Andres Serrano

Barbican Art Gallery, London
Until 23 December 2001
www.barbican.org.uk or 020 7382 7105

Roxanne, you don't have to wear that dress tonight

Being confronted by Andres Serrano's “Blood and Semen II” is an unsettling experience. The magnified image places us uncomfortably on the threshold of an unfamiliar micro-world. At a size of over 90 cm by 150 cm, the scale of the photograph is intimidating, as is the vivid red and black of the intermingling fluids. The picture becomes yet more sinister within its historical context. The gallery guide describes how, when “Blood and Semen II” was taken in 1990, the threat of AIDS was increasingly being acknowledged and “bodily fluids such as blood and sperm became life-threatening as well as life-giving.”

The gallery guide (available on admission) is an indispensable accompaniment to the exhibition of Serrano's work currently on show at the Barbican Centre in London. To be appreciated, most of the works need to be described and placed in context. Often, Serrano's life provides sufficient context.

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, dropping out of school, and becoming involved in drugs and inner city violence before studying at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School, Serrano enters the gallery in a confrontational “on the street and in your face” manner. He achieved notoriety and widespread condemnation in 1987 for “Piss Christ”: the photograph of a small plastic crucifix submerged in the artist's own urine. This image is included in the current Barbican exhibition, but other works on display are equally notable.

For the “Nomads” series, Serrano took his studio equipment into the night time New York subway. There, he photographed homeless vagrants, in their own clothes— grubby scarves and worn out jackets—but with subtle lighting against a studio backdrop.

The resulting portraits give the sitters a dignity rarely afforded to them in our society. The sensitive images capture something of the character of their subjects and force us to acknowledge that a character exists behind the sound of “Spare some change?”

Serrano's "Piss Christ"

Photographs in Serrano's series “Material and Sexual Body” expose and challenge our ideas of what is sexually “appropriate.” For example, while the photo of an aged man and woman standing naked, smiling and clasping one another, is touching, the image on the opposite wall of a young couple in similar repose is rendered radical and perhaps objectionable by the strap- dildo that the girl wears. Another picture shows a man contorted in an attempt to achieve autofellatio. Such images are shocking but shallow—they tell us nothing. None the less, as medical students, we may be better prepared for certain clinical encounters if we have already witnessed something of life's rich tapestry in the safe environment of an art gallery.

Andrew Moscrop, final year medical student, Edinburgh University, and Clegg Scholar BMJ
Email: andrewmoscrop@yahoo.com


studentBMJ 2001;09:443-486 December ISSN 0966-6494