WIR SIND SO GLÜCKLICHWIR LIEBEN ALLE DEN SCHEINThe image used is a mass-produced, plastic crucifix—already an iconmade kitsch through capitalism. By submerging it in urine, Serranodraws attention to how religious symbols have become commodifiedobjects, stripped of their spiritual intensity. Capitalism, not Serrano,is the true desecrator.Serrano's photograph Immersion (Piss Christ) is not an attack onChristianity, but a transgressive reclamation of Christ's humanitythrough the medium of bodily fluid. It critiques the commodificationof the sacred more than the sacred itself.Mainstream Christian imagery often sanitises the crucifixion ofJesus, making it bloodless, distant, aestheticised, as if only thesterile can be holy. It was not God’s hands nailed to the cross, but ahuman’s. Serrano puts the body back into Christ—flesh, pain, pissand all.The submersion of Jesus into urine is a reversal of baptism, broughtinto the world through waste, not water. It’s sacrament. If baptismis about entering the divine, Piss Christ is about God entering thehuman, through degradation.Immersion was vandalised in 2011, but it drew controversy longbefore then. Some Christians consider it blasphemy. But the angeroften directed at the work says more about the viewer’s assumptionsthan the image itself. What actually is desecrated in Piss Christ? Is itthe sacred, or is it how we believe the sacred should be visualised?Serrano dares to ask: do you worship Christ, or the idea of Christ? Theman, or the merchandise?
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