Andres Serrano uses photography to explore fundamental human issues such as life, death, religion, race, violence, physicality and sexuality. His work has been controversial and has led to accusations of obscenity and blasphemy. Despite the controversy, Serrano has become one of America’s most important photographic artists, exhibiting his large-scale colour photographs around the world.
Serrano was born in New York City in 1950 to an Afro-Cuban mother and a Honduran father. He entered the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1967, but left in 1969, struggling with drug addiction. In the 1980s, after a hiatus of several years, Serrano began showing his art in New York City. A lapsed Catholic, religion plays an important role in his work. For the past 25 years, Serrano has explored what he calls his ‘obsession’ with Catholic imagery.
Serrano is also interested in the figure of the outcast because, he says, as a non-white American he identifies with the underdog.
While biography has influenced Serrano’s work, he is also deeply interested in art history.
Serrano’s early work was influenced by Surrealism, which he revisited in a later series, The Interpretation of Dreams, 2000. Other paintings, such as those in The Morgue series, recall the work of the 17th century painter Caravaggio or the many Baroque and Renaissance paintings of the dead Christ.
Serrano presents his viewers with an aesthetic that is at once beautiful and horrific, disturbing and seductive. He has also made striking abstract photographs of unbroken expanses of milk or blood, reminiscent of the colour field paintings of the 1960s and 1970s.
Serrano tends to work in series, exploring a theme through the development of an aesthetic. Two early series, Bodily Fluids and Immersions, begun in 1985 and completed in 1990, use bodily fluids in previously unexplored ways. Serrano constructed Plexiglas containers of simple shapes (a circle or a cross) to hold urine, blood or milk, which he then photographed. He also began to combine the fluids in larger containers to see how they would mix.
Eventually Serrano began to work with another bodily fluid, semen, using a motorised camera to create photographs such as Untitled VII (Ejaculate in Trajectory), 1989. Serrano also began to submerge objects – small statues – in the vats of bodily fluids. In Female Bust, 1988, for example, he immersed a small plaster bust of Venus in a vat of his urine and, after lighting it from all sides, photographed it. The result is a beautiful classical image bathed in a warm glow of light. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many critics read these series in the light of the AIDS crisis, seeing the images as political representations of bodily fluids that had become taboo and dangerous.
In 1988, Serrano was awarded a $15,000 grant through the Awards in the Visual Arts programme of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a programme partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The award included participation in a travelling exhibition, which included the now infamous Piss Christ, 1987. When the American Family Association, which considered the image offensive to Christians, complained to members of Congress, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and New York Senator Alphonse D’Amato launched an attack on the NEA for using taxpayer money to support offensive art.
The controversy was widely reported in the press and, along with controversies over other contemporary artists who had received NEA grants, led to the ‘culture wars’ of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which raised questions about freedom of expression, federal funding of the arts in the United States, religious freedom and censorship.
After the Piss Christ controversy made Serrano one of America’s best-known photographers, he gradually stopped using bodily fluids in his work and began making portraits. In 1990 he began two new series of photographs: Nomads, which made heroic portraits of New York’s homeless, and Klansmen, which depicted members of the Ku Klux Klan in theirs hooded garb. Serrano has stated that ‘being who I am, racially and culturally, it was a challenge for me to work with the Klan, as much for me as for them, that’s why I did it’ (Serrano, Talking Art, 1993).
Serrano points out that he was inspired by photographer Edward Curtis’s photographs of Native Americans for the Nomads series. Undeterred by recent criticism that Curtis had romanticised indigenous people, Serrano wanted to create heroic portraits that ‘monumentalised’ his subjects, a word he often uses in interviews. Indeed, Serrano continued this tradition in the 1996 series Native Americans, which depicts traditionally dressed Native Americans in brilliantly coloured, large-scale portraits.
As a different kind of portrait, and in reference to the Victorian practice of photographing the deceased, Serrano made a series of images in an Italian morgue. These photographs from his Morgue series focus on details rather than the whole body. The Morgue (Knifed to Death I), 1992, for example, shows an outstretched hand against a black background, the fingertips blackened in the process of identification. To the left of the image, a streak of blood has oozed from a vertical wound just above the wrist. The photographs in this series are both horrific and visceral, as well as serene and strangely beautiful.
Serrano has claimed that he does not attack icons, but creates them. This is evident in all of his portrait series. For The History of Sex, a 1996 project for the Groninger Museum in Amsterdam, Serrano created images that function as types for different sexualities, sexual acts or sexual fantasies.
Serrano’s series, America, begun in 2002, is reminiscent of August Sander’s portraits of Germans in that it presents American ‘types’, including a heroin addict, Hollywood stars, an escort and a Native American woman. In America (Boy Scout John Schneider, Troop 422), 2002, Serrano places a young, blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy in a three-quarters pose against a glowing reddish-orange background. The boy becomes as iconic as the musician depicted in America (Snoop Dogg), 2002.
Despite his provocative subject matter, Serrano’s imagery is very traditional. Compared to other twentieth-century artists, Serrano draws much more on art historical models and established aesthetics. It is this combination of tradition and provocation that makes his photographs so appealing to a wide audience.
