Serrano, Andres

▪ American photographer

Andres also spelled  Andrés 

born Aug. 15, 1950, New York, N.Y., U.S.

      American photographer whose Piss Christ (1987), an image of a crucifix submerged in urine, resulted in a storm of controversy and was a central element in the so-called culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s. The piece and others of a similar confrontational nature caused a reexamination in the United States of funding for the arts.

      Serrano studied art, notably photography, at the Brooklyn Museum in 1967–69 and later acknowledged that in the 1970s he was a drug dealer and addict in New York City. He returned to photography in the early 1980s, presenting large-scale colour images concentrating on dramatic and provocative figural compositions. The intensity of these images evoked for the artist the images of Christ's Passion that he had observed growing up in a Hispanic, Roman Catholic home. An interest in bodily fluids—blood, urine, milk, semen—sometimes in isolation (Milk, Blood, 1986), sometimes combined with cruciform shapes or reproductions of statuary (Blood Cross, 1985), led the artist to create his infamous Piss Christ. This image was exhibited at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, N.C., in 1988, as part of that institution's Awards in the Visual Arts series, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Many viewers found the image profane and irreverent and further objected to the support of the NEA, which itself was funded by taxpayers. The public debate engendered by this and other provocative artworks caused Congress to restrict grants to individual visual artists and to cut the NEA's funding by two-fifths.

      In later series studies, Serrano employed traditional portraiture strategies to photograph members of the Ku Klux Klan (Klansmen, 1990) and homeless New Yorkers (Nomads, 1990). His Morgue series (1992), which is believed to have been photographed in Paris, studied the heads and bodies of corpses. His other series examine such subjects as Middle America, Catholic lay workers, guns, and human sexuality.

Additional Reading

Exhibition catalogues include Kunstmuseum Bern, Six Feet Under: Autopsy of Our Relation to the Dead (2006); Brian Wells (ed.), Andres Serrano: Body and Soul (1995); and Andres Serrano: Works, 1983–1993 (1994).

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