On Art
BLOCH, BRADLEY W.
On Art WASTEFUL IMAGES BY BRADLEY W. BLOCH The photographer Andres Serrano is in a peculiar situation—hardly anyone has seen his work, but almost everyone has an opinion on it. Like...
...The startling appellation is intended to throw us into a whirlwind of ambiguity: the sacredness of the religious object plunged into the profanity of bodily waste...
...The institution of the portrait—whatever the medium— is thus shown to be a deceitful construction...
...Without varying the compositional elements, Serrano was able to achieve a wide range of effects...
...In fact, his "secular" experiments with bodily fluids are more successful...
...The subject of the sizable photograph —it is enlarged to 60 by 40 inches—is a 13-inch plastic and wood crucifix available in any religious gift store...
...Yellow Christ was not a self-portrait, but like The Vision After the Sermon of the previous year, it served as important preparation for the subsequent works...
...Nevertheless, after providing challenging detours ambiguity must serve a purpose, lead us to some conclusion or experience...
...The lack of thematic justification is particularly disappointing because Serrano is a technically gifted photographer, who can boast of a painterly eye for color and a sure sense of composition...
...Sherman's recent offerings are self-portraits that present her as various Renaissance figures, including a hairy-chested swashbuckling revolutionary...
...After the months of ballyhoo, I looked forward to the recently concluded Serrano show at the Stux Gallery in Manhattan's Soho district...
...after a moment's thought, though, it does not hold up...
...Like Descartes dreaming up imaginary monsters out of ordinary animals, we can concoct an infinite number of variations on Piss Christ: a Torah scroll spray-painted with a swastika, a statue of the Hindu god Vishnu sitting atop a slaughtered carcass of a sacred cow...
...Serrano has a similar appreciation for the power of religious symbols...
...All these devices may raise interesting questions, but they are finally limiting...
...asaccharine, sentimental photograph suddenly revealed to be not so innocuous...
...In the hands of someone with a clear idea of his message, the ploy could be the starting point for insightful creation —by itself, incongruous juxtaposition is merely a hackneyed exercise...
...Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Serrano was at the center of a fracas last summer over Federal support of "obscene" art...
...On view were 13 pieces plus the controversial Piss Christ, which I expected would outrage or disgust or challenge me...
...Its seductiveness to the artist is undeniable...
...Gauguin's yellow—at the time, a highly iconoclastic hue for representing the crucified Christ—is neither sentimental nor shocking...
...Significantly, he is part of a larger trend toward equivocation in contemporary photography...
...Early on one might have assumed that he was laying the groundwork for tackling complex issues like the Church's long concern with body and society, or the questionable sanctity of mass-produced religious objects...
...On one level he seems to want to reinvigorate these substances with an ancient sense of taboo and mystery and push them in our jaded faces...
...She makes no attempt to conceal her elaborate makeup and costumes...
...Like an old tree trunk, it invited the viewer to find forms and shapes in its gnarled texture...
...My suspicion is that the attempts to ascribe deep meaning to the work have less to do with its inherent qualities than with an understandable reaction to Senator Jesse Helms' attacks on the National Endowment...
...To be sure, there is a long tradition of toying with images, exemplified by the surrealist photographers...
...The extreme act raises once again the old vexing question of why we revere certain symbols...
...In one photograph the bounding semen has the solidity of sculpted plaster...
...On another, he obviously counts on a deeply entrenched squeamishness in the viewer to energize his creations...
...By emphasizing its evocative, imaginative power, early practitioners hoped to establish photography as a fine art equal to painting and sculpture...
...The main room at Stux was hung with five photographs from a series labeled Untitled (Ejaculate in Trajectory), depicting a twisting white cord of semen suspended against a pitch-black void...
...The pictures —also greatly enlarged—have a certain fascination to them, not to mention the wonderment they inspire at the difficulties involved in capturing the image...
...Baldessari takes black-and-white photographs of family scenes and blocks out the faces with painted circles...
...Serrano has employed this approach often over the past few years, submerging likenesses of the Pope, Satan, and the Madonna and Child (the last also exhibited at Stux...
...The National Endowment for the Arts, you may recall, funded a group exhibition at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina that included his Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist's urine...
...Their reliance on artifice—the hidden identity, the disguise, the uncertain substance—seems fitting only for minor jabs, not giant strides...
...That playfulness, though, was meant to strengthen the medium, not subvert it...
...in another, the white liquid, reflecting light as if it were a prism, is streaked along the edges with reddish brown and blue...
...But he has never gone beyond setting up a conflict to make a coherent point...
...A double-take tension—"Oh, that's what it is"—is at the core of Serrano's preoccupation with bodily fluids, and it has the effect of miring even his better work in confusion...
...His self-image as artistic martyr and adulterous outcast fueled portraits of himself both as Christ in the Garden of Olives and as Satan replete with apple and snake...
...In his Madonnas we see a romanticization of Tahitian culture and the record of a stormy romantic life...
...Serrano's work fails to do so...
...Small bubbles shoot up from the bottom and scatter throughout, creating an effect of submersion that is heightened by the glossiness of the print...
...Another visually pleasing work was Red River #3, a whorled patch of intense crimson set against a flat white backdrop...
...In contrast, artists like Serrano, Cindy Sherman and John Baldessari focus on undermining the camera's promise of flawless documentation...
...That is the pitfall of the ambiguous embrace...
...Although little was resolved, many righteous pronouncements were made on both sides by prominent individuals who admitted they were not familiar with the picture...
...Religious scenes were a motif Gauguin employed to express different views of himself and the people around him...
...Meanwhile, his glossy, elegant photographs tend to sanitize his subjects, making them either maudlin conceits or highly formal abstractions...
...Without the title card, however, it is virtually impossible to guess the liquid involved...
...The clash between sacred and profane is, of course, what has given Piss Christ its notoriety...
...Yet a crucifix in urine is no profundity...
...Instead, I found it so remarkably boring as to be inoffensive...
...Piss Christ has been explained as a comment on the eucharist, a protest against institutionalized religion, and an attack on spiritual repression of the body...
...To call these strategies confusing is not to say that art is best when simple and direct...
...At first, Serrano's gambit seems powerful...
...Because it cannot be easily answered, the artist who poses it automatically appears profound...
...The subsequent debate within the political and art worlds divided along the predictable Manichean lines of public decency versus artistic freedom...
...Yet often, as in the case of Andres Serrano, it is a siren that prevents a more forthright expression...
...It was part of the exploration of the personalizing potential of color that marked the years between Impressionism and early Modernism...
...Only later did I realize I had been contemplating a photograph of a heavily used menstrual pad...
...Curiously, several art critics have sought to fill the void...
...it is simply a juxtaposition of blatant incongruities...
...the false noses, hairlines and breasts are apparent...
...More instructive, I think, would be a comparison of Serrano's ultimately hesitant picture with Paul Gauguin's purposeful 1889study, Yellow Christ...
...These travesties may prompt anger, even pseudophilosophical debate, but they have nothing to do with art...
...Not all of Serrano's photographs have religious subjects...
...Unfortunately, he has not used them for much besides crude prongs to goad us into visceral reactions...
...Man Ray once made the point explicitly by sarcastically titling a series of prints Photography Is Not a Fine Art...
...Jesus' right hand extends toward us in sharp focus, while the rest of the figure softens into a yellow glow produced by a reddish haze that envelops the picture...
...The painting was executed when Gauguin was interested in the intense Catholicism of Brittany, yet it is far from simply an evocation of local spiritual life...
Vol. 73 • January 1990 • No. 2
