Off Topic--more on Serrano, a Brooklynite, not an Italian as I incorrectly stated earlier.
The New York Times
January 22, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 2; Page 35; Column 1; Arts & Leisure Desk
HEADLINE: ART;
A Personal Vision of the Sacred and Profane
BYLINE: By CELIA McGEE
BODY: ONE EVENING TWO MONTHS ago, a number of Christian organizations gathered for a candlelight vigil outside the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia
to protest the debut of Andres Serrano's first museum retrospective. Arriving from New York for the opening, Mr. Serrano joined the marchers briefly. "I asked
them what was going on," he said, "and they explained that it wasn't right for the public to see this work. They weren't going inside to see it either, because they
knew it was blasphemous." In his courtly and gentle manner, Mr. Serrano wished them luck.
"A few weeks later," he said, "one of the marchers eventually went to the show and wrote in the comment book that he felt guilty for not being offended. That's
very telling -- most people criticizing my work have never seen it."
Now, from Friday through April 9, "Andres Serrano Works 1983-1993" can be seen at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan: early Cibachromes
of melodramatically posed tableaux, more abstract compositions and the "Immersion" series including his notorious crucifix suspended in urine, close-ups of guns
and portrait photographs of outcasts, misfits and the dead.
"Andres has been innovative," said Marcia Tucker, the director of the museum, "because his art opens up into so many issues, of popular culture and taste, of the
intersection of belief and disenfranchisement, and about the spiritual and physical body. He puts together things that people have strong reactions to."
Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman and others, Mr. Serrano, 44, has used some of the most visually seductive, normally harmless imagery available to
address -- and challenge -- religious and sexual, political and moral taboos. Pretty pictures made with blood, soil, semen and urine court controversy. And find it.
In 1989 Senator Jesse Helms, among others, denounced Mr. Serrano and an exhibition financed by the National Endowment for the Arts that included his work, and
cite Mr. Serrano as a reason for eliminating the endowment itself.
Perched on the neo-Gothic, velvet-draped bed that dominates the front room of his apartment in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, Mr. Serrano has tuned his
television set soundlessly to a 24-hour broadcast of "Leave It to Beaver," a favorite show during his boyhood. Then he lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with his
African-Cuban mother. After his Honduran father left for good, his mother often disappeared as well, hospitalized for psychotic episodes in which she heard
religious voices. "It's a really insightful show," Mr. Serrano said. "Ward Cleaver would say things to his sons that were great." Mr. Serrano is all for father figures.
Authoritarian figures, on the other hand, don't sit so well with him, especially when it comes to passing artistic judgment. The authority he has questioned longest is
that of the Roman Catholic Church; his work has been both a quarrel with the institution and an attempt to find a more personal, folkloric Christianity. The church's
policies, he said, are "at least indifferent to human need, and at worst malicious and intolerant."
He has created pictures of sinister, haughty clergy, and has photographed cheesy, mass-produced crucifixes oozing blood, Plexiglas crosses encasing milk as a
symbol of purity and mother love, and Christ and Madonna figures immersed in the bodily fluids that he felt returned an earthy dignity to artifacts he considered
cheapened by commercialization, and that addressed such crises as AIDS.
He has seen and done it all. A high school dropout at 15, he enrolled briefly in art school at 17, and became a drug dealer and addict at 20. A wife and infant
daughter were already history.
At 28, he kicked his habit and took up art again. "I felt a biological clock inside me saying that if I was still on drugs at 30, I wouldn't fulfill my destiny to be an
artist," Mr. Serrano said. He joined the radical artists' collaborative Group Materials and is still a member. Yet he remains a loner. "I like to go out at night to clubs
with loud music where I'm around a lot of people I don't have to talk to," he said. He and his wife, the artist Julie Ault, keep separate apartments.
None of his work is blasphemous, he says. "You can't have the sacred without the profane. I wouldn't be so obsessed with Christianity if I didn't have a feeling for
it, and I find it strange when people call me an anti-Christian bigot. What is wrong is to make something that isn't beautiful." Since Mr. Serrano's large pictures,
some 4 by 5 feet, are Cibachromes (he describes himself as an installation artist who uses photography), he argues that he employs his shock-value materials in the
interest of beauty -- yellow, red, black and white reproduce best for his technique.
The Church too is "a temple of beauty," he says. "When other people travel they take pictures." "I visit churches and buy religious things." His apartment is an
ecclesiastical wonderland of priestly vestments, a bishop's throne, candelabra, stained glass and holy pictures that occasionally double as props for his art. This fall,
some appeared in Mr. Serrano's first video for MTV, in which he filmed the band Godflesh screaming, "Crush my soul!" He loves movies, and admits to a passion
for the theatrical. Flanking his front door are pedestals with glass jars holding human brains.
They show off his desire to penetrate all that is human, whatever the form. In 1990 he went South to photograph members of the Ku Klux Klan, in costumes that in
front of Mr. Serrano's lens are pitifully makeshift disguises with crooked stitches. "They were quite nice to me," he said, "yet they represent this organization
dedicated to hatred of people not like themselves."
NOT EVEN THE DEAD LACK humanity for Mr. Serrano. His "Morgue" series of 1992 got mixed reviews for its depictions of cadavers. The negative responses
puzzle him. "I'm not a forensic photographer," he said. "Pathological, clinical studies are far more gruesome than what I was doing. I took these pictures out of a
desire to find some humanity and love."
Mr. Serrano links "The Morgue" to the 19th-century tradition of photographing deceased loved ones. "The Victorians didn't see anything scary about death," he said.
"Now there's fear and dread."
There is nothing Victorian about his fax machine and multiple telephones, which constantly demand attention. One call appears to concern his dropping off
packages in crime-ridden reaches of Brooklyn. It embarrasses him. Finally he admits to visiting the main post office on 34th Street before Christmas to look at the
thousands of letters children write to Santa Claus. He selected several from needy children, bought them gifts and is about to deliver the presents. "You don't want
to write about that," he said sarcastically. "I wouldn't want people to think I'm a good person." |
