Dean’s World (The Blog) Hearts Andres Serrano

Thanks to the always useful bag ‘o links at the Daou Report (and his own blogging is great), I came across this most amusing post:

Remember “Piss Christ,” the piece of “art” consisting of the image of a crucified Jesus Christ submerged in the author’s urine (with a government grant, no less; your tax dollars hard at work!), and how upset Christians got about that?

Well, compare and contrast.

[Link to the recent uproar over the caricatures of Muhammad on display in Denmark.]

You know, the art community is always congratulating itself for being “daring” by mocking Christ, but this is territory that’s apparently a bit too scary for them, as art mocking Muslims is exceedingly rare.

First of all, as a card-carrying (well, we don’t have cards, but you know what I mean) member of the downtown New York avant-garde scene, I do indeed remember Serrano’s Piss Christ with a tremendous amount of affection – that’s right, affection. Who wouldn’t look back fondly to an issue and a time when one of the Great Questions Of Our Age was whether it was right for the NEA to fund an artist who peed on a crucifix and took a picture of it? (Not that the NEA actually funded Piss Christ, they didn’t. See below.) Can you believe that once – before Monica, before impeachment, before Bush and the attendant horrors – anyone had the mental space to give a damn? Those were the days…

Back then, Serrano was one of those mediocre artists who was more tolerated than respected. He was an indifferent craftsman, as someone once noted in print, that is, his photographic technique was pretty amateurish, given his own aspirations. And his subject matter was pretty lame – a big pic of a nude woman in bondage, wow, how original! – but which gained a certain offensive je ne se quois when a SoHo gallery chose to display it in their window and created a ruckus (Tris, you spoke French, Cara mia!).

In short, no one cared too much what he did. Until, that is, he, Karen Finley (whose career at the time was not doing terribly well), Robert Mapplethorpe (conveniently dead) and some other naughty, naughty artists were made into a cause celebre by the Jesse Helmses on the right (I still remember Helms describing a Mapplethorpe print: “A black man is making love to a white man on a green marble tabletop.” Well, yes. And the problem? Would you rather the marble pink?). Prices for their work skyrocketed and the rest of us, while rallying immediately – and rightly – to their defense, couldn’t suppress quite a bit of private grumbling into our beers when late at night down at Puffy’s: hey, man, why does fuckin’ Andres deserve all that publicity?

In other words, “Piss Christ” is a construction of the rightwing, who elevated one unimportant artist’s photograph from just one more passmeby at an obscure gallery into an Important Statement. Talk about strawmen!

A couple more things. Dave Price says art mocking Muslims is exceedingly rare. Well, I immediately thought, of course, of Satanic Verses (ironically, a co-blogger with Dave, Mary Madigan, has an entire post about the book), but one can also find numerous examples throughout European art. There’s Mozart/Schikaneder’s Moor in the The Magic Flute, for one. In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, there are the Calormenes: “oily cartoon Muslims who wear turbans and pointy-toed slippers and talk funny.” I don’t have more examples, especially of modern art, simply because the subject matter – mocking Muslims – interests me even less than Piss Christ did. But trust me, Dave, you wanna find art mocking Muslims, you’ll find lots of it in Western Art.

Which brings us to Dave’s contention that modern artists are somehow only faux-daring because they mock Christ but ignore Muslims. I’m tempted to quip, “Not in Denmark newspapers they ain’t!” but let’s assume for the moment Dave is correct when it comes to modern American artists. The reason artists who wish to consider themselves “daring” may not bother too much with dissing Muslims is: the rightwing beat ’em to it! Remember the religious leader – invited to the White House, no less – who characterized Muhammed as a pedophile and Islam as a “gutter religion?” No, if you wanna be thought “daring” – always a good marketing idea in art since Beethoven – you go after (pardon the slightly homogenized metaphor) the sacred cows of your own culture, not others. And one of the biggest is Christianity and its iconography. Duh.

But in terms of art and the artworld, is an artwork like Piss Christ that daring? Not to anyone who knows the first thing about art. Bad art, yes. Poorly executed, yes. Interesting, well… maybe to some. But daring? Hardly. But I’ll go even further. Like most normal people in the West who aren’t trying to impress others with their self-righteousness, I”m indifferent to religious blasphemy. I’m just not gonna get, eh, pissed about it and start issuing fatwas; even if I found it patently offensive. It doesn’t matter like it did to the Ayatollah and Jesse Helms (did I just equate them? Bad Tristero, bad Tristero! ). Dave may find Piss Christ ugly, offensive, even blasphemous, but so what? Get over it, dude. If anyone’s religious faith is shaken by a photo of a cross floating in pee, then that faith is shaky to begin with, my friend. But if you wanna blame someone, blame Jesse Helms for rubbing your face in Piss Christ, without whose yeoman pr efforts, no one would have seen it.

Indeed, it comes down to this. The only people who consider Serrano a “daring” artist are the suckers on the right who make the mistake of taking him seriously – and the artist’s buddies and gallery, natch. A few years ago, the Village Voice published some of Serrano’s then latest work – nude photos of people with fairly unusual leisure time activities and concerns – and Richard Goldstein enthused about how astonishingly transgressive they were.* Oh? Apparently, Richard forgot Frank Zappa’s immortal “Mud Shark” from 1971, or Berg’s Lulu from the 1930’s, an opera about a venereal-diseased hooker who seduces and destroys everyone she meets until she’s finally murdered, to the tune of a blood-curdling scream, by Jack the Ripper and whose epilogue consists of a heart-breakingly beautiful love aria sung by Lulu’s lesbian lover as dies, infected with Lulu’s syphyllis. dies. It’s performed every few years or so at the Met (not often enough, imo). That, dear Richard, is fucking transgressive. That, my dear Dave, is daring.

Oh, and one more thing. It looks like Dave’s seeing his basic facts through a yelllowish-amber haze of stale urine. Turns out that Piss Christ was not funded with a government grant. Here’s the skinny for those who care:

For many years, the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has hosted “Awards in the Visual Arts,” a national competition for individual artists. In 1988, Andres Serrano was one of seven winners. His prize was $15,000 plus a place in the group show exhibiting the work of the winners. The fund that provided the money for the cash prizes came from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, private donors, corporate donors and the NEA.

Serrano’s submission to SECCA was a series of untitled photographs involving bodily juices, some of a crucifix submerged in various fluids, including milk and, for the controversial “Piss Christ,” “Serrano’s own urine. Serrano was not a NEA Fellow, nor did the NEA commission his work, including “Piss Christ,” in any way. The NEA was merely one of the “Awards in the Visual Arts” sponsors. Even this loose association, though, was enough to give the theocratic right a point of vicious attack on the endowment and its granting practices.

So in conclusion, thanks Dave, for reminding me of Piss Christ, not the artwork – that still fails to do much for me one or the other – but the huge flap-de-doodle. Face it Dave, don’t you, too, wish we could go back to a time when the country could afford to obsess over something so monumentally stoopid? Ah, those were the days, indeed.

*I love Richard Goldstein. What’s not to love about a fellow so oblivious that he panned Sgt Pepper’s in The New York Times when it first came out? The art world would be a lot more dreary without people like him.