Andres Serrano: Culture Shock

Arguably the most controversial artist of his time, photographer Andres Serrano rose to infamy in the 1980s with his unapologetic pairing of religious iconography with bodily secretions. He went on to captivate audiences with images of corpses and burn victims, mocking established aesthetics and censors along the way. Here, the 58-year-old enfant terrible takes stock of the music, the drugs and the character assassination that fueled his desire to keep going.

The top ten turning points in my life as an artist:

1. I dropped out of high school at the age of 15 and set out to paint like Picasso. I dropped out of Boy’s High in Bed-Stuy after the first year and spent half a semester at Bushwick High before dropping out for good.

2. I discovered Marcel Duchamp’s work around the same time I attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School at the age of 17. From then on, I considered myself a conceptual artist.

3. Bob Dylan. Like many of my generation, I wanted to be Bob Dylan. I once went up to Allen Ginsberg at a bar on 6th Street and Avenue A and asked him how I could find Bob Dylan. Ginsberg replied he didn’t know because Dylan traveled in his own circle. Even though I was a fan of Ginsberg (I’d seen him do the most incredible recital where he repeated the word “Blessed” like a mantra of condemnation at Lenny Bruce’s memorial in Judson Church), I was deeply disappointed that he couldn’t produce Dylan for me and I ended up turning my back on him.

4. The music and films of the 1960s—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the British Invasion as well as Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman. The ’60s was a time of change—political, sexual, racial, social, musical and cultural change. It was a time when many people got angry and put their lives on the line for what they believed in.

5. Going on drugs in 1971.

6. Getting off drugs in 1978.

7. Meeting William Burroughs in Lawrence, Kansas, a few years before his death. I was surprised to hear that at his age, Burroughs was still on the methadone program. It was drugs, he explained, that had kept him alive for so long.

8. Julie Ault, Sybille de Saint Phalle, Tracy Thompson and Irina Movmyga. I’ve been very fortunate to have had more than one muse in my life.

9. Jesse Helms denouncing me on the Senate floor and claiming I was “not an artist but a jerk who was taunting the American people.” Jesse’s words had the odd effect of empowering me and I was sorry when he passed away.

10. When I photographed the dead, the man in charge of the morgue asked me if I had ever seen dead people before. He said, “Over the years, two people came here wanting to photograph the corpses—and even though I told them it was alright, after that first day, they never came back.” He warned me, “Some people can take it and some people can’t.”

Photo by Andres Serrano.