An avant-garde video of ants skittering over the crucified Jesus is enraging Christians who say an upcoming Brooklyn Museum art exhibit is sacrilegious.
Silent video ‘Fire in My Belly’ shows ants crawling over a crucifix.
“Ants were crawling on the image of the crucified Christ,” said Msgr. Kieran Harrington, a spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, which sent a letter asking for the video to get yanked from the exhibit. “Certainly we don’t think this would be tolerated if this was the image of the Prophet Muhammed or any other religious symbol.”
“A Fire in My Belly” is a short, unfinished film created by the late David Wojnarowicz. The Brooklyn Museum intends to show a four-minute edit of the video, which is about suffering.
The shaky, Super 8 footage shows a crucifix lying on the ground as ants scamper across Jesus’ bare body. The 10-second crucifix segment is spliced between other bizarre scenes: objects dropping into a dish of what looks like blood, a boy breathing fire, hands lacing together a loaf of bread and bloody sewn-up human lips
“What is the point?” said Pastor A. R. Bernard, who leads Brooklyn’s Christian Cultural Center. “I think this is the piece in the Hide/seek collection they really need to hide.”
.”As a Catholic, this is very sad for me,” said Ginette Peterburs, 59, of Crown Heights. “It is not art, it is just disguising.”
Source: The New York Daily News | Erin Durkin , Mark Morales & Katie Nelson
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