How “Piss Christ” Became a Culture-War Bomb

Religious iconography was on Serrano’s palette from the start. He collects religious artifacts and uses church pews as living-room couches. Like many nonobservant Catholics, he appears to be anticlerical but not anti-Christian. He isn’t trying to make religious art. He’s trying to make art using religious materials. He treats Christ, the cross, and the Madonna the way Monet treated haystacks: not for or against, just alert to their aesthetic potential.

In 1985, Serrano was approached by William Olander, a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which had been founded as a venue for cutting-edge, issue-based art. Olander was planning a group show called “FAKE: A Meditation on Authenticity.” This was a standard topic of postmodernist interrogation. “In a global economy increasingly dominated by high technology capable of reproducing copies more ‘real’ than the real thing,” the catalogue explains, “for a fake to operate as a fake, it must pass as an original, circulating freely in our system of late capitalism.” That kind of thing.

That kind of thing was not Serrano’s kind of thing. He isn’t a postmodernist. He makes art for traditional reasons—interesting materials, striking images. But the project gave him an idea: “fake paintings,” or photographs that look like paintings and gesture at famous ones. Among the earliest, made in 1986, was a photograph of two Plexiglas containers side by side, one filled with animal blood, the other with milk; he’d later also use breast milk, menstrual blood, and his own semen. The point was to make bodily fluids read as paint. The result, “Milk, Blood,” was meant to recall Mondrian. He then made monochromes: “Piss,” a container of urine echoing Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue paintings, and “Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil),” alluding to Anselm Kiefer. All these pieces are abstract, and at some point Serrano decided to reintroduce representation into his art. The first such work, made in 1987, was “Piss Christ.”

Serrano seems to have picked the crucifix as something whose significance would be somewhat ambiguous. (A 1988 companion piece, “Piss Discus,” is boring by comparison—it lacks that ambiguity.) “Piss Christ” may also nod to Gauguin’s “The Yellow Christ.” Serrano first tried his wife’s urine, then switched to his own, judging it yellower. He built a two-gallon Plexiglas container himself; the crucifix inside is thirteen inches long, but the photograph is sixty by forty—large enough to function, on a wall, like an altarpiece.

As many have noted, without the title no one would object to the image. The urine is transfigured: reddish gold, faintly effervescent, almost tearlike. The critic Wendy Steiner called Serrano’s work “some of the holiest images in contemporary art”—which certainly seems to be on the spectrum of legitimate responses to it. “Piss Christ” isn’t the most sophisticated art work ever made. But it was made by an artist, for artistic reasons.

The photograph was first shown, in 1987, as part of an exhibition at the Stux Gallery, on Spring Street, which drew no notice and sold poorly. A year later, the director of the New Museum nominated Serrano for a fellowship administered by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (secca), in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was one of ten winners and received fifteen thousand dollars. What happened next is the subject of Isaac Butler’s entertaining new book, “The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars” (Bloomsbury), for “Piss Christ” turned out to be the bomb that set off those culture wars.

The term “culture war” derives from the German Kulturkampf, coined in the time of Bismarck for the conflict between the Catholic Church and the Prussian state. It seems to have entered the American vocabulary largely through the sociologist James Davison Hunter’s 1991 book, “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America,” and historians have been refining the story ever since: Daniel T. Rodgers’s “Age of Fracture” (2011) takes a wider view, tracing the breakup of older ideas about class, society, history, and collective purpose, while Andrew Hartman’s “A War for the Soul of America” (2015) covers ground closer to Butler’s, framing the culture wars of the eighties as a backlash against the sixties—notably the women’s, civil-rights, and gay-liberation movements. Butler trains his own lens mainly on a few years, from 1989 to 1992, when the National Endowment for the Arts was chaired by John Frohnmayer.