The Photograph Torn Up in the US Senate: Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ

In May 1989, a United States senator tore a photograph to shreds on the floor of the Senate.

The senator was Alfonse D’Amato. What he ripped up was a copy of an image showing a plastic crucifix submerged in glowing amber liquid. The liquid was the artist’s own urine.

The work was Immersion (Piss Christ), made in 1987 by the New York photographer Andres Serrano.

The first time I saw it, I did not know the title. Honestly, I thought it was beautiful. Once I knew, the same picture looked completely different.

Andrés Serrano, on his polemic work 'Piss Christ': 'I'm still a soldier of God' | Culture | EL PAÍS English — Andres Serrano. Image via El País

Fifteen Thousand Dollars

Serrano was born in New York in 1950 to a Honduran father and an Afro-Cuban mother, and was raised Catholic. At the time he was working on a series of objects photographed in bodily fluids such as blood, milk and urine.

Piss Christ caused little fuss when it was first shown at a New York gallery in 1987. The trouble came in 1989. The work had won an award from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina, and part of the $15,000 prize came from the federally funded National Endowment for the Arts.

The charge was that taxpayers had paid for blasphemy. Senator Jesse Helms said Serrano was not an artist but a jerk. Serrano received death threats and hate mail, and lost grants he had been promised.

The Funding Wars

The row did not stop at one photograph. Combined with an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs around the same time, it set off what became known as the culture wars over what kind of art the government should fund.

The consequences were concrete. The NEA’s budget was cut, and it stopped giving grants directly to individual artists. One photograph changed the structure of public arts funding in America.

Hammer and Screwdriver

The controversy crossed oceans. When the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne staged a Serrano retrospective in 1997, the Catholic archbishop asked a court to stop it. The application failed, but days later two teenagers attacked the work with a hammer and the gallery closed the show early.

In April 2011 it happened again at the Collection Lambert in Avignon. The day before, around 1,000 people had marched through the city in protest. On the morning of Palm Sunday, 17 April, a group of young men entered, broke the protective Plexiglas with a hammer and slashed the print. The museum put the damaged photograph back on the wall as it was.

Piss Christ Vandalized — Priceless — Piss Christ after the 2011 attack in Avignon. Image via Priceless

What the Artist Says

Serrano has always said the work is not blasphemous. He describes himself as a Christian and says he wanted to show how the body and blood of Christ have been commercialised and cheapened.

Whether you believe him or not, the cross in the photograph still glows gold. Perhaps that beauty is exactly why it has made people angry for more than thirty years.