Andres Serrano, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Yvon Lambert – London
3 Feb – 28 March 09
There is a way of thinking that sees art as about buzz. Packaging, publicity, celebrity, it says, are what makes something quality art. They see evaluating a piece of art as a completely arbitrary exercise, and so, whatever, I guess that piece is kinda cool – it’s famous and at least I understand it. This is a way of thinking that does not believe Art, as such, is worth saving. If crisis struck, nothing related to art would be anywhere near their list of lifeboat-worthy objects. And that is fine, except that for those of us peering into the art world from outside the first pieces we see are those that play to this art-doubting audience which relies on attention-gotten to direct them toward what is worthy of their own attention.
Works like these hurt Art. They are the Jay-Z or Nelly of Art, destroying what was good about hip-hop by simply overshadowing it with louder, more obvious songs – the songs the wider public expects, and expects to be able to condemn, in hip-hop. For the artist, these works build up her reputation, for better or worse, not based on what she has conveyed or depicted but how she has done so. Her works are simply the means of eliciting disgust, shock, outcry, debate, rather than being ends in themselves, being complete pieces of work that can be discussed as pieces of work rather than as topics of social debate.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a collection of past works from Andres Serrano, and the general thrust of his oeuvre can be seen clearly here – the intent to shock and disgust. Not everything said above is fair with regards to Serrano. I do believe his works are at least somewhat “ends in themselves”; many photos have an internal beauty and cohesion independent of their sometimes rather obvious attention-grabbing intent, but it is near impossible to view such works on their own internal terms – and the social context should never be completely ignored anyway. With Serrano’s “Piss Christ” (1989), the discussion was never left at whether this work or the work of Serrano was defensible as quality art – and so worth NEA funding – but whether contemporary art generally was defensible as a cause – and funding-worthy. This is how the deliberately shocking piece of art hurts Art, at least in the eyes of the general public. It is not so much Serrano’s fault as those – senators, church leaders, etc – that subscribe to the way of thinking above, but I can not imagine there was much of an inescapable artistic compulsion mandating Serrano make “Piss Christ”. It was always as much about the reaction to the piece as the piece, and as such was always more of a means than an end, and artistically suspect because of that – and that only.
The photos with the most shock value here are perhaps the ones upstairs – transsexuals, dwarfs, dead bodies, and androgynous older ladies in sexual acts or on their way. This room looks down on a schoolyard below and is furnished with two long couches. Downstairs are close-ups of smooth, detail-less guns and portraits of nuns, a KKK member, dead faces, homeless, and Ethan Hawke juxtaposed with 1980s porn star Vanessa del Rio. The photos are bright and sharp, with no interesting details to uncover; they are straightforward and do not say much aside from the obvious, whether it be disgust, accusal, or humor.
SHIT (Romantic Shit), 2008
Most interesting is the Shit series which has its own room filled with close-ups of, yeah. Taken individually, they are quite complex and interesting. Mounds become landscapes of deep brown gullies and crevices, punctuated by yesterday’s undigested plant matter. Personally, I had never looked at shit this way before, and so this is new, interesting, able to be seen as a piece of art rather than a photo of a pile shit. A room full of such photos, though, is a bit overwhelming. Of course, that is probably the point, but it is a crappy one (yep) and one that has been done too many times already.
SHIT (Sheep Shit), 2008
Milan Kundera’s “lightness of being” refers to the stochastic insignificance of life, how “what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all” (p. 238 of HarperCollins’s 1999 paperback), yet Serrano’s works drip with sociocultural significance and seem to keep coming back to the same tired themes. Their relation to an unbearable and fruitless search for deeper meaning is no where apparent in these works. – M.O. Berger
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Further reading
Yvon Lambert will close its London gallery at the end of March, due to a stingier art market and the fact that “Paris and New York are the two crucial centers for the gallery”: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=a0cKjgqZGkhQ&refer=muse
Andres Serrano bio: http://andresserrano.org/Bio.htm
Andres Serrano interview: http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2002/09/shooting_the_kl.php
