Andres Serrano: The artist who pissed on Christ
Piss Christ, arguably the most infamous work by American artist and photographer Andres Serrano, sounds like the most worthless piece of sixth-form garbage imaginable on the surface.
Taken in 1987 and almost immediately becoming a firestorm of controversy afterwards, Piss Christ is exactly what it says on the tin. A photograph of a small plastic crucifix submerged in a tank of the artist’s own piss. Surely you can imagine what the intentions of the piece are from there, right? Some smug, skin-deep “criticism” of “organised religion” that really is nothing more than button pushing for the sake of button pushing, right? Well, if you listen to Serrano himself, not quite.
I mean, the man must have known what he was doing by exhibiting the photo (let alone calling it Piss Christ of all things). However, if you ask him, there’s actually a deeper reason behind the image than you’d expect. Whether you believe him or not is a valid argument to have, but looking at Serrano’s life and work, there is reason to believe that he wouldn’t be such a troll as he seems. For one thing, he’s a devout Catholic and has been ever since he was a child.
It stands to reason that he’d have complicated feelings about the Catholic church in that case, but nothing so simple as “thing bad, put in piss”. He’s shied away that it has any political message, which sounds ludicrous on the surface. How can you put a simple of one of the world’s biggest religions in a bucket of piss and claim it has no deeper political meaning?
If you ask Serrano, he has a pretty compelling reason for it, though.
What did Andres Serrano say ‘Piss Christ’ was about?
Considering it’s one of the most controversial and outright hated pieces of art ever exhibited, Andres Serrano has had to justify the existence of Piss Christ on multiple occasions. While he says it does have a sociological message (surprise, surprise), its criticism is not of Catholicism or the Catholic church itself, but rather the commercialism that surrounds Christian iconography in contemporary culture. Serrano isn’t pulling this out of nowhere, either.
There’s a good reason why the crucifix in the photograph isn’t made of gold, or even sculpted out of wood. It’s a cheap, plastic bit of tat you can probably pick up at any truckstop in America for five bucks, despite the fact that it probably cost about 13 cents to make. So, that’s the reason why it’s a cheap, plastic depiction of Christ, so… Why all the piss? Well, Serrano has a reason for that, too. One that actually chimes with what he claimed the artwork meant earlier.
In an interview with The Guardian, Serrano said, “What it symbolises is the way Christ died: the blood came out of him, but so did the piss and the shit. Maybe if Piss Christ upsets you, it’s because it gives some sense of what the crucifixion actually was like.”
Thus, Piss Christ moves from being nothing more than a gross-out piece for shock value to something quite different. A meditation on the reality of Jesus Christ as a human being and how His message has been cheapened by capitalism.
It’s also very much a gross-out piece for shock value, but it’s not the most nauseating thing Andres Serrano ever photographed. That would be his 2003 portrait of one Donald John Trump.