Andres Serrano: the Double Negation/Death of the Artist through Abjection

Leo Deng

3/31/23 (Edits made 5/17/23)

Critical Studies: The Precarious Body

It is certainly better if we separate an artist sufficiently far from his work as not immediately to take the man as seriously as his work. After all, he is merely the precondition for the work, the womb, the soil, sometimes the manure and fertilizer on which it grows, --and as such--, he is something we have to forget about in most cases if we want to enjoy the work.

--Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay 3, Aphorism 4[1]

The created being takes possession of itself, and separates itself from its creator in order immediately to close in on itself and take up its being: it is in this sense that a book exists against its author. […] if the created being is supported even in its minutest parts, if it has no proper independence, […] then the creature cannot be distinguished at all form its creator but is reabsorbed within him.

--Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Introduction[2]

The question of separating the art from the artist, and its probing of the masses, has been on the rise in the last decade or two, specifically because of offensive opinions or crimes associated with musical artists or authors (Kanye West, XXXTENTACION, JK Rowling) that challenge consumers to actively support or even engage with their work or not. Unquestionably, this phenomenon occurs in lieu of the privatization of the political in postmodernity.[3] However, it also coincides with the advent of mass media’s ability to disseminate ideology at an accelerated rate and the access the internet provides consumers with the ability to know an infinite amount about any artist. However, what happens when an artist alive in this era actively rejects what these uncompromising forces will do to his art while extending across decades that engage with his art very differently? I will place Andres Serrano within the framework of this question, entirely separating his persona from his art to analyze the contradictory character of Serrano’s existence. The criticism of a creation should no longer be centered on the creator—like Baudelaire’s work being predicated on “the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice”[4]—rather it should be the totality of independent interpretations of the creation, which Roland Barthes advocates for in “The Death of the Author.” Andres Serrano’s sheer imprudence for his works, that range from the infamous Piss Christ (1987) to portraits of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members (1990s) to seeming glorifications of torture victims (2015) to a museum on Donald Trump memorabilia (2018-19), show a unique double negation of the interpretations of his art and the social commentary implicit within them.

I began with the quotes from Nietzsche and Sartre to show the quasi-progression of the conception of an artist separate from their art, both of which fittingly preceded and heavily influenced Barthes’s work. The affirmation of the separation is not simply that—a castration where the artwork fears the loss of its artist; on the contrary, it is actually the agglomeration of all associated interactions and attributes of the art congealed within a new entity I call the phenomenon-of-the-art. This idea is the logical, subsequent combination of Nietzsche’s commentary on asceticism and Sartre on phenomenology seen in Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author,” where he argues for the primacy of the reader’s interpretation as an infinite potentiality of possibilities in literary criticism rather than the restricting reliance on the biography or intentions of the author— “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text.”[5] That’s why “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”;[6] for the case of the art world however, the phenomenon-of-the-art attempts to integrate this sentiment and logos into a materialist conception of how artwork operates in its position in society. Thus, the primary idea that I embrace in my concept of the phenomenon-of-the-art lies in the mass perception of an artwork. In other words, the phenomenon-of-the-art occurs when popular audiences/consumers combine the recapitulated biography and persona of the artist as mere attributes of mass perception. For example then, the phenomenon-of-the-art of Serrano is the congealed sum-total of all the reactions to his shocking portrayals, his art’s reflection of his intentions, and his imprudence towards intentionality itself (or the mass awareness of it) that is also reflected through both his art and its mass perception. I will extrapolate on what these attributes exactly mean.

Shocking reactions were and are no stranger to the unwavering Serrano’s artmaking, which can be traced back to what put him on the map of the art world—Piss Christ. The 1987 photograph forever marked Serrano with controversy (luckily a positive driving force for the rest of his career) as he portrays a statue of Christ in this surreal, warm yellow-orange atmosphere that is in reality a small Christ figurine submerged in a urine-filled clear tank. Its immediate scandal concerning conservative Senators D’Amato (who performatively tore up a copy of Piss Christ, throwing pieces all over the senate floor) and Helms’ condemning of the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts’ funding of the work. That followed the general Christian fundamentalist sentiment and protest of blasphemy by the American Family Association, which is basically how Serrano made a name for himself, propelling him to the “top” of the art world.[7] He took no rest from controversy after that too, immediately jumping to his next shocking dual-work Nomads and Klansman (1990), with the former portraits of mostly black homeless people put in the same exhibition as the latter portraits of members of the Atlanta chapter of the KKK.[8] Thus, there is clearly a social and political inclination in his art by portraying two extremes of American society (the marginally oppressed vs. the marginally oppressing) and his critique against institutionalized[9] Christianity since Piss Christ (he submerged many other Christian symbols in piss, too, like Madonna and Child II). He explicitly affirms the critique of institutionalized Christianity in the Fusco interview[10], although it really does not matter as the subversive, blasphemous or not, act of placing the pure (Christ) in the abject (urine) reflects a commentary congealed within the shock effect—becoming a cultural shock effect. This all connects nicely in Serrano’s imprudence towards others knowing his intentions as I have mentioned, which he consistently abides by from 1991 to 2023. Serrano says, “any critic can have his or her own interpretation. I have always felt that I am the sum total of my parts”[11] in 1991. And, this idea persists: in a recent guest talk (March 2023) at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art, he repeated this desire — he wants his work’s meaning to be determined/interpreted by others.[12]

Serrano’s seeming self-awareness for the “death of the artist” encourages a peculiar understanding of the phenomenon-of-the-art as literally the “sum total” of his parts. That’s precisely why interpretations range from pure blasphemy to “art for the sake of shock factor” to highly intellectualized analysis like Andrea Fitzpatrick on Serrano’s The Morgue (1992) with frameworks such as postmodernism and abjection.[13] Serrano has truly relegated all meaning of his art to the audience, the consumers, the interpreters. Thus, when taking on Serrano (which I will use as a placeholder for Serrano’s phenomenon-of-the-art for the rest of the essay) radically cut off from his person, what is apparent in the art itself? What does shock connotate? Simply, I think the answer is abjection, but it is the portrayal of abjection in the contradictory aesthetic of the clean—the Superclean.[14] The shock reaction through disgust is clearly the sign of Serrano’s employment of the abject—the dejected, the ejected, the rejected of both body and society.[15] From the abject poverty in Nomads to his piss series that started it all to photographed ejaculation in Ejaculate in Trajectory (1989) to the pain-evoking Torture series (2015), Serrano represents abjection in a uniquely aestheticized, sterilized, grandiose way, leaving interpreters with the question of its purpose. Does it make otherwise indigestible topics more digestible? Does it communicate the topics more “clearly” to the audience by making the aesthetics literally clearer? This is the slippery slope of intentionality that I want to suggest is sourced from the phenomenon-of-the-art rather than the artist themselves; after all, we are ignorant of Serrano’s process and our interpretation is precisely predicated on that ignorance. Thus, its doesn’t matter if Serrano may be glorifying torture, corpses, or the KKK—the exact point, the exact meaning of Serrano is that his projects can render opposite evocations: some may think it is genuine social commentary and for others, it is the fetishization of the visceral. Therefore, there is no need to know Serrano’s exact opinion that he is reproducing in his art, nor any artist in contemporary art, because that is art’s position in society now—the-phenomenon-of-the-art.

Placing Serrano in the-phenomenon-of-the-art framework reveals his artwork as an independent agent and thus, the epitome of “the death of the author” brought into the art world. If we accept this, art ought to be treated as a reflection of the cultural interactions with its aesthetics in its specific epoch. Serrano stands alone as a spectacular creator of the shocking and abject without any clear reason we can find. He’s a double negation of sorts: sometimes it can seem that he propagates or is complicit or outright supports what he is making art about, but by making that a possible appearance, he negates others’ ability to impose meaning on his art. This negates the original negation, where clean presentation contradicts the abjection that would seem to contain the crux of the genuine issue of the art topics (e.g., is the depth of the issue in Abu Ghraib not in the dirty abjection of the real photos?). His lack of opinion negates how his beautiful presentation of All Things Trump (2019) negates the fascist and cultish tendencies of our past president. This becomes even more complicated in his NFT of Piss Christ, having subsequent editions where the different exhibitions’ glass is destroyed by different protesters.[16] Serrano says, “I prefer work that is more ambivalent, more complicated, loaded. It’s more interesting when it’s not this or that way. Why can’t it be both?”[17]

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: “On the Genealogy of Morality” and Other Writings, 3rd edition (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 72. [2] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Sarah Richmond, Later prt. edition (Washington Square Press, 2021), 18-19. [3] Here I refer to the commodification of everyday life to the point where political action is reduced to private affairs like boycotting, one’s choice in a more ethical brand, or what content they consume. [4] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 143, https://sites.tufts.edu/english292b/files/2012/01/Barthes-The-Death-of-the-Author.pdf. [5] Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 147. My italics -L.D. [6] Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 148. [7] Alison Young, Judging the Image: Art, Value, Law (Routledge, 2004), 22. [8] Coco Fusco, “Shooting the Klan: An Interview with Andres Serrano,” Fall 1991, https://web.archive.org/web/20090913054209/http://www.communityarts.net:80/readingroom/archivefiles/2002/09/shooting_the_kl.php. [9] Italicized because he notably is devoutly religious himself in the private sphere in a seemingly Kierkegaardian fashion. [10] Fusco, “Shooting the Klan.” [11] Fusco, “Shooting the Klan.” [12] Andres Serrano and Cash (Melissa) Ragona, “Guest Artist Talk: Andres Serrano” (Carnegie Mellon University Zoom, March 14, 2023). [13] Andrea D. Fitzpatrick, “Reconsidering the Dead in Andres Serrano’s The Morgue: Identity, Agency, Subjectivity,” RACAR : Revue d’art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review 33 (2008), https://doi.org/10.7202/1069545ar. [14] Cash (Melissa) Ragona, “SUPERCLEAN: The Violence of Theory in Contemporary Art,” The Beauty of Theory: Zur Äesthetik Und Affektökonomie von Theorien. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Press, 2013. [15] I take direct influence from Julia Kristeva’s conception of abjection in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection but using my own way of describing it. [16] “‘It’s a Piece of History’: Andres Serrano Transfigures His Legendary Photograph Piss Christ into a New NFT | Christie’s,” November 29, 2022, https://www.christies.com/features/andres-serrano-transfigures-piss-christ-into-nft-12556-3.aspx. [17] Nadja Sayej, “All Things Trump: Behind Andres Serrano’s Memorabilia Museum,” The Guardian, April 19, 2019, sec. Art and design, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/apr/19/trump-the-game-memorabilia-museum-andres-serrano.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image, Music, Text, 143. London: Fontana, 1977. https://sites.tufts.edu/english292b/files/2012/01/Barthes-The-Death-of-the-Author.pdf.

Fitzpatrick, Andrea D. “Reconsidering the Dead in Andres Serrano’s The Morgue: Identity, Agency, Subjectivity.” RACAR : Revue d’art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review 33 (2008). https://doi.org/10.7202/1069545ar.

Fusco, Coco. “Shooting the Klan: An Interview with Andres Serrano,” Fall 1991. https://web.archive.org/web/20090913054209/http://www.communityarts.net:80/readingroom/archivefiles/2002/09/shooting_the_kl.php.

“‘It’s a Piece of History’: Andres Serrano Transfigures His Legendary Photograph Piss Christ into a New NFT | Christie’s,” November 29, 2022. https://www.christies.com/features/andres-serrano-transfigures-piss-christ-into-nft-12556-3.aspx.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nietzsche: “On the Genealogy of Morality” and Other Writings. 3rd edition. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Ragona, Cash (Melissa). “SUPERCLEAN: The Violence of Theory in Contemporary Art.” The Beauty of

Theory: Zur Äesthetik Und Affektökonomie von Theorien. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Press, 2013.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Sarah Richmond. Later prt. edition. Washington Square Press, 2021.

Sayej, Nadja. “All Things Trump: Behind Andres Serrano’s Memorabilia Museum.” The Guardian, April 19, 2019, sec. Art and design. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/apr/19/trump-the-game-memorabilia-museum-andres-serrano.

Serrano, Andres, and Cash (Melissa) Ragona. “Guest Artist Talk: Andres Serrano.” Carnegie Mellon University Zoom, March 14, 2023.

Young, Alison. Judging the Image: Art, Value, Law. Routledge, 2004.