A Conversation about “Piss Christ”

Since our gabfest about health care, the very thoughtful author of the Just Jen blog and I have been having yet another interesting conversation about an entirely and altogether different topic. She writes:

Not a fan of Piss Christ, eh?

Did you know that Serranos is a professed and practicing Catholic? And that he viewed this piece of art as an Augustinian point of Catholic resistance against Protestant Gnosticism?

I just learned that myself–I wrote about it here.

And I responded briefly (due to time pressure):

Hmmm… Short assessment: good theology. Bad art. A for intention, F for execution. 🙂

She writes back:

well, put. pithy if nothing else. LOL.

But did his theology surprise you?

And isn’t interesting how it got automatically co-opted by the extreme left as an example of “daring” anti-religion art?

To which I reply:

It does indeed surprise me, thought the Left’s embrace of it doesn’t surprise me at all. Similarly, the NY Times eagerness to publish and republish images of it while lecturing Christians on their duty to submit to transgressive art did not surprise me. Nor their marked hesitance to do the same with the Danish cartoons while lecturing Muslims on the need for tolerance. Waiting for an outbreak of courage among our Journalistic Masters is… steady work.

Purely from an aesthetic perspective, I think it illustrates the problem I was getting at last week with the Church windows. I am all for art that does not rely exclusively what Tolkien calls the “purposed domination of the author” in order to communicate. Tolkien’s art relies heavily on ‘applicability”. He doesn’t tell you what LOTR “means” and so it’s meaning is enriched because we supply much to the meaning of the story.

But art which is intelligible *only* to the artist and which is executed in such a way as to invite as much misunderstanding, nay, as much interpretation directly contrary to the thought and feeling of the artist, is, well, bad art. When the artist has to issue a statement saying, “Actually, I think this” to counter the massive and overwhelming assumption that he thinks the contrary, he’s botched the job. Nobody comes away from Tolkien thinking, “Obviously, this man is a postmodern deconstructionist who denies the very existence of virtue as a mask on the face of race, class, and gender. Clearly, this man is an atheist who believes in the perfectibility of man and the subjugation of the material universe to the Will of the Superman.” We get where he’s coming from, even though we might not get all the details.

And she responds:

Well the first point, the “purposed domination of the author” this was later called in criticism “the intentional fallacy” by someone named Wimsatt–which states that the author’s intention is not all in literary criticism. However–THAT concept got so abused that you actually DO have critics that reappropriate work like Tolkien’s and give it a a post-modern, deconstructionist, atheist-materialist, Nietzchean reading, like the one you describe, and consider their work unassailable when confronted with Tolkien’s stated objectives.

So somewhere there is a balance, natch.

In the case of Serranos–I think one of the things about this piece is genre–the art involved here (and I’m not saying whether it is “good” or “bad” only faithfully examining what the artist actually set out to do) is not a piece of visual art. The image of the crucifix is actually an artifact of the performed moment of it’s submersion. It is actually a piece of performance art preserved as a photograph. It is a performance that began with Serranos’ thought about Augustine and the radical embodiment of Catholic theology, continued with his beginning to save his own urine, and executed at the point of submersion.

It’s a different mode of reception than the artifact itself–the artifact it self is rather mediocre but humbly glowing, and if one did not know that it was submerged in urine by the title “Piss Christ” it would be a pretty innocuous image, faintly illuminated but otherwise fuzzy in composition and unremarkable.

The fact that it is unitelligible to Catholics is a problem–that the connections between urine, Christ, and Augustine is so opaque is deeply problematic, and it’s not only an extension of the failure of our catechesis but an extension of American (Puritan) aesthetics that we are immediately alienated by the bodily function featured in this artifact. Which is not the immediate case for Catholics in the European country from which he originates. Necessarily.

This is not to defend it as a “Good” or “Bad” piece of art. I don’t like it the way I say, I like, Bernini’s Ecstacy of St. Theresa–which I venture to say I LOVE–but it isn’t intended to strike me erotically or emotionally the way that statue is. Serranos’ project is a cerebral one and that is why it is fascinating, but, perhaps, for most, not anywhere near “beautiful” as the Bernini statue may be described by a fairly large group of people.

So is it beautiful? It depends on what you look for in art? Is it unitelligible because the artifact requires some knowledge of the artists, his source, his process, and his belief system? perhaps, but then opera usually requires a libretto.

Is it worthy of being called daring, when you realize his background, process, source, belief and intention? I think one might say so.

Yes. I think one might say so, indeed.

The great thing about postmodern deconstructionism is that every thought and idea is soluble in the acid bath of the proposition that It’s All About Power. So yeah, I’m sure that the skilled lit crit guy from the National Institute for Coordinated Experiements could make short work of Tolkien and prove black is white and freedom is slavery. 🙂 Happily, pomo decon “scholars” are so inbred and incestuous that their unreadable prose tends to be self-sterilizing and is the richly deserve target of parody (as, for instance, at the Postmodern Generator, for all your undergrad term paper needs). Postmodern Scholarship: The only place were you can go to conferences, hear somebody read 10,000 words of closely reasoned argument that language has no meaning, and then break for lunch to haggle with the waitress about the check. She, at any rate, knows that language still has meaning. 🙂

With regard to “Piss Christ”, I can see a case being made for it as an affirmation of the organic as a good thing and a sort of radical attempt at nose-twisting directed at a Protestantism which is, at the end of the day, uncomfortable with the Incarnation. Our faith as Catholics really does commit us to the proposition that the God of the universe not only made creatures in his image and likeness who have to take a leak every few hours, but that he himself assumed that humanity and had to do likewise. And that makes people uncomfortable.

I remember having a conversation about the Eucharist with a Protestant guy whose mind immediately tended to move from the proposition “This is the body of Christ” to “The body can’t be holy because shit isn’t holy.” His tendency to repeatedly reduce physicality down to dung was striking and made very clear his deep hostility to the notion of the Incarnation. He was a Christian and believed that Jesus was the word made flesh. But he regarded the Incarnation as something like diving headfirst into a septic tank. The notion that the body was glorified by the Incarnation, death and resurrection was not there for him. The organic and the sinful were one and the same. The Ascension was, for him as for so many, the moment when Jesus stripped off his disgusting human body and escaped back into pure Spirit.

So I can see a piece of art that attacks this conception. I can see how, in a certain mood of Flannery O’Connor exaggeration (“When people are deaf, you shout.” – St. Flannery of Milledgeville) somebody might try to break through the equation of sinfulness with the organic and shout that the stool of Jesus of Nazareth is part of the very soil of our planet. It’s perfectly true and there is nothing at all irreverent in saying so.

But I still think that, whatever his intention might have been, Serranos execution is terrible, precisely because it radically fails to get across what he’s saying.

I had a friend who use to fix his gaze on me with an icy stare and say, “Mark, I hate you with all the passion my soul can muster!” [Pause] “But I mean that in the nicest way possible.”

This is the effect “Piss Christ” has on people. Whatever Serrano’s intentions, certain things are natural symbols (as the sacraments make clear). One can affirm the goodness of the organic and the Incarnation. But piss *means* something–and not something flattering. To, for instance, “baptize” somebody by pissing in their face would be understood by anybody as a gross mockery of the sacrament, not as a celebration of the incarnation. To similarly baptize a crucifix says (and was taken to say by the overwhelming majority of people) “mockery”.

I take Serrano’s word for it that he had a Catholic intention. No doubt God, who looks on the heart, sees it and is pleased with a faithful son’s attempt to honor him. However, *as art*, I can’t help but think it a spectacular failure in communicating what he understands himself to be trying to say. There are lots and lots and lots of ways of asserting the radical goodness of the organic and Incarnational against a Protestant ethos that is hostile and blind to the goodness of the body. This is about the worst way to do it, I think.

But you are right that it is daring. 🙂