When was piss christ made

His work evoked and explored the religious upbringing he experienced in his Hispanic Roman Catholic childhood home. He also dove deeply into an exploration of how he could use fluids in his work, milk but also, infamously urine, blood, and semen.

This series led to the creation of Immersion Piss Christ. The photograph, created in , was part of a larger series exploring immersions and classic iconography. Serrano himself has proclaimed that the work is not intended to be an overt political statement on religion, but rather that he prefers the work remains ambiguous. Despite this desire for ambiguity, Serrano has also alluded to being interested in the over-commercialisation and cheapening of Christian iconography in contemporary culture.

However, when contemporary artists tackle the subject, they always know how to add a touch of provocation to spark controversy. Yet very often, the issue lies in the context. The American artist placed a crucifix with a figurine of Jesus in a jar of urine his own and blood.

According to him, the crucifix is an object that has been trivialised in the United States; it can be found at any market, and yet it is first and foremost an object intended for torture. The artist wanted to pay tribute to Jesus Christ and remind everyone of the suffering he endured for humanity. Perhaps it reminds some people to question what we unthinkingly fetishize and thereby often minimize in lieu of pondering seriously what the crucifix actually symbolizes: the unimaginably torturous death of Christ, the Son of God.

But freedom of expression comes at a price. We have only to look to our shared human history to find that the artists and thinkers who have most advanced civilization in the direction of freedom and equality were often unpopular in their day. They questioned, they analyzed, they regularly offended. Without them we would surely be lost. Artists often work in mysterious ways, using unorthodox materials and ideas to challenge convention and put hard and necessary questions to powerful people and traditions.

But a free, tolerant society needs its artists and writers. And they must be free to live, work and speak without fear of censorship, attack or murder.

I think we need to break down what we are talking about in various ways. For one, it is important to pinpoint the identity of the pisser. Is the pisser a Christian, and if a Christian, is the person in question Catholic or Protestant?

Apart from this we need to think also about motive. Why would someone piss on a crucifix? Because of personal animosity toward Christianity in general or toward Catholic Christianity in particular? Resentment against the excesses and abuses carried out in the last two thousand years by Catholics against other Christians, and by Christians against other religions?

Pissing is an act that involves excretion. The act of pissing has important connotations that have to do with power. More in the case of men, whose act is a kind of challenge.

It involves holding your penis and pointing it outward, exhibiting the most private part of the male body, and doing it without qualms. Just showing off. Here I have something powerful, a symbol of my machismo. Let me show it to you, the proof of my virility and power as a man. Even when a small, naked child takes his little instrument, arching his back, and points it, there is something impudent about it.

We need only look at the famous Manneken Pis, to get the sense of impish shamelessness. It is charming in a child, but in a grown man, it is much more than that. The act, when done in public, becomes a sign of defiance. You are disposable, worthless, like piss. But the work by Serrano does not present us with an act of pissing! It is a crucifix immersed in piss.

So the piece need not be interpreted as implying that the crucifix, Christ, or Christianity are being pissed on. The meaning of the work could be quite different. It could mean that Christ, and perhaps Christianity as a whole, is immersed in piss, which is something very different. Because then the work does not entail an insult to Christ or even Christianity, but a criticism of Christians, of the Christian community. The art work could then become a cry against those who have soiled the cross and the faith, not a soiling of the cross or the faith.

Stavans: I ask the question as I wonder if I could do the same on a Torah scroll, the most sacred artifact in Judaism. The Torah, as you know, is a book. Well, not just a book but the Book of Books, meaning the Bible. What makes the Bible essential is not only its religious grounding—it purports to tell the history of the world from creation to the present—but its moral authority. The Ten Commandments are in it, not quoted once but several times.

Their delivery from Mount Sinai by Moses, the religious leader of the people of Israel, the successful people who embraced monotheism at a time of military and theological strife, is presented as a cinematic scene of cosmic proportions.

The Torah is written in Hebrew with portions in Aramaic. Again, would I piss on the Torah? Anger at religion for curtailing human freedom. Anger at what the Catholic Church has turned the crucifix into—an object of oppression. I know for sure that orthodoxy in Judaism is about extremes. The ultra-orthodox are against abortion, reduce women to little more than caretakers, and resist modernity as a distraction from the ways dictated by God. They reject scientific, technological, and in general social progress.

But a large portion of Jews today have pushed aside the oppressiveness of religions by endorsing a secular view of the world. That break occurred during the Enlightenment, as the French Encyclopedists like Robespierre, Diderot, and others were reassessing human knowledge beyond the confines of the church and as the fighters in the French Revolution of sought to establish an anti-monarchic, republican system of government.

Secularism is not the end of religion, it is simply another modality, even if that modality is categorically denied by the ultra-orthodox, who believe they alone are the keepers of the flame. Personally, the topic of God is central to my worldview. Faith comes second, but it has a role. What is the function of art in a secular society? To help us define ourselves.

To test the waters. But so is the reaction against it. They are part of the same coin. But the Serrano that we have could very well be interpreted as an indictment of the present state of Christianity, and not even, as you seem to suggest, an indictment of Christianity as a whole, but of Catholic Christianity.

Serrano is a Latino and Latino society is predominantly Catholic. What matters is that the context of the work is Catholic. The use of the crucifix with the image of Christ on it makes this clear, because most Protestants are iconoclasts, they do not accept images, a doctrine they share with Judaism and Islam.

It is primarily Catholic Christians, and particularly Roman and Orthodox Catholics, who accept images in religious rituals. Catholics kneel in front of images and pray to them.

Yet, Protestants generally regard what Catholics do with images as idolatry and abhor the practice of adoring and praying to images. Its meaning becomes a criticism of the Catholic hierarchy for engaging in, and the Catholic community as a whole for silently condoning, corrupt and anti-Christian behavior. The work turns into a criticism from within, an instrument of the faith, very much in the vein in which Christ behaved towards Pharisees in the Gospels, his cleaning of the Temple and his insults against their greed and disrespect for holy ground.

Instead of being sacrilegious, the work turns into a work of piety, a defense of a true Christian faith, unsoiled by the accretions of corruption. But if you are not Catholic, then your criticism, although perhaps valid, might be hostile not just to the present condition of the Catholic community and its hierarchy, but to the Christian community and the very faith. This brings me to the point of asking whether you have pissed on a crucifix, and what doing so would have meant in your case.

But I have burned a Bible. And not only a Bible but several other major works belonging to the Western canon.