During a span from the spring of 1989 to the summer of 1990, they were dragged, unwillingly, into the national consciousness, becoming-along with the late Robert Mapplethorpe-the art world’s most conspicuous household words.
At one extreme, Karen Finley and Andres Serrano were the scourge of Jesse Helms and the Rev. Donald Wildmon, and, at the other, part of a collective cause celebre for defenders of civil liberties.
Each had won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, not knowing at the time that they would be the most publicized NEA grants in history.
Evanston-reared performance artist Finley was indelibly labeled by nationally syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak as “a nude, chocolate-smeared young woman.” She and three other artists had their grants rescinded, then sued and won an out-of-court settlement.
For his 60-by-40-inch color photograph of a crucifix hazily submerged in urine and provocatively titled “Piss Christ”-part of a series on body fluids-Serrano was denounced as a blasphemer at worst and, at best, an individual of questionable taste.
As it happened, Serrano and Finley were in town recently-he to publicize a showing of his latest photographs at Feigen Incorporated on North Wells, and she to talk up a new book, “Enough Is Enough” (Poseidon Press), a satire on self-help books that is subtitled “Weekly Meditations for Living Dysfunctionally.”
Each, in separate interviews, talked about the still-hurtful flap and their post-NEA careers.
“My name was out there as `the chocolate-smeared woman,’ ” the soft-spoken Finley is saying, seated in a corner of the Blackstone Hotel lobby. “These days, I kind of laugh at it, but at the time, the whole thing was distressful-my knowing that powerful men like George Bush were having power breakfasts and discussing the morality of it all. One guy in the Boston press even compared me to Marla Maples. Which really depressed me.
“The Evans and Novak column came out of the blue. It was so devastating. I thought at first I was paranoid, but I found out my work had been flagged and the government actually had been sending people to see my performances. And that’s kind of bizarre-people taking notes on my work. I mean, why? Was it a security risk?”
“I wasn’t expecting it at all,” echoes the equally soft-spoken Serrano, sitting on a bench in the Feigen gallery. “Up until that point, I was pretty much a private citizen who was basically in the New York art scene that didn’t attract the mainstream audience.
“It all started as a ripple by Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, which found out about my photograph being exhibited at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (in Winston-Salem, N.C.). I also had a $15,000 grant, $5,000 of which was from the NEA. Wildmon urged his audience to complain to their congressional people, which resulted in several senators, including Alphonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.) and Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), denouncing me in Congress and petitioning the NEA to have stricter controls over the grants. No, they didn’t take away my grant.” Serrano smiles. “I’d already spent it all.
“At the time there really wasn’t an official explanation or rationale for `Piss Christ,’ and the director of the Southeastern Center called me and said, `We have to tell the NEA something. Why don’t we say it’s a protest against the commercialism of religious values?’ I said, `Well, it’s not language I would use, but you can say that if you want to.’ So a defense, if you will, was concocted. But, you know, I’m a visual artist. I’m not a man who explains his work through words, or needs to defend it. I think it was Robert Rauschenberg who put it best: `I like an art that can’t be rationalized.’
“To say it was `blasphemous’ came as a shock, because as an ex-Catholic and as a person who has grown up with the symbols of the church and is still attracted to them, I felt I had every right to use them in my work. I took all those mean things they said about me-from Helms to total strangers-quite personally.”
Serrano has described “Piss Christ” as “a very mysterious image,” and said he just decided to combine body fluids and religious imagery, that he had nothing specific in mind and the less said about the photo, the better. Now, he concedes that the title itself may have set people off, but doesn’t regret it. “A title is very important to me,” he adds enigmatically, “because I do work with photographs and so I’m representing a visual reality and I always like to give the audience some information.”
Asked about charges that he takes on societal taboos to shock people, he answers, “That’s certainly not my goal. But the controversy made me realize that I could be true to my art and take the heat if necessary.”
Finley thinks the First Amendment is being more and more threatened. “Helms and the Congress put in a NEA clause stipulating that you get federal money only if there’s a certain standard of `decency.’ The other three artists and I sued because it was too vague, and the clause was rejected last year by a federal judge as unconstitutional. But the Justice Department is appealing that decision. I don’t know, maybe Clinton doesn’t want to upset Congress right now.
“And what about the younger artists coming along?” asks the 37-year-old Finley, who had received several NEA grants prior to the 1990 flap. “The Endowment is supposed to help them, not necessarily be a `test’ for someone’s personal standards.”
In contrast, Serrano, who is 43 and says he is not a political being (“I do try to be politically correct without sounding pretentious”), believes the First Amendment’s being challenged may be a good thing because “it should invigorate the discourse and make people realize how important the Amendment is.”
As for the question of whether the government should even be in the arts business, Finley says: “I don’t want to go back to a time where the arts were only for the very wealthy. We’d have an artistic monarchy. Yeah, there have always been poor artists but there was always someone helping out. I mean, even Van Gogh was subsidized by his brother. I do think there has to be more art education, that grants could be brought out to the country, the community. If we don’t subsidize the arts, should we then not subsidize education? Or libraries? I mean, where does that end?”
Serrano and Finley are both ambivalent as to whether the controversy helped or hindered their careers.
“Mostly, it helped,” says Serrano. “But I’ve never tried to exploit it, as some people have said. I responded to the press whenever I was asked to, but I’ve never courted the press in any way. You know, for the first nine months of the controversy, I refused to have my picture taken because I felt these people were being very vindictive about `Piss Christ,’ and I didn’t want to give them a face to hate as well.
“I’ve always felt like I have one foot in and one foot out of the art establishment-which may be a blessing in disguise. Sometimes I feel, well, these museums don’t show my work, I’m not in this-and-that collection, they don’t ask me for this-or-that show. But that just means I have to try harder. And that’s good.”
“There were many places where I couldn’t perform, because they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to get funding,” says Finley. “And a lot of my energy had to go to the legal case, and I wasn’t able to create new work. But now I’ve recovered from that, although some theaters still don’t return my calls. OK, I’ve performed at Lincoln Center, I received a Guggenheim this year and I’m going to play Tom Hanks’ doctor in Jonathan Demme’s film, `Philadelphia.’ So things are happening for me. But, again, the important issue here is the First Amendment.”
She also says she never exploited the situation. “In fact, I turned down anything, including Gap ads. I stopped doing records. I didn’t want to make a mockery of it.”
Finley, who was traveling with her husband/manager Michael Overn and their infant daughter, was educated at Evanston Township High School and the San Francisco Art Institute, and says she actually started doing performance art in high school. (“When I was in the train, I’d write little notes to people sitting next to me-things like that.”) The oldest of six children whose now-deceased father was a businessman and jazz drummer, she says her mother has always been supportive of her work. “My grandmother, who is now 92, also saw me perform. She wrote me a note saying I was talented but had a toilet mouth.”
Besides the infamous chocolate, Finley-whose performance topics range from abortion rights to neighborhood gentrification-is also known for smearing yams across her buttocks to protest the way women are sometimes defiled by men. In addition, she has reportedly used everything from raw eggs and sauerkraut to cling peaches and pudding.
“Yes, I’ve used other food in my work. I think it’s very primal. It wasn’t a conscious idea on my part that, you know, I would be doing something shocking. The sadness for me, as a woman artist, is that if a man takes his shirt off, he’s going to work. But if I take mine off, immediately it goes into another element.”
Serrano’s just-ended exhibit of his selected works at Feigen, which ends Monday, included his striking portraits of KKK members in Atlanta, (“The Imperial Wizard knew who I was, and made jokes about Jesse Helms”) and homeless persons. The most provocative photographs-with self-explanatory titles like “Knifed to Death” and “Rat Poison Suicide”-were of bodies inside an unnamed morgue.
A high school dropout who studied at Brooklyn Museum Art School, he says his mother was “pretty flexible” about religion. “She was the sort of woman who would get to church about 15 minutes before the Mass ended. We had pictures of the Sacred Heart in the house, but no crucifixes, because I think she thought they were somewhat morbid. I made my communion at the age of 13 and then I stopped going shortly after that.”
Serrano admits he was into drugs from ages 21 to 28, when he suddenly stopped as he saw his career slipping away into oblivion. “I did it completely on my own,” he says. “I distrust all groups. Whether it be drug rehabilitation programs, the church or the arts community. Or Congress.”
