Andres Serrano
New York (USA), 1950

The son of a Honduran merchant seaman, who abandoned him soon after he was born, and an Afro-Cuban, he was raised in a Catholic Italian neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from the Art School of Brooklyn Museum, he abandoned his early inclination toward painting to concentrate the next few years on photographing street scenes and in black-and-white. During this time, he started taking drugs, which eventually drove him to give up art. After overcoming his addiction, in 1983 he took up photography once again, this time creating elaborate scenes in which he explored his feelings toward the Catholic religion and whose dreamy atmosphere makes manifest his interest in the surrealist movement. Characteristic of the pictures from this period are saturated colours and the accumulation of a variety of theatrical elements that toy with the spectator’s associative capacity through the deployment of strategies similar to those used in the language of advertising. In 1986, he began to explore abstraction, thereby questioning the objectivity that was traditionally considered characteristic of the photographic medium. He started to work with bodily fluids and produced images in which there is a contradiction between what is seen -surfaces of bright colour- and what, ascertaining from the titles, the spectator knows is represented: blood, milk, semen and urine. This investigation carried him into his next series, Immersions, in which, according to his own words, he proposed “to use natural fluids as being part of the essence of life and to either exploit their coloristic beauty or use their luminous effects”. The work Piss Christ (1987) belongs to this period. It is an image of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine. Along with the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at the ICA in Philadelphia, this piece sparked a crisis in the grant awarding system of the National Endowment for the Arts. After the controversy, Serrano believed he could no longer remain isolated from his surroundings and he turned his lens on counterculture. Influenced by Edward Curtis, in 1990 he produced portraiture of thirty homeless people he met in parks and in the New York City subway. Taking his studio out onto the street, he restored the dignity these people are denied. In keeping with this portraiture, he produced another series, this time ironic portraits of Ku Klux Klan members, wearing their masks and their habits, hiding their identities. He was thus challenging a world he feared, as a Hispanic, yet one he longed to know about. In 1992, he initiated his project The Morgue (Cause of Death) in which his camera converted death -which the spectator assumes has resulted from a terrible situation- into images of utter beauty that recall scenes from art history. A History of Sex (1996), the representation of sexual fantasies or of people -such as old or handicapped people- having sex, seeks the recognition of identities that are rejected as abnormal. In the year 2000, he regained his interest in dreams and, inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis, he produced The Interpretation of Dreams, where he revealed some of the taboos in contemporary society. His most recent project, America (2003), reflects on the concept of Americanism and the idea that Americans have of themselves. Although the series consists of portraiture that formally resembles his earlier work, Serrano’s intention here is not to represent individualities alone but also to question the monolithic essence of a concept, that of America, which in its heterogeneity is impossible to define. S. R.

The Church (St. Clotilde, Paris), 1991

This image belongs to a series of forty photographs depicting churches that Andres Serrano produced in 1991 during a trip to Europe, where he visited Italy, France and Spain. In addition to church interiors, the series includes a set of portraits of ecclesiastic personalities. In these portraits, Serrano’s lens was focused on the symbolism of attire and the detail of gesture.That same year, during an interview conducted by Coco Fusco, he admitted to what may have been the ultimate intention of this series, “I am drawn to the symbols of the Church. I like the aesthetics of the Church. I like church furniture. I like going to church for aesthetic reasons, rather than spiritual ones. In my work I explore my own Catholic obsessions. An artist is nothing without his or her obsession, and I have mine”.
In fact, since the beginning of his career, Serrano has maintained an ambiguous feeling toward Catholicism and the representation of its symbols has been one of the constants in his work. Following the scandal resulting from the public’s disapproval of his Piss Christ, he stated before the U.S. Congress that “religion relies heavily on symbols, and my job as an artist is to pursue the manipulation of that symbolism and explore its possibilities”. In his work, we can appreciate not only the direct presence of these symbols but also that he resorts to compositions from religious art to create some of his photographs addressing profane themes.
Despite the fact that Serrano does not consider himself Catholic, he does admit to being Christian. It seems that what he rejects is not so much the religion itself or its aesthetics but the oppressive and condemning stance the church institution takes with regard to the minorities that do not agree with its programme. He has commented that his own feelings about Catholicism resemble Buñuel’s attitude toward it, “Buñuel deals with religion subversively, he is completely sacrilegious. And yet, this is the work of a man who holds some religious beliefs, if not all that Catholicism embraces. He obviously has a love/hate relationship with the people and institutions he criticizes”.
In this series, as in the one on the Ku Klux Klan, he presented the personalities portrayed and the interiors photographed with monumentality and without associations that permit a critical reading. He is keener on aspects such as the habit as costume that, while hiding identities and equating those wearing it, also confers power on them because of the symbolism with which it is infused. Regarding the buildings, what attracts him above all is the theatricality of the effects of light and shadow, which, in turn, is linked to the very celebration of the Catholic rite. S. R.