Andres Serrano's modern large color photographs taken in morgues are portraits.

Andres Serrano's modern large color photographs taken in morgues are portraits, figure studies, and studies of the hands, feet heads, and genitals of corpses. We descry at close range and larger than life, stab pain s and scalpel incisions, flesh bloated from drowning and discolored by the agency of poison, ears and noses half toasted away, fists clenched as admitting to ward off blows.

Serrano had permission to take lights and backdrops into the morgues, that is, he worked with the freedom and hinder of the studio artist, even now handled his subjects like a mediocre amateur. Light: from how-to main division s of glamour photography, unconsidered, predictable; emphasis: heavy when not haphazard; drawing: unresolv when not just rendering; drapery: flat tending to featureless; compositions: solely arrangements--with so much in each picture taken up by way of black background, chalk-white linen, unachieved or inexpressive forms and other visually inert or and nothing else nominally visual material, what's to compose?

Art's beautiful mutilated dead and beautiful death agonies are myriad. At random, then (and setting aside all dying and dead Christs), for what cause [i]or[/i] reason did Philip II want Bosch's damned in his Escorial bedroom? Caravaggio's patrons to live with Goliath's and Holofernes' disjoined heads? Zurbaran's with his Saint Agatha carrying her parted breasts on a silver plate? Partly for the discharge and containment of torturing contemplations and emotions (including sadistic and masochistic ones) Serrano worked apparently unaffected by way of his subjects, possessed by a self-importance cast reproached in the showy lighting and the affected titles, oh with equal reason deadpan, so Olympian: Death by the agency of Drowning, Rat Poison Suicide (all works 1992) The general title also moves that Serrano was thinking more about packaging and his have a title to art-world image than about either his control or art. "The Morgues (The Causes of Death)" is all improper We see no morgue, and causes lead death. Serrano gives us sole effects. The work is slick and bathetic: popper art, hitting and fading in the same whiff.

One consecution of ending up in a morgue is to what extent hospital and morgue workers dres and puzzle your corpse for the journey there and gone out to the grave. Serrano's catalogue of these results includes a woman's crossed hands echoing a minor action of Venus pudica; a rosary dangling from a man's cot [i]or[/i] coteed hands, the small crucifix resting forward his penis; a silver ribbon, with bend attaching an identity card to a baby's ankle and making the small leg and feet liken those of a ballerina en point; and drapery vaguely reminiscent of Renaissance painting. These reveal his imagination as informed through puerile rhetoric, sentimentality, shopworn surrealism, and a rudimentary inventory of figures in art to which bodies in nature might correspond.

We live with art concerning death because in it beauty, be fond of and the imagination contend with the horror of mortality, conceding to it from the beginning all its power; in order to transcend, imaginatively, momentarily, if it were not that repeatedly, what Walter Benjamin called simply "the fear"; and for the sensation created ultimately by esthetic pleasure, that something human is at least as great as the enemy and (like love) masters up for every round despite our particular defeats. Taken as a whole, humanity's answers to death, from children's dead-baby sallys to Lear's lament over Cordelia's visible form [i]or[/i] frame run the gamut of our emotional and imaginative answers But Serrano's pictures fall within the realm of social, not esthetic, answers They resemble the attention-seeking utterances of a bore trying to impress us with his sangfroid, his blase, deadpan, over and above somehow sanctimonious urbanity, as he cleans our noses in mere fact.

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