“Piss Christ” has been resurrected.
Or, at least, the controversy surrounding it has been raised from the dead, now that it is back in New York at the Edward Tyler Nahem Gallery (through October 26) in an exhibit called “Body and Spirit” which celebrates the life and work of its creator, the artist Andres Serrano.
Over 20 years ago, in 1989, the hazy image of a crucified Christ, submerged in a jar of Serrano’s urine, created a public firestorm when conservative Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY) deplored it on the Senate floor as a “despicable display of vulgarity” — one that had, no less, been funded by taxpayers. Serrano was radical, but he wasn’t that radical: The so-called avant-garde artist received government support to the tune of $15,000 for the work.
Today, what’s astonishing about Piss Christ is not its vulgarity or shock-value; it is a completely mundane work of “art” which has aged as well as a cheap wine spritzer. The only merit it has is as an historical artifact of the culture wars.
No, what’s astonishing is that despite its third-rate stature, it continues, after all these years, to provoke its intended target to disturbing outbursts of anger and violence.
On Palm Sunday in 2011, for instance, a group of radical young Christians stormed a gallery in Avignon, France, which was displaying Piss Christ as part of an exhibit. They made their way past security, threatened a guard with a hammer, broke through the Plexiglas protecting the image, and slashed it with a sharp object. In 1997 at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, the work was also vandalized, and gallery officials received death threats for showing it. In 2007, a group of neo-Nazis attacked a Serrano show in Sweden (though Piss Christ was not on display there).
Are there parallels to the recent shocking events in the Middle East, where, on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, Islamists stormed the American embassies in Cairo and Benghazi, burning American flags and killing U.S. diplomats? Yes and no. The Islamists, too, were protesting an offense to the faith: a bizarre 14-minute anti-Islam YouTube video, “The Innocence of Muslims.”
On the other hand, no one expects Christian groups to start murdering innocent people over the exhibit.
Still, the Muslim reaction to the video and Christian reaction to Piss Christ raise a puzzling question: Why were members of each faith moved to destroy the object (or stand-ins for the object) that offended them? Why did they overreact to these C-grade works?
Last Thursday in New York, when the Serrano show opened, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights staged a press conference outside of the midtown gallery. Several days before the Catholic League president, Bill Donohue, said of the show: “The timing is done to basically take the middle finger of the artistic community and put it right into the face of Christians.”
That said, the longstanding confrontation between the Catholic League and Serrano’s work was rather anti-climatic on Thursday. Donohue claims that following the press conference, the gallery barred him from entering the show. There was no major protest.
That’s just as well. The Catholic League’s heart is in the right place, but I wonder if there’s a different way to respond to such boring blasphemies.
“Terrible ideas, reprehensible ideas, do not disappear if you ban them,” Salman Rushdie recently said in relation to the anti-Muslim video. “They go underground. They acquire a kind of glamour of taboo. In the harsh light of day, they are out there and, like vampires, they die in the sunlight.”
The culture war over Piss Christ is really a battle of competing egos: the ego of the artist and the egos of the offended observers. What more could it be?
Consider, after all, what Piss Christ is. It is the “aesthetic equivalent of a temper tantrum,” Rev. George Rutler, a Catholic leader in New York, told me in an e-mail. “Since Christ survived a crucifixion, Christianity will not be harmed by some man’s display of his own arrested development,” Rutler wisely remarks.
Speaking of arrested development, among the other works on display at the New York retrospective are: “Piss Discus,” “Semen and Blood, III,” “Madonna on the Rocks,” and an image of a Playboy bunny. Serrano has all the sophistication of a man-boy who delights in the filth of his own bodily fluids. Serrano is like the Charlie Sheen of the art world.
“Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination,” writes Camille Paglia, an atheist, in her new book “Glittering Images: A Journey through Art from Egypt to Star Wars.” She is referring directly to Piss Christ. I interviewed Paglia last Thursday about her new book at the museum of art in Philadelphia, and she made the point that religion lies at the heart of all great art. One of the reasons why the art world is spiritually and intellectually hollow today, she said, is because it continues to “sneer” at religion and think, mistakenly, that doing so is still avant-garde. It’s not. It’s old news.
Serrano’s work is not so much anti-Christian as it is anti-intelligent. So why not let the Piss Christ, and the juvenile imagination that gave birth to it, die in the light of sunlight?
Emily Esfahani Smith is the managing editor of the Hoover journal Defining Ideas and associate editor of The New Criterion. She writes about pop culture at acculturated.com.
