Postmodern heretics - influence of Catholicism on contemporary artists

Art in America, Feb, 1997 by Eleanor Heartney

Serrano's persistent subject is not, as many think, abjection. Viewed by series, his work reveals itself as concerned with transfiguring the mundane, the base and the profane. His 1986-89 photographs, which range from minimalistic monochrome images of milk or blood to Piss Christ, used bodily fluids, including an image of semen at the moment of ejaculation, to "paint" with light. Serrano originally thought of these photographs primarily in terms of abstraction, though he also had in mind Barnett Newman's merger of the spiritual and the abstract. "The fluid works only became Catholic to me when I started to submerge religious objects in them," he remarks. As a Catholic, I was taught that the crucifix is just a symbol. We were never taught to fetishize it as the critics of Piss Christ did."

These works were followed by two portrait series: "Nomads" (1990), monumental photographic images of homeless people done in the manner of Edward Curtis, and "Klansmen" (also 1990), pictures of high-ranking members of the Ku Klux Klan in their ceremonial robes. Citing the influence of Renaissance painting in which there is more concern with hat and the way it fell across the robes than with the faces of the figures," Serrano points to the religious content of the photographs: "I saw the Klan in those robes and wanted to show how they see themselves as religious figures."

After the "Nomads" and "Klansmen" series came "The Church" (1991), a series of photographs, never shown as a group in New York, of Catholic churches, priests and nuns in Italy, Spain and France. In these photographs priests and nuns appear as emissaries from an earlier time. Serrano has accentuated this metaphysical atmosphere by concentrating on symbols of his subjects, vocations -- robes, tabernacles, rosaries and other devotional objects. In a number of images he crops out the head entirely and zeros in on hands, religious accoutrements or the robes the nuns and priests wear. For instance, in The Church (Soeur Yvette II, Paris), the nun's face turns away from the camera so that the photograph focuses on the flat black form of her draped veil. While The Church (Father Frank, Rome) does include the sitter's face, the real point of the image is the red cross stitched on his black robe.

Serrano's interest in the transfiguration of the abject is most clearly revealed in his series called "The Morgue" (1992). These extreme close-up fragmentary views of the corpses of people laid low by such grim ends as drowning, rat poison, gunshots and AIDS, are infused with a gorgeous luminosity. Many evoke religious paintings of the Renaissance, and all the images radiate a beauty that may have eluded their owners in life. "I never saw the bodies as cadavers or corpses," Serrano says. "I called them my models, my subjects. I was interested in the way they still had a human presence, that something of their soul was still intact."

While it is impossible to deny the element of provocation in Serrano's choice of subjects, the power of his work derives largely from his ability to take the basest of subjects -- body fluids, abandoned corpses, Klansmen, homeless people -- and enact an esthetic transformation which lifts them into the realm of spirit.