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That Andrew Serrano's painting Piss Christ has caused an overwhelming amount of controversy and response is undeniable. A search on The Age's Archives turned up no less than 72 articles related directly to Serrano's Piss Christ, mainly from the time Serrano and the work visited Melbourne during 1997 and 1998. The exhibition of the work provoked some violent responses here. One Timur Grin caused almost $ 100, 000 worth of damage to works at the National Gallery of Victoria, including damage to Piss Christ, although he then claimed not to be offended by the photograph and not even to be a Christian (The Age, 28 March 1998 and 17 April 1998). When the photo arrived in October 1997, the Catholic Church took it to court in order to seek a ban, unsuccessfully, on the public display of the photograph.
Responses have been extremely varied. Some have criticised Serrano's work as dull and read the response to it as the public's "fear of art": The difficulty is whether the current debate is due to some new phenomena or if it is a manifestation of the old 'fear of art'. I suspect in Serrano's case it is both. Serrano's work is fundamentally conservative and indeed as boring in its spectacle as any 19 th Century salon piece. Apart from the obsessive recording of deviant behaviour, or the clinical approach to morbid subject matter, there is beyond that nothing of which to speak. The works are lifeless, tedious, over-inflated and depressing in their complete negation of themselves as gifts to the world.
It is certain the reviews and responses would have been savage if it weren't for the expected and current negativity from certain quarters of the public (Fish Communication Network, 1998). Other commentators have defended the work as a profound piece of religious art: I wish they'd all lighten up and see this piece for what it is: not blasphemy, but a profoundly religious reflection on the place of Jesus Christ in contemporary society. Yes, it IS disturbing. So? One of the most important functions of art is to disturb, and that, dear flock, includes religious art (Schildgen, 1998). Others have, in perhaps "typical" Australian fashion, attempted to defuse the hype and 'seriousness's ur rounding the whole situation by taking the "piss" out of Piss Christ: In the tradition of Piss Christ comes Piss Pot, featuring a pot of beer immersed in urine. "Piss Pot is deeply offensive to all Australians, " said Liam Cody, prominent beer drinker. "It takes one of our most sacred icons, a pot of beer, and destroys it.
We " ve all spent a night on the turps and woken up feeling like we must have drunk urine the night before. But this is different. It confirms our worst nightmares, " he said The exhibition will run until vandals and religious fruitcakes destroy everything with hammers (Cody and Tomkins, 1998). This type of parody can be significant in providing clues as to the logic that condemns Piss Art to mere blasphemy however. The joke works, because, in fact a pot of beer is so very banal while the figure of Christ is normally taken as one of the most sacred in Western history. Yet certain paradoxes surround the work Piss Christ.
To view the photo initially, out of the context of controversy which surrounds it, unaware even of the title, the work comes across as anything but blasphemous. It conveys, rather, a deep sense of reverence and even mystical appreciation of the crucifixion, denoted by a glowing aura surrounding the image of Jesus on the cross. It appears to relate something of the trans-historicity, the timelessness of the meaning of the crucifixion of Christ - a concept close to the heart of many conservative, orthodox Christians. It is only when one reads the title and the means by which the photo was produced that the blasphemous "shock" hits the viewer. What appears to be an image of sincere reference, turns out to be an image of a crucifix immersed in urine - not what one would read as a received notion of reverence.
The second paradox is that the same work which caused such massive outrage for being displayed at the National Gallery of Victoria, was constantly reproduced at the time in both The Age and The Herald-Sun, as well as on the TV networks; yet no one attempted to ban these papers or the networks from reproducing the artwork, nor did anyone express outrage at the fact that the newspapers and the networks would dare reproduce Piss Christ. The net result was that (as if often the case) the controversy created by outraged Christians caused many more people to view the work, even if not in its "original" medium or context, than would have if no one had spoken out about the work. This peculiar effect however belies a certain logic of textualist that pervades Christian metaphysics and may also be seen as the root cause for the outrage the work caused. The issue at stake is not so much the particular image as an historically concrete object - although this has been the target of vandals. What is more provoking to people who take serious religious offence at the work, is a loss of control over the category 'sacred' and its dissimulation and how it is interpreted. The fact is that the work was, and is, not just hanging in a gallery - it is extremely widely reproduced and reproducible.
A search on the net brought up multiple sources for digital (ie, downloadable) reproductions of the work itself - and the notion of just how reproducible not only Piss Christ, but works of art in general, are, in our particular historical era marked by mass reproduction only intensified by the advent and success of electronic technology, struck me as I was downloading materials for this essay including the image reproduced above once more for good measure. It struck me as I was playing around with my computer and set the image as a tiled background on my desktop - which instantly gave me not one, but ten reproductions of the work in question. The work as photographic reproduction defies location of an original - a particular effect of our postmodern culture determined by the logic of late capitalism (as described by Jameson, 1991). Assumedly, attempting to destroy the work by vandalism could only be a symbolic gesture, as another print could always be ordered.
In this critics of Serrano such as Fisher and Ramsay (1997) in their Quadrant article 'The Bishop, the Artist, the Curator and the Crucifix' (no doubt a play on the title of Peter Greenaway's film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover that caused a considerable amount of controversy also) are forced to locate the blasphemous impulse or effect not in the work itself as resemblance, but in its representation of an historical event: Profaning a sacred object by urinating upon it (or immersing it in urine) would be a sacrilege in almost any culture or religion; photographing and publicly displaying the record of such an act counts as blasphemy in almost any culture, let alone giving it the particular name it was here given; and if the creation and public display of such a work is deliberately provocative, as it almost certainly was, this in turn demonstrates disrespect for a particular religion, or at least insensitivity towards its adherents (49). Thus, due to the reproductive possibilities of the work of art, and that fact that at the height of the controversy the art work was reproduced in many media, to blame the work itself as blasphemous object can no longer be seen as the source of the offense. Fisher and Ramsay criticise the historical acts of immersing the crucifix, photographing it in this way, and placing the photograph on public display as an artwork. Nonetheless, their insistence on the fact that the act of blasphemy commited here was real and objective, and not just a matter of personal opinion, forces them into a contradictory point of view. On the one hand they argue that the effect of blasphemy is an immediate one, intuitively felt, almost as if blasphemy violated some innate, inbuilt moral / aesthetic faculty of human beings: In crucial cases, however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate. Popular repugnance at sacrilege and blasphemy would seem to be an example of this.
As with incest, bestiality, cannibalism, and the desecration of corpses, we are repelled... because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of thing...
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Research essay sample on National Gallery Of Victoria Immersed In Urine Work
