“Everyone knows Jesus: he is the most painted figure in all of world art, identifiable everywhere,” states Joan Taylor in What Did Jesus Look Like?[i] The image of Jesus is art historically interesting because unlike other historical figures, Jesus needs no symbol in his hand nor by his side; it’s his very face that viewers recognize. The most salient features of this countenance become fixed from the sixth century onwards: the almond-shaped eyes, the high cheekbones, the slim face.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari draw on this art-historical fact in their philosophical analysis of “faciality.” The face of Jesus Christ, they argue, is the face with which we compare all other faces. Moreover, they hold, the Christ image—which has become the face of faces—embodies goodness, whiteness, and maleness, inseparably; it is the face of the Good White Man himself.[ii] In other words, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the face of Christ is the very basis for the universalization of white maleness as good.
Not only does the face of Christ instigate this particular ideal; it serves as a ground for the notion of the ideal as such. It grounds the Christian logic of representation according to which there is one origin, one original, one truth, followed by an endless row of copies, wannabes, fakes, and misfits. One ideal Man, one ideal Woman, one ideal Life—and the rest are copycats at best. The face of Jesus, Deleuze and Guattari argue, grounds the very idea that there is an original and that all is else is deviation, which still permeates our societies.
This pervasive prejudice in favor of originals over copies shapes our expectations about normality, love, the first kiss, sex, fine arts, and kitsch. It’s there in our expectation of a normal life—free from illness, free from pandemics—and in our idea of the post-pandemic possibility of going back to normal—as if there’s such a state to return to. As if everything isn’t different now. As if creation and creativity are not dependent upon breaking free from such origins.
The representational Christian logic by which the unique original is favored over subsequent “copies” reaches beyond Christian imagery, manifesting more broadly in the elevation of the original work of art, and the original artist—an aspect of the art world logic that Walter Benjamin traces back to the ritual origin of art.[iii] The original artist and the original artwork are elevated at the expense of copies, fakes, and wannabes, while fine art is elevated at the expense of kitsch and "trashy" art.
My contribution to the Noli Me Tangere project consists of a video, a transcript, and the introduction you’re now reading. Entitled Jesus is a riff and u can’t touch it, the piece at once plays with and critiques the Christian logic of representation by engaging John 20:17. The contribution suggests that the fact that Jesus appears to Mary after his death not under his original, recognizable aspect, but as what could be described as a bad copy, exposes a crack at the very heart of the Gospel, a crack in the binding of Christian origin to truth. In the video, that crack is mirrored in a narrative emerging not from white fine art, but from "cheap," popular, bestselling rap music: the story about the riff that brought rap artist MC Hammer to fame.
The point of this piece is not to affirm the Christian origin, the Christ original, once again, but to depict how the oppressive power of the representational logic is outlived by the force of the riff, the repetition of difference, and the constant re/creation of reality and of relationships. What will likely stay with the listener after watching the three-and-a-half-minute video is not the abstract theological reasoning, but the riff itself, which worms its way into the mind/body. Similarly, the film suggests that the liberating force of Jesus comes not in the repetition of the same—the many reproductions of his white male face or the dogmatic repetitions of the meaning of his death and resurrection—but in the way in which Jesus stories through history and into the present moment function in their very multiplicity like riffs, as a force that breaks with oppression.
Enacting this critique of Christian representation, Jesus is a riff and u can’t touch it breaks copyright laws in its use of imagery and music—laws that are based on a capitalist implementation of the very representational logic of having, holding, and remaining that this piece addresses. This means that the video will likely be removed by YouTube. The riff, however, will always live on.