ART REVIEWS : Notorious Serrano Work Provokes Questions as Well as Wrath

In the age of the sound bite, promoters of conservative causes also have seized on the swift emotional appeal of famous symbols. What more dramatic way to describe unacceptable social behavior than to single out weirdos who want to burn the American Flag or do peculiar things with a crucifix?

By now, just about everyone has heard of Andres Serrano’s photograph, “Piss Christ.” Last year it became a target of wrath over National Endowment for the Arts funding in the U.S. Senate, the first thunderclap in the storm imperiling the NEA’s future.

The casual viewer glancing at Serrano’s notorious 60-by-40-inch Cibachrome photograph--one of several works in his current one-man show at BlumHelman Gallery--would see only a large, golden-yellow crucifix submerged in an atmospheric red liquid shot through with tiny trails of bubbles. The image has a lush, soft-edged romanticism that suggests a larger-than-life version of the surreally golden portrayals of Christ in children’s Bibles.

“Piss Christ” was part of “Awards in the Visual Arts 7,” a 1988 exhibit at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C. Funded in part by the NEA, the show traveled uneventfully to venues in three cities, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

It was the title, of course, that got the goat of the right-wing American Family Assn. of Tupelo, Miss. Learning that the artist had submerged a crucifix in his own urine, the group led a massive protest campaign that attracted the outraged attention of Republican Senators Alphonse d’Amato and Jesse Helms, who introduced an amendment last summer outlawing federal funding of “offensive” or “indecent” art.

You might think that “Piss Christ” is an example of conceptual art that was understood only too well by the non-art world folks whom it was supposed to offend. Yet the image retains a keen ambivalence.

Serrano has frequently mentioned Luis Bunuel as an influence, and the Spanish filmmaker’s visceral, anti-clerical obsession with Catholicism seems very much to the point in this work. The tension in the photograph is between the humanity of Christ, the historical figure, and Christ as the distorted symbol of conventional piety created by the religious Establishment.

On one level, urine is simply another body fluid, along with the blood and mother’s milk of Christian symbolism. In the Eucharist, for example, the bread and wine are believed to become the body and blood of Christ. Countless Renaissance paintings show the Virgin Mary nursing the infant Jesus.

Of course, urine is a waste fluid, and it is all the more ironic that a substance generally considered unpleasant creates such a mistily attractive effect in the photograph. And yet the red-and-yellow glow (derived from urine mixed with blood) also suggests a serious, symbolic reading: the mingling of the blood of martyrdom with a spiritual “light.”

In a startlingly original way, “Piss Christ” conflates the painfully graphic, bloody images of traditional Latin American religious art with the large, vague, gilded images of a televangelist culture. Ultimately, Serrano emphasizes the extraordinarily malleable nature of religious symbols as reference points for complex and subjective personal experience.

More recent work in the show includes photographs of statues of religious figures (“Grey Moses,” “Black Mary,” “Pieta II”) submerged in body fluids. More eerily fascinating than these are a trio of white marks on a black background that look as though they chart the rapid movement of some astral body. In fact, the images--rushing arcs and a thick, straight pour of molten whiteness--describe the path of the artist’s semen.

Once again, the shock value lies not in the images but in knowing how they were created. But beyond that, the “Untitled (Ejaculate in Trajectory)” series offers a wry metaphorical outlook in which the creation of life, the creation of the universe, the artist’s gesture and the stilled moment captured in photography all play a part.

BlumHelman Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to July 14.

Visceral Images: Judie Bamber’s new paintings at the Roy Boyd Gallery sulk and snarl with an underlying bruised sensibility that derives both from the imagery and the titles. Each square canvas is a monochrome field with a small, meticulously described object in the center. Some of these are just small (a chameleon); others have a viscous surface texture and erotic or squeamish associations (a side view of a mussel that looks like a female organ, a dead baby bird); and still others are simple manmade objects that coldly represent male anatomy.

Bamber’s titles--”I’ll Never Forgive You for This (Duo Tone Balls)”; “I Don’t Want to Talk About It (Mussel)”--inject a contemporary note of a relationship-on-the-rocks. The pairings of objects and titles sometimes give seemingly innocuous objects devastatingly cutting significance. Still, the heart of this work lies in the painfully visceral quality of some of the images rather than in the pop-psych play of the titles, which too easily become vapid one-liners.

Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, to July 21.

Terrain of Debate: “Polemical Landscapes,” at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, is a high-minded show of photographs made by artist-scholars passionate about the devastating social uses of land in areas as diverse as White Sands, N.M. (site of the first nuclear tests in 1945), and Bridgeport, N.J. (where an oil company has established a toxic waste site).

The problem is that much of the imagery is less than riveting and some of it is freighted with tedious--if significant--information that is too didactic to function as art. One conceives of a polemic in more immediately vivid, incisive terms.

By far the most absorbing project--although its awkward execution as a museum installation leaves something to be desired--is Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison’s “Trummerflora on the Topography of Terrors.” The artists are proposing to transform an 11-acre site in Berlin that served as Gestapo headquarters under Nazi rule into a memorial to the terror of those times, with interactive signage (each victim’s name, for example, would be shown and uttered).

The starkly simple, strikingly apt central portion of the memorial involves two large piles of “rubble flowering” ( Trummerflora) on the site, a mixture of brick, mortar, metal and plant life created by the plowlike action of frequent bombing. By spreading the contents of these piles where the former “buildings of terror” once stood, the artists would achieve a living, growing, deliberately unstable “memorial that is not a monument,” symbolizing “the ruins of the 1,000-year Reich and the new growth.”

Other artists in the show are David T. Hanson, Peter Goin, Allan Sekula, Deborah Bright and Joe Deal.

California Museum of Photography, 3824 Main St., Riverside, to July 29.