'The Last Supper' The Last Straw for Christians?

Indonesia's Tempo magazine suffered a backlash when its February issue cover depicted former president Suharto and his children in a composition mimicking Leonardo Da Vinci's masterpiece "The Last Supper" (ABC News 2008).

The "Tempo" magazine cover (top) and the Leonard da Vince masterpiece
(Source: www.indonesiamatters.com)

Christians in Indonesia, who comprise nearly 9% of the entire population (Petitt 2008), were outraged by the portrayal of Suharto, who replaced Jesus Christ at the center of the portrait, and his three sons and daughters, who replaced the apostles at the margins (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996).

While Tempo chief editor Toriq Hadad apologized to the Christian community and claimed that the cover was inspired by the painting instead of the biblical event, Christians would see the cover in a blasphemous context.

Putnis & Petelin (1996, p. 224) state that a document designer ‘will face a constant array of writing tasks that will rely on your sensitivity to your purpose, your readers and your context’; therefore, identifying the three elements of audience, context, and purpose should be the main aim of the document designer.

The editors at Tempo magazine obviously did not take the religious and cultural context into consideration. Walsh (2006) believes that understanding the cultural and social context contributes significantly to giving meaning to a particular text. Christian readers would first and foremost ask the question after seeing the controversial cover due to their knowledge of the Last Supper in relation to the Holy Bible: is Suharto being compared to the Son of God Jesus Christ?

The issue took another turn when The Alliance of Christian Students and Youth (AMPK) announced their intentions to sue the magazine whom they claim was in 'violation of Article 156 of the Criminal Code on public defamation, hostility and hatred against certain communities, including religious groups' (The Jakarta Post 2008). I believe that Tempo made a huge error of judgment, and the editors were not sensitive towards the religious and cultural context of the satirical cover picture, but the matter should have been done and dusted after an apology was printed in the magazine.



References:

ABC News 2008, Indonesian weekly apologises over Last Supper Suharto cover, viewed 8 June 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/06/2156269.htm.

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 2006, Reading images: the grammar of visual design, 2nd edn, Routledge, New York.

Putnis, P, & Petelin, R 1996, Professional communication: principles and applications, Prentice Hall, Sydney.

Petitt, KA 2008, Educating Indonesia's Christians, Cook International, viewed 10 June 2009, http://www.cookinternational.org/pages/page.asp?page_id=32048.

The Jakarta Post 2008, Christians sue 'Tempo' for blasphemy, viewed 9 June 2009, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/02/09/christians-sue-039tempo039-blasphemy.html.

Walsh, M 2006, ‘”Textual shift”: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.