Guide Assessment
The Final Supper: Artwork, Religion, Intercourse, and Controversy within the Eighties
By Paul ElieFarrar, Straus and Giroux: 496 pages, $33If you purchase books linked on our web site, The Occasions could earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges assist impartial bookstores.
In his gripping and important new e book “The Last Supper,” Paul Elie captures a pivot level in twentieth century social historical past, when sure concepts about faith, artwork and intercourse within the ’80s crashed headlong into one another throughout an epoch that tends to be shrugged off by historians as a quiet interval between the fuel shortages and political malfeasance of the ’70s and the emergent technological revolution of the ’90s. Nevertheless it was the truth is a breeding floor of inventive ferment, by which creatives grappled with what Elie calls crypto-religion, that “liminal space between belief and disbelief” that produced a wealth of thought-provoking well-liked artwork.
Elie’s masterful survey is a bunch portrait of artists and their fellow vacationers who participated throughout a bloody crossroads in American life, when Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the White Home in 1980 collapsed the partitions between church and state, sparking a counterrevolution throughout the humanities. It’s this dialogue, this back-and-forth, that drives Elie’s fascinating survey, inserting the reader within the thick of a convulsive period when concepts in regards to the function of faith in trendy life had been combating it out within the public sphere in ways in which we haven’t seen since.
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Amongst these voters that swept him into the presidency in 1980, Reagan was a savior, wresting the nation away from the unchecked permissiveness and aggressive secularism of the prior twenty years into a brand new period of “family values” that encompassed adherence to the straight and slim, of which biblical scripture was the important thing textual content. Gathering up zealots like Jerry Falwell beneath his new revival tent, Reagan preached the virtues of heterosexual marriage, of preserving the lifetime of the unborn fetus, of chastity and moderation.
The Roman Catholic Church had Reagan’s again. Pope John Paul II, who had ascended to the papacy in 1978, toured the world like a beatific rock star, preaching the gospel of this new sobriety in soccer stadiums throughout the nation. This was Christianity leached of all nuance or ethical ambiguity, a battering ram of spiritual doctrine.
What emerged from this nice leap backward was a various efflorescence of artwork that immediately addressed the very issues the church ignored. Elie calls it crypto-religion, by which artists negotiated the “liminal space between belief and non-belief,” and in so doing, created a wealthy physique of labor that raised the query “of what the person who made it believes, so that the question of what it means to believe is crucial to the work’s effect.”
Elie’s solid of characters — an eclectic record that features Andy Warhol, Sinéad O’Connor, Bob Dylan, Bono, Czeslaw Milosz, Martin Scorsese and Robert Mapplethorpe — had been, to various levels, youngsters of the church who had internalized its tenets at a time when faith was nonetheless a central truth of life in America and Europe within the ’50s and ’60s. As Elie astutely factors out, even an artist as outwardly estranged from non secular life as Warhol carried with him the teachings of the Polish Byzantine Order of his youth. “He made silk-screen images of skulls, memento-mori style,” writes Elie. “He dressed dolls as priests and nuns and photographed them.” As an grownup, Warhol attended church, albeit sporadically, and accepted a fee to refashion Leonardo’s da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” for an exhibition in Milan.
Creator Paul Elie.
(Holger Thoss)
What these crypto-religious artists shared was a imaginative and prescient of divinity shot by with doubt and surprise, weighing the wishes of the flesh towards the ephemerality of the holy spirit. It was vital for these insurrectionists to embrace religion on their very own phrases, transmuting their inside theological dialogues into well-liked artwork. On his 1979 album, “Slow Train Coming,” Dylan had come out in no unsure phrases as a person who now held quick to Jesus love. That document would have a profound affect on O’Connor, the Irish singer who wrestled with God like a scorned lover: “Tell me, where did the light die?” she sang in her tune “Troy.” U2, whose lead singer Bono additionally regarded to Dyan as an exemplar, turned the tropes of enviornment rock inside out, so {that a} garage-rock traditional like “Gloria” turns into a “crisis of faith,” an “anthem of self-surrender” by which the devotion Bono feels “involves something larger than himself, and he’s trying to empty himself of everything that’s not in it.”
As faith and crypto-religion had been locked in mortal fight, the AIDS plague was sweeping throughout homosexual communities like a firestorm, to the entire indifference of the federal authorities and their Christian handmaidens. The homosexual inventive group was ravaged, lots of its biggest inventive geniuses felled by the illness. However a groundswell of protest artwork was answering the decision with a brand new type of ardent feeling that damned the false piety and hypocrisy of homophobic Christian doctrine.
Peter Hujar, who would die from AIDS in 1987, used solemn, stark portraiture to create a brand new type of crypto-religious iconography, whereas his compatriot David Wojnarowicz, one other sufferer of AIDS, channeled his rage towards homophobic indifference into mixed-media items that restored his topics’ bruised humanism.
Then there was Scorsese. The filmmaker, who had been raised in a strict Catholic family in New York’s Little Italy and had in his prior movies grappled with concepts of perception in a violent world, was obsessive about adapting Nikos Kazantzakis’ 1955 novel “The Last Temptation of Christ.” It took years to drum up the financing, however when the 1988 movie was accomplished, the non secular proper did every part in its energy to dam its launch. No surprise: Right here was crypto-religious artwork writ giant, a imaginative and prescient of Jesus who was all too human, tormented by doubt and a troubled inside life. It was, in response to Elie, the “Jesus of history more than the Christ of faith” — a person first, in different phrases. This dovetailed with the work of students reminiscent of Elaine Pagels, who had been framing Jesus as a historic determine, slightly than the “Christ of faith.”
The place has all of this crypto-religious observe left us in 2025? That liminal house that Elie describes between perception and disbelief has closed, no less than in the interim. But whilst “the American population has become less religious and religiosity more diverse,” the thought of mainstream artists grappling with faith now not exists, maybe as a result of such issues are irrelevant in an aggressively outward-directed, spiritually bereft time. Elie’s good e book is a bracing reminder of artwork’s far-reaching energy in issues of the center and soul. His expansive imaginative and prescient of the ’80s rings out like a clarion name for a brand new period of rigorous inventive engagement with the unknowable and the unseen.
Weingarten is the creator of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”
