No, I am not referring to our current electoral season but to Andres Serrano’s latest work. Seeing an ad for his current show in the latest issue of Art Forum brought to mind a conversation I had with an acquaintance a while back. Said acquaintance was an art lover in the way that the average person who likes art likes it; not in the way that people who are familiar with the art world have had to understand it. Your average person would not ever have come in contact with Serrano’s work had the evangelicals who occasionally run the congress not seen to it that he become national news, thereby launching him into stardom, sending the price of his photographs sky high, and forever insuring his place in the anus, I mean, annals of art history.
My acquaintance broached the subject of Piss Christ and told me how he hated it and how offensive it was to him. In vain I tried to explain what a lovely photograph it was. But to see it as lovely one of course has to forget that it is the picture of a crucifix floating in piss, and my friend could not see past subject to form. I then tried to embody the voice of Eleanor Heartney and launched into a lame explanation of its content (as opposed to contents) by evoking the significance of body fluids in the Catholic religion. Even I couldn’t get past the nonsense I was spouting.
This season Mr. Serrano asks us to contemplate big beautiful pictures of piles of shit; this time with no little crucifix atop a mound[1] like a mini Corcovado. The medium is the message best describes Serrano’s work. His photographs are big, glossy, well printed, and chromatically pleasing; in essence, they are nice big pictures whose prettiness overshadows any content, if content there really is. In the end, after you pay your ten thou and take one of these home, “whatchu got” is just one more pile o’ shit.
[1] though at least that might actually bring Jesse Helms back from the grave so that we could again have a rollicking good time of “us” versus “them”.
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