I'm so happy to see so many people here tonight. When I arrived nobody was here and someone said to me: "I thought you were famous, why is nobody here?". Basically, I'm just going to show some slides and explain them. We will discuss them together, so please ask me questions. I have never studied photography and I do not consider myself a photographer. I studied painting and sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum Arts School. I don't know much about photography and so for me it is very ironic that people consider me a good photographer. This is called Cabeza de Vaca, which literally means "Cow's Head". Cabeza de Vaca was also the name of a 15th-century Spanish explorer. You can see here that my early work is very much tabloid oriented, the background and the subject matter have a very traditional tabloid set-up. This is from 1984. It's called Heaven and Hell. The figure on the right is the painter Leon Golub, who is very politically engaged; certainly you know him. I thought of the work by Golub with his "victims", and of my work which is mainly oriented towards catharsis... This is from 1984 and is called Mid Weapon. This is the actor Lawrence Fishburn_I don't know if you know him but he's starred in many movies, he's very famous in the USA. Question: In the first picture of the cow's head, did you move the cow's eye or did it come out staring in that direction by chance? Serrano: Yes, I moved it myself, a bit. I also had to cut the eyelashes which were too long, and I had to clean the eye because it was a bit dirty. Question: Why did you do this? Serrano: I wanted to make a portrait of a cow's head and I usually try to make the objects and the people I photograph as beautiful as possible. This is from 1984 and is called The Passion. I was raised as a Catholic but stopped going to church at age thirteen. Not until twenty years later did I see this background coming out in my work. I used to buy a lot of meat from a butcher, a Greek. One day I went to him and told him, "I need a goat but I cannot afford one". He said, "Why don't you rent one?" I asked him what he meant. He said, "Give me twenty dollars and bring it back tomorrow." And so I did. I brought the goat back the following day and he started putting it away without looking at it. And so I asked him, "Why don't you check it?" "What for?" he replied, "It's still good." My work is very intuitive, it is not strategic or intellectual. When I look back at my works of a few years ago I wonder where the inspiration came from. There are people who are very frustrated with me because although I am politically involved I do not call myself a political artist. My feeling is that my role is to make the work and not to justify it or clarify the meaning. That's up to the audience. But sometimes people are uncomfortable with this, they would like to be told how to react. This is from 1986 and is called Blood Cross. This is a plastic vessel which I shaped and filled with blood. This was the first time I used plexiglass or plastic and you can see how it changes the work completely. The next image was taken one or two months later and is called Milk Blood. It is very important to me because it is the first fluid picture I did. Question: I would like to know if you really filled with blood the Blood Cross, and what this means. Serrano: The reason why I started to work with blood is that I used to buy a lot of meat for my work, and at a certain point I decided to concentrate on blood that came with it instead, to use it in my works. Question: Since you replaced meat by blood, I would like to know what it meant for you to work with meat. Serrano: I was influenced at one point by a visit from the curator of the New Museum in New York, Bill Hollander. He was doing a show called "Fake," which was about fake painting. After that visit I started to think about the idea of mimicking painting through photography using blood and milk. At the beginning I was a frustrated painter, and it was like painting with the fluids, using them as paint, but at the same time they had more symbolism than if they had been just paintings. This work with the fluids was essentially anti-photographic, in the sense that photography is more concerned with spatial relationships and perspective, and with this work everything is flat_I have eliminated the background, the props. They are still tabloids but there is a flatness to them. So I was able to enjoy photography as pure expression of light and colour, much like abstract paintings, and in my case they became more like geometric paintings and or even like abstract expressionism. This is called Blood Stream; basically it is a tank with milk where blood is poured. Question: After Blood Cross you built the objects you photographed from plexiglass. This construction process is like those of other artists like Cindy Sherman or John Casbere. Have you ever thought of displaying the objects, instead of the pictures alone? Serrano: I never thought of displaying objects. I studied painting and sculpture in high school. Initially I would make constructions or paint, but then I started living with a woman who had a camera and so I started to take pictures. So you know, I feel like many years ago I had already imposed some limitations on what I wanted to do, but maybe once in a blue moon I will still make an object for specific purposes_perhaps for AIDS benefit; otherwise I have concentrated on making photographs and only photographs. This is my domain and construction interests me only as a photographic excursion. But for sentimental reasons I hold on to props; I have had one of those pinsticks on my fire escape for years. This is called Circle of Blood and is a circular vessel filled with blood, photographed from above against a yellow background. This is a tridimensional construction that I have flatted down and made into a bidimensional photograph. Question: I guess that displaying photographs instead of objects can be easier. Do you think that photographs are easier to be brought around and displayed, in comparison to objects? Serrano: You're talking about diffusion; does it mean that you are questioning the fact that objects can limit diffusion? I have never thought about it like this, but I am aware that as an artist I have always wanted to have as big an audience as possible, and this is only possible by making my work accessible also to a vast popular audience. This is Milk Cross. It is a tank within a tank, one filled with milk and the other with blood. This is Piss. Sometimes people ask me why I started to use piss. The answer is easy. It took me long time to figure out that if I were to use milk and blood forever I would have taken red and white pictures forever. So I needed a third colour to add to the others. This is called Piss Christ, and it is from 1987. Up until this point the fluids were very abstract; when I decided to refer back to some sort of representation it seemed logical for me to do religious images, and for me Christ was a way to take two different directions in the work with fluids and abstraction, with tangible religious images. Even though Piss Christ was denounced by some fundamentalists and a handful of senators who made part of their agenda a fight against art, and particularly against this genre of art, as an ex-Catholic and also as a person who still feels a sort of identification with Christianity, it was not my intent to do what has been called and anti-Christian bigotry. I felt that rather than to destroy existing icons I should try to make my own. Question: Will you please explain what occurs to a picture that has been denounced? Is it taken away and are you forbidden to show it to the public? Serrano: The image was not censored. They never stopped me from showing it. On the contrary, they increased the photo's value over a hundred times. I have been personally criticized, however, and I have been ostracized. Last year I applied for a grant, and even though the panel recommended me for one they denied it to me. But for me, though Piss Christ became a political football between the right and the left in the art quarrel, I have always tried to maintain my distance from it. This is called Piss Elegance and it is from 1987. The piss pictures after Piss Christ are lit very differently. The lights are behind the tank and to the side of the tank, that's why you get the bright yellow. For me ideas are important, but equally important is the visual presentation. I am always telling younger artists that they have to make images that will grab the viewer's attention. I had decided to work with the fluids, with blood, milk, and urine, and when I did, to my surprise I found that they made very beautiful and strong images. This is Madonna with Child. This is Piss and Blood. Question: I was wondering if these images with piss aim at degrading the idea of beauty, as in fact they are very beautiful images indeed. Serrano: I wouldn't use the word "degrade". But I feel that if the images were only beautiful they would be problematic for me, because they would become mere decorations. Ideally, I'd like to make images that are beautiful yet make people think or even disturb them. At some point I got tired of these fluids_piss and blood_and I started to use other fluids. This is Ejaculation. I had a technical problem here because at first I kept shooting and missing it. After ten times of getting films back that were completely black, I realized I needed a motor drive for the camera. So with a motor drive I was able to synchronize both actions; before I felt myself coming I started shooting, and I was able to photograph 36 exposures within 12 seconds_one of them would have an image. Only one. Sometimes the interesting part of being an artist is not only doing something but figuring out how to do it. Question: I would like to know how important the titles are in your work. Serrano: Titles are very important for me because of the fact that these are photographs; I like to inform the audience about what they are looking at. I hate "untitled" as a title, which many artists use. For me it is particularly annoying when in parenthesis they put the name of the picture anyway. The first time I decided, against my better judgement, to make an "untitled" work, some writer took me to task for being a coward with the titles, and so after that I decided to add the titles to every image. What I like about this work is that it is one of those abstractions; for me also works on an abstract level, and then when you know what it is you might have a different reaction to it. Sometimes people can't handle ejaculates. I have always believed in the saying "write what you know", but I also believe in exploring the things I don't know about. After working on the ejaculates, which is more about male sexuality, male reproduction, I decided to look at the other side of the coin, which is something that I do not have real experience of, that is to say female reproduction. This is called Menstrual Path. I remember my art dealer saying to me, "Andres these are going to be hard to sell." And I said, "Who cares? That's your problem, not mine." I find sometimes that women have a more difficult time looking at these, I think it is again this discomfort of looking closely at our bodies. This is Blood and Semen. It was done with two large pieces of plexiglass squeezing the liquids together which were then held upright and photographed with a black background behind them. Sometimes people ask why I photographed this or that. Mostly, it is out of curiosity. Sometimes I have no idea how something will look. I have an image in my head; the reason why I do what I do is because I have a desire to look. In that way I identify with the audience; I feel that they have the same curiosity. This is called White Christ, and this is the only sacred image that I made after the Piss Christ controversy. After White Christ I decided to do Black Jesus. This is actually one of my favourite images from that time; basically it is a very slow exposure of the statue painted black, in water, with bubbles formed around it. I feel like I have already anticipated a question from you: Where do the bubbles come from? But I can't take credit for that, it was one of those accidents. This is called Black Mary, and it is photographed in the same way. I do not like special effects. What you see is what I saw when I looked through the camera. I do not even touch up the negative in any way. This is the "Nomads" series. At some point I got tired of the fluids and I decided to end them, to go on to something different. This was influenced by Edward Curtes who photographed the Native Americans or Indian tribes probably almost a hundred years ago. Curtes felt that he was photographing a vanishing way of life or vanishing race. He himself was very controversial because when he photographed these Native Americans he gave them costumes they were not wearing anymore, even if they were traditional costumes. For me that is not a problem, it just makes the work more postmodern like my own or Cindy Sherman's than actual documentary photography. Basically, what I did was photograph the homeless people who I found late at night in the subway or on the streets. I would take them to the subway where I would set up a studio very quickly and do the work. The reason I had to work quickly is that every time the transit authority inspected the place they would throw me out, as I did not have a permit to work in the subway. These people I photographed live outside the system, and so I felt I had to operate outside the system as well. And my intent in doing this work was to pay homage to Edward Curtes, to what he did, but also to take a closer look at the invisible poor, the people we see every day but don't really see. To give them names and faces and to put them in galleries and museums as much as possible. This is Ren‚. About two years after I took this picture Ren‚ called me and left a message on my machine. (I did not give Ren‚ my number but people manage to find me anyway). He said to me on the machine, "You photographed me two years ago and my picture was in Mirabella and I want to ask you a question". He said that at the time I'd taken his picture he was doing very badly in his life, but when people saw his picture in Mirabella they called his mother to find out why he was doing so badly, and at that point he started to turn his life around. Now he was calling me because he had a job; he went back to college and had a job as a counselor at the Port Authority for a homeless community. He called me because he wanted to know if I could give him a small photograph for his office, which I did. Six months later Ren‚ left another message on my machine saying that he was going to get married in June, and he wanted me as a guest or as a photographer. Question: Did you go to the wedding? Serrano: No, I was out of the country and I could not go. This is Rose. I met her in the park and I asked her to pose and she asked me whether she had to pose naked. At some point I moved away from the homeless portraits. I did not get tired, I ran out of money because I would pay my assistants, and every time I got out to take pictures it would cost me about a hundred and fifty dollars; after going twenty or thirty times I just could not afford it anymore. The idea of portraits was something that was still intriguing me, but I thought that I wanted to make unusual portraits. The normal idea of a portrait is to show some sort of identification with the individuality of a person, but if a person is masked it would be an anti-portrait. When I thought of masked people I immediately thought of the Ku Klux Klan, and of course because of who I am, racially and culturally, it was a challenge to work with them and also to get them to work with me. I spent about a month in Georgia trying to convince people to pose for me. This is the ex-leader of the Klan, he was 83 years old and retired. This is why he wears the grey robe, because he is the top dog. Question: You have declared that you are very attracted to extremes. I would like you to explain something about this aspect of your work. Serrano: I am certainly attracted to extremes. I feel there cannot be the sacred without the profane, the point being that there is a lot of strangeness in everyday life. For me, normal life would not be that interesting without some sort of conflict. This is why, having been born in New York, a big city, I prefer big cities to small towns_I need their tension. But of course I do not have a problem with such tension in my work. Sometimes this is a little problematic for the audience, not so much for the general audience as for the critics. What struck me about these Klan people is that as human beings they were ordinary, sometimes less than ordinary. But as soon as they put on the robes they assumed a role and a power they did not otherwise have. This person knew me and even made jokes about senator Jesse Helmes, who had denounced me. When I see these images before me I also remember how these people were like, and who they were. And sometimes the image you see is not the same as the human being behind it. For instance, this man was a very nice old man who would say that all men are brothers under the skin, and he explained that he lived in a black neighbourhood. I asked him why he was in the Klan and he explained that the Klan was a good group of people... except for a few bad apples. Three years ago I decided to do something different and an opportunity came to me. (Sometimes I feel I have been blessed with luck, and I always think it must be God's will). Many years ago I wanted to go to a morgue to photograph dead people, but I found that it was not very easy, and so I gave up. But three years ago a friend of mine who knew that I had wanted to go into a morgue said to me that she had a friend at a morgue. She said to me, "Do you want me to ask?", and I said, "Go ahead!" And two weeks later she came to me and said, "If you want to go in, you can." So this is called "The Morgue," and in parenthesis I write the cause of death, because I don't know anything about these people when they were alive. The only thing I know about them is what they died of. This is called (Infectious Pneumonia), and at first I did not want to photograph this woman because she had died of AIDS and looked a kind of grotesque in death. You could tell she was a very plain woman when she was alive, but when she died she looked very grotesque as she had a bloated throat. So I couldn't find any beauty there. After going to the morgue for two or three days, and realizing that no one new had come into the morgue, I knew I either had to shoot her or to shoot someone who had been in the freezer for several months. The way I found to photograph her disclosed some beauty I did not believe could be there. She ended up by being my favourite image of this series. Sometimes as an artist it is necessary to push yourself because you never know what you are going to discover about yourself. My work makes certain people uncomfortable; sometimes I want to make works that make me uncomfortable. This is a baby who was about two years old; he came in when I was there and he was still warm. People at the morgue, after one or two days, are cold and stiff, but he was still very warm. Sometimes you have limitations_I had the permission of the person in charge of the morgue to photograph, with the understanding that the people would not be recognizable. This is the same baby. Sometimes people ask me what was running through my head when I did such a photograph. They expect me to give them some sort of profound, metaphysical thought on what I was doing, when in reality I may have had only ten minutes or less to do the photo, so I try to focus and to find the angle and the light from which to photograph. So sometimes I do not even see the details in the photograph until later. And one of the details which I did not see in this one was, in asking my assistant to remove the baby's socks, which I felt were too recognizable, we left all these stretch marks from the elastic which you can see now. This is a (Shotgun Suicide). What struck me about the people I found in the morgue was that no matter what they died of they always looked like victims. Sometimes I am asked why I didn't photograph any "normal" death, why I went after the violent death. My answer is that these were the normal deaths. I photographed a hundred people, and only two or three of them died of old age, everyone else died of violent and premature death, either through suicide, homicide, or accident. This is called (Poisonous Suicide), and that's exactly how I found the body in the morgue, in the freezer. Sometimes you look at these people_and I don't know what these people went through in their lives_and certainly you speculate: I speculate that this woman probably found in death what she didn't find in her life. This is the same woman. This image reminds me of the death of Christ, especially with that stigmate-like wound. That cut is made by the pathologist_he was explaining to me that sometimes if a person was hit, bruises take a while to surface, so they cut to make sure that there is no damaged tissue in there. This is called (Active Death). This man was stabbed by his wife with a kitchen knife fifteen times. This is called (Burn Victim). Sometimes at the morgue appearances were not always believable, that is to say, this appears to be a black man but he was not a black man, he was a white man who, while smoking in bed, burned himself to death. He has been cut open; this is after the autopsy. Normally for an autopsy they take out everything they need and afterwards they throw everything back insid, but in this case they did not put him back together for his family. They just buried him like this. As you can see, the top of his head has been cut open, which is a normal procedure in an autopsy. (One time I was photographing and I smelled something funny and heard a sound: it was the razor cutting someone's head open during an autopsy). People ask me I reacted to all this Basically I felt a sort of clinical distance that allowed me to work there and not get emotionally involved, much like a professional that goes there every day. It was a similar response to that I had when photographing the Klan as they made very racial talk_I'd say racist talk_but I put up a wall and made it clear that I was not there to judge them. This the same man who was killed by his wife. This is a jungle baby; a jungle baby is someone who dies without an identity, and this child was one of a set of twins who was abandoned by his mother the day after he was born_he died and the other twin survived. Even though this child was only one day old when he died, I think there is an incredible power in that fist. Question: I would like to ask you what is the difference between your first series of very formal and well-done pictures and this series, which is just the opposite. Serrano: After I did my work I looked at some pictures of forensic pathology, the pictures that are normally taken in the morgue, and compared them to what I did there. And I think there is a lot of me in this work: it is very aesthetic, while the other pictures are clinical and distant. When I got to the morgue I did not know how to photograph these people, and the work developed the more that I did it. I saw a vision or a sort of thread develop from one image to the other. Even though I tried not to interfere too much, literally, with what I had before me, there is still always manipulation as far as the camera, lighting, and angles. In a way I tried to aestheticize these images in the same way that I did in the early work. This is a jungle killed by the police. She was in a stolen car and the police fired on it. She was hit in the head and the driver got away. This was a black woman with peroxided hair. I asked the doctor about this white skin and he said that there is white skin underneath the black skin. He explained to me that one time he had a teacher who took a very thin slice of skin from a dead person and explained to his students that that was the thickness of racism. Question: You have used the body and its fluids like a mystical person would do in your photographs. I also liked the pictures you took at the morgue and the fact that you considered every dead as a victim. Thus I would like to know what is the relationship between your work and the Catholic religion. Serrano: I feel that I am a believer with a certain amount of disbelief, and to me that makes a healthy Christian. I always have identified with people like Fellini or Bu¤uel. I feel that they approached the subject matter, the Church, in the same way: they embraced it and rejected it at the same time. One thing that I found in the morgue was that even though these were dead people, I never thought of them as corpses. There was always a human presence in them. I don't know if I unconsciously tried to capture this feeling when I went in there, or if I really saw it, but there was an essence that I wanted to get out. When I went to Budapest the first time, I stayed only a few hours, but I decided that I would have to go back and remain for one or two months. When I did return to Budapest I went with an assistant and my camera equipment and I stayed four months, photographing everyday people that I found there. I liked the idea of doing a show called "Budapest" because for me that name could mean anything. This is called The Model. It always amazes me how critics can look at the same works and have completely different reactions. I remember after I did this show I went to a store and I looked at two magazines that both reviewed it, which were completely different. One review was quite positive and the other critical, which is typical of the reactions I get from my work_it's a love-hate relationship I have with certain people. I remember one review, the bad one, accusing me of having a grotesque view of women and siting this image of an 84 year-old model as an example. She criticized me for showing this woman naked, old and seemingly oblivious to her surroundings, implying that the woman was crazy, when in fact this is an 84 year-old model who has been a model at the Art Academy in Budapest for 30 years_and is still posing now for the students as well as for me. The point is that this woman is 84, and she has an 84 year-old body, but she is not ashamed of it. And I think sometimes people react adversly to my work because they have difficulties dealing not only with death but also with the idea of aging. The critics often get upset with me because my work is a little too provocative and they feel like I am only out to shock. At the same time I am aware that when I do work that I know is not going to be provocative they seem to be disappointed in some way. This is a sailor, which is part of the everyday fabric of Budapest. As well as women praying in churches. I would find these women praying in churches and then I would wait for them to stop praying and through an interpreter ask them to pose for me. It was sometimes a scene out of Fellini, because here I am with my camera equipment, my assistant with a mask on, and we are doing this re-creation for the camera with willing models and not professionals. This is a person a friend of mine knew, and for this reason he accepted to pose for us. And again the "Madonna and Child" theme recurs. This is a gipsy woman with a baby, who is probably two and a half and is still sucking. Another woman praying in a church. She was kind of funny, because after ten pictures she would hear me stop because I had to change the film and she would ask me, "Did you get enough or do you want some more?", and I would say, "I want some more," and she'd say, "Okay," and go back posing. There is always a fine line between the real and the artificial, which is certainly always present in the medium of photography, and also in my work specifically. I guess I never really knew whether they were praying or were just posing. When I approached this woman she said that she would pose for me but that she was a widow and did not have a man. So I took her number down. One month later I saw this man with another woman in another bathhouse, and I approached them_he was willing to pose but she was not his woman so she said no. So in effect these two people in this photograph together do not know each other_they had never met until the moment they took their clothes off. But of course many people look at them and want to believe that they have been a couple together for thirty years. Other people ask me whether or not they got together after the photograph, and I answer that I sent them back in the same car and maybe they did. This is the last shot, part of the everyday people life I found in Budapest. I found a lot of young girls who were prostitutes, ex-Romanians; this is a young Romanian who works as a prostitute in Budapest. She said to me that she had to do the photo on a certain day because she had to go back to Romania for two days. And I said, "What are you going back for?" She answered, "I have to give my parents the money." And I said, "Do they know what you do here?" She replied, "No, I am telling them that I am working in a boutique." Anyhow, I hid her and hid him but he doesn't appear as much as she does. And after the first roll of film, my camera got stuck_ there was something wrong with it and so I was only able to take ten pictures_and I said to her, "I can't continue anymore, if you want you can finish him." She looked at me and said, "No," and she just walked away, making it clear that this time she had been hired as a model and not as a prostitute.

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