“Artists Needs Obsessions”: Andres Serrano, in Conversation With Todd Solondz

Almost 40 years ago, the artist Andres Serrano became that unlikely thing—a visual artist who’s also a household name—in a manner he didn’t necessarily intend. When his 1987 photograph Piss Christ was included in the body of work that won him an award and a cash prize, partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, he quickly became a cog in the machine of the Reagan Era culture wars, accused of blasphemy for his depiction of Christ, on the crucifix, submerged in milk, blood, and urine. Serrano, now 74 years old, has no regrets about the scandal, except the way in which his own faith was brushed aside by the carnival barkers looking to drum up a moral panic about taxpayer-funded art. “They didn’t want to hear that I was a Christian,” he told the filmmaker Todd Solondz, a provocateur in his own right, when the two got together earlier this month at Serrano’s Manhattan home. “They just wanted to say that I’m sacrilegious, that I’m the bad guy.” But Serrano, whose new works are on view through January at the Lubov Gallery in a joint exhibition, In Battle or in Vein, with Benjamin Bertocci, eventually got his lick back when the Vatican invited him and dozens of other groundbreaking artists to meet Pope Francis last year. “I don’t care what anybody else says anymore,” Serrano quipped. To mark the artist’s return to painting, and his recent embrace of X, where he now regularly posts new work, he and Solondz met up to talk about a life lived on the razor’s edge of the sacred and the profane.

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TODD SOLONDZ: I just came today from the Lubov Gallery show and I loved what I saw there. I really did. I’d love to know about the genesis of this show and how it works together with your photography.

ANDRES SERRANO: Well, thank you for seeing the show. And also thank you for your compliment on the work, because it’s high praise coming from you. I’ve always admired your work. But from one artist to another, you know that sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to do until you do it and it sort of just hits you. Ideas just come to you, or opportunities, situations, circumstances. A few years ago, Irina [Movmyga, Serrano’s wife] went away to Greece on my behalf. I didn’t want to go for one of my exhibitions there, so she went instead. And in the time that she was gone, I started looking through this book of black and white photographs of Michelangelo sculptures. And then I picked up some pastels that were around the house and I started coloring the photographs like a coloring book, like a child. I had fun doing it, and it was very spontaneous. I wasn’t thinking, “How am I going to do this picture?” I would do them very quickly and it was fun to use my hands and express myself in a way that I haven’t expressed myself since going to art school. I’ve always said, “I’m not a photographer, I’m an artist.” And that’s because I went to the Brooklyn Museum Art School where I studied painting and sculpture when I was 17. But after art school, I lived with a girl, Millie Ehrlich, who had a camera. And so I started taking pictures with Millie’s camera. I’ve always seen myself as an artist who chose to use photography as my art practice, but never saw myself as a photographer. So, for me to start painting all of a sudden, first pastels and then blowing up pictures of black and white classical sculptures, that has been a new way of creation. But it makes sense for me because I feel like I can create in any medium. It’s just that sometimes the opportunity or the idea doesn’t come to you.

SOLONDZ: Well, when I saw the show, it’s immediately recognizable as your work even if it’s not photography, per se. And I love the kind of technicolor saturation that you give it, juxtaposed against the cardboard, and how it plays with ideas of the sacred and the profane. [Observing Serrano’s home] Look where we are… Your home is a gallery in and of itself of your own obsessions and the things that drive you. It makes me think a little bit of [Pier Paolo] Pasolini and the way [Salvador] Dali did some Christ work. I wonder if any of that stuff resonates for you.

SERRANO: All of it, and these people that I looked up to as a teenager—Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, Buñuel, Fellini, Ingmar Bergman—had an eye. So, in my paintings, I want them to pop the way my photographs pop. In the case of the paintings, I put layers and layers of paint glazes, building up the color slowly so that, eventually, there’s like 50 layers of yellow on, and not just one but different kinds of yellow. I saturate my paintings with pigment, with glazes, so that they achieve the luminosity that I look for in all my work. I’ve always said, “I like to make the kind of pictures that you can see from across the room.” But, you said something about obsession. I feel like we’re nothing without our obsessions. Artists need obsessions. That’s our bread and butter. I mean, that’s the fuel that makes everything work. So yeah, I become obsessed by things sometimes. But with my work, as I’m sure with yours, there’s a thread. You go from one thing to the other and even as things change, as the work changes, you know that it’s basically the same work just taking on a different form.

SOLONDZ: You always have to find a fresh way of digging in that vein. One of the threads I see is an obsession with beauty itself. That is so apparent in your photography, your home, the show, and so forth. I understand you to be very sincere in terms of faith, but there’s also clearly a transgressive kind of impulse where you’re being naughty in a way.

SERRANO: Well, one of my great heroes in cinema is Luis Buñuel. And you speak about the sacred and the profane. I’ve always felt, like Buñuel, that you have to have both, and you have to have a sense of humor. You cannot tell good from bad unless you have bad. So, for me, I don’t judge, and I don’t think Christ judged. I’ve always been a Christian. And for me, my work is not profane. It’s a reflection of my religious upbringing and the church’s obsession with the body and blood of Christ. Christ was the son of God, but he was also a man. I’ve always felt, in general, that God allows me to do what I do and that’s why I do it.

SOLONDZ: Well, he not only allows, he encourages you.

SERRANO: He certainly does.

SOLONDZ: Catholicism itself is like the most visually rich religion. Not to put down any other religion, but it’s just the greatest sort of spectacle that I’ve ever seen from my travels and my experiences. Does it worry you? Because I do believe you’re sincere in your sense of faith and that your work is misunderstood as a violation of that which you most cherish.

SERRANO: Well, [the controversy around “Piss Christ”] upset me, especially when I realized that people didn’t want to hear about my religious upbringing. They didn’t want to hear that I was a Christian. They just wanted to say that I’m sacrilegious, that I’m the bad guy, up until last year, when on the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Collections Contemporary Art Museum, the Vatican invited me along with 200 creators around the world to meet Pope Francis in the Sistine Chapel. He made a speech called “An Address to the Artists.” After the speech, everyone went up to the Pope, one at a time, and you only get a couple of seconds with the Pope, but the Vatican is very well organized. There’s photographers taking pictures of every person who went there, and there’s videos of everything. And when it was my time to go up to Pope Francis, I knew what I was going to say. I spoke to him in Spanish because he’s from Argentina. And I said to him, “Your Holiness, my name is Andres Serrano, and I’ve come here to ask for your blessing.” And the Pope took my hand, he tapped it twice. He smiled at me and he gave me a thumbs up. And afterwards the press said to me, “You’re the only one he gave a thumbs up to.” So, I got my blessing and I got what I wanted from Pope Francis. I don’t care what anybody else says anymore.

SOLONDZ: I don’t know if there are many other artists that can compete with that. But I’m curious, having seen what I saw today, and just the way you have these images that are very classical and sacred attached to these materials that are just the opposite, is there something you’re trying to elicit from that tension?

SERRANO: Not intentionally at first, because those cardboards serve a purpose. I paste the photographs on top of these cardboards, and then I paint. And I paint in front of a 17th century cabinet. So, in order not to get paint on the cabinet, I use these cardboards as the easel. When [the curator] Nathan Bennett came by to look at the work, he saw the boards and he said, “Oh, I like it. Why don’t we show them like that?” So that’s why you have that. It’s almost like bringing the studio with me to show the process.

SOLONDZ: I love the practical, almost prosaic explanation of where this comes from. I think that when you create art, it’s open in terms of the meanings it can generate. And, in fact, the less open it is, the less interesting. Is that something that you come across often, where meaning or interpretation comes out of left field, or is something you hadn’t considered?

SERRANO: Yeah. With my work, I try to say as little as possible about it, and I put my emphasis in the title. I try to give you all the information I really care to give you about the work of art, whether it’s a painting or a photograph. What you do with that is open to interpretation. Of course sometimes, like in the case of “Piss Christ,” I’d rather you have a positive interpretation. But if you don’t, then I say, “Well, if the picture upsets you, think about what it symbolizes.” And what it symbolizes is the death of Christ, and how not only did the pee come out, everything came out, the blood, everything. It was a horrible way to die. But when you look at the crucifix, it doesn’t mean anything. If the picture upsets you, maybe it connects you with what the event represents.

SOLONDZ: I don’t think any serious work is designed to please everybody. It’s a tricky line to navigate because, on the one hand, you’re directing the gaze of the viewer and suggesting the way in which to experience what you have put out there. But on the other hand, you don’t want to be so oblique that they can’t enter the experience, nor do you want it to be so obvious. That’s where the richness lies, I think.

SERRANO: Well, let’s start with “Piss Christ.” When I was a kid, I once read that “Ulysses” by James Joyce was once banned in this country. It’s the ’60s and I’m thinking, “This is ridiculous. How could the book be banned?” But many things that were once banned are no longer banned. Even though “Piss Christ” is not banned, it still provokes. And it’s very difficult for something to maintain that aura of—

SOLONDZ: Transgression.

SERRANO: Yes, or outrage. And it wasn’t done on purpose. I prefer for people to look at it the way they want to look at it. And as far as I’m concerned, sometimes your interpretation is good, if not better than mine.

SOLONDZ: With “Piss Christ,” did that controversy start because the NEA [National Endowment of the Arts] was subsidizing the work?

SERRANO: It started because I had won a SECCA Visual Arts Award put up by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I was one of 10 artists that were awarded for 1988. And along with the award, there was an exhibition that would travel around the country with 10 works by each artist. And along with the exhibition, there was a $15,000 prize for each of the artists. A third of the budget for that award came from the NEA, another third from the Equitable Life Assurance, and another third from the Rockefeller Foundation. So at some point, a guy named Donald Wildmon, who was the head of the American Family Association, a Christian fundamentalist right-wing group, became aware that “Piss Christ” was in this show and that “Piss Christ” had gotten $5,000 of NEA’s money. That was where the outrage began, and I got denounced in Congress over that several times in May of 1989. A few weeks later, the Corcoran canceled Robert Mapplethorpe’s show in order to avoid what was happening to me. And in doing that, they started the culture wars.

SOLONDZ: I almost wonder if you hadn’t titled it “Piss Christ” and instead you’d just called it “Christ Submerged,” you might not have had this problem. But on the other hand, it was probably very helpful in getting attention to other work that you had coming along. It was in the news everywhere.

SERRANO: Well, as you said before, sometimes the mundane is the real answer, the thing that is just practical. I’m very good with titles, and in the case of “Piss Christ,” well, it was piss and it was Christ. So I had no choice but to call it “Piss Christ.” I was an unknown artist at that time. And artists, we live in our own world. I had no idea it would be received the way it was. But it was not an act of provocation. They say the best provocation is when you don’t mean it.

SOLONDZ: Well, that’s what makes it enduring. It came out of a sincerity of your real passions and obsessions—

SERRANO: With art and with religion.

SOLONDZ: For me, art is an expression of desire in some form. Without that desire, that motor, there’s just no fuel, there’s no point. And I think you’ll agree with me, when you do create whatever it is that you do create, you want to please yourself. But you also want to communicate your experience to others. Otherwise, it becomes such an insular experience, something that has no value to others. So on some level, there’s the drive that inspires you to do what you do. But then, when you step back, analytic or intellectual aspects of your mind have to assess how this communicates, if it communicates, what it communicates, and make adjustments as needed. If you’ve got a subject that’s very troubling to people, or shocking in a cliche sense, you have to figure out how to present this so that it’s not just shocking.

SERRANO: I think for you, as a filmmaker, it’s much more difficult because a film is not just one image. It’s many images where you have to engage the audience for a long time. I’ve always done work that anybody can understand. It’s not art about art. It’s not art that needs text on the wall. You don’t need an arts writer to explain it to you. My best audience is often people who don’t usually go to galleries or exhibitions. They’re the ones who understand my work the best because it’s a visceral, emotional connection, as I intend it to be. They’re not overly intellectualizing it in any way. I’ve always said, “I do work about basic things: life, death, race, sex, things anybody can relate to.”

SOLONDZ: Well, your audience, in some sense, is the opposite of my audience. You have this sort of elite, high-end, hyper-educated, critical group of people who determine meaning and value about your work. And then people come in and they look and have a very different experience from the language of the art world, so to speak. I make a movie, and I am working in a populist kind of medium where I have to bring in all types of people to fill seats, and they have to sit there for two hours. So the demands are different. On the one hand, you are freed from the worry of the marketplace the way I have to worry in order to survive as a filmmaker. But on the other hand, your work is somewhat more captured or constrained by what the powers above at these magazines have to say and what your stock value is, so to speak.

SERRANO: I’ve been fortunate that I’ve worked with great galleries, but I haven’t had a New York gallery since leaving Paula Cooper Gallery in 2008. I worked with Yvon Lambert in France, Nathalie Obadia in France and in Brussels, Baldwin Gallery in Aspen. But as a New York artist without a New York gallery, it’s hurt me a lot. I feel like I’m known in America, but I’m known as a controversial artist. I’m known, but I’m not shown.

SOLONDZ: So that’s a bit frustrating for you that you feel you don’t have a bigger showcase?

SERRANO: Bigger showcase, but also I’d make a lot more money if I sold in America and not just Europe.

SOLONDZ: Not that money is the issue here.

SERRANO: It’s not the issue, but it helps. You know what I feel good about? A lot of times when my wife Irina and I are sitting outside for coffee at Blue Bottle, that’s when people come up to me and they say, “I love your work.” They could be a student, but sometimes they’re lawyers or doctors. Recently, I had a man come up to me and he said, “I saw your show in Paris at the Maillot Museum.” And I said to him, “Are you an artist?” And he said, “No, I just like good things.”

SOLONDZ: That’s very beautiful, to experience that. It’s very gratifying, because it comes from a very sincere moment. I mean, it takes a certain kind of courage just to go up to someone you don’t know, particularly one that maybe you admired, and say something.

SERRANO: I know I’ve done it, and I feel like shit because they treat you like shit. That’s why I’m nice to people. 

SOLONDZ: I’ve never known you to be any other way.