COMMENTARY : Serrano’s Critics Missed the Point : A survey of Andres Serrano photographs in Philadelphia shows that all his work, including ‘Piss Christ,’ focuses on camera’s ability to lie.

The first time I saw Andres Serrano’s big 1987 Cibachrome photograph “Piss Christ,” it hadn’t yet acquired the national notoriety that subsequently engulfed it. At the time--just about a year after it had been made--I didn’t pay much attention to the picture.

“Piss Christ” was one of several flashy images by the artist installed in a traveling group exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. All of the young artist’s work (he was 38) had an aggressive graphic punch, and the pictures reminded me of slick advertisements--especially of those lit-from-behind ads you find on bus shelters.

The works’ clout was propelled not by content but by technique and style: bright, saturated, sometimes lurid colors; big, attention-grabbing size; simple, uncomplicated imagery; a kind of cool laminated look that played against the hot colors, a look that was achieved by attaching the photograph with silicone to a sheet of plexiglass.

The photographs seemed rather desperate in their calculated effort to seduce. (This was the late 1980s, remember, when the art clamor was reaching fever pitch.) Their sense of calculation also extended to the showy photographic subject matter--a hanged dog, a plastic crucifix, a pool of blood--which recorded a litany of topical subjects of the day.

Pervasive violence, born-again Christianity, innocently tainted blood--it wasn’t the look-at-me calculation of his art that was bothersome but the illustrational obviousness of its rhetoric. I didn’t give Serrano’s photographs a second thought.

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Not, that is, until about 10 months later.

Then, in the spring of 1989, I watched wide-eyed as the Rev. Donald E. Wildmon, a conservative minister in Tupelo, Miss., and founder of the old National Federation for Decency, together with his redoubtable agents in the U.S. Senate, Alphonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) and Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), lit out after Serrano as if he were the devil incarnate and “Piss Christ” the gaping maw of hell. What could they possibly have found in Serrano’s flashy but fatuous photograph to incite such evil-minded wrath?

Not much, as it turns out--although, what I perceived to be the picture’s obviousness was evidently lost on them.

The charge they lodged against Serrano’s photograph was blasphemy against the Christian religion. While “Piss Christ” does speak ill of several things, the Christian God is not among them.

A mid-career survey of 52 Serrano photographs from the last 10 years, recently opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, shows that, like all of his work, what “Piss Christ” speaks ill of first and foremost is photography’s pernicious capacity to dissemble.

The camera’s ability to lie, falsify, fabricate and mislead--all in the most glamorously convincing ways--is the artistic pivot around which Serrano’s work always turns.

The fact that photographs lie is, of course, neither an original nor an earth-shattering observation. It is, in fact, part of the camera’s wily charm, not to mention the bottom-line reason photographs can be compelling art.

The moldy 19th-Century debate over whether or not photography could be art hinged on accepting the misperception that a camera is a neutral, transparent observer of whatever scene passes before its viewfinder. If it is, art wouldn’t stand a chance, except as a way to isolate and, therefore, valorize its subject.

But the camera isn’t neutral or transparent. Knowing that camera images conceal at least as much as they reveal is a ground zero for Postmodern art. Serrano, like countless photographers before or since, makes pictures whose dissembling nature is essential to his enterprise.

As for spiritual blasphemy, “Piss Christ” specifically speaks ill of the camera’s capacity to lie even in the face of sacred subjects. As a picture, the photograph is all slick, Technicolor splendor, achieved in Serrano’s studio as it is at Paramount or MGM: with the aid of props, carefully orchestrated lighting and colored gels.

The background field of the radiant altar-size photograph is a deep, rich crimson; the crucifix rising before it is irradiated with a golden glow. Tiny bubbles proliferate across the picture’s surface, as if the tortured body of Christ is being seen submerged in the translucent blood of his spectacular Passion.

Unless you already know the title of the photograph and the artist’s method, you have no way of knowing how the picture was actually produced: by photographing a carefully lit dime-store crucifix propped inside a small glass container filled with the artist’s urine.

This extra-visual revelation of the subject’s actual tawdriness and debasement is critical to Serrano’s enterprise. He wants you to be tempted, seduced and taken in by the sacred image--hence, the calculated advertising style--then smacked across the face with the sorry news of what went on behind the camera’s duplicitous lens.

Remember, “Piss Christ” was made in 1987. That was the banner year for exposure of shocking humiliations in a new form of religious enterprise, which was based on the deceptive power of the camera.

The new, evangelical television ministries that had blossomed into potent empires during the previous decade were threatening to topple in the wake of trashy sex-and-money scandals. As vulgar stories of hypocrisy and criminality unfolded in the press, the nation was held in thrall.

For months, the center ring of the modern media circus was held by Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker. The pair were dragged blubbering from their lofty thrones atop the PTL Club--Praise the Lord!--by their pious rival in the televised fire-and-brimstone trade, Jimmy Swaggart (who soon had prostitute problems of his own). Jim was sent up the river, Tammy Faye to a rehab clinic.

Jerry Falwell scolded from the sidelines and briefly took the reigns of PTL but soon resigned, wary of the taint. Finally, he stepped down as head of the Moral Majority as well.

Oral Roberts, the father of the lucrative television-ministry idea, gave 1987 a fitting send-off. He claimed that God had whispered in his ear that he was going to die--unless, of course, dedicated viewers stuffed $8 million into envelopes and mailed them to Tulsa by year’s end.

Serrano’s “Piss Christ” is a reflection on these brazen goings-on. It shows a gorgeous and seductive image of faith and redemption fabricated from filth.

The picture blasphemes neither God nor the Christian Savior. It does speak ill of media-manipulated ministries like the Bakkers’, which were using the incomparable reach and authority of their dissembling cameras to lie and extort in the name of spiritual salvation, and on a scale that would make Elmer Gantry blush.

Like I say, that commentary seemed pretty obvious when I first saw Serrano’s work at the L.A. County Museum. Today, after all the nonsense that has transpired, it still does.

I mean, if a picture of a wood-and-plastic crucifix submerged in urine is supposedly intended to blaspheme Christianity, what is a urine-filtered picture of a plaster reproduction of Myron’s famous antique sculpture of a discus thrower--which Serrano also made--intended to blaspheme? Ancient Greek sports?

“Piss Discus,” which followed “Piss Christ” but predates the enchanting Wildmon-D’Amato-Helms display of good old-fashioned American Philistinism, is an ordinary artistic extrapolation on its extravagant predecessor. This equally glamorous picture likewise uses human waste as a critical filter, through which to examine the peculiarly modern debasement of art.

Serrano had been using fluids associated with the human body--milk, blood, urine--since 1985. In 1989 these were joined by semen. As materials, these fluids were loaded dice, given contemporaneous political fistfights around such subjects as HIV and drug testing.

The current ICA exhibition pre sents Serrano’s photographs in groups, which approximates the way he works. In addition to the large group of body-fluid pictures, there are portraits of homeless men and women, hooded Ku Klux Klansmen, Catholic nuns and clergy and, most recently, dead people laid out on slabs at the morgue.

Each body of work is stylistically consistent with his earliest pictures: An aura of seductive advertising prevails, regardless of whether the subject matter is horrific or benign. Similarly, whether it’s the elaborate robes of a Klanswoman or a nun, or the severe shroud of a homeless person’s rags or a dead man’s clinical mortuary sheet, the familiar Postmodern conundrum of concealment stands front and center.

There’s a narrow sameness to Serrano’s art, but the resultant potential for highly concentrated, laser-like insight is undermined by the general shallowness of the enterprise. As simple illustration, “Piss Christ” finally tells us nothing we hadn’t already read in the papers, nor does it create a useful replacement for it.

Even if I don’t have much use for Serrano’s photographs, I am nonetheless grateful to ICA for having assembled the exhibition and its often informative catalogue. (The show will travel to New York, Miami, Houston and Chicago.) It answers many questions left hanging in the wake of the vicious hurricane of publicity whipped up around the artist.

Furthermore, it’s clear that the show’s curator, ICA Director Patrick T. Murphy, does have faith in the significance of Serrano’s work. The museum is doing its job.

And it is doing its job with grace and courage, which is more than can be said for many art institutions these days. This is the museum, after all, that organized the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective, which, along with Serrano’s lone photograph, incited 1989’s congressional riot over funding for the arts.

The ICA, after facing hysterical threats and intimidation, and despite the not-uncommon institutional practice today of basing artistic decisions on fear of reprisals from the federal government, is standing behind the art in which it believes. Praise the Lord.

* “Andres Serrano: Works, 1983-1993,” Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 118 S. 36th St., Philadelphia. Through Jan. 15. (215) 898-7108.