Andres Serrano: If you Can’t Say Something Nice

Relishing in the grotesque and offensive, Andres Serrano challenges the world to remember what mama always said.

When Andres Serrano entered the art world, it was with a bang. Thanks to his 1987 photograph of a plastic crucifix floating in his own urine, Serrano carved out a sizeable space in which people of various communities threw rocks and stones, fast and furious. For the attackers, their well-aimed stones weren’t to destroy freedom of speech. They were to do away with an insult to the art world.

Following the offensive “Piss Christ,” Serrano continued pursuing a shocking affront on the sensibilities of the art world. A few years later, he produced two series of photos shown together. The first featured various members of the Ku Klux Klan. The second featured homeless people. Shown together, Serrano essentially pitted the two against one another. Then there was “The Morgue.” As the name implies, Serrano photographed the dead, titling each photo according to the subject’s manner of death. Drowning, stabbing, and rat poison are represented in all their discolored, disfigured disgrace. More horror than art, the images were enough to again give Serrano an importance reserved for outsider artists who do something fresh with their mediums in a meaningful manner. Unfortunately, the pieces do little more than disturb in the same fantastic way the “Faces of Death” video series did decades earlier.

Despite an undying fondness for unpleasantness, some of Serrano’s work is appealing. In a small series of pictures called “The Church,” Serrano showed the respect and love for the church that he claims resonates throughout his works. And in the series titled “America,” there are honest portraits of some of America’s most iconic figures, such as B.B. King, Anna Nicole Smith, and Snoop Dogg. To show that America is more than celebrity, Serrano shot a firefighter, a news reporter, and a couple of other people with more common callings.
 
But Serrano wasn’t content to let something good remain untarnished. Instead, he chose to round the group out with a more bothersome picture of America. Pictured alongside other notables are “Dominatrix” Mistress Adriana, “Neo-Nazi” Shaun Walker, and “Slave” Stephen. It’s as if Serrano dares art critics and collectors, newspapers and parents to pay attention to him and to say offensive words to describe what they’re seeing.

This childishness is evident in one of his most recent collections of photos. Since a nun masturbating and a young model with blood spotting her underwear in wasn’t shocking enough, Serrano grabbed his camera and headed for the dung hills to create the collection titled, “Shit.” That’s right—larger than life images of jaguar feces, bull manure, and even a pile of Serrano’s very own.

Which reminds viewers of their mothers, who often said, “If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything at all.” Obviously that rule has been broken time and again by and about Serrano, so it is fitting to consider what else mother taught: Focus on the positive. The positive is not that a man took photos of religious symbols drowning in the artist’s own urine or that he attempted to turn manure into something abstract and beautiful with his camera. The positive is that we live in a society that allows individuals to form their own opinions and make their own judgments about what deserves to be art and what belongs in the commode.

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