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Andres Serrano (born August 15, 1950) is an American photographer who has become most notorious through his photos of corpses, as well as his controversial work "Piss Christ", a red-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of what was purported to be the artist's own urine.
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Life
Serrano is from a half Honduran, half Afro-Cuban background and was raised a strict Roman Catholic. The New-York-born artist studied from 1967 to 1969 at the Brooklyn Museum and Art School, and lives and works in New York.
His work has been exhibited in locations as varied and prestigious as the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City and a retrospective at the Barbican Arts Centre in London (2001) and in the Collection Lambert Avignon France (2006).
On 5 October 2007, several of his works were vandalized at an art gallery in Lund, Sweden by people who are believed to be part of a neo-Nazi group.[1]
Work
Serrano's work as a photographer tends toward relatively large prints of about 20 by 30 inches (51 cm x 76 cm), which are produced by conventional photographic techniques (as opposed to digital manipulation). He has shot a vast array of subject matter including portraits of Klansmen, morgue photos, and pictures of burn victims. He went into the New York subways with lights and photographic background paper to portray the bedraggled homeless as art objects, as well as producing some rather tender but sometimes decidedly kinky portraits of couples. One of these last shows what Adrian Searle of The Guardian described as "a young couple, she with a strap-on dildo, he with a mildly expectant expression."[2]
Many of Serrano's pictures involve bodily fluids in some way—depicting, for example, blood (sometimes menstrual blood), semen (for example, "Blood and Semen II" (1990)) or mother's milk. Within this series are a number of works in which objects are submerged in bodily fluids. Most famous of these is "Piss Christ" (1987), a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of his own urine. This caused great controversy when first exhibited. The work was sold for $162,000 in December 1999 in London, which was far beyond the estimated $20,000 - $30,000.[3] Serrano, alongside other artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, became a figure whom some attacked for producing offensive art while others defended him in the name of artistic freedom (see the American "culture wars" of the 1990s).
The most famous and notorious of Serrano's work plays on the relationship between beautiful imagery and vulgar materials, his subject matter often drawing from the potentially controversial and, perhaps, the willfully provocative. Guardian art critic Adrian Searle was not impressed in 2001: he found that Serrano's photos were "far more about being lurid than anything else... In the end, the show is all surface, and looking for hidden depths does no good."[2]
Serrano's work "Blood and Semen III" is used as the cover of heavy metal band Metallica's Load, while "Piss and Blood" is used on ReLoad. Serrano also directed a video for industrial metal group Godflesh, "Crush My Soul".
See also
References
- ^ Gallery Vandals Destroy Photos, The New York Times (09-10-2007), Carol Vogel. Retrieved on 10-02-2008.
- ^ a b Negative energy, The Guardian (13-10-2001), Adrian Searle. Retrieved on 10-02-2008.
- ^ Auction Results: Andres Serrano's Piss Christ
External links
- Artcyclopedia web page providing some useful Serrano links
- Art In Context Serrano page
- Andres Serrano catalogue in artnet's Artist Works Catalogues
- Annotated transcription of U.S. Senate discussion about "Piss Christ"
- Story about Piss Christ gallery closing, as well as attacks on the image itself (includes image)
- Photo gallery (Warning: contains graphic photos of corpses)
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 21 August 2008, at 16:27.
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