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:<\/p>\n
Not a fan of Piss Christ, eh?<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
I just learned that myself\u2013I wrote about it here<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And I responded briefly (due to time pressure):<\/p>\n
Hmmm\u2026 Short assessment: good theology. Bad art. A for intention, F for execution. \ud83d\ude42<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
She writes back:<\/p>\n
well, put. pithy if nothing else. LOL.<\/p>\n
But did his theology surprise you?<\/p>\n
And isn\u2019t interesting how it got automatically co-opted by the extreme left as an example of \u201cdaring\u201d anti-religion art?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
To which I reply:<\/p>\n
It does indeed surprise me, thought the Left\u2019s embrace of it doesn\u2019t 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\u2026 steady work.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cpurposed domination of the author\u201d in order to communicate. Tolkien\u2019s art relies heavily on \u2018applicability\u201d. He doesn\u2019t tell you what LOTR \u201cmeans\u201d and so it\u2019s meaning is enriched because we supply much to the meaning of the story.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cActually, I think this\u201d to counter the massive and overwhelming assumption that he thinks the contrary, he\u2019s botched the job. Nobody comes away from Tolkien thinking, \u201cObviously, 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.\u201d We get where he\u2019s coming from, even though we might not get all the details.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And she responds:<\/p>\n
Well the first point, the \u201cpurposed domination of the author\u201d this was later called in criticism \u201cthe intentional fallacy\u201d by someone named Wimsatt\u2013which states that the author\u2019s intention is not all in literary criticism. However\u2013THAT concept got so abused that you actually DO have critics that reappropriate work like Tolkien\u2019s 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\u2019s stated objectives.<\/p>\n
So somewhere there is a balance, natch.<\/p>\n
In the case of Serranos\u2013I think one of the things about this piece is genre\u2013the art involved here (and I\u2019m not saying whether it is \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbad\u201d 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\u2019s submersion. It is actually a piece of performance art preserved as a photograph. It is a performance that began with Serranos\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a different mode of reception than the artifact itself\u2013the artifact it self is rather mediocre but humbly glowing, and if one did not know that it was submerged in urine by the title \u201cPiss Christ\u201d it would be a pretty innocuous image, faintly illuminated but otherwise fuzzy in composition and unremarkable.<\/p>\n
The fact that it is unitelligible to Catholics is a problem\u2013that the connections between urine, Christ, and Augustine is so opaque is deeply problematic, and it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
This is not to defend it as a \u201cGood\u201d or \u201cBad\u201d piece of art. I don\u2019t like it the way I say, I like, Bernini\u2019s Ecstacy of St. Theresa\u2013which I venture to say I LOVE\u2013but it isn\u2019t intended to strike me erotically or emotionally the way that statue is. Serranos\u2019 project is a cerebral one and that is why it is fascinating, but, perhaps, for most, not anywhere near \u201cbeautiful\u201d as the Bernini statue may be described by a fairly large group of people. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Is it worthy of being called daring, when you realize his background, process, source, belief and intention? I think one might say so.<\/p>\n
Yes. I think one might say so, indeed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The great thing about postmodern deconstructionism is that every thought and idea is soluble in the acid bath of the proposition that It\u2019s All About Power. So yeah, I\u2019m 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. \ud83d\ude42 Happily, pomo decon \u201cscholars\u201d 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<\/a>, 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. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
With regard to \u201cPiss Christ\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n
I remember having a conversation about the Eucharist with a Protestant guy whose mind immediately tended to move from the proposition \u201cThis is the body of Christ\u201d to \u201cThe body can\u2019t be holy because shit isn\u2019t holy.\u201d 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 <\/em>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.<\/p>\n
So I can see a piece of art that attacks this conception. I can see how, in a certain mood of Flannery O\u2019Connor exaggeration (\u201cWhen people are deaf, you shout.\u201d \u2013 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\u2019s perfectly true and there is nothing at all irreverent in saying so.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s saying.<\/p>\n
I had a friend who use to fix his gaze on me with an icy stare and say, \u201cMark, I hate you with all the passion my soul can muster!\u201d [Pause] \u201cBut I mean that in the nicest way possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is the effect \u201cPiss Christ\u201d has on people. Whatever Serrano\u2019s 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\u2013and not something flattering. To, for instance, \u201cbaptize\u201d 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) \u201cmockery\u201d.<\/p>\n
I take Serrano\u2019s 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\u2019s attempt to honor him. However, *as art*, I can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
But you are right that it is daring. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n