Piss Artists 3: Andres Serrano (Piss Christ)

Andres Serrano: Immersion (Piss Christ) (1987) 

Cibachrome print photograph (150 x 100 cm) [1]

 

I. 

 

For most British people, a piss artist is one who likes to get drunk, act the fool, produce shoddy work and generally waste time. In other words, one who gets pissed a little too often; pisses around a little too much; and pisses people off more than is deemed acceptable. 

 

However, for some of us, the term also triggers thoughts of Warhol, Chadwick and Serrano and here I would like to discuss a famous work by the third of these piss artists, Andres Serrano ...

 

 

II.

 

It's debatable if Piss Christ (1987), by the American photographer and artist Andres Serrano, is profoundly appropriate for publication on Easter Sunday, or wildly inappropriate. 

 

Either way, the mysteriously beautiful (and award winning) picture of Jesus on the Cross submerged in a small glass tank of urine is his one work that pretty much everybody recognises and it's the work that most fascinates me at the moment.

 

Serrano often likes to use bodily fluids in his work; not just piss, but also blood, semen, and human breast milk. Why that's the case - what his artistic obsession with these things (and other base materials) reveals about him or forces us to face up to in our own lives - I'm not sure. 

 

Having read a fair amount of Bataille, however, I've a pretty good idea: the use of base materials disrupts the opposition of high and low by exposing the fact that whatever is elevated remains dependent on soil, slime, and shit and this dependence means that the purity of the ideal is contaminated or corrupted. 

 

Similarly, by affirming à la Henry Miller everything that flows and showing how bodily fluids very much belong to a libidinal economy - even though such secretions are often subject to severe prohibition and taboo - artists are able to destabilise all fixed and firm foundations. 

 

 

III.

I suspect that Serrano knows all this, so his expressions of surprise that the work should generate huge controversy (mostly because it was thought blasphemous by those on the religious right, rather than deconstructive of metaphysical dualism) are somewhat disingenuous [2].

 

And, as a lifelong Catholic who takes his faith seriously, Serrano probably also knows that the Eucharist contains a dirty little secret; that the bread and wine are not symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ as most people believe, but, rather, of metabolic waste materials (the idea being that the holy spirit is born of excess; that divine energy is a surplus that cannot be absorbed into daily life; that the accursed share is that which makes blessed) [3].          

 

Thus, whilst I may not want to hang a print of Serrano's Piss Christ above my bed, I acknowledge its theo-philosophical importance.

 

And, like Apollinaire, I refuse to be shocked, or scared, or to stand in awe of art and have no qualms about any materials the artist chooses to use. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Piss Christ was one of a series of photographs that Serrano had made that involved classical statuettes submerged in various body fluids.

[2] Although initially Piss Christ was well received, as word got round that Serrano had (at the very least) insulted Christ and all those who regard him as their saviour, he started to lose funding and receive hate mail (including death threats) - which isn't very Christian when you think about it. 

      Serrano, however, denied his work had any overt political content and rejected the accusation that he was attempting to blaspheme. In fact, Serrano suggested that Piss Christ should be regarded as a serious work of Christian art, saying:  "What it symbolizes is the way Christ died: the blood came out of him but so did the piss and the shit. Maybe if Piss Christ upsets you, it's because it gives some sense of what the crucifixion actually was like."   

      And in 2023, even the Pope was prepared to accept this argument, after meeting with the artist in Rome and giving him his blessing. By this date, the value placed on the work by the art market had also risen miraculously; in October 2022, Piss Christ was sold at Sotheby's (London) for £130,000 ($145,162).

      The quote from Serrano is taken from an interview with Jonathan Jones in The Guardian (3 April 2026): click here. 

 

[3] As one commentator on the subject of excrement and religion notes:

      "The perennial intermingling of scatology and religion is so extensive that cataloging it could fill volumes. The conjoining of excrement and divinity may bring about cognitive dissonance in some, or even most, but for many throughout history it has been a harmony that leaps immediately to mind, though to various ends." 

      See Andrew G. Christensen, "'Tis my muse will have it so": Four Dimensions of Scatology in Molloy', Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Summer 2017), pp. 90-104. Lines quoted are on p. 97. This essay can be found (if interested) on JSTOR: click here. 

 

 

To read the first post in this series - on Andy Warhol and his Piss and Oxidation Paintings (1977-1978) - please click here. 

 

To read the second post in this series - on Helen Chadwick and her Piss Flowers (1992) - please click here.        

 

 

Never Mind the Bollocks (On Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence and the Sex Pistols)

Punk Nietzsche by Gary Neill (2010) on Tumblr

Someone writes and asks why it is that so many posts on Torpedo the Ark invariably refer back to either Nietzsche or D. H. Lawrence. What is it about these two figures that first attracted you and why is it they continue to fascinate?

In order to answer this, it's important to clarify that I'm someone whose intellectual background is neither in German philosophy nor English literature. Rather, it's in art, music, fashion, and radical French politics as filtered through the imagination of Malcolm McLaren. And thus what initially attracted me to Nietzsche and Lawrence was the same that attracted me to McLaren's punk revolution; the attitude, the style, the humour, the extreme nature of their call to arms. 

For like the Sex Pistols, Nietzsche and Lawrence demand an intense level of commitment from their devotees, whilst also encouraging a great level of individual freedom; they don't want you to follow them faithfully, but to lose them and find yourself.

Further, they allow outsiders to feel heroic members of a counter-cultural elite; part of a subversive secret society and part of an adventure - if not, indeed, a crusade that pits you against everyone and everything (certainly against all authorities and all orthodoxies).

Ultimately, if you're a Sex Pistol, then everything else is bollocks and of no vital concern. Likewise, if you're a lover of Nietzsche or Lawrence, then all other philosophers and novelists suddenly pale into insignificance.

That's not to argue, obviously, that there are no other great thinkers or artists with genius. But there's certainly very few who belong like Nietzsche and Lawrence to that order of genius which, in the words of Henry Miller, beats out the boundaries of human experience and widens the frontiers of life.    

Lovely Lesbians

 Photo of June Miller by Brassaï (c. 1933)

Henry Miller's posthumously published novel Crazy Cock, was originally entitled Lovely Lesbians - this with reference to his beautiful second wife, June, and her lover, the somewhat mysterious figure of Jean Kronski, fictionally portrayed by Miller in the above work as the arts-loving and rather dapper dyke, Vanya.

Miller met June in 1923, when she was still only 21 and working as a dancer in New York. He immediately fell in love and abandoned his first wife and child in order to be with her. They married in the summer of the following year and their relationship is central to much of his work, including the two Tropic books and his semi-autobiographical trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion.     

In October 1926, at June's insistence, Jean moved in with them. This allowed her to cultivate an intensely close relationship with the latter and she seemed to enjoy Jean's affections more than her husband's, much to Miller's chagrin. Not surprisingly, things soon came to a head and in April 1927 June and Jean left for Paris together.

Unfortunately, things didn't work out very well for the lovely lesbians and June returned to her old life with Miller in New York just three months later. As for Jean Kronski - if that was in fact her name - she is thought to have committed suicide in an insane asylum c.1930.

Now, I'm no expert on Miller, so I don't really know what he meant by the phrase lovely lesbians - one suspects he was using it in a sardonic manner, as I can't imagine he was entirely happy about the affair between his wife and Miss Kronski (though, that said, he didn't seem to mind later sharing June with Anaïs Nin, who was as sexually and creatively obsessed with her as Miller himself) - but it appeals very much because, for me, there is always something lovely about lesbians, wherever they are on the Sapphic spectrum; from the most feminine of lipstick lesbians, to the most butch or bullish of dykes.      

    

Does saying this make me a malesbian perchance? Not really. For this is a problematic term, for several reasons. Let's just say it demonstrates that I'm very much oriented towards women, feel happier in their company than in the company of men, and that Torpedo the Ark is an openly feminist blog which shares the view subscribed to by American poet and activist Audre Lorde that feminism fundamentally emerges out of a lesbian consciousness, whether or not one actually sleeps with women.

I Love Everything That Flows

 Sarah Maple: Menstruate With Pride (2010-11)

Vaginal lubrication and menstrual blood; saliva, semen, and tears ... these bodily fluids all belong to love, even though such secretions are often subject to severe prohibition and taboo. It is feared that they possess magical properties which threaten to dissolve the solidity and rigidity upon which Man prides himself and bases his integrity. 

For the bone-dry moralists of patriarchal society, that which is soft, formless, and liquid is intrinsically evil: to be male is to be hard and firm of body and misogynists everywhere repeat after Heraclitus that, above all things, a dry soul is best. 

But for those of us fascinated by decadence and the corruption of the flesh, the moist cunt that waits like a carnivorous plant in the boggy marsh where insects and philosophers lose their way, is both a site of strange truths and the dissolution of all Truth with a phallic-capital T.

Feminism begins when one decides to reject the petrified and well-organized bodies produced by molecular fascism (bodies that daren't leak, or sweat, or even cry) and when one finds the courage to declare like Henry Miller: 'Yes, I too love everything that flows.'

Fragments of Remembrance

Gathered here are six little fragments of text written in remembrance of authors who have, at one time or another, meant something special to me. Arguably, they might be read as an attempt to bear witness to the uniqueness of the relationship that one has with the writers and the books that one loves. And, indeed, with the dead.

Not that these somewhat incomplete and unfinished verses constitute anything so grand as a poetry or a politics of mourning. In writing them, I think I simply (and at the risk of banality) wanted to record an affection, rather than produce art or pass judgement.

In Memory of Anaïs Nin 

Many types of flow - of madness and literature, desire and disintegration - 

traversed the queer forest of her body in which gay little birds twittered 

obscenely and dark poppies blossomed.

In Memory of Henry Miller

A boy from Brooklyn: a pornographer: a mystic.

A son-of-a-bitch quoting Nietzsche in an East Coast accent,
whilst parading round Paris with a personal hard-on like the
happiest man alive.

In Memory of Friedrich Nietzsche

Bones, a few biographical details, the odd photograph,

and a small number of books: the remains of a dead

philosopher.

And yet he is more alive now, in death,
than he was in life, having become that
posthumous individual he said he would.

And this childless man is today father to us all.


In Memory of Sylvia Plath

I do not like the English summer, unfolded
into green completion and the smugness of
strawberries and cream.

Intolerable the seasonal stupidity of the natives;
one yearns for the first breath of autumn and
the fresh reassurance of rain.

Even, like a spinster, I long for winter,
so scrupulously austere.

In Memory of Marinetti

When I think of Marinetti
hurling defiance at the stars
beneath a violent electric moon,

I think of a bald-headed little man
in a bow-tie masturbating whilst
erect on the summit of the world.

Instinctively, one can't help but smile
at how quickly this ludicrous lover
of the machine and the manifesto
became passé.


In Memory of the Marquis de Sade

A monster, say his jailers.
Perhaps.

But, if so, then a monster of generosity
and good will, in whose name sex and
death entwine to produce a singular
form of love.

Epilation

The policing and removal of female body hair is practised in every phallocratic society for a number of reasons - from religious phobia to cultural fashion - using a wide variety of methods. 

In the Western world, women have been obliged to shave legs and underarms for over a century. But it is only recently that they have also been expected as a matter of porno-social convention to remove hair from the pubic region like an Arab woman; not as an act of Fitrah, or in the name of hygiene, but due to changing ideas of what constitutes desirability.

I have to confess, I remain a little troubled by this trend. 

For whilst I understand the appeal of the hairless pussy on grounds that range from the aesthetic to the practical and perverse, still I can't help regretting the universal Brazilianization of women as I recall the words of Henry Miller: 'It doesn't look like a cunt anymore; it's like a dead clam or something. It's the hair that makes it mysterious.'