Blood Cross

"On Good Friday 1985, Serrano photographed his 'Blood Cross' in Leon Golub's studio. Consisting of a plexiglas tank in the form of a cross, which the artist filled with cow's blood purchased for ten dollars per gallon (...) The tank started to leak as he filled it with blood; deciding that the image of a dripping cross might prove interesting, he filled the tank to the top and photographed it against a spray-painted backdrop especially created to suggest an ersatz apocalypse. Although the darkening sky and the light rising from behind may appear to spoof religion, this image was inspired by the genre of religious illustrations dealing with the cross in the landscape that he had seen in stores selling religious paraphernalia.
Photographed from a low vantage point, the bleeding cross seems monumental. Regarding the use of blood in this and other images, Serrano stated:
'The Church is obsessed with the body and blood of Christ. At the same time, there is the impulse to repress and deny the physical nature of the Church's membership. There is a real ambivalence there. It's one thing to idealize the body and it's another to deal with it realistically... In my work, I attempt to personalize this tension in institutional religion by revising the way in which body fluids are idealized.'" (R. Hobbs, in: 'Andres Serrano. Works 1983-1993', Philadelphia 1994, p.25.)