Serrano Answers Congressional Critics

From the moment the crisis enveloping the National Endowment for the Arts broke in April, the brouhaha has revolved around the work of two men who never met--photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, who died this year of AIDS at age 43, and Andres Serrano, 38.

Without fanfare last weekend, Serrano and his wife set out to change that--at least symbolically.

They took the train from New York to Washington and melted into the crowd of 4,400 people at the Washington Project for the Arts who viewed a Mapplethorpe exhibit that includes homoerotic themes. The show’s cancellation by the Corcoran Gallery of Art helped propel this year’s endowment budget debate into what most informed observers agree is the worst threat to the agency’s existence since it was founded nearly 25 years ago.

“I thought it was incredible how people responded,” Serrano said of the Mapplethorpe exhibit. “The clear message they’re sending is that they want to judge for themselves. You just can’t tell the American people what they ought to be looking at.”

For Serrano, whose image of a crucifix immersed in urine has been seized upon by religious fundamentalists and the political right as sacrilege, it was a visit not without irony. The image, “Piss Christ,” has become one of the lightning rods in the national endowment crisis because the agency was one of three co-sponsors--with the Rockefeller and Equitable foundations--of a traveling show in which the photograph appeared.

In a telephone interview from New York, Serrano said he has kept his silence for weeks in the face of a barrage from Washington on the floor of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In ways, it has made Serrano the artistic equivalent of what an infantry officer would call a beaten zone--the area of a battlefield where survival is virtually impossible.

“I cannot go into detail about the crudeness and depravity of the art in question,” said Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) in a Senate debate July 26. “I will not even acknowledge that it is art. I do not even acknowledge that the fellow who did it was an artist. I think he was a jerk.”

The remark was made in debate during Helms’ successful attempt to amend the budget bill to bar federal support for offensive or indecent art.

The amendment--which, with other restrictive provisions of the bill, must now be addressed by a House-Senate conference committee expected to meet just after Labor Day--came as a surprise to observers who believed that the controversy over the Serrano and Mapplethorpe works had begun to dissipate.

That was before a Senate subcommittee, and then the Senate Appropriations Committee, amended the bill to make the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art--the North Carolina arts agency that organized the Serrano show--and the Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania--which organized the Mapplethorpe exhibit--ineligible for federal grants for five years.

Then Helms added his amendment prohibiting government funds from being used to “promote, disseminate or produce” artwork that is “obscene or indecent,” or “material which denigrates the object or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or nonreligion,” or anything that “denigrates, debases or reviles a person, group or class of citizens.”

It was not the first time Helms had derided Serrano. On May 18, Helms said in another Senate speech that “I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano, and I hope I never meet him, because he is not an artist, he is a jerk.

“And he is taunting the American people, just as others are, in terms of Christianity. (It) is all right for him to be a jerk, but let him be a jerk on his own time and with his own resources. Do not dishonor our Lord.”

When Serrano visited Los Angeles last year to participate in a series of gallery talks in conjunction with the opening of the endowment-sponsored show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he opened his presentation with a string of profanities--calculated, he says now, to gain the attention of his audience. The crudeness of his language offended some curators and, it is said, shocked some museum members who attended.

Serrano acknowledged in this week’s telephone interview that he is impetuous and sometimes knowingly provocative. But he was silent as he listened to a recitation of these attacks--punctuated, again and again, by the word jerk.

“I was amazed,” Serrano said finally, “that a respected elected official, who doesn’t know me at all, would be so vicious. I mean, I know (of) Jesse Helms and I know his record. However I might feel about that record, I would never publicly say the things that he has said about me.

“Sometimes I am quick to anger. But in this case . . . I wonder what it is that people are afraid of with ‘Piss Christ.’ Is it a threat to the First Amendment or a threat to the church, which is also my own? I feel that my respect and belief in the teaching of Christ is not shaken by this picture, despite the very anti-Christian treatment that I have received because of it.

“I feel I have to practice tolerance and understanding and turn the other cheek in this case.

“My work is done in such a way as to be left intensely open-ended. I’ve always maintained that the work is meant to spark a dialogue, not to end it. It seems that there are people who would not want to have that debate and that dialogue. This is what upsets me.

“I think Mapplethorpe and myself have come along at the right time for this to happen. The political wind in this country has been shifting for a while and there are people in this country who feel that their world is rapidly changing. They’re afraid of this.”

Does he believe Helms is one of these people? “I would say so,” he replied.

It is a commentary on the unwanted notoriety Serrano has received that, after a telephone interview, he called back to ask that his wife’s name not be published because he fears for her safety.

This role as an artist who guards his privacy jealously but who is also a key foil of one of the Senate’s most powerful members comes unexpectedly and uncomfortably to Serrano. He is only beginning to come to prominence--his work had not been shown publicly before 1984--and was little known outside New York before the controversy.

Serrano was born in New York, the only child of a Cuban mother and Honduran father. He doesn’t remember his father very well because he left the family when Serrano was very young. “Being Hispanic,” he said, “I grew up in a Catholic home.” He was reared in an Italian-American neighborhood, and when his friends began the instruction leading to first Communion and confirmation, Serrano joined them.

But confirmation age was about as far as Serrano got in the church. Like many of his contemporaries, he stopped attending Mass when he was 13, he said. Far from being a symptom of an abandonment of his religious upbringing, Serrano said, his decision was taken because he had a falling out with the concept of organized religion.

“My work,” he said, “reflects ambivalent feelings about religion and Christianity . . . of being drawn to Christ but resisting organized Christianity.”

Serrano dropped out of high school when he was 15, dropped back into art school in Brooklyn two years later and then quit again for good two years after that.

It was only after he left art school that he turned to photography. From then until about 1984, he said, he supported himself in a variety of jobs, including working as the assistant art director of an advertising agency.

“Originally, my photographs were typical ‘tableau photography,’ ” Serrano said, meaning that he constructed his images so they were passive and comparatively predictable.

But three years ago, Serrano said, he began to move stylistically into the use of bodily fluids--first blood, then urine and, more recently, semen. The fluids have been his own. He said he stockpiles urine for use as the medium in images that all tend to feature props and artifacts immersed in a plexiglass tank, shot close up with a 35-millimeter camera.

“I use bodily fluids because they’re life’s vital fluids,” he said. “They appeal to me visually and they’re symbolically charged with meaning. I’ve never judged whether these fluids were good or bad.

“The pictures are about abstraction and representation. (They involve) an attempt to flatten out the picture plane, which is something you don’t normally do in photography.”

Serrano has also produced graphic images of animal heads and such things as chicken hearts in a pool of blood, a cow’s head on a pedestal or a coyote hanged by the neck. Ironically, said Howard Fox, curator of contemporary art at the county museum, when the show first arrived in Los Angeles last year, it was the coyote head that seemed most provocative. Fox was on the jury of the Awards in the Visual Arts competition, which selected Serrano as one of the 10 most promising emerging artists in the country in 1988.

So concerned was Fox that Serrano might have participated in killing the coyote that he called the photographer for an explanation. Fox recalled that he fleetingly considered removing the coyote head image from the exhibit. But Serrano explained that the animal had been killed by a farmer.

Since that time, Fox has followed Serrano’s career closely.

“When you first see the blood or the entrails,” Fox said, “it is very shocking. It’s repulsive. It’s intended to be that way, but if you have the natural curiosity and any kind of respect for the artistic process, you ask yourself: What’s going on?” Fox is satisfied with Serrano’s creative answers.

“You realize that there is a profound interest in the sacred and the profane,” Fox said. “There is a consistent theme of blood and violence and death and suffering. While I would not make the case that he is making sectarian art, I think it’s coming out of an awareness of the themes of passion and suffering and blood and violence and death that you see in Christian art, especially Hispanic Christian art.

“I found him (Serrano) to be a personality who’s extremely respectful of religion and other people. You wouldn’t know that from all the discussion that’s taken place in the newspapers. Nobody’s tried to analyze the work. Nobody asked the artist about his intention.”