EXHIBITIONIST OF THE WEEK ANDRES SERRANO Techno music blasts out of Andres Serrano's answerphone in New York before a beep shuts off the din without any message of introduction. When Serrano hears the incoming call is from the Sunday Morning Post, he snaps up the receiver. 'I'm screening my calls,' he says.
The American-born artist says he is shocked by the controversy surrounding his work, and lumps reporters in with the latter of two groups of people in his life: those that understand him and those that do not.
Gallery owners claim he does not court publicity. But the media has certainly helped him get what he wants. For many people, the introduction to Serrano is via newspaper headlines.
Fluent in Spanish, the New Yorker has a Cuban mother and a Honduran father. He studied painting and sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum Art School but chose photography as his means to talk to the world.
'All I wanted was an audience. I never thought I'd make money from my work. The same philosophy still goes,' he says of the days when he displayed his pictures in store-fronts.
Lately he has drawn crowds of 90,000 to the Gronenberg Museum in Amsterdam and an estimated 100,000 in Australia. Both exhibitions drew strong protest from the Catholic Church and added to his long list of confrontations with publicly-funded galleries worldwide.
Serrano is known for putting urine, blood or semen in jars and photographing it, sometimes with religious symbols or sculptures inside, sometimes with the fluid alone. He also photographs dead people, severed animal heads and graphic sexual positions.
