Art:

...homeless people-the subjects of countless documentary photographs- are granted the sort of stylized sittings usually reserved for actresses and presidents...

...I had to ask myself: Had I ever seen an art photograph of a priest before...

...The controversy prompted the NEA's directors to insert an anti-obscenity clause in the grant guidelines, and led legislators to raise hard questions-now being raised again-about whether the agency should be scrapped altogether...

...The bright light of controversy shone all through the show, lending it an aura of danger and subversion which the artist and the museum invited and made the most of...

...For if it would be unfair to condemn an image without knowing essential information such as its title and materials, so it would be unfair to judge it beautiful based on its visual qualities alone...

...it is an argument in which the crucial middle term-that is, contemporary visual art that does in one way or another frankly embody religious standards and expectations-is all but absent...

...Serrano makes the most sense...

...The priest who sat for Serrano, it happened, was wearing glasses with whorled plastic rims, the sort of traditional but up-to-date glasses that one might buy at Sterling Optical...

...But Serrano's religious photographs also negotiate with a tradition that is longer and broader, yet more remote...

...Well, blasphemous or no...

...The figures cannot bear the weight of the iconic status that Serrano has thrust upon them...

...A related photograph, the crucifix smaller against a horizontal golden ground, was even more powerful...

...Bodily fluids- what could be more realistic?-are made abstract...

...a priest bites his lip, wearing a super-orthodox, all-the-way-round-the-neck white collar...

...from the tags one learned that they were compositions of blood, milk, and urine...

...And this suggested to me just how deep the controversy over Serrano's work really is...

...This paradoxical information complicates the religious images and the commentary that swirls around them...

...at the same time, it gave the exhibit an accessible, even populist, character of the kind that conservative critics often lament is missing from contemporary art...

...Where once an artist like James Joyce generated artistic tension through frank acknowledgments of apostasy, today an artist like Serrano does so through an unexpected assertion of his Catholic identity-by claiming, like Martin Luther, in effect, that he has not left the church and its artistic tradition so much as the church has left him...

...Sure enough, the critic who reviewed the exhibit for the New York Times suggested that "it may be as a religious artist, and specifically as a Roman Catholic artist, that Mr...

...Heaven and Hell" (1984), which depicts a bishop figure indifferently looking away from a nude, mutilated woman, is sheer agitprop...

...They reminded me that this figure was not an icon, after all, but a man who is a priest...

...Lucky for him-and not so lucky for us-the religious is territory that he, for the time being, has claimed as his own...

...And a series of portraits of Klan members, while powerfully iconic, gains its greatest effects from Serrano's attention to the coarse weave of the Klan robes and the crow's-feet of a Klanswoman's eye peering out from her hood...

...I remember the first time I saw the photograph, at the Saatchi Collection in London in 1991...

...I decided the latter, if only to avoid being manipulated by the photograph and its detractors alike...

...Only as I leaned forward to look at the tags did I realize that these were the notorious photographs...

...A gauzy white splatter arcing across the photographic field was revealed as ejaculate...

...Is Andres Serrano a genuine religious artist, or a sham one...

...A series of photographs that might have been drawn from the ad campaign for a Gap line of grunge clothing turned out to be portraits of homeless people...

...PAUL ELIE Paul Elie, editor of A. Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints (Harcourt Brace & Company), is a frequent Commonweal contributor.weal contributor...

...it suggested Giacometti, yes, but more than that it suggested Golgotha at the moment the heavens were rent...

...The "Morgue" series, for example, depicts freshly dead bodies in close-ups of high color and relentless clarity in which all the medical apparatus has been carefully screened out...

...It is not only a conflict of values and standards, a conflict between religious tradition and the avant-garde...

...If so, I couldn't recall it...

...The golden hue that suffuses the photograph had just the right touch of apocalypse, the crucifix just the right tilt to suggest windswept, earthshaking drama...

...One of them is "Piss Christ...

...And of course the extravisual information made it necessary to try to see them all over again...

...In the museum lobby, a documentary about the artist was played continuously on an overhead television set ("His work is not in any way didactic," the voice-over pronounced as I walked in), drawing a crowd at least as large as that in the galleries...

...To me they were the most striking detail in the whole exhibit...

...So while the Serrano retrospective was a summing-up so far, it was also a justification of sorts, an attempt to ground the artist's reputation in something deeper than notoriety, even as that notoriety was a justification for the exhibit...

...But Andres Serrano: Works 1983-93, which closed in April at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, had the feel of a postscript to the 1989 controversy over the National Endowment of the Arts...

...In these photographs, Serrano's basic strategy is to reverse the conventions usually applied to the subject...

...A nun wearing an over-starched wimple-and bright red lipstick-gazes at the camera, fresh-faced and clear-eyed as Jodie Foster...

...Serrano describes himself not as a photographer but "a conceptual artist with a camera," and, as with much conceptual art, his photographs depend to an unusual degree on extravisual information to make them intelligible and interesting...

...Even as they provoke the viewer's curiosity through their treatment of controversial subjects, these photographs assume a certain familiarity with the photographic tradition whose terms they alter and refer to-with the work of Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Tina Barney, and the like...

...Controversy is in no way a distraction from Serrano's work...

...It is a series of portraits of French religious figures...

...In the most powerful of the religious photographs, the tension between tradition and propaganda is sharp and evocative...

...Most of Serrano's other religious images are considerably less effective...

...Quick, try to think of a noted religious artist...

...there is very little contemporary religious art of any prominence with which Serrano's might be compared...

...Just as Serrano is a photographer who is not a photographer, he describes himself as "a former Catholic...who even today is not opposed to being called a Christian...

...ART ANDRES SERRANO IN VIEW ICON MAKER OR BREAKER...

...On one wall hung abstractions suggesting, in turn, a smoldering volcano, the Japanese flag, a Georgia O' Keeffe flower, a Barnett Newman color field...

...Here in a corner of the gallery was a crucifixion, and it was one of the most powerful contemporary religious images I had ever seen...

...The work on display inside depicted subjects (guns, homeless people, Klansmen, corpses in morgues, as well as religious figures and bodily fluids) that have long since been deemed controversial, and did so in a medium (Cibachrome color photographs) familiar to the viewer's eye from advertising...

...That year, of course, Serrano's photograph "Piss Christ," which depicts a crucifix immersed in urine, became an exhibit in the congressional debate about whether the agency should support artists (such as Serrano, a grant recipient) whose work scorns the standards of common decency thought to be shared by the taxpayers who support the agency...

...I had read about it in accounts of the controversy, of course-and doubtless had seen it reproduced in black-and-white-but I had the impression that Serrano was a prolific photographer, the creator of hundreds of images on religious subjects...

...A retrospective exhibit is usually a milestone in an artist's career: a gathering together of years of work, and a message sent to the art world and the culture at large that the artist has claimed a place altogether his or her own...

...Rather-and this is what most riled his critics in Congress-it is the work's fulfillment...

...And the "Church" series of 1991 seems overwhelmed by the sense of mission the NEA controversy must have inspired in Serrano...

...Not only is there no authoritative definition of just what a Christian artist might be...

...Pieta" (1985), in which a Mary holds a giant fish, and "Blood Cross" (1985), a plexiglas cross filled with blood, are ineffectual visual puns...

...How might we judge...

...for a moment-contrary to what Serrano intended-the nature of that golden hue was hardly relevant...