American view – Sword of controversy

‘I’ve refused to become a prisoner of “Piss Christ”,’ said the photographer Andres Serrano, referring to his 1987 photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass filled with urine.

‘I’ve refused to become a prisoner of “Piss Christ”,’ said the photographer Andres Serrano, referring to his 1987 photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass filled with urine. But the fact remains that he has become a very wealthy prisoner of that work. The picture, created while he was the recipient of a $15,000 grant from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which itself had received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1987–88, drew fiery condemnation from religious groups around the United States and members of Congress. Coming at the same time as a controversy over the indirectly government-sponsored exhibition of the work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, the outcry came close to abolishing the federal arts agency. And, recently, a copy of the same photograph was damaged by Christian fundamentalists when it went on show in Avignon last month.

The dispute over ‘Piss Christ’ has proved to be a ‘double-edged sword’, the artist said. ‘Collectors rushed to support me. I’ve sold a lot of work, and I wouldn’t have sold anywhere near that much if the controversy hadn’t occurred.’ The other side is that the flap broke up the artist’s marriage and coloured all the work that Serrano has done or will ever do.

Public controversy or instances of censorship can’t help but affect an artist in a significant way. For certain artists, there is a clear upside. ‘I like to think that my career would have reached this level without the help of the FBI,’ said the photographer Jock Sturges, whose San Francisco studio was raided in 1990 by the FBI, which confiscated and destroyed many of the artist’s prints and negatives of nude children before a federal grand jury failed to indict Sturges.