Mildly amusing: The sight of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, proudly displaying his copy of Andres Serrano’s The Game: All Things Trump.
Taken Tuesday evening, the photo comes courtesy of Isabelle Brourman, who is best known as the sketch artist for the Trump trial and was at the Palm Beach complex. Brourman, a friend of Serrano’s, gave the former president an autographed copy of The Game. It featured the inscription from the artist, “To President Donald Trump, Best wishes, Andres Serrano.”
Photo by Isabelle Brourman of Donald Trump hold a copy of Andres Serrano’s The Game: All Things Trump. Photo courtesy the artist and a/political.
As its title suggests, the book is a photographic catalogue of all things Trump by Serrano, based on his 2019 New York pop-up exhibition of the same name, produced by the socially engaged art organization a/political. When it debuted, Serrano told Sarah Cascone that he had spent some $200,000 of his own money on the 1,000-odd pieces of Trump-themed paraphernalia, from a slice of his wedding cake to a 10-foot sign from the Trump Taj Mahal’s ‘Ego Lounge’ to many, many magazine covers, and much more. He showed it all as a two-floor installation meant to be a portrait of the media and consumer culture that built the Trump brand.
(Two variations on Serrano’s exhibition are currently on view in Europe. Based on their titles, it seems to intuitively read there as being as much about the grotesqueries of American excess as it is about the 45th president: At the Forum in Groningen, Holland, it is “America and Trump by Andres Serrano,” while at the Maillol Museum in Paris, a scaled-down version appears in “Andres Serrano: Portraits of America.”)
Andres Serrano’s “The Game: All Thing Trump.” Photo: Sarah Cascone.
Brourman’s Mar-a-Lago pic mainly gets its punch because Andres Serrano is, to this day, synonymous with the Culture Wars and a hate symbol for the evangelical base of the Republican coalition. Serrano himself, however, has emphasized that his infamous artwork Piss Christ is the work of a Catholic struggling with the meaning of Christ. (He made an NFT of it in 2022 through Christie’s in the form of a video that incorporated the various vandalisms the artwork has faced over time.)
In addition to Serrano’s photos of the items in “The Game,” the catalogue that Trump holds contains essays by the well-known art historian Eleanor Heartney, author of Doomsday Dreams: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art, and New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz. The latter (which you can read on the project’s website) opens by branding the red “Make America Great Again” hats associated with Trump’s MAGA movement as the “American swastika,” going on to call Trump “one sick fuck” and talk extensively about his crimes and misdeeds.
Even Saltz’s vituperative essay, however, states that the meaning of Serrano’s exhibition can go either way. Specifically, he wrote, “Trump supporters, happy-talking Fox News conspiracy theorists, Vichy Republicans in Congress, wealthy beneficiaries of recent Republican tax breaks, and the red-meat base will look at this artwork, and say, ‘This is who we are! Isn’t it great?’”
Referring to the installation documented in the book, Serrano wrote in an email: “Frankly, it makes sense for it to go to Donald Trump’s Presidential Library since it’s all about him.” (He struck a similar ambiguous note about Insurrection, his film about the January 6, 2020 attack on the capital.)
It’s probably best to take Brourman’s incongruous pic as another contribution to the feedback loop of American celebrity and media culture that the project itself documents. Perhaps it will even appear in some future showing of Serrano’s installation.