Andres Serrano

Yeah, okay, okay.

So, so Piss Christ is a, a photograph, a, a Cibachrome or Cibachrome photograph that was, uh, created by, uh, Andres Serrano.

And, uh, it is, uh, it, it came out the same year I did, 1987.

Um, and it's a photograph that depicts a small plastic crucifix that is submerged in a glass tank of the artist's own piss.

Another promised to restore truth and sanity to American history.

Today, we're bringing back an episode that looks at how this shift made artists, historians, and communities rethink the work they're doing, and to ask what happens when the government decides certain stories and certain points of view no longer deserve support.

That question was on the mind of Reveal's Jonathan Jones.

So this past January, he started driving the same highway that runs past the old fort, Interstate 65, traveling south from Tennessee into Alabama.

What interested me was the range of what the cuts touched.

Film, theater, dance, festivals, stuff that you might just take for granted in your community.

I wanted to understand what this money actually does and what changes when artists are told their work is no longer in the national interest.

What does it change in America?

A fun fact! The cover image, entitled Semen and Blood 3, is a photograph of cow blood and the artist's own semen under plexiglass.

A very special thanks to visual artist Andres Serrano for providing his semen for the project.

Anywho, singles from Load included Until It Sleeps, Hero of the Day, Mama Said, and King Nothin'.

It's a bit of alt-rock, a bit of country, a bit of trad metal, and they all suck.

... nationally famous, but you know, venues wouldn't book them because of the insurance costs, 'cause there might be a bomb threat or, you know, whatever it is.

The only person I interviewed for my book who said that the controversy helped his career is Andres Serrano, the photographer who made Piss Christ.

Okay.

And he was like, "I was an obscure nobody until-

But as the years wore on, a tension seeped between the core band members over the direction of the music itself, Jello Biafra was hungry for bigger studio ambitions and bolder lyrical attacks, while East Bay Ray and Klaus Flohride clung to tighter punk grooves and the DIY ethic that had defined their first five albums.

Add in the fact that by 1985, the band was suddenly embroiled in an obscenity trial over the cover of Frankenchrist, featuring a piece by Andres Serrano.

The legal battle drained finances, rattled morale, and forced the group to wrestle with a new kind of pressure from record stores refusing to stock their material.

Then there's the financial side.

Totally.

I came of age in the '90s where there was a big conversation about what sort of art should be shown in museums, and right wing Family values type conservatives were going after artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, and this isn't totally dissimilar in the sense that this exhibition may have been canceled because a group of people have a moral objection for the show, and wanted to bar the public from seeing the show.

Whatever you think of Galliano, I do think the circumstances of how this went down are scary.

Again, this is a clusterfuck.