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Interview (Fragment) Barbara Pollack : Interview with Andres Serrano
For more than a decade, Andres Serrano has been America’s favorite whipping boy, the artist who, for better or worse, has become the target of the public’s love-hate relationship with contemporary art. Serrano’s classic image, Piss Christ (1987), may not have launched the Culture Wars, but certainly fanned the flames when it was "discovered" by members of Congress in 1989. Since then, he has churned out bodies of work that uncannily return the favor, by targeting middle-brow sensibilities and disrupting zones of comfortability that infuse our expectations of high art. I met with him on the eve of the opening of his latest show, ironically titled America, at Gimpel Fils in London this fall. The setting was an editing studio where the film, Leo’s Fantasy, a documentary about the making of Serrano’s 1996 series The History of Sex at the Groninger Museum in Holland, is nearing completion. At the time you did Piss Christ, at least in New York, there were many artists doing work about the identity politics and the body. There were penises all over the place, or so it seemed, yet your image of a crucifix set off the biggest controversy. I’ll tell you a story. During that time, I met an artist in
San Francisco who said to me that he had been to a dinner the night
before with a bunch of artists who were griping about Piss Christ.
They did not understand why so much attention had been focused on
Piss Christ, since they had been trying to do provocative work for
many years. You see, when you are trying to be provocative it doesn’t
work. Whereas many artists have been confronted with controversy
surrounding their work which was not necessarily their intent at
all. It was certainly true for me with Piss Christ. I was 37 when
I made Piss Christ and the controversy really took place 2 years
later. Before Piss Christ, I had a very limited audience. I had
my supporters but I was certainly not very well known outside the
New York art world. So, it was a very strange feeling for me to
wake up one day and find myself being denounced in Congress. I have
always said it was a very Kafkaesque experience.
When you were making that work, were you conscious that it was going to be provocative? Was it provocative to you? Early on, I was working on religious images. Then, I started exploring this new idea where I wanted to photograph bodily fluids very close up, in a very abstract way, referring to abstract painting, geometric painting, and action painting. Initially the fluid pictures, which consisted of milk, piss, and blood, were very abstract. So, at some point, I decided to submerge a crucifix in one of the liquids for two reasons: to go back to the religious issues that I was exploring earlier and to go back to representation. So Piss Christ was two different directions in my work coming together in one image and certainly it didn’t provoke anything in me. But, it is quite a different thing to look at a red and white painting than to look at a photograph of blood and milk. When you use materials such as blood or urine, you know you are going to provoke something in the viewer, don’t you? I used the fluids because they were a little more meaningful than red paint. But I certainly didn’t anticipate what happened with Piss Christ. I wouldn’t call it a fluke. I have since understood it as an act of destiny. But it certainly wasn’t something that was intended to be provocative. For you as an artist, what was it like living though that period, with day after day after day of news headlines and television coverage. Actually, it was a living hell. Some people would probably welcome
the attention focused on their work all of sudden, even if it’s
good or bad, any kind of attention, especially for an artist just
struggling to get by. But, I was afraid, really. I was afraid because
I thought these people were coming down so heavily on me over a
photograph, just an idea, just something that popped out of my head.
So, I was afraid that my life itself would be even a greater offense.
I was afraid on a personal level. I had a few threats, just a few
letters that came to me by way of the gallery. Actually, one of
the scariest moments for me was about a month or so after the controversy
erupted and I was getting all this hostile reaction in papers across
the country. I told my dealer at the time, Stefan Stux, that I thought
I needed a show to vindicate myself and he said to me, this was
in July of 1989, ‘Frankly, Andres, I can’t give you another
show because I can’t afford to lose money on you again. You
know your last show didn’t sell at all so I would advise you
to find another gallery.’ That hurt me the most, that at the
height of it, not only was I being vilified by the press—by
people who didn’t know about art or didn’t care—but
also I was beginning to get slammed from the other side, by art
professionals who do know something about art, but most importantly,
my gallery abandoned me. About three weeks later, Stux called me
saying that he had reconsidered and he gave me a show that December
and that show really turned my career around.
Your career has always straddled that contradiction. You can’t really say that this is a case of the art world supporting you against the masses. It is true that you have been attacked by politicians and the religious right, but you also have a huge audience that reaches beyond the art world. I am happy for that. My work reaches people that do not necessarily go to galleries. And better yet, I often get people who don’t know my work at all, but they have heard something about it in the press that excites their imagination, so it compels them to come see the work. I have always considered myself a man of the people, an artist of the people, so I like that cross-over audience. So, you are a man of the people, even though you have been represented as the enemy of the people, even the antichrist at times? Well, I will say one thing. I am not an aloof artist. I am not an artist who is making art about art. I think sometimes the general public is offended by things they don’t understand. My work is pretty understandable. You may not like it, but it’s easy to access. When you approach a new body of work, do you anticipate that it will provoke controversy? Not really. It is funny how little has impacted me from my audience, my collectors, my supporters, my detractors, even my dealers. They really don’t have that much influence over what I do, which I think is the way it should be. I have never got cold feet from the public’s reactions or overreactions. On the contrary, it makes me feel that I am on the right track. So do you actively try to get that response? Not at all, I follow my own drummer. What’s the expression? I dance to the beat of my own drummer. For example, I knew that the Budapest show in 1994 was not especially offensive or provocative and knew it would not necessarily get a big reaction because it was not so provocative but I still felt compelled to do it So I feel the need to do the work that I want to do, regardless of how people respond to it.
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