Not long ago we blogged that Andres Serrano, the artist whose photograph, “P–s Christ”–a hazy shot of a crucifix dunked in the artist’s urine–raised Cain with social conservatives back in 1989, was planning a new exhibit at a Manhattan gallery, this time featuring photos of fecal matter.
A recent article in the New York Post on the show backs up the assertion we made a couple of months ago that Serrano’s move from pee to poo was hardly a groundbreaking artistic development.
The Post’s piece deepens our disappointment by providing a sampling of the photographs of bull, jaguar and other unidentified doo. For the most part, as with “P–s Christ,” the shots of feces are taken in fuzzy soft-focus with dewy natural lighting, clearly intended to be beautiful. The one hope that Serrano could avoid trite sentimentalizing of our incarnate state was that he’d refuse to let photographic technique direct our reactions to the dung in question. So much for that.
If the photographs don’t do it, Serrano’s stated reason for doing the show confirms that he doesn’t grasp how irrelevant a sh–t shot is in today’s world. “The art world–even though they hate it, they expect provocation from me,” Serrano tells the Post. If only the photographs contained a smidgen of provocation.
posted September 29, 2008 at 5:13 am
I’ve been looking up information about Serrano’s new work after reading about it on the Myartspace Blog. This is just insane. The Sherwin article titled Serrano’s (not so) Humble Investigative Triumph
is a good read if you have time to look it up.