Andres Serrano - Cycads
08 Sep 2007 - 12 Oct 2007
Witzenhausen Gallery Amsterdam, The Netherlands
MAF exhibition in collaboration with Witzenhausen Gallery - Elandsstraat 145 - Amsterdam - The Netherlands
Opening hours: wednesday-saturday 12-18pm
Andres Serrano - Cycads
The New York artist Andres Serrano (1950) already has a considerable career behind him. Half Honduran and half Afro-Cuban, he was born in New York and grew up in a Catholic family. From 1967 to 1969 he studied at the Brooklyn Museum and Art School. Serrano lives and works in New York.
‘Spirituality now wanders from sex to drugs to art to revolution to violence – whatever seems to promise deliverance from the quotidian’*.
This statement seems to fit Serrano very well. He has explored these areas in his work in a unique and unusual way. Some examples are the series ‘Piss Christ’ (1987), photographs of images of Christ in containers of urine, ‘The Klan’ (1990), photographs of the Ku Klux Klan, ‘Morgue’ (1992), photographs of corpses in a morgue with the causes of death as their titles, ‘A History of Sex’ (1996), photographs of people engaged in striking sexual acts, and ‘America’ (2002), portraits of American citizens ranging from a homeless person to Snoop Dog, a politician and a voluptuous Playboy bunny, and of course the latest series ‘Cycads’ (2006).
Serrano’s Catholic background can be felt very strongly in his work. Guilt and penance, and ambivalent feelings towards the body (the ‘sinful’ body) play an important role in his imagery. After all, according to the Catholic religion the body is sinful by default. Every Catholic is faced with a choice: opt for the rules of the faith or for what your body tells you. Serrano once said that ‘fortunately’ he had listened to his body. The fact that bodily fluids play such an important role in Serrano’s work is undoubtedly connected with this Catholic conflict. Blood, sperm, milk, urine – all are to be found in his work: an ode to the ‘sinful’ body and perhaps an attempt to rehabilitate it. But it goes further than the body. Serrano’s work also contains a tribute to society’s outcasts and fringe figures: the homeless, pimps and whores whose portraits are shown side by side with those of cardinals, nuns, politicians and firemen. Pleasure and pain, spirituality and sensuality – all are represented.
Some parts of Serrano’s work might be regarded as modern ‘vanitas’ symbols, alluding to the still lifes which remind us of our transience. ‘Memento Mori’ – be mindful of death – is a very Catholic motto and according to this view any lingering in beauty is a sign of emptiness and vanity. Serrano has replaced the skull – the classic vanitas symbol – with images such as the corpses in the morgue.
Cycads, tropical plants which resemble ferns and palms but genetically speaking are not related to either, may refer implicitly to still lifes. They are as old as the dinosaurs – in fact, they are even older. They are one of the oldest plant families on earth (38 million years old). In the course of time they have armed themselves with thorns and poison and have survived – at least until now. The pharmaceutical industry is a great threat to them, as are the collectors who are keen to own a specimen of a cycad. Suddenly many cycads have become threatened species; thirty-eight per cent of cycad species are now on the IUCN list of threatened species.
Most cycads have pinnate leaves; some of them ‘flower’ with exuberant red tongues while others bear cones which are almost phallic in shape. Magical in all its beauty, because of its thorns and poison the cycad is also daunting and solitary. Serrano has photographed the plants with extraordinary attention. It is as though he has transformed them into a poetic statement. The defiant beauty of these plants fits into Serrano’s oeuvre very well. The duality of the beautiful and the dangerous, the fascinating and the horrifying which is so typical of Serrano’s work can be felt in this series as well.
*An aphorism by Mason Cooley quoted by Paco Barragàn in ‘Contemporary mythologies’, Cycads catalogue.
Margriet Kruyver