Speaker 1: School of Humans. Today, we're starting the show with a
Speaker 1: churning vat of pists. That's right, philth Head's piss. It's
Speaker 1: foemen at the top, swirling and swishing. The color of
Speaker 1: a crisp pale ale just poured from the tap, which
Speaker 1: is not a healthy color for your piss to be.
Speaker 1: Whoever pissed this piss was extremely dehydrated. Was it me?
Speaker 1: Could have been? I only drink a spoonful of water
Speaker 1: every day. I am perpetually dehydrated to prepare myself for
Speaker 1: the water wars to come. I don't even need water.
Speaker 1: But actually, no, it's not my piss. This piss belongs
Speaker 1: to Andres Serrano. He's a photographer and heat into this
Speaker 1: vat of piss to make what some people would call art.
Speaker 1: But don't worry, it's not just a vat of piss. No. Indeed,
Speaker 1: submerged inside of it, floating amid the bubbles, bobbing in
Speaker 1: the brine is a small white, plastic and wood figurine
Speaker 1: of Jesus on the crucifix. Serrano set this scene up
Speaker 1: and sometime in the nineteen eighties snapped a photograph of
Speaker 1: this crucifix suspended in his urine. And now, if you
Speaker 1: saw this photograph in the gallery just willy nilly, you
Speaker 1: might not even know that it was necessarily in piss.
Speaker 1: But don't worry. Serrano titles the piece very explicitly. It's
Speaker 1: called immersion parentheses piss Christ for yes, indeed, the Christ
Speaker 1: is immersed in piss. And while this image, if you
Speaker 1: can imagine, really piss some people off, but I'm kissed.
Speaker 1: That's right. Today we're talking about the arts, and specifically
Speaker 1: artists who use bodily fluids in other matter aka feces
Speaker 1: and their work and how people really hated that shit.
Speaker 1: But don't kiss sorry. Cue the beautiful theme song. This
Speaker 1: is American Filth. I'm your host, Gabby Watts. Each week
Speaker 1: I tell you a filthy story from American history. This
Speaker 1: week's episode Jesus p Christ. The pea stands for piss.
Speaker 1: I will say as a precursor to this episode, I
Speaker 1: am very skeptical of all fine arts because my sister
Speaker 1: is a fine arts photographer and also performance art, and
Speaker 1: I've seen too many performance art pieces to really take
Speaker 1: it seriously. Okay, if you guys an't know what performance
Speaker 1: art is, it's very similar to the experience of when
Speaker 1: a child is like, oh I made a play, come
Speaker 1: watch it, and you watch it and there's no story,
Speaker 1: and really, wear's the razzle dazzle. Oh that's it. Okay, anyway,
Speaker 1: that's what it's like. But I'm going to try to
Speaker 1: be really intellectual about this and really take it all
Speaker 1: very seriously. So let me try to get into my
Speaker 1: intellectual artist's voice. M Andres Serrano, what's coming up in
Speaker 1: the art world in New York City in the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty I'm just kidding. I'm not going to do that.
Speaker 1: So Andre Serrano, he was coming up in the art
Speaker 1: world in New York City. He was finally getting some
Speaker 1: notoriety in the nineteen eighties. At the time, New York
Speaker 1: City was racous and dirty, some might even say filthy,
Speaker 1: and filled to the rim with artists questioning the status quo.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of cool things going on. Andy Warhol's
Speaker 1: studio aka the Factory was where all the cool kids
Speaker 1: would hang out. Lou Reid and the Vellet Underground, Debbie
Speaker 1: Harry of Blondie, everyone who was Nito Burrito, and Andre Serrano.
Speaker 1: He wasn't the only one who was using piss and
Speaker 1: other bodily fluids in his art. Andy Warhol himself in
Speaker 1: the late seventies released a series of images called Oxidation,
Speaker 1: Piss and Come, where he basically spread copper on canvas
Speaker 1: and then had his assistance piss and or come on
Speaker 1: said canvas. Sometimes they were just pissing and coming right
Speaker 1: on the canvas. Other times Warhol would dribble the substance
Speaker 1: where he wanted it to be on the canvas. And
Speaker 1: also these assistants, all of them were people who he
Speaker 1: hired from the local gay bathhouses. One of Warhol's favorites
Speaker 1: was his friend Ronnie Catrone because, quote, he takes a
Speaker 1: lot of Vitamin B, so the canvas turns a really
Speaker 1: pretty color when it's his piss end quote. Art is profound.
Speaker 1: Now let's cue some music where I can do a
Speaker 1: little art critique. Okay, let's take a moment to reflect
Speaker 1: on the meaning of Andy Warhol's Piss and Come work.
Speaker 1: I think the meaning is that sometimes you be pissing
Speaker 1: and sometimes you be common. I'm a philosopher. Another artist
Speaker 1: using bodily fluids was the great Cuban artist Anna Mendieta.
Speaker 1: She made art with blood and yes, of course sometimes
Speaker 1: she used period blood. That's the whole point of having
Speaker 1: a period, though less exciting like sometimes she would just
Speaker 1: use blood from her veins and other times just corn
Speaker 1: syrups staged in a public place to look like blood.
Speaker 1: Like in one of her works from the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: she created an enormous puddle of blood just soaking the sidewalk.
Speaker 1: It looks like it's floating out of a white door,
Speaker 1: pulling on the concrete before running down into the gutter.
Speaker 1: And the whole point of it was to be like,
Speaker 1: how are people going to respond to this blood on
Speaker 1: the sidewalk? Many people just walked right past it, distracted
Speaker 1: or simply unfazed. Some got curious about it and poked
Speaker 1: the blood before moving on. Anna and her sister sat
Speaker 1: in a car across the street, watching until finally a
Speaker 1: shop owner emerges from the next door and sprays down
Speaker 1: the sidewalk with a hose, mopping the blood into the gutter,
Speaker 1: destroying all evidence of what might have happened there. But
Speaker 1: isn't that the h rustle and grind. It's just another
Speaker 1: day on the job mopping away all this blood on
Speaker 1: the sidewalk. And now back to Serrano, who made piss Christ.
Speaker 1: Piss Christ wasn't his first piece at the intersection of
Speaker 1: Christianity and bodily fluids. In nineteen eighty five, two years
Speaker 1: before piss Christ was exhibited, he made a piece called
Speaker 1: Blood Cross. It's a photograph of a cross made out
Speaker 1: of plexiglass and it's filled to the brim with cow's blood. Wow.
Speaker 1: He's so good at giving precise titles to his work.
Speaker 1: Because it was blood in a cross. Crazy. Also, there
Speaker 1: was so much blood inside of it. It looked like
Speaker 1: it was like leaking blood. And it appeared in a
Speaker 1: series he made called Fluids. Because that's not all. He
Speaker 1: also exhibited an aptly named print called Milk and Blood
Speaker 1: because it is in fact made of milk and blood
Speaker 1: in piss Christ. It was also part of a larger
Speaker 1: series exhibited in nineteen eighty seven. Not only was Christ
Speaker 1: submerged in urine, he also had some photographs of other
Speaker 1: religious figurines submerged in his other favorite fluids like blood, seamen,
Speaker 1: and milk. Honestly, flem, sweat, and bile probably felt pretty
Speaker 1: left out. But despite this vast collection of fluid works,
Speaker 1: it's piss Christ that set off behaters. What happened was
Speaker 1: that Piss Christ was exhibited at the Southern Center for
Speaker 1: Contemporary Art in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and there it
Speaker 1: won the Visual Arts Competition, which meant that he won
Speaker 1: a fifteen thousand dollars cash prize from the National Endowment
Speaker 1: for the Arts the NAA, and the NEA is a
Speaker 1: government agency, so the grant tech was funded by American
Speaker 1: tax dollars. The American Family Association, originally called the National
Speaker 1: Federation for Decency, formed in nineteen seventy seven, was an
Speaker 1: organization that was still getting its sea legs and latched
Speaker 1: onto these artists like Serrano who were making seemingly blasphemous arts.
Speaker 1: They're like, we don't want our tax dollars going to
Speaker 1: piss art. That is so anti Christian. Reverend Donald Wildman,
Speaker 1: founder of the Mississippi Chapter, complained he held a goddang
Speaker 1: press conference to yell about works like Piss Christ. He said, quote,
Speaker 1: this is anti Christian bigotry. And this is kind of
Speaker 1: interesting because Serrano actually identifies as a Christian and said
Speaker 1: this about his work in a Vice article, quote I
Speaker 1: had no idea Pis Christ would get the attention it did,
Speaker 1: since I meant either blasphemy nor offense by it. I've
Speaker 1: been a Catholic all my life, so I am a
Speaker 1: follower of Christ. But I'm an artist, and the role
Speaker 1: of the artist is to break new ground for himself
Speaker 1: and for his audience. End quote right right, right, right,
Speaker 1: right right. I'm sure he had no idea that submerging
Speaker 1: a crucifix in urine would make anyone mad? How could it? Anyway,
Speaker 1: back to Reverend Donald Wildman. His complaints ended up making
Speaker 1: it to the Senate floor, and six senators publicly denounced
Speaker 1: Serrano's work. Al Demato, a Republican senator from New York,
Speaker 1: was one of the people who hopped on the bandwagon
Speaker 1: against Serrano's work. He made a little speech about it
Speaker 1: on the Senate floor, and he said, what a disgrace
Speaker 1: multiple times. Here's some of the stuff he was saying
Speaker 1: about the complaints he's been getting about Pissed Christ and
Speaker 1: other pieces of art. Quote. They said, how dare you
Speaker 1: spend our taxpayer's money on this trash? They all objected
Speaker 1: to taxpayers money being used for a piece of so
Speaker 1: called artwork, which, to be quite candid, I am somewhat
Speaker 1: reluctant to utter its title. This so called piece of
Speaker 1: art is a deplorable, despicable display vulgarity. If this is
Speaker 1: what contemporary art has sunk to this level, this outrage,
Speaker 1: this indignity. Some may want to sanction that, and that
Speaker 1: is fine, but not with the use of taxpayers money.
Speaker 1: This is not a question of free speech. This is
Speaker 1: a question of abuse of taxpayers money. Taxpayer's money. Another
Speaker 1: senator objecting to the art was Jesse Helms of North Carolina.
Speaker 1: He notably opposed civil rights, disability rights, environmentalism, feminism, gate rights,
Speaker 1: affirmative action, access to abortion, and he saw the NEA
Speaker 1: as a proponent of all those things. He said about Serrano, quote,
Speaker 1: I do not know miss s Andres Serrano, and I
Speaker 1: hope I never meet him, because he is not an artist.
Speaker 1: He is a jerk. Let us examine exactly what this
Speaker 1: bird did to get fifteen thousand dollars of the taxpayer's
Speaker 1: money through the so called National Endowment for the Arts.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's literally what's called so I don't know
Speaker 1: why I said so called. If they have no more
Speaker 1: judgment than that, it ought to be abolished and all
Speaker 1: funds returned to the taxpayer. What this Serrano fellow did.
Speaker 1: He filled a bottle with his own urine and then
Speaker 1: stuck a crucifix down there, Jesus Christ on a cross.
Speaker 1: He set it up on a table and took a
Speaker 1: picture of it. For that, the National Endowment for the
Speaker 1: Arts gave him fifteen thousand dollars to honor him as
Speaker 1: an artist. I say again, he is not an artist.
Speaker 1: He is a jerk, and he is taunting the American
Speaker 1: people just as others are in terms of Christianity. And
Speaker 1: I resent that. And I do not hesitate test A,
Speaker 1: soh yuall, don't hesitate, Senator Helms go on. By the
Speaker 1: end of the eighties, piss Christ wasn't the only piece
Speaker 1: of art rufflin' some big conservative feathers. It was just
Speaker 1: one part of a larger culture war, because there were
Speaker 1: plenty of other artists not only using pists in Christ
Speaker 1: in their works, but also gays and sex. Oh God,
Speaker 1: more on that after the break. Now, I understand that
Speaker 1: doing a history podcast that is set in the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties might be an insult to some of you people
Speaker 1: who were like born in the eighties. I mean, I
Speaker 1: was born in like ninety one. Don't tell Hollywood that
Speaker 1: I'm only eighteen. But it's still history. Your life is history.
Speaker 1: I know that's sad, that's depressing, but you're all as fuck.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry about that. So yeah, back to the eighties.
Speaker 1: One of the most important artists of the nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: in New York was photographer Robert Maplethorpe. Maplethorpe attended the
Speaker 1: Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he met and dated the
Speaker 1: great Patty Smith. Eventually they moved into a room at
Speaker 1: the Chelsea Hotel, where a staggering amount of artists resided
Speaker 1: like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Milos Foreman, Stanley Kubrig, Jim Morrison,
Speaker 1: Iggy Pop, Leonard Cohen. Robert began photographing his large network
Speaker 1: of artists friends and eventually started dating only men. He
Speaker 1: and Patty remained great friends, though, and he also happened
Speaker 1: to be into some very kinky shit and often found
Speaker 1: himself at the Mine Shaft club in the Meatpacking District.
Speaker 1: And oh boy, were they back in some meat. Mine
Speaker 1: Shaft was an underground gay BDSM club that opened in
Speaker 1: late seventies and would only operate for eight years or so.
Speaker 1: The building was unmarked. The entrance of the club lay
Speaker 1: behind a grimy, industrial metal door that could only be
Speaker 1: opened from the inside. Patrons had to climb a flight
Speaker 1: of stairs and pass a bouncer who would turn away
Speaker 1: anyone who wore cologne or looked too preppy. The place
Speaker 1: was initially one story, complete with a scat room. Yep,
Speaker 1: that's a room where you could indulge and arousal from
Speaker 1: feces if that was your thing. This particular room, though,
Speaker 1: was short lived because it got pretty unsanitary. I wonder why.
Speaker 1: Eventually the club expanded and they had all sorts of
Speaker 1: activities you could do there. They had different sort of
Speaker 1: sets in stages, you know, things that like jail cells,
Speaker 1: the back of a truck, dungeons, and then there was
Speaker 1: a room that was completely dark save for some bathtubs
Speaker 1: that were just flooded in spotlights. Well what happened there
Speaker 1: is men would sit in them and then the other
Speaker 1: dudes around them would just piss on them. So yeah,
Speaker 1: they had everything, slings and swings, glory holes, tubs of
Speaker 1: crisco all around. Chrisco was a popular choice before the
Speaker 1: advent of personal lubricants. Basically, it was a frickin' good
Speaker 1: time and Robert Maplethorp was inspired. He would bring men
Speaker 1: home from his nightly sex capades and photograph them, sometimes
Speaker 1: just simple nudes, and other times in various sexual scenes.
Speaker 1: In one of Robert Mablethorpe's self portraits, he stands with
Speaker 1: his back to the camera in a leather vest and
Speaker 1: assless leather chaps and boots. His left foot is up
Speaker 1: on a pedestal and he's hunched over as his right
Speaker 1: hand reaches around grabbing a handle of a bull whip
Speaker 1: that is being pulled out of his asshole. Ow wow
Speaker 1: wow wow wow wow. Of course, lays through this era
Speaker 1: of sexual liberation was the dark shadow of an epidemic.
Speaker 1: The outbreak of AIDS in nineteen eighty one would wreak
Speaker 1: havoc on the United States. While so many people were
Speaker 1: dying across the country, the Reagan administration was doing nothing,
Speaker 1: in fact, just making it worse. In the eighties, Reagan
Speaker 1: made major budget cuts to national health organizations, including the CDC.
Speaker 1: Reagan didn't even utter the word AIDS until nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: and didn't acknowledge its severity until nineteen eighty seven, when
Speaker 1: the death toll had already surpassed twenty thousand people. Robert
Speaker 1: Maplethorpe was diagnosed with HIV in nineteen eighty six, and
Speaker 1: the more intimate he became with his mortality, the more
Speaker 1: ambitious he became to leave a legacy, and in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight, the Wedding Museum hosted a retrospective, a very
Speaker 1: rare honor for a photographer at the time. He also
Speaker 1: put together a show called The Perfect Moment, a collection
Speaker 1: of one hundred and fifty photographs that was going to
Speaker 1: tour around the country. The exhibit was extremely popular wherever
Speaker 1: it went, long lines formed outside the premieres. This amount
Speaker 1: of notoriety for photographs of gay sex. Whow. This also
Speaker 1: made all those conservative senators really pissed off. They're like, dang,
Speaker 1: our tax dollars are funding museums and grants and all
Speaker 1: this other stuff, and then they're just making pictures of
Speaker 1: anal sex. I don't like that at all. Another big
Speaker 1: anti National Endowment for the Arts proponent was Congressman Dick Army.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's kind of funny because his name's like
Speaker 1: Dick arm He sent a letter signed by one hundred
Speaker 1: and seven other representatives calling to cancel the Maplethorpe show.
Speaker 1: In DC. He called his work quote morally reprehensible, trash.
Speaker 1: I mean, I honestly feel like gay sex photos totally chill.
Speaker 1: But he did, you know, he did have a few
Speaker 1: pieces where you could say they were child pornography, which
Speaker 1: that's this a little sus not really good. But there's
Speaker 1: a whole other, like art critique that there's a whole thing,
Speaker 1: there's a whole debate about that anyway. So maple Thorpe's
Speaker 1: on the shit list, Serrano's on the shit list. But
Speaker 1: then they all started going after other art pieces, even
Speaker 1: art pieces that didn't even feature piss or com or pornography.
Speaker 1: Dred Scott Tyler, a student in Chicago, put up an
Speaker 1: installation piece at the Art Institute. It's called What's the
Speaker 1: right Way to Display an American Flag? And in it,
Speaker 1: an actual American flag lays on the ground. It's an
Speaker 1: interactive piece. There's a little book where you're supposed to
Speaker 1: write the answer to that question. But in order to
Speaker 1: get to the book, you have to actually step on
Speaker 1: the flag. That's right. You got to put your little
Speaker 1: foot seas on the flag. And that's what made some
Speaker 1: people real mad, especially Senator Jesse Helms. The one who
Speaker 1: hates all the stuff. The Senate unanimously voted that Tyler
Speaker 1: committed a federal crime with his American flag installation. The
Speaker 1: institute was marched on by veterans, and the museum received
Speaker 1: a bomb threat. The Governor of Illinois reluctantly signed a
Speaker 1: bill cutting off grants to both the school and the
Speaker 1: Illinois Arts Alliance, an arts advocacy group that defended the exhibit.
Speaker 1: The Cochran Museum in DC wanted to stay out of
Speaker 1: the fight and potentially diffuse the whole NEA situation, so
Speaker 1: they canceled the Maplethorpe show, and this was the last
Speaker 1: straw for the other side. Artists and LGBT activists marched
Speaker 1: outside the museum and even projected images of Maplethorpe's self
Speaker 1: portraits and even some of his censored works on the
Speaker 1: facade of the building. After that happened, the museum's director
Speaker 1: issued a formal apology. It said, quote the Cochrane Gallery
Speaker 1: of Art, in attempting to fuse the NEA funding controversy
Speaker 1: by removing itself from the political spotlight, has instead found
Speaker 1: itself in the center of controversy by withdrawing from the
Speaker 1: Maplethorpe exhibition. We the board of trustees, and the director
Speaker 1: have inadvertently offended many members of the arts community, which
Speaker 1: we deeply regret. Our course in the future will be
Speaker 1: to support art, artists and freedom of expression end quote.
Speaker 1: And the thing is that the NEA was also trying
Speaker 1: to fight back against all of this anti artist sentiment.
Speaker 1: Like in June nineteen eighty nine, the House Interior Appropriation Subcommittee,
Speaker 1: they issued a bill with an amendment that would require
Speaker 1: grant urs to receive approval from the NEA before awarding
Speaker 1: monetary grants, basically being like, whoever's awarding the grants, they
Speaker 1: got to get permission to make sure, you know, the
Speaker 1: artists they're trying to give money to isn't producing you know,
Speaker 1: reprehensible trash or whatever. And then a month later, NEA
Speaker 1: Chairman Hugh Southern released a statement asserting that a govern
Speaker 1: an agency is quote expressly forbidden in its authorizing legislation
Speaker 1: from interfering with the artistic choices made by its grantees,
Speaker 1: basically being like, fuck you guys, that's stupid. But then
Speaker 1: a few months after that, Congress came back, doubled down,
Speaker 1: and they passed the NEA's nineteen ninety Appropriations Bill. The
Speaker 1: bill denied funding for projects that quote produce materials which,
Speaker 1: in the judgment of the NEA, may be considered obscene,
Speaker 1: including but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homo eroticism,
Speaker 1: the sexual exploitation of children, individuals engaged in sex acts,
Speaker 1: and which do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or
Speaker 1: scientific value. Though to be honest, I do feel like
Speaker 1: homoroticism has a lot of scientific value. And then the
Speaker 1: bill also authorized the budget to create a twelve member
Speaker 1: commission to review the NEA grant making policy, basically just
Speaker 1: to be like, h we're gonna tell you what to
Speaker 1: do now. Brah Maplethorpe died of AIDS nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: And despite these setbacks against the artists community, Is the
Speaker 1: Perfect Moment continued to tour, premiering again in Cincinnati. This
Speaker 1: resulted in an unsuccessful persecution of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts
Speaker 1: Center and its director, who are accused of handering obscenity.
Speaker 1: So what happened to everyone else? While Senator Helms and
Speaker 1: the other Conservative senators they continued their crusade against the arts.
Speaker 1: He started going after independent theater companies and arts organizations
Speaker 1: throughout the country. Meanwhile, the American Family Association that sort
Speaker 1: of started this whole mess, they're still trying to get
Speaker 1: the NEA defunded completely. What fun folks, And technically they
Speaker 1: are a hate group designated by the Southern Poverty Law
Speaker 1: Center and Andre Serrano, his career was basically launched by
Speaker 1: this scandal. In December of nineteen eighty nine, his solo
Speaker 1: gallery show was an enormous success, and he continued to
Speaker 1: use all sorts of blood and guts in his work.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety he exhibited his piece Blood and Seamen five,
Speaker 1: made of you guessed it, Blood and Seamen and Piss
Speaker 1: Christ continues to piss people off. In twenty eleven, it
Speaker 1: was on view in Avignon, France, and it was vandalized.
Speaker 1: Rocks were thrown at it, which cracked the glass and
Speaker 1: nearly destroyed the photo. But actually earlier this year, in
Speaker 1: summer twenty twenty three, Serrano was actually invited to go
Speaker 1: hang out with the Pope. He and a number of
Speaker 1: other artists were invited to the Sistine Chapel and apparently
Speaker 1: while he was there, Pope Francis gave Serrano a thumbs
Speaker 1: up Serrano said, I was surprised to be invited and
Speaker 1: even more surprised that he gave me a thumbs up,
Speaker 1: and I was very happy that the church understands that
Speaker 1: I am a Christian artist and I am not a
Speaker 1: blasphemous artist. I'm just an artist. Every episode of American
Speaker 1: Filth us a lesson, and I think the lesson we
Speaker 1: can learn here is that you know, sometimes your tax
Speaker 1: dollars aren't gonna go where you want them. But from
Speaker 1: now on, I'm going to write a personal letter to
Speaker 1: the irs every time I file my taxes that says
Speaker 1: I want my money to exclusively go to art made
Speaker 1: from piss. Thanks for listening. American Field is a production
Speaker 1: of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. This episode was
Speaker 1: hosted in sound designed by Me Gabby Wants and written
Speaker 1: by Julia Chris Gao. Theme music is by me and
Speaker 1: Jesse Niswanger. Our senior producer is Amelia Brock, and our
Speaker 1: executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Random Barr and Elsie Crowley.
Speaker 1: You can follow along with the show on Instagram at
Speaker 1: American filth Pod. Be sure to subscribe and review. Leave
Speaker 1: us five stars. Why not talk about you? Next time
Speaker 1: School of humans