>>> Andres Serrano : shit

Artiste new yorkais, Andres Serrano celui à qui l'on doit la puissante oeuvre photographique "Piss Christ" s'expose à Paris avec une nouvelle collection "Shit".

"Shit" nous oblige à porter un regard sur le plus sale de nous même, ce que l'on rejette, ce que l'on se refuse de faire chez les autres, c'est-à-dire la merde...

Peut-être écoeurés, repoussés, choqués, "shit" nous fait découvrir de merdiques paysages, animaux ou humains laissant apparaître de somptueuses textures.

Ouvrir les portes d'un monde nauséabond sans se salir les mains est le cadeau de Serrano, Merci

"Là où ça sent la merde ça sent l'être" Antonin Artaud

Aurélien

It's that time of year again when the art world picks up speed and a flurry of exciting openings and events are underfoot.  Check out ARTINFO's helpful guide to the best of the new contemporary art shows, including artists Allison Schulnik, Gary Simmons, Phyllis Bramson Josef Koudelka, Andres Serrano, and Su Xinping.  In general, this season's work is shaping up to reflect the currently pessimistic attitude about world events and the economy, such as Allison Schulnik's fascinating yet depressing "Hobo Clowns" series.

Beitragsforum Kunst & Kultur allgemein: Der Würfelwurf ist seine poetische Metamorphose und zugleich Metapher einer Poesie des Zufalls.
In beiden Werken erscheint der Text als graphisches Muster, als geschlossenes System, das dem Zufall zugrunde liegt.

Textportraits - Ralph Ueltzhoeffer.

Textportraits - Ralph Ueltzhoeffer.

my mom with andres serrano

yay...finally the Shit show opened at yvon lambert and my mom surprised me with not just a signed copy of the book for the show, but also of his older book ''America"....It was great meeting with him on the day of the opening, he's one of my top influences (plus a genuinely nice guy), though I have to figure out why since my work doesn't share that many similarities with his. i'm also looking forward to the panel happening at my school on Tuesday discussing his work.

Andres Serrano is one of my top favorite photographers, and I was sooo surprised to see he's having a show at Yvon Lambert this fall, titled "Shit". Most famously known for his piece, Piss Christ, Serrano is coming back to exploring bodily excrements in this new series, merging it together with bright backgrounds, that are similar to his last series, he gives the photos a sense of humour.
Andres Serrano

SHiT

Yvon Lambert New York

September 4th - October 4th 2008

Signing September 5th 2008

3pm to 5pm

Det dreier seg altså om fotografier av skitt og avføring, men som er såvidt close-up at det nærmest blir abstrakte bilder. Og, som tittelen på overnevnte viser, her ser Serrano et ansikt. Lynn Yaeger har en interessant artikkel i the Village Voice, der man også kan finne flere bilder.

"The art you and I now admire in the scrubbed stillness of the museum once dripped with blood, reeked of idolatry, or caused its makers suicidal depression and anguish.”
–Nicolas Wolterstorff

Free E-Course Lesson 8

Chapter 3: Art, Poetry, and Beauty
Part 1: Leftover Pizza Is Not Art

Join now! Find details about this free E-course at Lesson 1.

In philosophy, as in many other disciplines, good definitions are the product of lengthy debate.... Children talk, and know what they are talking about, although they cannot define even one of the terms they use. Using and understanding a language does not involve being able to define its terms.... Definition allows us to improve our use of language....  —Norman Swartz, “Definitions, Dictionaries, and Meaning”  Copyright © Norman Swartz 1997
This revision: September 27, 1997. Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University

Art: A Definite 'Maybe"

Now, let’s define and clarify our terms.

Art, poetry, beauty, and the self are huge ideas, not easily defined. The practice of defining is practically a science in itself, one that is rather neatly described by philosopher Norman Swartz (quoted above) in “Definitions, Dictionaries, and Meaning.” In that article, Swartz describes seven types of definitions. The type we will be using here is called “operational.” Briefly, an operational definition is one that we agree to agree on, whether or not it is strictly accurate.*

I have chosen and adapted the definitions that I believe will be most useful to us. Here are a few to get us started:

In short, art (including poetry) requires creativity, emotional honesty, originality, skill, imagination, and intention. In our current context, beauty and spirituality must also be present.

For there to be art, there must be an artist. Therefore, according to our operational definition...

Leftover pizza is not art

Just as you can call yourself Arnot-Jean-Jacques Feuillette [Seventh Sanctum French Male Name Generator ] or Belching Doom Kangaroo [Seventh Sanctum Humorous Monster Name Generator] if you want to, you can string a bunch of words together and call them a poem:

I.
The magneto lurches into fetid paste
spurning the crispy scythe
on a poaching ä safari in Kenya
shadowing the uncommon solicitor.  **

II.
U Ua-Uo U (uracil) (NLM) UA UAA UAG
UAL Ubidecarenone Ubiquinone
Ubiquitin Ubiquitination Ubiquitous
UBT UDP-glucuronosyltransferase UGA
UL Ulcer Ulcer aphthous Ulcer
Buruli Ulcer duodenal Ulcer esophageal  ***

At a poetry reading, you could breathe raggedly into the microphone for precisely seventeen seconds and then pronounce the word ruction — and call it a poem.

The following “poem” consists of randomly selected html code:

<TD WIDTH="50%">&nbsp;<A HREF="HistoricalDocuments.html"><IMG
SRC="BookFeatherPen.gif" WIDTH="70" HEIGHT="62" ALIGN="BOTTOM"
ATURALSIZEFLAG="3" BORDER="0"><FONT SIZE="-2" FACE="Verdana">Historical
ocuments</FONT></A></TD>
<TD WIDTH="50%">&nbsp;<A HREF="index.html"><FONT FACE="Verdana"><IMG
SRC="caplink.gif" WIDTH="50" ALIGN="BOTTOM" BORDER="0" HEIGHT="65"
ATURALSIZEFLAG="2"></FONT><FONT SIZE="-2" FACE="Verdana">National
enter Home Page</FONT></A></TD>

If art is merely “an expression of human creativity”—a widely held belief—then anyone can be an artist. You don’t have to take classes or anything. There’s no particular discipline involved. You thought of it, you created it; ergo, it’s art.

Let’s say you have created a painting that looks something like this  (the outside border is the frame):

It’s art, all right, no question about it — an “expression of your creativity.” But surely you have applied your creativity at other times in other ways that might not qualify as “art.” Like the time you told your dad you had been detained at a roadblock while law-enforcement officers searched hundreds of vehicles for an escaped homicidal maniac, and that’s why you got home past your curfew. “Creative,” your dad said, and then he grounded you “for your own protection” until the missing maniac had been returned to custody.

Notwithstanding, you take your painting, which you have titled Dash, to an art gallery for validation by a real professional art personage, but Monsieur is unavailable at present. Still, you are encouraged by the inscrutability of the other works of art on display, although, examining them closely, you wish you had thought to vomit on your work of art before framing it.

Depending on the year and the location, you might see the following examples of art in the world’s most respected museums:

• One of 90 copies of Merda d’artista, by Piero Manzoni, consisting of thirty grams of Manzoni’s feces sealed in a tin can. The Tate gallery in London reportedly paid more than $20,000 for one of these copies in 1961.
• Piss Christ, a crucifix immersed in the urine of the artist, Andres Serrano. This is one of Serrano’s more traditional works.
• Tom Friedman’s Untitled, a dead ladybug in a Styrofoam cup, which sold for almost $30,000.

Other works given the stamp of approval by critics and patrons of the arts include

• This poem (reproduced here in its entirety):

LIGHGHT

The poet, Aram Saroyan, explains that his intent was to change the word light “from a verb (the agency of illumination) to a noun that yet radiates as light does. The double ghgh seems to work in that way.” The poem was published in the 1969 American Literary Anthology [Source: Rapportage, the literary journal of the Lancaster Literary Guild, Fall 2005].

• A novel consisting of blank pages.
• A musical work by composer John Cage titled 4’33” (Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds), in which a pianist sits at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds without playing a single note.

My opinion on the more mystifying or malodorous forms of art mentioned above is that they represent a variety of artists and motives:

• The genuine artist who has been formally trained, has exhibited talent, and has grown bored with pretty pictures and conventional media (water colors, for example, as opposed to the more exotic elephant dung à la The Holy Virgin by Chris Ofili).
• The person who may or may not have talent but whose principal motive is to shock.
• The artist who wants to make a social or political statement, illustrating the ugliness and depravity that surrounds us, as if we didn’t know.
• The con artist who has seen an easy way to make $20,000 and get invited to lecture at prestigious universities by creatively assembling the contents of a wastebasket using duct tape, which can be analyzed for its likeness to the ephemeral quality of substantial yet emergent flora that have been dispossessed of their progression toward ultimate decay and regeneration... which everybody swallows (figuratively) because they don’t want to admit that they think it’s stupid.
• The true artistic genius who is totally out of my league.

I repeat, art is not merely “an expression of human creativity.” If it were, then Auschwitz was art.

Art is disciplined

Few would argue that art is an external expression (a dance, a sculpture) of a spiritual or at least an intangible quality (such as love, beauty, anger, or despair). I believe, with Keats, that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” I am unable to separate spirit from beauty, or to believe that whatever emanates from the life-force common to us all can lack either truth or beauty.

Again, beauty is essential in our operational definitions of art and poetry. In theory, however, I am willing to entertain other viewpoints.

Is found or readymade art — noted examples are Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel and Tracey Emin’s My Bed — intentional? Does it require skill? Can you just pick up any old thing and call it art?

Possibly, if the picker-upper is legitimately an artist. As my poetry professor at Stanford University explained when we wanted to let our free spirits loose on paper and he made us write sonnets instead: You must work from the inside out; examine the interior of your territory before you explore the nether reaches; know what the boundaries are before you stretch them; internalize the discipline until it is part of you; master the discipline in order to not be mastered by it.

I know a few people who have arranged every aspect of their lives so as to spend as much time as possible hang-gliding or soaring. “It is the ultimate experience in freedom,” they say. “It sounds wonderful,” I say. “I’d like to try it.”

Do they hand me their gear and say, “Great idea. Go for it”? No. They warn me about the expense and the hours of training and practice and the necessary physical conditioning and the skills, specific to the sport, they had to acquire. The cost of freedom was servitude to the goal. 

In these pages we are concerned with the discipline of poetry as a tool to realize your potential for joy.***** We are not “searching for joy” or “journeying toward joy.” The joy is right here, right now. It might be guilt-bound, fear-encrusted, or anger-suffused. It might be hiding in your gut, having run for cover from an abusive parent or an oppressive spouse. (Many people, not all of whom are modern-day snake-oil salesmen or delusional, believe that the site of a physical illness is related to the way in which you have tried to shield your core being from harm.)

NEXT: What is beauty, and is it optional?

____________________________

* “Many philosophers have chosen... to leave some terms undefined... [claiming that we] cannot define being, unity and similar concepts.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition, accessed January 12, 2008

** Assembled from numerous Random Sentence Generators on the Internet

*** MedicineNet.com medical dictionary

****  Duchamp’s urinal, which he exhibited as My Fountain (1917) created quite a fuss in the art world, as did Emin’s My Bed. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Bed), “the artwork generated considerable media furor, particularly over the fact that the bedsheets were stained with body secretions and the floor had items from the artist's room (such as condoms [and] a pair of panties with menstrual period stains…. The bed was presented as it had been when Emin had not got up from it for several days due to suicidal depression…. [During the Tate exhibition] two performance artists, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, jumped on the bed with bare torsos in order to ‘improve’ the work, …[calling] their performance Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey's Bed. The men also had a pillow fight on the bed for around fifteen minutes, to applause from the crowd, before being removed by security guards.”

***** We will explore the discipline of poetry in “The Therapeutic Value of Strict Poetic Forms” in a later chapter. Gosh, that sounds so pompous. A better title might be, "When You Focus on Form, Feeling Flows." It's alliterative, too.

Serrano has always been seen as a controversial artist in the media, which I think has both positive and negative connotations towards his work. Obviously he gets a lot of publicity and notoriety from the media buzz, but I it can also take his work out of context. I don't think Serrano is purely trying to shock people and his work has always been made for consumption in a gallery in an artistic context. Anyway I was lucky enough to see Serrano's most famous photograph 'Piss Christ' (shown above) at the Pompadeu centre on my recent Paris trip so he is the first of my featured artists from the trip.

Piss Christ shows a model crucifix suspended in a pool of Serrano's own urine. Unsurprisingly when it was first exhibited many religious figures deemed it blasphemous but I think the piece has more to do with artistic expression and freedom of speech than deliberately trying to offend people. Serrano himself is a devout christian and has described the piece as an expression of his own beliefs. If you can track it down (I couldn't) there is a really good BBC documentary we watched at college called Damned in the USA which covers the controversy around Piss Christ and other artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe.

Serrano's other works follow a similar religious theme, with portraits of members of extreme religious groups (such as 'The Clansman' shown below) and staged portraits of bishops attacking naked and bound women. In conclusion if your after a bit of controversy, check out the rest of Serrano's work.

And you know what? They're absolutely right.

Example: Chop Suey by System of a Down:

"Father into your hands, I commend my spirit
Father into your hands
Why have you forsaken me
In your eyes forsaken me
In your thoughts forsaken me
In your heart forsaken, me oh
Trust in my self righteous suicide
I, cry, when angels deserve to die."

This is a very obvious and open attempt to make light of Christ's choice to surrender his life. But that's just rock and roll. How about television?

I am, I confess, a fan of the animated series Family Guy, which fails to show any reverence for anything, but in particular seems to single out Christ as a focal point of ridicule. Here's a clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkvI4jdciho

If you don't feel like linking or would be too offended to watch, the clip shows Stewie traveling through time to watch Christ perform in front of a crowd. He sings and dances and makes hand puppets while a stunned audience looks on.

This is one of the less extreme examples of Family Guy's potshots at Jesus. You might also remember the clip of his return when people snicker at his height "people were shorter back then..." or the Chris Tucker/Christ movie trailer when the show returned to the air.

But television and mainstream music are notorious for their irreverence for religious figures of any kind. What about the fine arts?

Photographer Andres Serrano caused quite a stir when he created a piece entitled "Piss Christ," that shows a crucifix submerged in urine.

I could keep giving examples, but that would make this a very long, very discouraging post. Take a look for yourselves. If you pay close attention, you will find that Christianity is dragged through the mud in pop culture on almost a daily basis. You will probably find a few angry people denouncing Islam as a violent and perverted religion, but you probably won't see any Saturday Night Live sketches about it.

At some point in our recent history mocking Christ became no longer politically incorrect. I can imagine that some of this has been caused by an image of bigoted Christianity that is perpetuated by hateful televangelist ministers and people who grossly misinterpret the message of the Bible. (Like the people who picketed Heath Ledger's funeral with God Hates Fags signs.) But the level at which Jesus is openly mocked in our media has become, in my opinion, unacceptable, and I think I would feel that way even if I was not a believer.

There is a great deal of animosity between parts of the secular community and Christians. But if any progress is going to be made on this front, then we have to remember that tolerance is not a one-way street.

I'm not asking for anyone to get on their knees and convert, I'm just saying that there needs to be more respect shown for Christians in our popular culture.

Vier nationaal-socialisten uit Zweden kwamen in aktie tegen vunzige en typisch-westerse post-oorlogse kunst. De kunstenaar Andres Serrano had deze 'kunst' trots tentoongestelt voor het publiek vanaf 6 jaar. De tentoonstelling ging over sexuele onderwerpen die te goor en te vunzig zijn om op te noemen, totaal ongeschikt voor kinderen maar ook voor het oudere publiek. Toch werden ouders met hun kinderen aangemoedigt in de staatsmedia om naar deze  voorstelling toe te gaan, een tentoonstelling met 'alternatieve' vormen van liefde. Zeg maar gerust, dierensex en andere smerigheden.

De aktie van deze dappere nationaal-socialisten kreeg veel media aandacht in Zweden. Door de staatsmedia werd gebruikt gemaakt van deze aktie om te laten zien dat deze jongeren tegen vrijheid van meningsuiting waren en tegen de democratie. Door dit bericht onder andere te verspreiden in ons blog willen wij ervoor zorgen dat zoveel mogelijk mensen de ware achtergrond te weten komen van deze aktie en deze smerige en onmenselijke tentoonstelling. Uiteindelijk hebben de Zweedse mannen veel steun en ook een oneindige stroom aan positieve reacties gekregen.

Hieronder de amateur-opname van de aktie;

[livevideo id=5EE428F2D2FD4E969990468D369C3480]

Bron: http://www.den-svenske.com/nationalists_act_out_against_degenerate_art_in_sweden.html

There’s a freedom of speech where you’re allowed to speak up. Where you spill your heart and put yourself in an awkward position, namely crouched.

If Phara can remember what happened last Saturday night, you’ll get a overview of the night at Petrol Club. She’ll give you a neat account of the bands and the Brodinski’s DJ-set. I’d like to take you to the moment when the Black Box Revelation singer’s body was the target of Phara’s little grabby hands. The first sign we were unto a night of freedom of intoxication . It’s an unwritten rule that you can’t let a friend dance drunk by herself, so grateful for the opportunity I dived into the liquid sea. Quite obvious what happens next: some wine and Corona flowing down the pharynx (and on to the floor) and before you know it, it’s inevitably high tide. It doesn’t take a sober mind to figure out that 5 trips to the ladies room equals another glass of wine, so muttering you hand over €0,50 and there it is: the First Fatal Pee. The first of many more to come. By the time you leave the club your body doesn’t want to stop the flow and decides it’s time for yet another sequel. You’re lucky, this time containers protect you from keen eyes. But there were days when you walked around at 4AM in some city centre and there wasn’t a single toilet around. Days when you crouched next to a van. Days when you pulled your trousers up and you suddenly saw that there were men sitting in that van. Days when you wished you were a bloke and you could write your name in the snow.

I would write poems about lost love in the snow.

As long as I can’t write my poems, I assign myself the privilege to pee behind corners, underneath the streetlightning and next to a van. And in the meantime I’ll admire artists who assign themselves the privilege to exploit the freedom of speech.

Andres Serrano, an American photographer, is known for his controversial works. His pictures often involve bodily fluids: (menstrual) blood, semen or mother's milk. His most famous (and controversial) work is "Piss Christ" (1987), a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a glass of the artist's own, indeed, piss.

...Christ gets the juices flowing...

A famous example of such faux-art is "Piss Christ" by Catholic and photographer Andres Serrano. Serrano, who was the recipient of a grant by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (also known as "the American taxpayer"), depicted a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of his urine. As planned, the "Piss Christ" image stirred much controversy.

Piss Christ

Serrano's work confirmed one of the most reliable rules in the art world: if you lack talent and are desperate for immediate publicity, insult Catholicism.

Another artist utilizing shock sans substance is Karen Finley. The "performance artist" has "smeared herself with chocolate, painted with her own breast milk, [and] put Winnie the Pooh in S&M gear..."

(Which must have thrilled the suits at Disney.)

Karen Finley

In contrast to Serrano's success at the public trough, Finley's application for the National Endowment for the Arts was rejected. As is common among liberals who feel entitled to government funds, Finley threw a hissy fit and sued the government. Due to the free speech/1st Amendment ramifications involved, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, in 1998. By a razor-thin margin, Finley lost 8-1. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, in a concurring opinion, interpreted the relevant law plainly by declaring that "decency and respect are to be taken into account in evaluating applications."

Little surprise that Finley sued considering that liberals accept no objective standard for decency (except that there is no objective standard).

Which brings us to the latest court jester in the art world: Aliza Shvarts. A Yale art student, Ms. Shvarts, whose last name could only have led to years of therapy, has stirred controversy with her most recent work.

A Yale University student's senior art project, which she said documented her bleeding during repeated self-induced abortions, sparked a protest on campus, an outcry on the Internet and debates over morality, medicine, art and academia.

And — it was all faked. Senior Aliza Shvarts told Yale officials Thursday that she didn't get pregnant and didn't have abortions. [...]

Shvarts told classmates that she had herself artificially inseminated as often as possible for much of this past year, then took legal, herbal abortifacient drugs and filmed herself in her bathtub cramping and bleeding from the miscarriages. She said her work will include video, a sculpture incorporating her blood mixed with Vaseline wrapped in plastic, and a spoken piece describing what she had done.

[She] told the Yale Daily News that she wanted to provoke debate about the relationship between art and the human body but that the intention of the piece was not to scandalize anyone.

Indeed, who could possibly be scandalized by filming do-it-yourself abortions?

Aliza Shvarts

"Provoking debate" is the convenient shibboleth of those who are caught committing acts of gross idiocy. Apparently as long as society is forced to jabber about something, the underlying controversy, filming your faked abortions and expecting people to believe that it's art, is somehow justified.

Shvarts's art ("Shv_art"?) has created an outcry (and rightly so), but the project shouldn't surprise anyone. Faked or not, Shvarts's hideous brain child is the logical and natural result of decades of policies and laws which debase abortion to a common surgery with little or no moral ramification. In such an environment, a faked abortion is a mundane enough act to be worthy of filming and exposition. If you are offended, well, Shvarts merely intended to provoke debate.

As one of the premier and selective universities on the planet (charging around $45,000 a year), it would be reasonable to expect the art from any Yale student should reflect some maturity and talent. Apart from the her shameless dishonesty, Shvarts lacked taste, talent and judgment.

So she'd certainly fit in the art world.

Det mest spännande i denna trista historia är hur alla snubblar över varandra för att få visa hur otroligt fria de är i dessa frågor, till skillnad från puritaner i kyrkor och i KD. Nu kan till exempel en ambitiös ungdomsförbundsordförande få visa hur fri och härlig han är, minsann. "Moralpanik" säger de med ett snett leende, men missar att deras "tolerans" endast ser ut som feg medgörlighet från min horisont.

En stilla tanke som infinner sig när det gäller denna typ av utställningar och de förväntade reaktioner de ger upphov till är vad alla dessa ack så fria människor som talar sig varma för dessa utställningar skulle göra utan oss troende. Vilka skulle de då peka på för att få chansen att berätta hur fria och härliga de är?

Och Andres Serrano är ju en så angelägen och sympatisk ”konstnär”, i samma anda som vår egen lilla folkhemsprovokatör Elisabeth Ohlson-Wallin kan man kanske säga. Andres Serrano slog sig in i den moderna konstens finrum med konstverket Piss Christ, ett fotografi av ett krucifix nersänkt i konstnärens eget urin. Generellt är det så att olika kroppsvätskor, som urin, blod och sperma, är återkommande motiv i Serranos fotografier. Låter kul, inte sant? En härlig  provokatör!

Och jag är ju en sådan där puritan, och dessutom så inskränkt så jag inte vill se Serranos smörja någonstans i hela vår vida värld. Men jag påstår ju andra sidan inte att jag är fri och härlig – om något tvärtom.

Men en sak är väl klar – det är väl spenderade skattekronor, eller?

Däremot är sexuella handlingar som utförts inomhus privata och ska inte förevigas med kamera för senare bruk i publika sammanhang - då är det pornografi - enligt Gomér.

Kd som parti i Alingsås är emot hela Serranoutställningen - medan folkpartisten Lars Lundgren säger till Aftonbladet:

- Det är olyckligt att politiska partier går in och tycker vad andra ska göra och olyckligt om politiska partier vill censurerar i det offentliga rummet.

Aftonbladet skriver vidare:

"Att det är våra kommunala skattemedel som används gör givetvis inte saken bättre", skriver kd i Alingsås. Liknande argument använder nynazisterna - skriver Aftonbladets reporter.

Ja, vi kanske ska ta upp den gamla hederliga benämningen Entartete Kunst - det var i alla fall en utställning som drog en rekordstor publik. Synd bara att så många av verken brändes efteråt - och att konstnärerna tvingades till yrkesförbud, landsflykt eller i värsta fall - koncentrationslägervistelse...

Kd:s Stefan Svensson verkar dock inte vara överens med sin partikollega Gunilla Gomér han säger till SvD.se att:

- Tidelag hör inte hemma i en kommunal verksamhet.

Kanske kunde ett samarbete över blockgränserna leda till ett konsensus angående sex med häst. Socialdemokraternas Jens Orback har i ett tidigare uttalande sagt sig vara positiv till relation människa-häst.

Han nämnde för några år sedan att han inte alls tyckte det var konstigt med samkönade relationer - eftersom hans mormors syster levde med en häst.

SvD om Jens Orbacks hästuttalande.

Uppdatering:

Fick tips om vad som egentligen låg bakom Gunilla Gomérs val av bild.

Tack för tipset. Storleken har betydelse för en kristdemokrat.

Och vad gäller Kd:s moraliska dilemma så håller jag fast vid att den som gapar högst av indignation är den som är mest fascinerad egentligen.Jag tror Kd:politikerna skulle vilja gå in och se själva!

Fast om Alingsås ligger så särskilt i farozonen som "litet samhälle" med farliga kvardröjande konservativa åsikter vet jag inte.Det flyttar in mängder med utsocknes(som vi)så gubbsen har nog redan börjat vänja sig vid att få sin konservativism utmanad.Tur är väl det.
Men ja,det finns en del religiös konservatism kvar,många frikyrkor och social kontroll.Men vi bor inte direkt i Twin Peaks heller.

(pysselverkstad på konsthallen som nu solar sig i sina fifteen minutes of fame,i november förra året)

On Monday I give my paper on Bataille and Catholicity at Oxford. Today I found this interview with Andres Serrano regarding his work "Piss Christ", his views on religion and other work.

Coco Fusco: Your use of Catholic symbolism stands out in part because you are operating in a predominantly Protestant context. An attraction to the sensuality and the carnality that you bring out in your Catholic iconography can develop, since Protestant symbolism looks rather pale by comparison. How would it affect your work to be exhibited in a Catholic context?

Andres Serrano: I have always felt that my work is religious, not sacrilegious. I would say that there are many individuals in the Church who appreciate it and who do not have a problem with it. The best place for Piss Christ is in a church. In fact, I recently had a show in Marseilles in an actual church that also functions as an exhibition space, and the work looked great there. I think if the Vatican is smart, someday they'll collect my work.

CF: Does your interest in Catholicism have to do more with an attraction to the iconography or is it about wanting to make a social or political comment about what the Church represents?

AS: Look at my apartment. I am drawn to the symbols of the Church. I like the aesthetics of the Church. I like Church furniture. I like going to Church for aesthetic reasons, rather than spiritual ones. In my work, I explore my own Catholic obsessions. An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine. One of the things that always bothered me was the fundamentalist labeling of my work as "anti-Christian bigotry." As a former Catholic, and as someone who even today is not opposed to being called a Christian, I felt I had every right to use the symbols of the Church and resented being told not to.

[...]

CF: So you do see yourself carrying on a tradition of religious art?

AS: Absolutely. I am not a heretic. I like to believe that rather than destroy icons, I make new ones.