Performance Theology

Someone has put an air-rifle pellet through a twelve-foot painting of the Last Supper, causing the artist much upset. Lorna May Wadsworth, who has painted Margaret Thatcher and David Blunkett and evidently has a penchant for authoritarian thugs who don't much care about the poor, interpreted the shooting as an iconoclastic act directed against her portrayal of Jesus. Wadsworth peopled her painting with young actors and fashion models as "a way of challenging perceptions", and the shootist has been careful to place their own contribution at the spot where Jesus received the last of His wounds on the cross. The anachronism, both biblical and biographical, emphasises the eternal significance of the crucifixion while harmonising with the modernity of Wadsworth's own interpretation of the scene. If her anonymous ballistic collaborator hadn't shot Wadsworth's Jesus, it would certainly have challenged perceptions if she had shot Him herself.