This artist peed on Jesus — and people were pissed off
Andres Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ infuriated conservatives and jeopardized arts funding
Andres Serrano was a little known photographer in the 1980s, until one controversial image skyrocketed him to fame and became the center of a political feud over public arts funding in America.
The image, called “Piss Christ,” was a 60-by-40-inch photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a jar of liquid that the artist said was his own urine. (Other images in the same series showed small statues submerged in blood and milk.) “Piss Christ” debuted in 1987 and didn’t cause much of a stir, but when it was later exhibited in Virginia — as part of a show partially funded by a grant from the National Endowment of Art — some museum-goers were outraged. When conservative politicians got wind of the fact that the NEA had partially funded the exhibition, they seized upon the opportunity, arguing that federal money for the arts be directed toward less offensive forms of expression. Conservative Senator Jesse Helms said that Serrano was “not an artist, he is a jerk.” Senator Alphonse D’Amato excoriated the work for being “deplorable, despicable,” and vulgar, and even publicly tore up a copy of the piece.
Serrano, whose work has always involved bodily fluids, has said that viewers tend to see the crucifix as a kind of “accessory” without reflecting on the violent, messy death the image entails. “So if Piss Christ upsets you, maybe it’s a good thing to think about what happened on the cross,” he told the Guardian in 2012.
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