including below; they are unavailable
elsewhere due to the museum having taken down the most objectionable
drawing.)
There are other drawings, including one of Jesus getting groped while nailed to the cross, all included in the following video.
Hrdlicka defended himself by saying that there were no women in Leonardo's rendering of the Last Supper, so he just had to depict men doing the pleasuring of other men. That's about as convincing as the following statement on how taking the picture down is not censorship:
The museum took down the Last Supper piece at Cardinal
Schoenborn's request just over a week after the 'Religion,
Flesh and Power' exhibition opened, leaving a blank black wall
at the entrance to the display.
"This has nothing to do with censorship, rather corresponds
with the understood "reverence for the sacred," the Cardinal's
spokesman said in a statement.
Via the AP.
