Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
“Piss Christ” has been resurrected.
Or, at least, the controversy surrounding it has been raised from the dead, now that it is back in New York at the Edward Tyler Nahem gallery (through October 26) in an exhibit called “Body and Spirit” which celebrates the life and work of its creator, the artist Andres Serrano.
Over twenty years ago, in 1989, the hazy image of a crucified Christ, submerged in a jar of Serrano’s urine, created a public firestorm when conservative Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (NY) deplored it on the Senate floor as a “despicable display of vulgarity”—one that had, no less, been funded by taxpayers. Serrano was radical, but he wasn’t that radical: The so-called avant-garde artist received government support to the tune of $15,000 for the work.
Today, what’s astonishing about Piss Christ is not its vulgarity or shock-value; it is a completely mundane work of “art” which has aged as well as a cheap wine spritzer. The only merit it has is as a historical artifact of the culture wars.
No, what’s astonishing is that despite its third-rate stature, it continues, after all these years, to provoke its intended targets to disturbing outbursts of anger and violence.
On Palm Sunday in 2011, for instance, a group of radical young Christians stormed a gallery in Avignon, France, which was displaying Piss Christ as part of an exhibit. They made their way past security, threatened a guard with a hammer, broke through the Plexiglas protecting the image, and slashed it with a sharp object. In 1997 at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, the work was also vandalized, and gallery officials received death threats for showing it. In 2007, a group of neo-Nazis attacked a Serrano show in Sweden (though Piss Christ was not on display there).
Are there parallels to the recent shocking events in the Middle East, where, on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, Islamists stormed the American embassies in Cairo and Benghazi, burning American flags and killing U.S. diplomats? Yes and no. The Islamists, too, were protesting an offense to the faith: A bizarre 14-minute anti-Islam YouTube video, “The Innocence of Muslims.”
On the other hand, no one expects Christian groups to start murdering innocent people over the exhibit or to storm U.S. embassies over it.
Still, the Muslim reaction to the video and Christian reaction to Piss Christ raise a puzzling question: Why were members of each faith moved to destroy the object (or stand-ins for the object) that offended them? Why did they overreact to these C-grade works?
Last Thursday in New York, when the Serrano show opened, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights staged a press conference outside of the midtown gallery. Several days before, the Catholic League president, Bill Donohue, said of the show: “The timing is done to basically take the middle finger of the artistic community and put it right into the face of Christians.”
That said, the longstanding confrontation between the Catholic League and Serrano’s work was rather anti-climatic on Thursday. Donohue claims that following the press conference, the gallery barred him entry into the show. There was no major protest.
The Catholic League's heart is in the right place, but I wonder if there's a different way to respond to such boring blasphemies.
“Terrible ideas, reprehensible ideas, do not disappear if you ban them,” Salman Rushdie recently said in relation to the anti-Muslim video. “They go underground. They acquire a kind of glamour of taboo. In the harsh light of day, they are out there and, like vampires, they die in the sunlight.”
The culture war over Piss Christ is really a battle of competing egos: the ego of the artist and the egos of the offended observers. What more could it be?
Consider, after all, what Piss Christ is. It is the “aesthetic equivalent of a temper tantrum,” Rev. George Rutler, a Catholic leader in New York, told me in an e-mail. “Since Christ survived a crucifixion, Christianity will not be harmed by some man’s display of his own arrested development,” Rutler wisely remarks.
Speaking of arrested development, among the other works on display at the New York retrospective are: “Piss Discus,” “Semen and Blood, III” “Madonna on the Rocks,” and an image of a Playboy bunny. Serrano has all the sophistication of a man-boy who delights in the filth of his own bodily fluids. Serrano is like the Charlie Sheen of the art world.
“Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination,” writes Camille Paglia, an atheist, in her new book Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. She is referring directly to Piss Christ. I interviewed Paglia last Thursday about her new book at the museum of art in Philadelphia, and she made the point that religion lies at the heart of all great art. One of the reasons why the art world is spiritually and intellectually hollow today, she said, is because it continues to “sneer” at religion and think, mistakenly, that doing so is still avant-garde. It’s not. It’s old news.
Serrano’s work is not so much anti-Christian as it is anti-intelligent. So why not let the Piss Christ, and the juvenile imagination that gave birth to it, die in the sunlight?
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Nov '11
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
Isn't everyone bored by Piss Christ?
It was shocking when it was new and novel. Now its old and boring.
All it ever had going for it was shock value. It wasn't good. It wasn't interesting. It wasn't intelligent. It was shocking and nothing else.
Apr '12
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
Why does anyone react to insult? It's ultimately about survival. While Christians need not fear any immediate threat, such a malicious public insult encourages contempt and mockery and does undermine them, as a people, on a cultural level.
Clearly there is maliciousness underlying the piece, and that's more than just ego, that's an allowance based on previous tolerated insults giving more allowance to more contempt and it couldn't be more specifically anti-Christian.
Why? Because of the Christian belief regarding homosexuality. Piss Christ is a willful act of war in defense of his sexual interests and serves as a rallying flag for homophiles of all stripes.
As for Islam, it's an anachronism of monumental scale slowly coming to self awareness not unlike 1400 years ago when the Arab world awoke to being a global joke and were gathered together under submission to punish their detractors. Gay pride pales in comparison to Islamic pride which is now engaged in brutal revenge for every insult real or imagined.
Jan '11
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
Why? Because individuals start to shape their own attitudes and behavior by mimicking what they see. Culture is a model for citizens to shape their attitudes around. Culture is the public mold for virtue, what counts as praiseworthy and what doesn't.
And when cultural authorities elevate such juvenile expressions to the status of art (never mind using taxpayer money to do it), then those authorities are hijacking culture and defeating its purpose. Instead of highlighting certain works as praiseworthy, they're saying that nothing is praiseworthy - it's all relative, it's all lies.
This "work of art" declares that nothing is sacred.
I deny that, and I reserve the rights to (a) say so; and (b) to oppose those who declare otherwise. Note the distinction between censorship and promotion. I wouldn't agree to censor or punish Serrano. But don't ask me (or use my tax dollars) to promote him. And if I think his "nothing is sacred" attitude is not only wrong but harms the culture, I claim the right to protest it. Not destroy it or censor it, but protest it and oppose it? Of course.
Edited on October 2, 2012 at 5:17pmAug '12
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
I was more upset that taxpayer funds subsidized it.
Jul '12
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
Can we let it die in the light without actively subsidizing it?
The contrast between the state actively financing one person sneering at one religion's primary prophet while simultaneously spending great amounts of energy and money to say we do not finance the disrespect of another faith's primary prophet is ludicrous. We should be financing neither the display nor the disowning of any such art.
Jul '12
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
I think that so-called "works of art" like P*** Christ say more about the supposed "artist" than they say about the subject matter. If the best Serrano can do in the great debate about the relavance of religion is immerse the object of his hatred in his own waste fluids, then he is hampered not only by a limited imagination, but the inability to intelligently express himself. It is more a cry for help than a meaningful comment.
If all artistic endeavors are ultimately auto-biographical, the man appears to be drowing in his own frustration and hate.
Jun '10
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
The only reason Piss Christ should be held up as Piss Christ! is that it needs to be held side-by-side with The Innocence of Muslims and a demand made of this fetid Administration that it tell us - in exact detail - why the former should be ignored - or even celebrated - and the latter condemned loudly by the President, blamed for all the world's troubles, and its creator dragged off in handcuffs by multiple officers very publicly in the night for a probation violation that would, I suspect, normally be handled by a visit from a Probation Officer, who would certainly be armed, but whose focus would mainly be on the case folder he's carrying.
Jun '10
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
That too was my biggest concern.
I disagree with Emily's suggestion that Serrano's work is "not so much anti-Christian as it is anti-intelligent." That makes no sense to me: how can it not be anti-Christian to place a picture of Christ in urine? It takes some mighty intellectual gymnastics to read it other than what it so obviously is.
I can agree it's "anti-intelligent," but "anti-Christian" and "anti-intelligent" are not mutually exclusive categories. In my worldview, they are almost synonymous.
Frankly, Serrano is an untalented hack. My bigger concern is the existence of an art world that views this kind of stuff as "art." That says more about the degradation of our culture than the work itself.
May '11
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
Pardon, this is completely off topic, but this quote from Rev. George Rutler jumped out at me and I could not let it go by:
“Since Christ survived a crucifixion..."
No, he did not "survive." He died and was resurrected. I trust this was just a slip, because the entire Christian faith hangs on this fact.
Nov '10
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
First off, I agree with James Lileks: If you didn't know what the medium through which the crucifix is photographed was, then you'd probably find Piss Christ beautiful. Unfortunately the medium is the point; Serrano's modus operandi, as I understand it, it to try to find beauty in the repulsive.
And second, I think part of the reason Piss Christ still resonates is the shameless double standard where Christianity and Islam are concerned. At a time when some people honestly seem to endorse throwing a filmmaker in prison for "offending" Muslims, the fact that major art galleries still show something like this sends a clear message from the culture that it's okay to offend Christians and only Christians.
Edited on October 2, 2012 at 6:49pmRe: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
Thanks for the interesting, thought-provoking post.
May '10
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
In art school, we had weekly critiques of our work. Sometimes they were brutal, especially if someone had it in for you, but the worst type of critique was one in which no one had an opinion of it, a collective "meh." Serrano's work is relevant, because you are making it so. And calling an artist "third rate" or a "hack" does nothing to diminish his standing when he's a household name. His work is supposed to be provocative. I don't think you are taking the conceptual context of Serrano's work into consideration, but that's, well, not shocking. Speaking of shock, an interesting read is The Shock of the New.
Jun '11
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
We all know that President Obama told the UN: "The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam."
But he went on to say, "But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated..."
So, we "don't let it die in the sunlight" so as to remain "credible" when we burn and murder on behalf of slandered Muhammad. See, once again, our President has made clear a previously muddled issue.
Jun '12
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
All I could think when I saw the photo was, "Dude, take some fluids. You're seriously dehydrated."
Apr '12
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
This reinforces my view that art has become little more than sensationalism and publicity seeking. I mean really, Serrano's talent is in graphically demonstrating his disdain for Christianity ... that almost qualifies as intelligent.
Apr '12
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
I'm not bothered by Piss Christ, but I'm also not a Christian. I don't find it intelligent as a work of art. I definitely don't believe it should have been subsidized by the government.
Recent events surrounding The Innocence of Muslims has led me to some unfortunate conclusions.
I keep reading those who defend Piss Christ and yet protest The Innocence of Muslims. To take this position one has to believe it is acceptable (even celebrated) to insult Christianity, but unacceptable to insult Islam. This viewpoint is understandable for someone wants Islam to be the dominant world religion, but I have trouble believing those defending Piss Christ are hoping for a caliphate. I am leaning towards the view that many believe two things at once:
1. Nothing is sacred.
2. Islam is sacred.
Man (in the sense of "human") is sometimes defined as a "rational animal." I am led to the conclusion that those who defend Piss Christ but condemn The Innocence of Muslims are, quite simply, not human.
Mar '12
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
"Serrano’s work is not so much anti-Christian as it is anti-intelligent. So why not let the Piss Christ, and the juvenile imagination that gave birth to it, die in the sunlight?"
If human beings were purely rational entities, shopping for opinions in a free marketplace of ideas, such an approach would have merit. But of course, we are not: religion and art are grounded in the emotional/sensational/social aspect of human experience. In that realm, the expression of open contempt, literally pissing on an image, desacralizes it in the common eye. And, just as in the Old Testament confrontations between true prophets and pagan priests, such actions (and the lack of consequences) themselves demonstrate hollowness or falsity of the deities, the idols, smashed.
Serrano is a sensationalist, but make no mistake, he is engaged in a power play as well. (The fact that his exhibit was state-supported makes the artistic statement that much more powerful.) The Christian who shrugs off Serrano's immersion of Christ in urine with a world-wise sophistication has internalized Serrano's re-valuation of the image: "who cares?"
Jul '10
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
As with most things in the art world, the proper response is mockery. It's Kryptonite to the self-important swells.
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
To me it's about escalation.
Conversation to criticism to insult to shoving to ass-kicking to murder (insert other levels if you care).
If you think escalating to insults is OK, why complain when I escalate to punching? You were guilty of the first escalation. If you are unwilling to continue, why escalate at all?
Of course it is the civilized man who doesn't go that far. At some point you have to be dignified enough to halt the escalation.
It is the difference between us and Jihadi Muslims.
It is the reason I don't break Serrano's jaw.
Civilized and dignified - things Serrano obviously is not evidenced by his escalation to insult.
Edited on October 2, 2012 at 9:33pmMay '11
Re: Piss Christ, "Art", and Violence
Chad E. Brown: Recent events surroundingThe Innocence of Muslims has led me to some unfortunate conclusions.
I keep reading those who defendPiss Christand yet protestThe Innocence of Muslims. To take this position one has to believe it is acceptable (even celebrated) to insult Christianity, but unacceptable to insult Islam. This viewpoint is understandable for someone wants Islam to be the dominant world religion, but I have trouble believing those defendingPiss Christare hoping for a caliphate. I am leaning towards the view that many believe two things at once:
1. Nothing is sacred.
2. Islam is sacred.
Man (in the sense of "human") is sometimes defined as a "rational animal." I am led to the conclusion that those who defend Piss Christbut condemn The Innocence of Muslimsare, quite simply, not human. · 1 hour ago
Or, they carry their "rational" logic one more step:
1. Nothing is sacred.
2. Islam is sacred.
3. Islam is nothing.