andres serrano interview in whitewall

Email interview with Andres Serrano in Whitewall’s winter ish. Photographs by Slava Mogutin. And Serrano, of course.

GOD HELP US ALL
An Interview with Andres Serrano
by Sarah Kessler

Since the late 1980s, Andres Serrano’s photographs have delighted and offended a broad audience, from conservative Christians to art world insiders alike. It all started (the story goes) with a 60 by 40-inch print whose bluntly revealing title provoked a veritable shitstorm. Part of a series called “Immersions,” Piss Christ (1987) came to fruition when Serrano submerged a plastic crucifix in his own urine, casting an eerie golden glow over Christ’s tortured body. The National Endowment for the Arts rewarded Serrano for his artistic effort, while Republican Senator Jesse Helms accused him of sacrilege, declaring, “[H]e is not an artist, he is a jerk.”

“The photograph, and the title itself,” wrote Serrano in a letter to the NEA, “are ambiguously provocative but certainly not blasphemous.” He went on to propose that, “In a free society ideas, even difficult ones, are not dangerous. The only danger lies in repressing them.”†

Representing the repressed might be Serrano’s core obsession. Fascinated by the subjects, objects, and ideas that most citizens of the free world are trained to find distasteful, Serrano turns out images so seductive that we are unable to avert our eyes. His newest series, “Shit,” debuted at Yvon Lambert’s Paris and New York galleries this September. Whitewall spoke with him via email in October, before the election.

Whitewall: Your work has often tended towards portraiture, but in your newest series you’ve replaced human faces with piles of feces blown up larger than life. When did you first alight upon excrement as your subject of choice, and why photograph it portrait-style?

Andres Serrano: I once said I would never work with feces, and in addition to making work to challenge myself I also make work that will challenge and confront my audience. If it’s not interesting for me, how can it possibly be interesting for others? Most of my work is portraiture – portraits of Klansmen, portraits of the homeless, portraits of the dead, portraits of plants (cycads) – so it made sense for me to photograph excrement as formal portraiture as well.

WW: The sheer size of your “Shit” portraits forces us to literally “look shit in the eye.” In doing so, other senses are stimulated. (For my part, I smell excrement when I look at these images.) What sorts of bodily sensations were you hoping “Shit” might inspire in viewers?

AS: First and foremost, there is the visual impact, much of which is due to the scale of the photographs. The feces are photographed close-up, made monumental. You have to look at them; there is no escaping that confrontation. The project is also just as much about language and the use of the word “shit” in the parlance of our times – the cultural references and innuendos that exist in that word. Many of the works’ titles go beyond the descriptive and the literal – they are symbolic as well. Bullshit is both literal and metaphorical, as are Freudian Shit (feces from a therapist), Holy Shit (feces from a priest), and Self-Portrait (all 2007). You are not the only one who thought they smelled excrement while in the presence of the photographs. Many people at the opening felt the same thing. It is the power of suggestion.

WW: Humor often surfaces in the titles of the individual works in “Shit”—Bad Shit (2007), along with the photographs you mention above, evidences this trend. What role does humor play in your work?

AS: Humor plays a big role; you said it yourself. I think I have a good sense of humor, and I can laugh at myself. I purposely gave my critics plenty of ammunition to hurl back at me with titles like Dumb Shit, Stupid Shit, Evil Shit (all 2007) and Bad Shit. You have to be one step ahead of your audience as well as your critics.

WW: What prompted your decision to install Piss Christ—arguably the most controversial work you’ve produced—along with the “Shit” portraits in your current solo show at Yvon Lambert in New York?

AS: Yvon Lambert suggested it and I thought it was a great idea.

WW: Do you feel that Piss Christ has (in some sense) come to represent your oeuvre, due to its iconic status in the art world and beyond? To your mind, why is this older work of yours still so heavily referenced?

AS: Piss Christ is so heavily referenced because it made an impact on artistic expression and freedom of speech that still has relevance today.

WW: What were you searching for during the early 1990s, when you photographed a diverse array of subjects ranging from KKK “Wizards,” to street people, to nuns, to the corpses of AIDS victims? In other words, what connects “The Klan,” “Nomads,” “ The Church,” and “The Morgue?”

AS: What connects those series’ is that I’m driven to make unusual portraits. For example, with “The Klan,” I thought, “How do you make a portrait of someone who is hiding behind a mask?” I decided to make this series because I myself am not white. If I were white, perhaps it wouldn’t have been interesting for me and there would have been no point in doing it. When I did “The Church” in Spain, France, and Italy, I tried to photograph the Cardinal of Paris. His press secretary asked me, “Why Piss Christ?” The point is that I like to do the things I’m not supposed to do. For me, the question should not be, “Why ‘The Morgue,’” or, “Why ‘Shit,’” but rather, “Why Not?”

WW: Seven photographs from your 1995-96 series “The History of Sex” were vandalized just last year while on exhibit in Sweden. How is it that the depiction of an unconventional sex act (fisting, for example) can upset people to such a violent degree? What was your reaction to the events in Sweden, more than a decade after producing the “offending” images?

AS: The people that attacked the show at the Kulturen in Lund last year were Neo-Nazis. I was surprised there were Neo-Nazis there because I’d just been to Lund and was struck by what a peaceful and magical town it was. I heard that there was a Neo-Nazi riot there last week. This time, I didn’t cause it.

WW: With “America” (created in the early 2000s), last year’s “Les Sociétaires de la Comedie Française,” and now, “Shit,” your work appears increasingly theatrical. Is this observation off base, or is theater/theatricality in fact central to your current practice?

AS: There was nothing theatrical about “America” for me. I started working on “America” a couple of weeks after September 11th. I spent three years making the 116 portraits. I did “America” for myself – it was my personal response to America being attacked by people who have no idea what America is. “America” was my way of documenting who we are. I felt that I had enlisted in the war effort, and this was my contribution. I remember speaking with an Austrian a few days after September 11th and she pointed to my arm-band of stars and stripes and asked me, “Why the arm-band?” I thought to myself, “If I have to explain it to you, I can’t, so I won’t.”

I try to make my subjects bigger than life, and if that’s being theatrical, then I suppose I’m theatrical, but I think of my work as more human than anything else. One of the most stupid criticisms I’ve seen of my work recently is that I’m doing it for the attention. Does that mean I should make work that gets overlooked and ignored?

WW: In what ways do you find the United States cultural climate to have changed since 1989, when Jesse Helms and others took the NEA to task for funding Piss Christ?

AS: Things are a lot worse. The question is no longer whether or not the government should support the arts; the question is, can it? America is faced with a new reality, both economic and political, and art is the last thing on most peoples’ minds. We are now faced with the greatest financial crisis of our lives, and there will be a tightening of the belt on all levels, especially on the level of the arts. Most Americans are too concerned with how they are going to survive to even notice, or care about, the country’s cultural climate. In times of strife, art can be the catalyst the people need. I expect to see more dissension.

WW: Are you optimistic about the upcoming election?

AS: Not really. Either way, whoever ends up in office will face the same problems. But, how these problems are handled will make all the difference in the world. I don’t see how anyone could possibly think that spending ten billion dollars per month on a war that few people want is good for the country. I also don’t see how electing people who are obviously not qualified for such high offices is going to help. The election will swing the pendulum one way or the other. God help us all.

† See the Congressional Record of May 18, 1989 for Helms’ full commentary. Serrano’s response is reprinted in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings by Kristine Stiles and Peter Howard Selz (University of California Press, 1996).

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