Postmodern heretics - influence of Catholicism on contemporary artists

Art in America, Feb, 1997 by Eleanor Heartney

While Serrano, having left behind the anger of his early work, seems to have made peace with his Catholic heritage, Joel-Peter Witkin mounts a radical challenge to the Christian belief in resurrection and an afterlife, bespeaking a spiritual despair. The child of an orthodox Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Witkin was raised as a Catholic (although he has retained a fascination with aspects of Jewish mysticism). Witkin has been extremely voluble about the influence of Catholicism on his work. His master's thesis for the University of New Mexico, completed in 1976 and reprinted in the catalogue for his 1995-96 retrospective (seen in Italy at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, and in this country at the Guggenheim Museum), is titled "Revolt Against the Mystical." It chronicles Witkin's desire to "bring God down to earth" by creating photographic images that make the invisible visible.[11]

Unlike Mapplethorpe, who sought to capture an eternally frozen perfection through photography, Witkin uses the camera to enthusiastically depict the deformities and inevitable decay of the physical body. Instead of flawless physiques, he prefers models who are deformed, maimed, tattooed, obese, insane. He is particularly fond of bodies which suggest dual realms -- hermaphrodites, Siamese twins, fetuses, corpses. Witkin's work stakes out the threshold between life and death, which for a Catholic believer provides the ultimate border between the human and the divine.

From a Catholic perspective, there is almost too much material in Witkin's oeuvre. An early series from 1974 carried the title "Contemporary Images of Christ" (one of the photos addressed the theme of "Christ Mocked" through a Christ-like figure wearing World War II kamikaze goggles and women's high heels), and Witkin has frequently based works on Christian iconography, albeit bizarrely transformed. In one photograph, a crucified nude man, masked and pierced with what appear to be threads, is flanked by two smaller crucifixes suspending the bodies of dead rhesus monkeys, tattooed for laboratory experiments. The work is entitled Penitente, New Mexico (1982), an allusion to the New Mexico sect which every Easter reenacts Christ's flagellation and crucifixion. Another work, which shows a man's severed head on a plate, refers unmistakably to the martyrdom of John the Baptist, while an image depicting a hooded nude woman surrounded by torture devices is titled Choice of Outfits for the Agonies of Mary, San Francisco (1984).

Yet for all its profusion, such iconographical evidence does not firmly establish Witkin's interest in Catholic themes -- the images could be seen as a subset of his larger interest in re-creating motifs from Western art history, as in his hermaphroditic version of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. Instead, the key to Witkin's despairing, pessimistic Catholicism seems to he in the ambiguous course of his search for the sacred. In his 1976 thesis, he tells how, at age 17, he sought out a rabbi who was reported to have seen God. In what would prove the first in a series of failed efforts to make direct contact with God, Witkin found only a tired, sleepy, little old man sitting in a comer of a large dusty study."[12]