RE: Elephant Dung and Bodily Fluids

A couple of comments on Serrano's "Piss Christ" and Offili's "The Holy
Virgin Mary:" I first saw both before the uproar and I would have been
totally underwhelmed by the flack IF I HAD NOT READ THE LABELS. Nothing
about the Serrano piece without the labels established that we were seeing
Christ or that the fluid was supposedly a biologic product when it was first
shown in Greenwich Village in the Stux Gallery. While the case of the
Offili piece is not quite the same, my having read of it before I saw it, it
falls into a similar category of being unrecognizable as to its intent
without the text. That art and photography do not exist outside context has
been discussed many times before. Joachim

-----Original Message-----
From: Judy Seigel [mailto:jseigel@panix.com]
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 12:57 AM
To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
Subject: Re: Elephant Dung and Bodily Fluids

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004, Pruitt Igoe wrote:

> To answer a couple of questions that appeared previously under the "Stinky
> Paper" threads, "The Holy Virgin Mary" painting that caused the flap at
the
> Sensation exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum was by Chris Ofili, who is a
he,
> not a she. And the photograph "Piss Christ" was made by Andres Serrano,
not
> Lucas Samaras. Sorry for being such a know-it-all, but thought I'd
provide
> the information, since it was right off the top of my head.

Pruitt,

Don't you read the list ?-- this was posted several days ago... with even
more details by various folks.... Glad about the top of your head,
though.

Judy

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Received on Fri Dec 17 07:27:04 2004