The crucifix was immersed in a combination of urine and cow’s blood. Because this is a piece about grace. Even though I am deeply and permanently lapsed, I will briefly put on my Catholic prayer beads and talk about grace.
Replies
Grace is a thing that happens in the world. It is not confined to churches, and I suspect you find it more often outside them. It is not a pale bloodless thing wrapped up in incense and white altar cloths.
sep 2, 2025, 5:09 am • 497 36 • view
The places where you actually NEED grace are filthy and bloody and despairing. Grace is the last cigarette shared in the gutter, the hand of the dying being held by the stranger, the kindness done by the broken.
sep 2, 2025, 5:15 am • 803 93 • view
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a previous roomie about Humility. Humility is hard; it doesn't feel good. It's allowing yourself to be vulnerable and naked. Humility isn't some good job feels-good pat on the back. Humility takes strength, courage, and grace to sit with humility.
sep 2, 2025, 9:53 pm • 2 0 • view
I don't know if you've read Flannery O'Connor, but this reminds me of her. Especially in her insistence that the end of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" actually has grace and redemption in it.
sep 2, 2025, 9:26 pm • 0 0 • view
And it often, if not always, happens without an audience.
sep 2, 2025, 8:43 am • 4 0 • view
And the whole point of having a god embodied on earth is that they are down there, on earth, being human! Which means dirt and blood and piss and a host of other bodily fluids. That’s why you HAVE a god like that in the first place.
sep 2, 2025, 5:19 am • 535 18 • view
Despite all the religious art, poor dudes in Galilee did not wear white and people who hang around lepers get a lot of nasty shit on them. You have a human god so that they can say “I was one of you, I understand, I went to the hard places where I was needed.” Grace, embodied.
sep 2, 2025, 5:22 am • 572 22 • view
And the point of this photograph is to bring that moment to life and show the grace of this man’s god shining through all the filth and dross of mortal existence. And it does it really fucking well, if you ask me. It fucking GLOWS.
sep 2, 2025, 5:24 am • 649 33 • view
That’s art. You can not understand it or even hate it, but it wasn’t a gimmick. He wasn’t trying to get away with something. Dude was completely sincere and took days in the studio to get everything just right.
sep 2, 2025, 5:28 am • 534 10 • view
And in the end, I think he came up with a take on grace a lot more genuine than any number of paintings of Extremely White Jesus in freshly laundered robes on cloud background. Thus endeth the screed.
sep 2, 2025, 5:32 am • 744 23 • view
So very true. When I worked as a guard at a large art museum, homeless folk would often come in on very rainy or hot or cold days for a days respite because admissions was free. They were often in pretty rough shape. The amount of times visitors asked me to "do something about them" was obnoxious.
sep 3, 2025, 12:49 pm • 2 0 • view
These were very clean, well off people here to see clean devotional art commissioned by well off people. And they could not stand the reality of the truly in need. Meanwhile when an unkempt veteran was acting erratically my supervisor just came in and chatted with him about art for awhile.
sep 3, 2025, 12:52 pm • 1 0 • view
Thank you very much for this. I remember the original outcry, but you've explained it perfectly for me. Thanks again.
sep 2, 2025, 1:06 pm • 0 0 • view
Thank you. I lived in an art apreciating household, and still never knew, beyond the pearl clutchers of the day.
sep 2, 2025, 2:12 pm • 1 0 • view
Last time I heard about this, I figured it was just someone trying to shock or troll people. "Take THAT, mom and dad!" I like your interpretation way better.
sep 2, 2025, 6:04 am • 9 0 • view
That’s beautiful. It makes me think about how when you love your baby you get covered in piss, shit and vomit and you don’t even mind. Love is amazing! (Some people mind, I realize…but honestly I have lain in a pool of vomit happy as a clam because my sick child peacefully fell asleep).
sep 2, 2025, 11:34 am • 11 0 • view
thank you. I remember at the time not getting it, being offended by it (photography was not my thing way back then). My parents? Horrified? The priest at the Catholic hospital was strangely (to me at the time) unbothered by it. It took me years, and education, and learning to understand it better.
sep 2, 2025, 1:37 pm • 6 0 • view
I have been up since 5 am. I am so tired.
sep 2, 2025, 5:32 am • 366 0 • view
Thank you for your for educational and thought provoking screed. I first came across this piece in jr high and the associated pearl clutching. But your interpretation gives me much more context and a better understanding of what Serrano was looking to accomplish.
sep 2, 2025, 1:25 pm • 1 0 • view
I read the whole thing. Well said. 👏
sep 2, 2025, 11:44 pm • 0 0 • view
www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/u... At least the one in Hamilton, Ontario seems to only get paramedics called during winter for an obvious reason.
sep 2, 2025, 10:42 pm • 6 0 • view
I remember your Twitter thread, but thank you for the refresher.
sep 2, 2025, 5:33 am • 37 0 • view
Thank you 🙏
sep 2, 2025, 8:47 am • 1 0 • view
I remember this piece well; sadly one was destroyed in Australia 1997.
sep 2, 2025, 8:00 am • 6 1 • view
ursula I really hope that you slept for at least ten hours soon after posting this (at present this post is 8h old so hopefully you're still sleeping)
sep 2, 2025, 2:19 pm • 9 0 • view
Eleven hours worth! Now I’m sore in that “you didn’t move for hours” sleep way.
sep 2, 2025, 8:50 pm • 15 0 • view
He laid aside, and here with us to be, Forsook the courts of everlasting day, And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay. - Milton, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
sep 2, 2025, 9:32 pm • 6 0 • view
And yet at the same time the work reminds us that blood and piss are made by God, and so made good, and so themselves suffused with divine light, as is this whole mess we have made if only handled right.
sep 2, 2025, 9:36 pm • 4 0 • view
Great thread! Thank you 🙏🏻 I love Eleanor Heartney’s argument that the work is über Catholic because it is so rooted in the body (c.f. Catholic scenes of martyrdom since at least the Baroque era) and its American Protestantism that prevents us from seeing its devotional quality. 1/2
sep 3, 2025, 2:13 am • 2 0 • view
*it’s
sep 3, 2025, 3:49 pm • 0 0 • view
2/2 Heartney notes that when Serrano later requested permission to shoot Vatican officials, they asked him about his photos of ejaculate—concerned it violated a biblical rule against “spilling seed”—but they never asked about Piss Christ. They weren’t offended by it.
sep 3, 2025, 2:16 am • 1 0 • view
While recognising your lapsed-ness, I feel I have to say: Preach it, sister!
sep 2, 2025, 6:06 am • 8 0 • view
Thank you I learned something today.
sep 2, 2025, 2:44 pm • 0 0 • view
Hey uh I know this screed is coming from a place of deep frustration, but from the bottom of my heart thank you for writing it. I am very happy to have learned about this today.
sep 3, 2025, 1:18 pm • 3 0 • view
Thank you for a delightful screed, I learned something!!
sep 2, 2025, 5:25 pm • 0 0 • view
For the record, Sister Wendy agreed with you, felt that it could be reverent. Her mild objection was not that it was blasphemous, but that it was “easy” art, in that once you saw it and decided how you felt/what it meant, you were done.
sep 2, 2025, 5:04 pm • 12 0 • view
Sister Wendy was a gem.
sep 2, 2025, 6:45 pm • 7 0 • view
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
sep 2, 2025, 5:38 am • 40 1 • view
Most contemporary bibles translate that as last verb as "overcome" but I love "comprehended." It may not be the most accurate translation, but it's by far my favorite.
sep 2, 2025, 2:10 pm • 9 0 • view
Comprehended means both overcome and understand, making it a lovely word to use for this passage.
sep 2, 2025, 2:48 pm • 6 0 • view
Yep — two meanings, and they both work.
sep 2, 2025, 5:01 pm • 2 0 • view
Thank you. I hadn’t heard this explanation before.
sep 2, 2025, 6:03 am • 4 0 • view
You gave a very beautiful description of grace & why the god became human and performed the acts described in the scriptures. The artwork is transcendent. Thanks!
sep 2, 2025, 11:42 pm • 1 0 • view
I did not know that. Thank you for the explainer Also, I had never seen the photo. It's beautiful
sep 2, 2025, 11:52 am • 0 0 • view
38 years? My goodness. I was 13, and I heard from the Christians around me in my fundecostal environs just how offensive and disgusting that was, and how deeply offended I should be. …and it didn’t stick. That photo sat with me for years. I had no idea of Andreas Serrano’s beliefs until today.
sep 2, 2025, 5:43 am • 24 0 • view
As I sat with that image over the next few years, and tried to grapple with what I believed, I decided it was beautiful. If I was to take Jesus seriously, then his last horrifying moments involved blood and piss and shit. Because that happens at the moment of death. Even then I was grappling…
sep 2, 2025, 5:43 am • 27 0 • view
with this whitewashed (pun intended) version of Jesus that stripped away all of His humanity, that ignored his dirty feet and sweat-stained robes, and presented Him as an idealised blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan in a snow-white robe, floating a few cm off the ground. So… thank you for this thread.
sep 2, 2025, 5:43 am • 26 0 • view
I wonder if this is a difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. I get the impression that the Protestants would prefer to ignore the mortality of Christ.
sep 2, 2025, 9:20 am • 6 0 • view
It might depend on the sect. I was raised ELCIC and was taught that his mortality was the whole point.
sep 2, 2025, 10:43 am • 7 0 • view
Thank you, Ursula.
sep 3, 2025, 11:24 am • 1 0 • view
Have you seen the wonderful interview where Sister Wendy, the art historian nun, is being asked about it and the interviewer expects her to be shocked or pearl clutching but she very much isn't and discusses it as sincere religious art?
sep 2, 2025, 7:05 am • 23 0 • view
Thank you for this, gonna go find it.
sep 2, 2025, 7:22 am • 5 0 • view
Now I understand why your religious characters are so credible. The good ones, at least, have a sincere spiritual life, regardless of their particular divinity, and they grok grace. Cuz it really doesn't matter what you believe in or whether it is "real" so long as you have humility and grok grace.
sep 2, 2025, 5:35 am • 27 0 • view
Huh! I feel like I've only ever seen bad photos of like, a crucifix in a jar of urine and thought he was one of those just being Edgy and provocative. Thanks for explaining.
sep 2, 2025, 12:02 pm • 0 0 • view
Now that one, I remember. Good luck getting peeps to look past their superficial hot take and put shit in context. But never stop trying.
sep 2, 2025, 11:36 am • 3 0 • view
This is one of the reasons I like art, you get learn stuff, & the stuff you learn helps with appreciating it on more than a surface level. Always thought this was kinda cool, but that came from dumb teenage me wanting to like the controversial thing rather than understanding the artists intent
sep 2, 2025, 5:55 am • 9 0 • view
As another non-practicing Catholic, I appreciate your explanation of grace, a concept I still find beautiful. And I'm surprised to learn that this is what the piece I've been hearing about for so long looks like. It's not what I was picturing. At all.
sep 2, 2025, 1:56 pm • 6 0 • view
Thank you for this highly informative thread
sep 2, 2025, 9:23 pm • 0 0 • view
That's the thing I think I love the most about Serrano's work. It's not JUST "confrontational." It's always DEEP and LAYERED with meaning & the saturated color values are ASTONISHING.
sep 2, 2025, 5:28 am • 12 0 • view
When I was working at Auntie's Bookstore in Spokane in college, we had a customer order his corpse series photographs book. It was bound in fuzzy sky blue cloth & we had to re-order multiple times to get them a pristine, unsmudged copy. So we all had a chance to look at the images. Astonishing. 🤯
sep 2, 2025, 6:05 am • 4 0 • view
The one of the child's legs with the indentations from ankle socks still moves me to tears even now. Beautiful work.
sep 2, 2025, 9:41 am • 2 0 • view
Awesome (really). Thank you, I deeply appreciate this thread!
sep 2, 2025, 8:16 am • 2 0 • view
Yeah, and I think even beyond the meaning, it's just actually beautiful. Finding the beauty in these things is its own grace.
sep 2, 2025, 5:27 am • 20 0 • view
I firmly believe that if the people who got angry about it had never been told how the picture was created, they would have praised it as both beautiful and reverent.
sep 2, 2025, 10:27 pm • 0 0 • view
📌
sep 3, 2025, 1:46 am • 0 0 • view
Oh, gosh. And presumably the deliberate resonance with the long uses of blood for liturgical spiritual cleansing and urine for domestic and industrial cleansing. Thank you so much for the thread. I never knew or thought about the piece beyond it name, and hadn’t seen it.
sep 2, 2025, 5:27 am • 25 0 • view
Lent/lant
sep 2, 2025, 5:32 am • 0 0 • view
@slacktivistfred.bsky.social posts about this at Epiphany (eg www.patheos.com/blogs/slackt...)
sep 2, 2025, 5:34 am • 5 0 • view
iirc, the artist’s mother was indian? hence, the cow’s blood. he did other religious pieces that combined catholicism and his indian roots. i may be getting him confused with another artist, though. i’ll look it up later.
sep 2, 2025, 11:24 am • 24 1 • view
Serrano adamantly denies making art to freak out the likes of the American Family Association, Jesse Helms or New York’s Senator Al D’Amato, who histrionically ripped up a catalogue containing a reproduction of Piss Christ on the floor of the Senate…1/3
sep 2, 2025, 12:29 pm • 18 0 • view
Yet he understands that there are certain factions that will always try to ensure that audiences don’t think for themselves. “These special-interest groups are very small,” he remarks, “but they manage to wield a lot of power by intimidating those people who are in charge…2/3
sep 2, 2025, 12:29 pm • 21 0 • view
There’s a billion-dollar Christ-for-Profit industry out there—what I want to know is, who monitors them? While these groups are busy weeding out what is to them morally objectionable on the airwaves and in our museums, who decides what is morally offensive in the religion industry?” 3/3
sep 2, 2025, 12:29 pm • 25 4 • view
I read a fantastic article on ancient Persia & the cool things we know about about them, but are usually credited to Rome. And I swear, they had every single religion (of which there were many) deal with their own fanatics - or suffer consequences. I went back to the article to share with.. (1/2)
sep 2, 2025, 6:55 pm • 7 0 • view
..a friend & it wasn’t mentioned. So I have switched dimensions or had a fever dream ~ and yet, it is still the *best* solution I’ve heard of so far. - separates govmn + religion - you have the most sway on your own disciples - consequences & compassion All ✅’d ~ I love it (2/2)
sep 2, 2025, 6:58 pm • 2 0 • view
…OR CONSEQUENCES…my kingdom for consequences to actions 😓
sep 2, 2025, 7:04 pm • 4 0 • view
ok he is not the artist i was thinking of. i did, though, find this quote from Serrano re: Piss Christ: He said, "What it symbolizes is the way Christ died: the blood came out of him but so did the piss and the shit…1/2
sep 2, 2025, 12:13 pm • 5 0 • view
Maybe if Piss Christ upsets you, it's because it gives some sense of what the crucifixion actually was like...I was born and raised a Catholic and I've been a Christian all my life." 2/2
sep 2, 2025, 12:13 pm • 8 0 • view
Nah. They found the fella’s ossuary in Jerusalem in 1980, along with wife and children’s’. Fuck off, Christians, yer boy was human and just another boring hippie. Get over it.
sep 2, 2025, 5:34 am • 5 0 • view
Fortunately grace is real, regardless of the historical accuracy of any one person’s faith.
sep 2, 2025, 5:44 am • 162 2 • view
I agree in principle, but that ossuary was probably a fake as well. It had forams (microscopic marine organisms) in the patina. For an object not found near the coast, this strongly implies a forgery.
sep 2, 2025, 1:36 pm • 8 0 • view
Been thinking about this lately. My new thought is that a better act would have been if Jesus had made it to infirm old age and still been "perfect" b4 being crucified. He only suffered for a few days and knew nothing of the part of life that happens after 30. I'm less impressed than I used to be.
sep 2, 2025, 10:33 pm • 1 0 • view
People forget the radical meaning of the cross. It took a tool of death, cruelty & oppression, & subverted it. Among the things ostensibly finished/fulfilled by him was the era of spilt blood In faith there is technological innovation & Grace is one of the BIG ones, the spiritual steam engine
sep 2, 2025, 5:33 am • 10 0 • view
And this is why the current trends in the Catholic Church, which embrace this model of grace and treat it as holy and righteous, are so controversial! How dare the Pope say that ministry lies in manufacturing those moments for people who need them instead of berating people!
sep 2, 2025, 3:07 pm • 57 1 • view
On the slopes of Mt. Doom, at the end of all things.
sep 2, 2025, 5:15 am • 16 0 • view
That was saving two lives after the mission succeeded. More importantly, at the Cracks of Doom, when the Ring finally overcame Frodo's will, and only by Eru Ilúvatar or Manwë did the despised Gollum become the instrument to save the world.
sep 2, 2025, 5:23 am • 10 0 • view
This is one of the best statements I've read in a while. Thank you!
sep 2, 2025, 12:04 pm • 0 0 • view
This thread makes me think about how America's rightwing is deeply opposed to, and offended by, compassion and mercy. And it seems to highlight that they've not simply been indifferent but outright hostile to it for longer than I realized.
sep 2, 2025, 2:11 pm • 10 0 • view
I remember studying this in art history 25+ years ago! SCREED AWAY!
sep 2, 2025, 1:11 pm • 2 0 • view
Same! …Also the realization that college was over 25 years ago hits hard some days, lolsob.
sep 2, 2025, 3:13 pm • 2 0 • view
I'm so sorry for our collective loss of decades!
sep 2, 2025, 6:16 pm • 1 0 • view
That makes a lot of sense, it brings up the question "Is grace a purifying force? Or is it something that can be defiled?" And I think a lot of groups have the idea it can be defiled, the sin of empathy, if you get too close to understanding sin then it will destroy your faith.
sep 2, 2025, 4:13 pm • 2 0 • view
Was it both? I thought it was just Serrano's urine - and "Blood Cross" was an earlier plexiglas cross filled with cow blood.
sep 2, 2025, 1:50 pm • 1 0 • view