Gert Jan Kocken

Defacing

Gert Jan Kocken discovered that the number of artworks which survived the Iconoclastic Fury – and have retained visible traces of the damage – is extremely small. He decided to capture the best possible visual record of those last remnants. His photos of these mutilated artworks demonstrate that one can behold the destruction caused by the iconoclasts as if they were choices made by an artist.

From: http://www.gertjankocken.nl/?ess=13

Book series “The world according to”: http://thewato.blogspot.com.br/search/label/4

Andres Serrano

         

Immersion (Piss Christ), 1987 (original and after attack)

Andres Serrano was raised in a devoutly Catholic neighborhood where religion played a significant part of his growing up. From his first images as an artist, sacred icons and other symbolic elements have been frequenting his tableaux-like photographs. From religious iconography, human subjects, dead animals to more precise elements such as blood (a symbol for passion and violence), urine, milk, semen and later excrement, the artist seeks to convey a sense of dignity to his subjects and to reconcile the sacred and the profane through what Germano Celant termed as “the synthesis of the opposite”, so that “the lower part is in dialogue with the upper part, the human with the divine, the earthbound with the celestial”.