Shooting the Klan: An Interview with Andres Serrano

Andres Serrano was an apparently unwilling soldier in the Culture Wars of the early '90s. Here scholar and performance artist Coco Fusco asks him what he intended to do when he made Piss Christ, what he thinks he's doing photographing the Ku Klux Klan, and how things have changed for him as a result of all the hoopla. —Eds.

It was Piss Christ, Andres Serrano's photograph of a crucifix immersed in his own urine, together with Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic images, that in 1989 set off the attack against art from the far Right. In a short period of time, Serrano was transformed from a relatively successful but reclusive New York artist and member of the collective Group Material into a celebrity/pariah under perpetual public scrutiny.

He has received death threats and hate mail and has lost grants on the one hand, and on the other has enjoyed dozens of laudatory articles and a sizeable hike in his prices. Furthermore, the fuss caused by Christian fundamentalists has hardly dimmed Serrano's fascination with religious iconography. His apartment, nestled in a semi-industrial area near downtown Brooklyn, is full of antique ecclesiastical furniture. It would give the impression of a Mediterranean antechoir were there not also numerous skulls, artworks and other unusual knick-knacks.

The combination of indirect approach to issues, cool conceptual technique and emotionally charged focus on symbols that resonate outside the vocabulary of the art world has been Serrano's trademark since he began to produce mature work in the early '80s. In his first pieces, he concentrated largely on reworking Catholic iconography in highly stylized tableaux. Later he moved into more abstract images that also touched on social and religious taboos, using bodily fluids such as milk, menstrual blood and semen. Piss Christ emerged out of a transition between these periods and was originally part of a series in which Serrano photographed several statues, which had varied connotations, immersed in different fluids. Nonetheless, just as the artist has come to stand for the biggest controversy to rock the art world in the '80s, so has one photograph come to stand for his entire oeuvre.

Many other artists whose funding and freedom of expression were threatened by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) controversy have since made their "censorship" the subject of their work. Serrano, however, has avoided focusing on the far Right's attacks as much as possible, and has ostensibly ignored it in his recent work.

In November, 1990, Serrano opened a new chapter of his career with an arresting exhibition of 20 cibachrome portraits, 13 of homeless people in New York entitled Nomads, most of whom are African-American, and seven members of the Atlanta, Georgia, chapter of the Ku Klux Klan entitled Klansman. Presenting us with an encounter of extremes, Serrano uncovers disturbing paradoxes. The homeless become the symbols of the outcome of life for people of color in a racist society, while the Klansmen stand as the symbols of racial hatred; but they are both outcasts, both marginal in relation to the presumed audience. Even the most liberal "other-loving" spectator or collector would have to contend with the impossibility of assuming a racially or socially neutral position in relation to these subjects.

These images confront us with the moral and political dilemmas stemming from racial tensions in this country. Yet Serrano's style, though frontal, is far from declaratory. His pictures are emotive and elliptical, puzzling, frightening and beautiful at the same time.

Coco Fusco: Your use of Catholic symbolism stands out in part because you are operating in a predominantly Protestant context. An attraction to the sensuality and the carnality that you bring out in your Catholic iconography can develop, since Protestant symbolism looks rather pale by comparison. How would it affect your work to be exhibited in a Catholic context?

Andres Serrano: I have always felt that my work is religious, not sacrilegious. I would say that there are many individuals in the Church who appreciate it and who do not have a problem with it. The best place for Piss Christ is in a church. In fact, I recently had a show in Marseilles in an actual church that also functions as an exhibition space, and the work looked great there. I think if the Vatican is smart, someday they'll collect my work.

CF: Does your interest in Catholicism have to do more with an attraction to the iconography or is it about wanting to make a social or political comment about what the Church represents?

AS: Look at my apartment. I am drawn to the symbols of the Church. I like the aesthetics of the Church. I like Church furniture. I like going to Church for aesthetic reasons, rather than spiritual ones. In my work, I explore my own Catholic obsessions. An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine. One of the things that always bothered me was the fundamentalist labeling of my work as "anti-Christian bigotry." As a former Catholic, and as someone who even today is not opposed to being called a Christian, I felt I had every right to use the symbols of the Church and resented being told not to.

CF: At the same time you have expressed concern about the Church's position on many contemporary issues.

AS: I am drawn to Christ but I have real problems with the Catholic Church. I don't go out of my way to be critical of the Church in my work, because I think that I make icons worthy of the Church. Oftentimes we love the thing we hate and vice versa. Unfortunately, the Church's position on most contemporary issues makes it hard to take them seriously.

AS: Absolutely. I am not a heretic. I like to believe that rather than destroy icons, I make new ones.

CF: Your most recent portraits of the homeless and the Klan do not appear to have anything to do with Catholicism. Does this represent a break from your past interests, or will you return to them?

AS: I leave the option open. When I was photographing the Imperial Wizard and saw him put on his green robe, I said to his secretary that it looked like a religious robe, and she said, "To some Klan members, they are." Some people have compared the Klan images to ecclesiastical figures.

CF: Many critics who have written about you have attempted to situate your work in the context of art that deals with ethnicity. I would say that your work is better understood as a reflection on culture as institution and symbol, and the power invested in certain icons. Do you see interpretations of your work as problematic?

AS: Any critic can have his or her own interpretation. I have always felt that I am the sum total of my parts. One of the things that I am happy about in my life as an artist is that I am not considered a Hispanic artist. I am just an artist. That is the way that it should be. My work is intensely personal. I don't think that because I am Hispanic I should therefore do Hispanic work. Are cum shots Hispanic? What about close-ups of menstrual pads? Is it Hispanic to photograph the Klan? People have to find ways of explaining the work. Sometimes I don't reach out enough, so they have to fill in the void.

CF: It is extremely difficult to categorize art by Latinos on the East Coast. The population here is so varied—from the largely middle-class South American emigres, to first and second generation Puerto Ricans, mostly from working-class backgrounds, to Cuban exiles and the newest arrivals, undocumented Mexicans. Little if any of the work resembles Chicano art from the Southwest.

AS: It could be that the New York art world is so cosmopolitan and so international that artists doing this sort of work tend to want to be here rather than on the West Coast. I went to San Francisco last year to give a lecture, a few months after the controversy. The minute I got off the train reporters appeared who wanted to talk to me and all sorts of interviews were set up. People seemed to imply that I was doing something for the race. I was told that no Hispanic artist had gotten this much coverage in over ten years. It was as if they were thanking me. In Boulder, Colorado, I recently gave a presentation to a Chicano class. A student asked me if I would ever want to take pictures of Hispanics, for the race, once again. I said I wasn't sure, but that the best thing I could do for the race, or for any race for that matter, is to do my work.

I usually refer to myself as Hispanic. When I was a kid, we were all Spanish. As we grew older, the terms changed and we became Hispanic. The students I met in Boulder were very politicized and used the term Latino or Chicano. I hadn't realized there existed that separation between those who are bothered by the term Hispanic and those who are not.

CF: Your approach to issues is consistently indirect, including your stance toward ethnicity, which you suggest could be a partial explanation of a work, but not a complete one. Your work has achieved politically volatile results from what you claim is not an overtly political practice. Many artists are cautious about talking about themselves as political artists because it damages their commercial potential and implies an agitprop stance some take to be too limiting and simplistic. Yet, the conceptual art tradition you intersect with has political implications. What then is the relationship of your work to political issues?

AS: Being born, especially being born a person of color, is a political act in itself. Everything you do from that point on is political without having to be called political. My work has social implications, it functions in a social arena. In relation to the controversy over Piss Christ, I think the work was politicized by forces outside it, and as a result, some people expect to see something recognizably "political" in my work. I am still trying to do my work as I see fit, which I see as coming from a very personal point of view with broader implications.

CF: Many of the performance artists whose work has been part of the NEA censorship controversy have made art and activist interventions in response to having lost grants. You have not. Your answer to having been taken up in this controversy appears to be, at least in terms of your work, to ignore it. In doing so, you diminish the importance of that judgment. Is this one more indirect move of yours, one more way of stepping around the obvious?

AS: As far as I am concerned, I wasn't going to let Jesse Helms or any other politician dictate what direction my work should take. If I didn't directly respond to it, it was my way of ignoring them and continuing my own merry way.

CF: Your most recent exhibition of portraits of Ku Klux Klan members and homeless people seems to take portraits of these groups as an entity, implicitly referring to each other. Whoever views the portraits of these two very different groups of people must momentarily evade a moral judgment, although most art gallery visitors make judgments about these groups of people all the time. In everything I read in which you talk about your encounters with the Klan, you also seemed to avoid making a moral judgment about the people you were taking pictures of. What does it mean to you to throw morality into question in this way?

AS: The idea of showing the Klan and the homeless pictures together was exciting. I like the tension between the two. They are about extreme poverty and extreme prejudice. I like the way you put it that the average gallery-goer is probably somewhere in the middle, and he has to reconcile his feelings for one group with his feelings for the other. The homeless by themselves could have worked well, people would have liked them, they would have been fine. But then if the Klan pictures had been shown by themselves the first time, it would have been problematic not to have something to balance them.

CF: I couldn't help wondering about the implications of having an affluent art collector purchase a photograph of the Klan Wizard to hang in his or her living room. Someone who might never associate with a Klan member or admit to being a Klan supporter would end up wanting to consume an image of one. You were bringing them into a relationship with an image of something they might otherwise reject.

AS: What you just described is exactly what I also imagined in terms of the portraits of the homeless. Collectors would purchase work about people who they would probably never have a relationship with, but are safe for them to admire from a distance. I wondered if there would be any kind of conflict for the collectors. Someone pointed out to me that it wasn't pictures of Klansmen or homeless people that were being collected—they are Serranos, so the subject matter is secondary.

CF: I don't think that any other postmodern photographer calls on the viewer to engage with subjects as abject or as socially marginalized as yours. Your work demands that the form expand in order to explore its own moral/ethical implications. You can find sublime beauty in these pictures, but they also invoke a sense of horror.

AS: I am pulling at the form. My intent as an artist is to monumentalize or aestheticize the mundane. But it is also important that I identify with my subjects. The Klan people and the homeless are outcasts. I have always felt like an underdog; I root for the underdog.

AS: After making the homeless portraits, I still wanted to continue doing portraits. They had to be unusual subjects for me to be interested in them. I thought that masked portraits would be very unusual and immediately thought that the Klan would be a natural. I was in Atlanta giving a lecture. I had four or five names, and I pursued them until I made more contacts and continued from there.

CF: So it started as a formal decision—you weren't thinking about who it was that you were photographing?

AS: I was aware of that dimension as well, and that is why I was attracted to it. Being who I am racially and culturally, it was a challenge. If I had just been a white photographer taking pictures of the Klan it wouldn't have been very interesting for me.

CF: It seems that the way you photograph your subjects changes with these portraits. The images in the Nomads and Klan series evoke a humanist sentiment that none of your previous work does. You seem to be expressing a desire to connect on a subjective level with your subjects. Why did that happen?

AS: One of the things that the controversy made me aware of was that I have always been a loner. There have been times in my life where I have been fairly antisocial. I have never been part of the system. I have never voted in my life. Whenever possible, I operate outside the system. Now, I realize that I can no longer function as a human being in a vacuum. All of a sudden people were reaching out to me—in critical or supportive ways—but in either case I was bombarded by human contact, which was very strange for me. It made me change. I began to allow people to enter my life and work.

CF: So your response to a controversy that made you a public figure was to connect with people more in your work?

AS: One of the things about the controversy was that it actually hurt. It confused me. It caused me a great deal of grief. Maybe I am now trying to reach out to people and in some way connect with them in what I hope is a more positive light. That doesn't mean that I am compromising my work in any way. Like I always say, I like to give people what they want and what they don't want. Besides, I know I can take the heat.

CF: I don't mean to suggest that you are moving into sentimentalized portraiture. I do think that you've chosen your subjects strategically, as representatives of—

CF: They are undesirable, but they are also people who in and of themselves are symbols. That seems to connect them with your previous work, which is so much about iconography and symbol. A homeless person stands for the homeless, for economic and racial inequities and for capitalism's lack of morality. A Klan member with a mask on stands for the entire Klan, and for white supremacy, racism and the South.

AS: In dealing with these people, particularly with the Klanspeople, I realized that they became more powerful as symbols than they actually were as human beings. I saw them as human beings first, and then they put on their robes and became symbols. The homeless too are symbols. I see this as my dilemma as well. In a way, I have become a symbol. But I am just a human being—and it is hard for human beings to be symbols.

CF: They represent two polar opposites of a spectrum of symbols that have to do with racism. The overwhelming majority of the homeless people in your photographs and in New York are black, and the Klan stands for white supremacy. What did you want to express in relationship to race in these pictures?

AS: I am trying to connect with my own feelings. I am somewhat ambivalent about most things and sometimes even confused. I have never been able to fit. I have never been able to see myself as fitting into one category, and I have never been able to limit my contact with people to one group of people. I have always prided myself as someone who got along with people who didn't get along with each other. I am not talking about groups of people. I am talking about individuals. I just extended to a larger arena.

CF: How did the homeless people deal with you? What were their concerns when you first approached them?

AS: They were surprised that I would offer them money. After that surprise most accepted the offer. I asked about 50 people. Only two people said no.

AS: Yes, not to the opening, but several of them went to the show. In fact, the homeless man who opens the door to the Citibank on 14th Street and First Avenue proudly told someone I know, "Oh yes, I have some pictures up at Stux Gallery."

CF: Your interest in the late-19th-century photographer Edward Curtis and in his portraits of Native Americans is often mentioned. You've said his work influenced the choices you made in taking pictures of the homeless. What is it about his work that led you to take pictures of homeless people?

AS: His pictures are very heroic. I don't care about the controversy as to whether or not they fabricate a false reality. I like the way the people look, and I get a sense of who they are and I get a sense of their dignity. I think that is really important. Growing up in the '50s, the only Indians I ever saw were on TV, and usually they were savages being massacred by soldiers. Curtis felt he was photographing a vanishing race. I didn't think I was photographing a vanishing race, but rather a class of people who are on the verge of extinction as individuals. The homeless problem will never go away. These people may or may not survive the next winter. Being the faceless and nameless people whom we don't even ordinarily look at made me want to monumentalize them even more.

CF: Your artwork contains strong statements about institutions like the Catholic Church, and about symbols that relate to politically charged groups such as the Klan and the homeless. At the same time, your use of photography suggests a particular stance toward the medium and its power. What exactly is your relationship to photography as a medium?

AS: I am an artist first and a photographer second. My "medium" is the world of ideas that I seek to present in a visually cohesive fashion. I think of myself as a conceptualist with a camera. In other words, I like to take the pictures in my head that may or may not have anything to do with photography.

My use of the medium—photography—is in some ways traditional. At the same time it is very unconventional. The photography critic Andy Grunberg pointed out that I am not that technical, that I don't care about printing. I feel as though I am anti-photography because I have no interest in the medium except as a means to an end. I am interested only in the final image. At the same time, my role as an artist leads me to want to pursue subjects that generate the tensions we talked about. I think my technique is a comment on my subjects and on photography. I say things, but I say them indirectly. At the same time, I try to make my images as direct as possible.

AS: Judging from what I have read, people are getting the point—even the politicians.

CF: But you wouldn't want to reduce the work to its shock value for right-wing politicians?

AS: No. I think that's the dilemma for them. My work does more than just shock. It also pleases—and that really fucks with their heads. My work has often been spoken of in terms of the sacred and the profane. My feeling is that you can't have one without the other. You need both.

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Shooting the Klan: An Interview with Andres Serrano

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