Opening of an Envelope

hyperallergic:

Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Ten Punching Bags (With Christ from Last Supper)” (1985-6)

Rev. Canon Harold T. Lewis’s comments on this installation are presented next to the work at the Andy Warhol Museum:

This provocative, disturbing and challenging work is a study in juxtapositions, paradoxes, contradictions. But that is exactly what Christianity, a religion that claims that God took on human form, died and was raised from the dead, claims to be. I think Warhol chose punching bags to portray Jesus as taking the blows (read ‘bearing the sins’) of humankind. That there are ten of them suggests both the Ten Commandments and the ten lepers (outcasts) whom Jesus cleansed (Mark 10:41). Onto Warhol’s serene images of a DaVinci-esque Christ, Basquiat superimposes his own images, both religious (a crown, a Root of Jesse. Trinitarian symbols) and secular (lead, asbestos, a gallows, a dilapidated football stadium). Jesus the Judge is himself judged by the squalor of urban poverty.