‘I’ve refused to become a prisoner of “Piss Christ”,’ said the photographer Andres Serrano, referring to his 1987 photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass filled with urine.
‘I’ve refused to become a prisoner of “Piss Christ”,’ said the photographer Andres Serrano, referring to his 1987 photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass filled with urine. But the fact remains that he has become a very wealthy prisoner of that work. The picture, created while he was the recipient of a $15,000 grant from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which itself had received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1987–88, drew fiery condemnation from religious groups around the United States and members of Congress. Coming at the same time as a controversy over the indirectly government-sponsored exhibition of the work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, the outcry came close to abolishing the federal arts agency. And, recently, a copy of the same photograph was damaged by Christian fundamentalists when it went on show in Avignon last month.
The dispute over ‘Piss Christ’ has proved to be a ‘double-edged sword’, the artist said. ‘Collectors rushed to support me. I’ve sold a lot of work, and I wouldn’t have sold anywhere near that much if the controversy hadn’t occurred.’ The other side is that the flap broke up the artist’s marriage and coloured all the work that Serrano has done or will ever do.
Public controversy or instances of censorship can’t help but affect an artist in a significant way. For certain artists, there is a clear upside. ‘I like to think that my career would have reached this level without the help of the FBI,’ said the photographer Jock Sturges, whose San Francisco studio was raided in 1990 by the FBI, which confiscated and destroyed many of the artist’s prints and negatives of nude children before a federal grand jury failed to indict Sturges. ‘Certainly, the feds pushed my career ahead by ten years.’
Perhaps, we are seeing this all happen again. David Wojnarowicz’s four-minute 1987 video ‘A Fire in My Belly’ was yanked from a recent exhibition — Hide/Seek: Differences and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery — because it included a segment in which live ants crawl over a crucifix. The Catholic League protested about the work’s inclusion, sparking similar condemnations from a few members of Congress and, eventually, leading to the work’s removal from the exhibition altogether. The controversy led two museums to set up screenings of the Wojnarowicz video, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art purchased a copy earlier this year. All this helped to bring more attention to an artist who has had a limited following to date.
‘Remind me to thank the Catholic League for making this artist so popular,’ said Wendy Olsoff, co-owner of New York’s PPOW art gallery, which represents the estate of Wojnarowicz. ‘This has certainly helped David become better known. We’re re-evaluating prices on everything. I mean, the work is ridiculously undervalued.’
However, for most artists, the sword of controversy is not double-edged. The controversy elevates an artist’s name and face long enough for the individual to become the focus of death threats and hate mail, snubs from collectors, dealers and curators, with little but a tarnished reputation to show for it.
‘Controversy hasn’t been a fast track to success for me in the art world,’ said Kate Millett, whose 1970 ‘The American Dream Goes to Pot’, featuring an American flag partially stuffed into a toilet behind prison bars, has been picketed by veterans’ groups and others whenever it has been displayed. ‘I’ve got a sort of notoriety because of that piece and some others I’ve done but, in another way, the controversy hasn’t affected me a lot because I’ve never been able to sell my sculpture. All my life, collectors and curators have backed away from me.’
Controversy worked in her favour when her 1971 book Sexual Politics was published and became an instant classic among feminists, but her artwork has never benefited. Why one artist’s career is aided by controversy but another’s is not may not be easily understood. Collectors, critics, curators and dealers rallied around Serrano but avoided Millett.
In 1993, the studio of photographer Marilyn Zimmerman, a professor at Wayne State University in Michigan, was raided by police who confiscated prints and negatives in a manner similar to the FBI raid on Jock Sturges. She, like Sturges, took photographs of a nude child — her own daughter, in fact — and the district attorney decided to drop all charges in the face of protests. However, ‘There was no great surge of interest from collectors in buying my work or from dealers who might show my work,’ she said. The fear that this raid created in her life ‘did stop me from photographing the nude. I use other, appropriated images instead. Frankly, for a long while, I lost the heart to make images.’ She also lost her daughter as her ex-husband used the photograph controversy to gain primary custody in court.
Millett also noted that she felt frightened when the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, ‘denounced me on the floor of Congress. There is something about being the target of all this animus. It’s different from just a bad review when the government is attacking you. It has the power of social force behind it.’
Artists are sometimes accused of deliberately seeking publicity by courting the outrageous, then taking advantage of the notoriety in order to sell their work. ‘But would you trade what Sturges went through just to get your name out there?’ said David Mendoza, former executive director of the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression. Within the first five weeks of the FBI raid on his studio, Sturges said that he had spent $80,000 on legal fees. ‘I was anxious all the time. If I had been convicted, the sentence was ten years. I thought I was going to prison.’ He sought psychiatric help.
Public controversies bring artwork into a far larger realm, but they may also diminish artists. Serrano is the ‘Piss Christ’ artist, Sturges a child pornographer. Their entire careers have been reduced to one or more images that encapsulate the public controversy generated. At other times, their work has been cited by their opponents in order to make points about something else.
‘I saw a picture of my flag-in-the-toilet reproduced in a newspaper, accompanying an article on why the NEA should be abolished,’ Millett said. ‘I’ve never received a cent from the NEA, but that didn’t apparently matter to this newspaper or to the person who wrote the article. I feel horrible about being used in this way.’
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