By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Police in southern France are looking for the persons responsible for destroying a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine that was on display in a museum in Avignon.
The Associated Press is reporting that the photograph depicts the 1987 “artwork” of Andres Serrano, known as “Piss Christ.” The blasphemous art outraged American Christians 24 years ago after it won a $15,000 award, part of which was provided by the taxpayer funded National Endowment of the Arts. Serrano claimed the photo was a statement on the “misuse of religion.”
At the time, Serrano made 10 Cibachrome prints of the photo, including one that sold at a Christie’s auction in New York for $277,000 dollars in May 2008.
It was one of these photos that was attacked on Palm Sunday with hammers and destroyed only a day after several hundred Christians conducted a peaceful demonstration outside the gallery to protest the exhibit. Museum guards say four people in sunglasses between the ages of 18 and 25 entered the exhibition just after it opened at 11a.m. on Sunday morning. One took a hammer out of his sock and threatened the guards with it. Before the guards could subdue them, a member of the group smashed the plexiglass screen covering the photo and then slashed it with what appeared to be either a screwdriver or an ice pick. They also smashed another work, which showed the hands of a meditating nun.
French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand responded condemned “an attack on a basic principle, the exhibition of these works being fully in line with the freedom of creation and expression enshrined in the law.”
However, he did admit that “one of the two works could shock some people.”
A week before the incident, the gallery complained about “extremist harassment” by offended Christians who were “persecuting” him with tens of thousands of complaint emails and bombarding the museum with spam. He likened the atmosphere to “a return to the middle ages.”
The gallery director, Eric Mézil, said it would reopen with the destroyed works on display “so people can see what barbarians can do” and complained that there had been a “kind of inquisition” against the art work.
Serrano’s offensive “art” has caused similar uproars over the years. The work was vandalized at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia in 1997 when then-Archbishop of Melbourne, George Pell, sought an injunction from the Supreme Court to restrain the National Gallery of Victoria from displaying the photo. The injunction was denied and some days later, two teens attacked it with a hammer.
The art was also vandalized in Sweden in 2007.
Christian activists from the General Alliance Against Racism and the Respect of the French and Christian Identity are taking the Lambert Collection to court tomorrow to try to have the photograph removed from the exhibit.
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