Andres Serrano
02 Jun - 22 Jul 2007
ANDRES SERRANO
"The Morgue – Part II"
You can not want to consider this death, not want to think about it. But if you accept, if you admit intimately that your death touches you, then undeniably these photos concern you. And in their sincere and profound stake, they are serious, in the full and ancient resonance of this term: gravitas: weight, strength, dignity, elevation, nobility, solemnity - but also hardness, rigor, awkwardness, malaise, heaviness. Andres Serrano's grand photographic images are not light. Like all art according to Klee, but coyly and almost explicitly, they play with the ultimate ends.
Andres Serrano explained himself on his work, his choices, his way of working. His work is instinctive ; he himself is often surprised by the result: the finished work differs from what he had anticipated. Contemporary art criticism categories barely concern him because he places himself entirely within his own research. He feels himself more artist than technician-photographer, and for him, his photos are also his canvases. His Catholic education has played a decisive role in his progress but his method is not intellectual. It is, as he says, "natural": once his work is finished, the photo printed, when he looks at the work, then he sees the implicit culture. At that level, the gravity of his photos reveals his interest for everything that is rite and ritual ; the strange majesty that appears also has to do with precisely the fact that his models have no name; they're anonymous, gathered accidentally by their respective deaths, cut off from the world in a city's morgue, celebrated in the world by the photographer's work.
When he says that he doesn't really know the difference between what is and what is not acceptable, he doesn't mean to be deliberately provocative. Once again, it's rather a statement. But what is really shocking, first of all, in his work, is this instinctive incapacity to look as others do, as one should. There is something childish in this absence of criteria, in this ignorance of convention, in this tendancy of bringing his eye on what is at the margin of what can be seen, secondary, forgotten or neglected and making it the center of attention, the medium of a personal poetics. Childish, on the condition of understanding it as Baudelaire did when, in 1863, he spoke of the “recovered childhood” of the artist who knows “to see everything new” and whose art possesses something “barbarian and ingenuous”.
If provocation there is on the part of Serrano, it is that he demands us to look, eye to eye, at what we have a growing tendancy today to dismiss. not to want to know, not to envisage. In this mediatic and glamourous culture, you don't die anymore; the images of the body overwhelm us with their models of immutable youth and sumptuous and ascepticized beauty - and meanwhile, the inventor of American utopia, Disneyland, big Walt, is waiting, cryogenized, for his return to life. In this series, Serrano has chosen to envisage death and to give a face back to dead people. Photographic art puts in front of our eyes, close-up, the various aspects of the dead body, in its physical flesh, right there.
"The Morgue – Part II"
You can not want to consider this death, not want to think about it. But if you accept, if you admit intimately that your death touches you, then undeniably these photos concern you. And in their sincere and profound stake, they are serious, in the full and ancient resonance of this term: gravitas: weight, strength, dignity, elevation, nobility, solemnity - but also hardness, rigor, awkwardness, malaise, heaviness. Andres Serrano's grand photographic images are not light. Like all art according to Klee, but coyly and almost explicitly, they play with the ultimate ends.
Andres Serrano explained himself on his work, his choices, his way of working. His work is instinctive ; he himself is often surprised by the result: the finished work differs from what he had anticipated. Contemporary art criticism categories barely concern him because he places himself entirely within his own research. He feels himself more artist than technician-photographer, and for him, his photos are also his canvases. His Catholic education has played a decisive role in his progress but his method is not intellectual. It is, as he says, "natural": once his work is finished, the photo printed, when he looks at the work, then he sees the implicit culture. At that level, the gravity of his photos reveals his interest for everything that is rite and ritual ; the strange majesty that appears also has to do with precisely the fact that his models have no name; they're anonymous, gathered accidentally by their respective deaths, cut off from the world in a city's morgue, celebrated in the world by the photographer's work.
When he says that he doesn't really know the difference between what is and what is not acceptable, he doesn't mean to be deliberately provocative. Once again, it's rather a statement. But what is really shocking, first of all, in his work, is this instinctive incapacity to look as others do, as one should. There is something childish in this absence of criteria, in this ignorance of convention, in this tendancy of bringing his eye on what is at the margin of what can be seen, secondary, forgotten or neglected and making it the center of attention, the medium of a personal poetics. Childish, on the condition of understanding it as Baudelaire did when, in 1863, he spoke of the “recovered childhood” of the artist who knows “to see everything new” and whose art possesses something “barbarian and ingenuous”.
If provocation there is on the part of Serrano, it is that he demands us to look, eye to eye, at what we have a growing tendancy today to dismiss. not to want to know, not to envisage. In this mediatic and glamourous culture, you don't die anymore; the images of the body overwhelm us with their models of immutable youth and sumptuous and ascepticized beauty - and meanwhile, the inventor of American utopia, Disneyland, big Walt, is waiting, cryogenized, for his return to life. In this series, Serrano has chosen to envisage death and to give a face back to dead people. Photographic art puts in front of our eyes, close-up, the various aspects of the dead body, in its physical flesh, right there.