Andres Serrano
|
|
Andres_Serrano.jpg
Andres Serrano (b. August 15, 1950, New York City) is an American photographer who was notorious for his controversial piece "Piss Christ", a red-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist's own urine.
Life
Serrano is of a half Honduran, half Afro-Cuban background and was raised a strict Roman Catholic. The New-York-born artist studied 1967-1969 at the Brooklyn Museum and Art School, and lives and works in New York.
His work has shown in locations as varied and prestigious as the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City and a retrospective at the Barbican Arts Centre in London (2001).
Work
Serrano's work as a photographer tends toward relatively large prints (in the neighborhood of 20 by 30 inches), which are produced by conventional photographic techniques, (as opposed to digital manipulation). He has shot a vast array of subject matter including portraits of Klansmen, morgue photos, and pictures of burn victims. He went into the New York subways with lights and photographic background paper to portray the bedraggled homeless as art objects, as well as producing some rather tender but occasionally decidedly kinky portraits of couples. One of these last shows what Adrian Searle of The Guardian described as "a young couple, she with a strap-on dildo, he with a mildly expectant expression." [1] (http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,1169,728550,00.html)
Many of Serrano's pictures involve bodily fluids in some way, depicting, for example blood (sometimes menstrual blood), semen (for example "Blood and Semen II" (1990)) or mother's milk. Within this series are a number of works in which objects are submerged in bodily fluids. Most famous of these is "Piss Christ" (1987), a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a glass of urine. This caused great controversy when first exhibited (see Piss Christ for more details). Serrano, alongside other artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, became a figure who some attacked for producing offensive art while others defended in the name of artistic freedom (see the American "culture wars" of the 1990s).
On a simply visual level, Serrano's works could not be considered "challenging" art. They fall well within what would generally be considered a technically well-made and well composed photograph. However, his subject matter often draws from the potentially controversial, perhaps the willfully provocative. Guardian art critic Adrian Searle was not impressed in 2001: he found that Serrano's photos were "far more about being lurid than anything else... In the end, the show is all surface, and looking for hidden depths does no good." [2] (http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,1169,728550,00.html)
Serrano's works "Blood and Semen III" and "Piss and Blood" are used as the covers of rock band Metallica's Load and Reload albums respectively.
External links
- Artcyclopedia web page providing some useful Serrano links (http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/serrano_andres.html)
- Art In Context Serrano page (http://www.artincontext.org/artist/s/andres_serrano/index.htm)
- Annotated transcription of U.S. Senate discussion about "Piss Christ" (http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361_r7.html)
- Story about Piss Christ gallery closing, as well as attacks on the image itself (includes image) (http://home.vicnet.net.au/~twt/serrano.html)