Virginia Woolf
andres serrano
Andres Serrano has been at the centre of controversy for most of his career, from the history of sex to the media attention that it attracted with his most controversial piece, Piss Christ. The debate behind this piece, much like Mapplethorpe’s Project X, asks questions on acceptance and pluralism. The main outrage was that this work, ‘Piss Christ’, was an offence to Christians and Christian iconology. ‘Piss Christ’, without the artist’s intentions to do so, attacks the boundaries between the blasphemous and sanctified. Serrano stated in a reading room’s interview 'I have always felt that my work is religious, not sacrilegious. I would say that there are many individuals in the Church who appreciate it and who do not have a problem with it. The best place for Piss Christ is in a church. In fact, I recently had a show in Marseilles in an actual church that also functions as an exhibition space, and the work looked great there. I think if the Vatican is smart, someday they'll collect my work.' It is what can be accepted within the Christian society and the limits a pluralist church can reach, and how far they can be pushed, in this case not an inch. The church and Christians see it as a battle of ownership and vandalism towards their religious symbols and Serrano has no right, nor the authority to use it in this manner. Arguing the fact that regardless of Serrano's intention of ‘Piss Christ’, it has to be looked at as an overwhelmingly strong piece of religious artwork that blurs the boundaries of art and religion. Even twenty-three years on we still must consider the effect it had and the questions it poses.
Piss Christ was not one of Serrano’s most aesthetically stunning pieces, but as with Mapplethorpe's Corcoran gallery scandal, the controversy around it gave the work its sensation. Piss Christ became symbolic as a Tableau vivant (living painting) as the piece itself used fluids within the mixture of the floating cross; urine, milk, sperm and blood. This has been taken out of context due to the uproar of the religious aspects featured in the work from the Christian community. The exploration between the inanimate object and the sanctified is what not only makes it an amazing piece of art, but a fascinating piece of religious iconography. Our vision of the normal (a crucifix) is distorted as we usually understand the normal, yet here the religious object has manifested into something completely different. As the philosophizers Fichte and Hegel wrote on the topic of recognition of the eyes, "The familiar is not understood precisely because it is familiar." The name of the piece itself causes a stir, where audiences have classed it as blasphemous; it is simply in itself obscurely provocative. Within the title it touches on Christianity, typically catholic fascination with the body and blood of Christ, to the extent it is used in communion and other religious ceremonies. Using blood, urine, milk and sperm in the work creates an outrage by using the beliefs of the church against itself: turning the church’s preoccupation upside down and making the contrast all the more shocking to a Catholic viewer.
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