Andres Serrano on his Capitol attack film: ‘I like that word, excruciating’
Andres Serrano is not known as an especially political artist. The 71year-old’s photographs are more accurately described as transgressive, perennially summed up with a singular point of reference: Piss Christ, his 1987 photo of a crucifix submerged in his own orangetinted urine, which has over the years sparked multiple instances of national outrage. In the photographic series that followed, including The Klan (1990), The Morgue (1992), Shit (2007), and Nudes (2009), Serrano’s work has remained as provocative as it is aptly named.
“I like to make the kind of pictures where you don’t need much more than the title to tell you what you’re looking at,” the artist said over the phone. As for his perpetual association with a single, 34-year-old work of art, he doesn’t mind: “Piss Christ is a good soundbite – easy to remember and repeat.”
Serrano’s latest work, Insurrection (2022), takes a decidedly more political tone, having debuted in CulturalDC’s Source Theatre in Washington this week, the one-year anniversary of the Capitol attack. As the artist’s firstever film, Insurrection offers a grim portrait of the United States, stitched together from found footage of the 6 January riot. True to the transgressive nature of Serrano’s practice, it zooms well past the point where ordinary news media would cut away: we get extended cuts of the sheer spectacle of violence, the smashing of windows, the prolonged attempt of one adrenalized horde of men to force its way past another. The frenzy climaxes with an uncut, closeup sequence of Ashli Babbitt’s death, and her subsequent martyrdom in a eulogy by the former president. Much of Insurrection is nothing short of excruciating to watch.
“I like that word, excruciating,” Serrano says. “What I intended to make was an immersive experience that takes you to Washington DC on January 6 in real time.”
In close collaboration with the London-based organization a/political, Serrano began working on the film in April, feeling compelled to respond to the day’s events on multiple levels. He was appalled by the racial dynamics that played out on the Capitol steps, as white rioters who had broken into a federal building were gently escorted out: “Black people get killed for a lot less than storming the Capitol, and these white people got treated with kid gloves.”
To him, the Capitol insurrection was also an extension of Donald Trump’s legacy of divisiveness and fraud, a subject the artist had begun to explore in his 2018 installation The Game: All Things Trump. The former president’s widely accepted version of events – that these were righteous citizens protesting a rigged election – represented not only a triumph of fake news, but his continued hold over the Republican party.
“This guy has to be commended for having the charisma that Hitler had with the German people; there are Americans who don’t believe it really happened, and Republicans who say let’s forget about it and move on,” Serrano says. “I wanted to make a film that anyone would have a difficult time walking away from saying ‘We should forget about it.’”
Spanning 75 minutes, Insurrection comprises news clips and smartphone footage culled from around the internet, alongside archival imagery dating back to the riots of the Great Depression. The score is a mix of American ballads that range from Bob Dylan’s You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere to a children’s rendition of the historic civil war song, Battle Hymn of the Republic. As rioters march toward the Capitol steps, the incessant repetition of “glory, glory hallelujah” emphasizes the role that Christianity, a recurring theme in Serrano’s practice, plays in validating violence in American mythology. “There are groups of people who believe they have the right interpretations of Christ, not only in how they should live their lives, but how the rest of us should live ours,” he says. “They’re going into battle like Crusaders in their holy war.”
The musical interludes and title cards interspersed throughout – “D.J. Trump Presents Insurrection”; “The Killing of Ashli Babbitt” – were inspired by Birth of a Nation, a 1915 silent civil war film condemned for its heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan. The inclusion of these historical references is a reminder, according to Serrano, that “history repeats itself in specific ways.” The insurrection was not a novel event, but another instance of division within a nation that never recovered from civil war, he adds, citing the widespread refusal to accept Biden’s presidency as a resonant parallel. “There are also a lot of people who’ll never accept that the north won, and who’d love to go back to the good ol’ days. Donald Trump was there to tell those people what they wanted to hear.”
Despite the symbolic criticism embedded throughout the insurrection, Serrano is actually reluctant to speak poorly of Trump, whom he photographed in 2004 for his America series. “This guy is a massive showman; he’s incredible at it, and I could see why he’s gone this far in life. He did not wreak damage on America – America was damaged already.” As for the Capitol rioters, he refuses to condemn anyone, nor say that they belong in jail: “I tried to humanize this crowd, to show their faces and hear what they’re saying. That’s what gives a work of art power: when you let people speak for themselves.”
Serrano makes an important distinction in his practice: while provocation is essential to bringing art to life, he is not in the business of political messaging, telling his viewers what or how to think: “A lot of times I look at work, particularly paintings or pictures on the wall, and I’m not particularly moved,” he says. “The one thing I always try to do, whether it’s photographs or with this film, is to give you something to react to. I’m not concerned too much about how you’re going to feel about it, good or bad, but the important thing is that you’re not indifferent. You can’t walk away from it, and say, ‘I didn’t feel nothing.’”
nity to realise. Next week Memoria is released, 15 years after it was first discussed by Swinton and the brilliant Thai film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. An eerie meditation about a woman haunted by a sound that only she can hear, Memoria is at times so slow you think you’re looking at a photograph; the next minute you’re jumping out of your seat. It’s like nothing else – a neo-realist, time-travelling thriller that leaves you with a heightened sense of sound and a diminished sense of life’s certainties.
It’s 36 years since Swinton made her film debut in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio. She became Jarman’s muse, and he her mentor. Jarman’s work was experimental, collective and challenging – perfect for the young Swinton, who had no formal training, and felt technically disadvantaged for much of her career. Sometimes Jarman used her more as a model or presence than a conventional actor, which she loved.
Swinton certainly never wanted to be a star. “I only ever intended to do one film,” she says. Really? She nods. “I like seeing people for the first time in a film. It’s one of the reasons I love documentary. I love seeing people, I’m not interested in seeing actors at all. And the best way if you’re an actor to avoid that annoyance for the audience is just to do one film; then they’ve seen you, they’ve met you, you were interesting and new and they never have to see you again.”
She ended up making nine films with Jarman, and since then has won an Oscar for her dyspeptic lawyer in Michael Clayton and has worked regularly with the world’s most gifted directors – four films each with Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson (including the upcoming Asteroid City), on to her third with Joanna Hogg, and two each with Bong Joon-ho and the Coen brothers. She says it’s like having different families, and that working consistently with different people is a way of keeping herself fresh.
Last year, the great Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar made his first English-language film – a half-hour, onewoman adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice, starring Swinton. She first met Almodóvar at a pre-Oscar party in 2008. They bonded, she says, because they were outsiders having the time of their lives. “He and I have this lovely long history of meeting at Hollywood events and being the two shy ones – both shy and tickled pink and pinching ourselves and looking forward to telling people at home, but not confident enough to step in and talk to, say, Angelina Jolie.”
We reach Loch Ness. Rosy and Dora hobble out of the car to stretch their legs. Neither are up for a full walk, so they get back in the car while Dot, Louie and Snowbear jump out. The air is fresh, the leaves are crunchy, the dogs ecstatic.
Katherine Matilda Swinton was born in London to an aristocratic
Anglo-Scots military family that can trace its lineage to the middle ages. At 10, she was sent to boarding school; a year ahead of her peer group, she was bullied for her brains and barely talked for five years. She went to Cambridge University with the intention of becoming a poet, then never wrote another poem once she got there.
“This is the shame of my life,” she says. “I am a proper capital F failure.” I assume she’s joking, but she means it. “I was supposed to go for one thing and dropped the ball immediately. There is a real dark shame attached to it.” Did she really never write poems again? “Very, very sporadically and privately.”
After giving up poetry, she began to perform with fellow students who were more driven than her. It made her feel a fraud. “I was embarrassed about my lack of ambition. As a child, my ambition was always about having a house by the sea, a kitchen garden, children, some dogs and lots of friends. I wanted to make work with friends. It didn’t matter what, it could be a wool shop. Those were my ambitions and they still are, and I just want all of that to keep going.”
Why did she find that embarrassing? “Because it felt like such a dilettante thing to want. One of the reasons I say I find it difficult to describe myself as an actor is because at university the first people I met who wanted to be actors were very serious about it and some of them went on to do very well.” One of her peers was Simon Russell Beale. “They were focused and professional, very clear about taking part in a tradition and a profession. I was very aware I was not like that.”
For Swinton there is still a link between stopping writing poetry and starting to perform. “I’ve got a hunch that I’ve got to stop performing and then I’ll write again.” She pauses. “Let’s go and have some lunch.” Does she want to stop performing? “Yeah. Oh yeah. I’ve always wanted to stop.” I bet most people would rather have your career than be a poet, I say. “Well, possibly, which makes me even dumber in that I don’t know a good thing when I see it.”
We pass a man with three poodles. Swinton stops to chat. Dot starts barking at one of the dogs. “Dot! Don’t use that language!” she chides in disappointed-mother mode. “I’m so sorry,” she says to the poodle owner. This is why Dot is the only one of the five springers not to have a movie career so far, she says. “Dot is a free radical. She’s not inclined to do take after take of anything. She is above all this. She is much too evolved.”
As we stroll on, she looks around in awe – at the skyline, the loch, the trees. “This is why I live here.” She opens her arms wide. “Because of this. And to have a blether with a man with some poodles!”
She leads me to the Dores Inn on the edge of Loch Ness. Haggis, neeps and tatties for me, five-bean curry for Swinton. She tells me she’s entering a new stage of her life. The twins have now left home – Xavier is working in film props, Honor is in her third year at university in Edinburgh.
Over lunch, Swinton talks about how her first family of film will always be the Jarman gang with whom she made nine films in nine years. It was a fantastic time – she made so many friends, discovered so much about herself, lived in a squat in Chelsea’s World’s End, and went on demos every weekend, whether in support of the miners or against clause 28 and the Gulf war. But it also left terrible scars.
Like most of her friends back then, she identified as queer, but for Swinton it was more about her place in the universe than her sexuality. “I lived through my 20s in a whole queer environment and it was just at the point when queer was being reclaimed because it had always been a term of abuse. It just so happened I’d also been a queer kid – not in terms of my sexual life, just odd. People said I was queer, like she’s a queer fish.” She had never quite fitted in anywhere, and for the first time she felt she did.
But there was a traumatic postscript to the Jarman years. “Derek died in 1994 and that year I went to 43 funerals, all Aids-related deaths. The one person who really understood what I was going through was my grandmother, who lived through two world wars, and she said: ‘This is your generation’s war.’”
She mentions Russell T Davies’s It’s a Sin, about a group of young male friends caught in the Aids epidemic. In the series, the character Jill, who lives with the boys, visits them in hospital. She holds their hands as they are dying, a surrogate for absent parents who are ashamed of their children’s illness. “I was that girl,” Swinton says. “That was very much my experience. That was the atmosphere of my late 20s and early 30s. What was so tragic was the breakdown of the blood family support. Lots of people couldn’t go home so they stayed with us and we looked after everyone as best we could.”
By the end, London and its association with lost friends became too painful, and she left. “The collective way we lived broke down because of people getting ill and dying or going home or leaving the country. I came up here to the Highlandswhen my babies were born and never went back. I still find it difficult to go back to London. I can count on three hands the times I’ve spent longer than a night there.” At the same time as the Aids epidemic, British culture was being eviscerated by Thatcherism, she says – a topic that is addressed in The Souvenir Part II. “The way in which films were funded were changed. If you wanted to make a film you had to write five pages of forms saying this is how I can prove my film will make a profit.”
At times, the tabloids have depicted Swinton living a life of swinging decadence in the Highlands. The father of her 24-year-old twins is her former partner, the artist and writer John Byrne. Back in 2008, she was the subject of lubricious stories about a menage a trois with Byrne and her artist lover Sandro Kopp, who is 39 years younger than Byrne. The truth was more mundane, Swinton says – she and Byrne had separated but were happily co-parenting, while Kopp was her partner (and remains so today).
Over the past decade she has experienced another prolonged period of grief. In 2018, Swinton’s father died, seven years after her mother. “My experience of grief is a kind of emptying,” she says. “All the stories stop, there is no road in front of you. It all just goes black, and it takes a long time to get over it.”
Swinton says her brain has also emptied in another scary way. She is still recovering from long Covid. For three weeks in August, she couldn’t get out of bed. “I was coughing like an old gentleman who smoked a pipe for 70 years, and had nasty vertigo. I got off relatively lightly, but the worst thing is how it affected my brain.
“I did two films that I had to learn a lot of text for. One was the Wes Anderson and he likes you to speak like a speeding train. I’m normally quite quick at studying, and picking stuff up, but this was like chewing a really big piece of gum. I couldn’t remember my lines.” Is she coping now? “More or less, but I’m still forgetting things. I have to work my brain.”
But, she says, there has also been a positive emptying that has resulted from bringing all sorts of longterm projects to fruition, ranging from the all-consuming (seeing her children grow into “kind, connected and engaged” adults) to the mere 15 years she spent on Memoria. Swinton mentions another project that has been particularly important to her. “We had this campaign to buy Derek’s cottage in Dungeness and turn it into an artists’ retreat, which we managed to do in lockdown. Just before lockdown, a lot of us kids from Jarmania came together to raise funds for Prospect Cottage. All of us coming together was so wonderful.”
I ask if she’s planning to slow down. “No, if anything I feel like expanding into something different.” Is she serious about wanting to stop stopping acting? “Yes, I’m thinking of retraining as a palliative carer,” she says out of the blue. She talks about witnessing the loving support her parents received from professional carers at the end of their lives, and the impact it had on her.
The idea of Tilda Swinton as a palliative carer sounds so unlikely, but then so many of the things she has done have been. When the twins graduated from their Steiner school at 14, she co-founded a secondary school based on the same principles to complete their education. (Every one of the students who applied to further education was accepted without having taken exams.) When she thought the Highlands would benefit from a film festival, she created a travelling one with the film-maker Mark Cousins. It’s the kind of quixotic fantasy you might find in a Werner Herzog movie, but they made it a reality.
Has she looked into palliative care as a career option? “I have a bit, because during lockdown there were all sorts of people in our village who needed looking out for, not only in the care homes but the sheltered housing and those living by themselves. There’s a lady who hasn’t been over the door for two years. It’s not that she’s unable to move, it’s that she’s frightened and she’s become detached from the possibility.” Swinton is aware she couldn’t do something like this on a whim. “I’ve looked into retraining and I would need a good two to three years clear and I haven’t got that yet.”
It’s late afternoon and getting dark. The skyline has turned a magnificent silver-black.
Swinton points out the sights as she drives me back to the airport. “This is where they have the RockNess music festival,” she says. “Isn’t that a great name? Can you imagine RockNess in this field? I love festivals.” She tells me about a charity in Inverness called Spokes for Folks that provides bikes with double buggies for elderly and disabled people. “It’s like a rickshaw, and they go around to the care homes and give people a spin. I want to see if they’ll come to Nairn just to get some of the people over the door and out to the sea.” It would be great for the woman who hasn’t been out for two years, I say. “Exactly! That’s what I was thinking.”
She looks at Rosy. “I can tell she is very comfortable with you. She’s sunk into you like melted cheese.” I tell her I’d be happy with all five dogs on my knee. “When Sandro is not here, I sleep with all of them in bed. It is the most indulgent thing. Such hugs.”
I’m thinking about her plans for the bike rides for the elderly, films such as Memoria that wouldn’t get made without her tenacity, the school she built for her kids, the mobile film festival, and it strikes me that Swinton is one of life’s great hands-on doers. She laughs. “If we’re going to find a word for it, I have actually been producing always, and I love producing. I’ll always want to go on producing; not necessarily being in the film, but being at the side of the ring with a sponge and a bucket and a towel round my neck. I’ve done that from the beginning.”
It’s not just film I’m thinking of. She may well be producing in an entirely different arena in future. The one thing we can be sure of is that she will still have the sponge in her hand and the towel around her neck.
• Memoria is released in the UK on 14 January, The Souvenir Part II on 4 February.
I lived through my 20s in a whole queer environment, just at the point when queer was being reclaimed