Abstract
Andres Serrano’s photography is often dismissed as being shocking for the sake of being shocking. His infamous photograph Piss Christ (1987) is the oft-cited example at the center of the National Endowment for the Arts controversies during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s. I return to Piss Christ as a way to expand the interpretative scope of Serrano’s early photographs, which I call “taboo icons” because of their ambiguity and ability to crisscross symbolic boundaries in the unstable space between sacred and profane, thus making his images both powerful and potentially dangerous. Building upon previous scholarship that draws connections between modern and early modern aesthetic practices, I look to the material practices of Christianity in medieval Europe characterized by a sophisticated visual culture that mixed both the physical and the spiritual. The intensifying rejection and reverence of matter resulted in divergent responses, yet the contradictory nature of matter remained central to the ideological beliefs of Christianity where the doctrines of Creation, Incarnation, and Resurrection are at its core. Serrano’s visceral photographs are emphatically material and can productively be read vis-à-vis medieval visual culture. In doing so, this reading changes the narrow perception of Serrano’s early photographs and provides an alternative understanding of his artistic project that reinserts religion into contemporary American art discourse.
Highlights
Andres Serrano’s photography is often dismissed as being shocking for the sake of being shocking
I return to Piss Christ as a way to expand the interpretative scope of Serrano’s early photographs, which I call “taboo icons” because of their ambiguity and ability to crisscross symbolic boundaries in the unstable space between sacred and profane, making his images both powerful and potentially dangerous
Building upon previous scholarship that draws connections between modern and early modern aesthetic practices, I look to the material practices of Christianity in medieval Europe characterized by a sophisticated visual culture that mixed both the physical and the spiritual
Summary
It is perhaps incidental that the initial reception of Piss Christ was favorable. Reverend Wildmon – founder of the National Federation for Decency in 1977, later renamed in 1987 the American Family Association (AFA) – sent one million letters of protest along with Serrano’s photograph to members of Congress and within a few months, the Piss Christ controversy was born.[12] This series of events is interesting because it raises a set of questions about what is defined as being offensive or indecent and who gets to make these judgments, and largely ignores the fact that the various artists, like Serrano, who came under attack during the Culture Wars were Catholic.[13] Serrano was raised Roman Catholic in the predominately Italian section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn and he is no longer a practicing Catholic he is not opposed to being identified as Christian.[14] In Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art, Eleanor Heartney attempts to answer how we might account for this paradox by thinking of the diverse practices of these “blasphemous” artists as working through an “Incarnational consciousness” that repudiates the commonplace assumption that art and religion are necessarily mutually exclusive categories.[15] not all of the critics of the culture wars were Catholic. Serrano’s ambiguous pictures complicate the relationship between signifier and signified, highlighting the promiscuous nature of meanings that are too mobile to be confined to an inflexible system or contained by an artist’s intentions. 19
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