Beschreibung:

Andres Serrano (born 1950) Piss Christ, 1987 Dye-bleach print, flush-mounted on board and flush-mounted to Plexiglas, signed, titled, dated and numbered '6/10' in ink on the flush-mount verso. 40 x 27 1/2in (101.1 x 69.8cm); artist's frame Fußnoten Provenance With Stux Gallery, New York, acquired by the present owner in 1989 Literature Kuspit, "Objects and Bodies: Ten Artists in Search of Interiority," Awards in the Visual Arts 7, Winston-Salem, 1988, p. 115; Johnson, "Storm Over 'Art' Photo of Christ," The New York Post, May 12, 1989, p. 6; Atkins, "Stream of Conscience," The Village Voice, May 30, 1989, vol. 34, no. 22, pp. 87-88; Finnegan, "Bearing the Cross: An Interview with Andres Serrano " Contemporanea, no. 22, November 1990, pp. 32-35; Denson, "John Miller and Andres Serrano 'Bad Boy' Sublimation", Contemporanea, no. 22, November 1990, pp. 37-41; Bolton, Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts, New York, 1992, p. 309; Wallis, Andres Serrano Body and Soul, New York, 1995, n.p.; Serrano, A History of Sex, Milan, 1998, p. 5; Wallis, Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America, New York, 1999; Hanson, ed., Andres Serrano "America" and other work, Cologne, 2004, n.p. Piss Christ, Andres Serrano's 1987 image of a plastic crucifix submerged in a tank of urine, is one of the most influential yet controversial images of all time. Serrano submitted the photograph for a competition Awards in the Visual Arts, organized by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Ten artists from ten US regions, Serrano among them, were awarded a prize of $15,000 and a traveling exhibition, funded by the Equitable Life Assurance Company, The Rockefeller Foundation, a non-profit philanthropic organization and, most importantly given the furor that followed, The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), funded by tax payers and bestowed by Federal Government. The first sign of trouble came when the exhibition was on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. A local resident complained about the work in a letter to a local newspaper and this was noticed by Bill Wildmon, head of the American Family Association, a right-wing Christian fundamentalist organization. Wildmon petitioned Congress to denounce and defund the NEA, a demand staunchly supported by Republican Senators Alphonse d'Amato and Jesse Helms. The episode marked the beginning of the so-called "Culture Wars" in the US, a series of skirmishes between left and right that has continued virtually unabated ever since. Artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe's 1989 show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, also funded by the NEA, was cancelled due to right-wing pressure. As recently as 2010, David Wojnarowicz's film of Christ on the cross being slowly consumed by ants at The National Gallery of Art in DC was also discontinued due to the outrage it engendered. Occasionally, some of these battles were won by artists and institutions; Chris Ofili's dung-encrusted painting The Holy Virgin Mary, which had its American début in 1999 as part of the Sensation traveling exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum, incited then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to freeze city funding to the Museum and threaten eviction from its longstanding home near Prospect Park. However, the Museum counter-sued New York City for violating its First Amendment rights and won the case unequivocally. In various interviews, Serrano has said that when he made Piss Christ he had no intention of creating something so controversial - that Piss Christ was always both a work of art and an act of devotion. Serrano is a practicing Catholic, who as a child was told by the nuns who taught him that it was wrong to idolize representations of Christ since they merely described sacred scenes and were not actually holy in themselves. Serrano considers Piss Christ a comment on this paradox, making him neither a "blasphemer" nor an "anti-Christian", as his accusers would attest. He also beli