As I once told performance artist Coco Fusco, I have always felt that my work is religious, not sacrilegious. I am not interested in destroying or tearing down icons for the sake of shock value, but to instead test the strength of these images through deconstruction and confrontation, to challenge the power of these symbols forged in the crucible of public perception. Reality is as much about death and decay and hate as it is about birth and comfort and love; often, it is more about the former. There are no easy answers to be had in a portrait of an Elvis impersonator with his penis and testes hanging out of his spangled jumpsuit. Nor should there be.

While his most recent work has been described as a “prank”, sculpter Daniel Edwards has found himself posing these hard-to-answer questions with his plaster “casts” of Ted Williams’ cryogenically frozen head. The allusion made to Napoleon’s death masks is apropos – after all, Williams ruled baseball and the press with an iron fist during his career, cutting down opposing teams with his mighty bat and unerring vision, and treating the gaggle of news reporters hovering around his locker like the meager gnats he believed them to be. Also, like Napoleon, Williams was renowned for his prowess on the battlefield of war.

Unfortunately, Williams’ life descended from these Napoleonic heights into the sordid depths found only in Shakespearean tragedies. Betrayed first by his body, and then by his blood, the once-proud Williams is now a sideshow exhibition, with nothing remaining but his tainted legacy, and his head. Alas, poor Splinter, we knew him well. Edwards’ work shows that he, too, knows Williams, knows the pain and shame he experienced during the final throes of his existance.

The bealeagured, pained visage of Williams in these faux casts shows a man shouldering the burden of daggers in his flesh. This is the face of betrayal, the face of impotence. Perhaps it is the just comeuppance for a man of mixed descent that willfully shunned the unslightly portion of his heritage to promote himsef as a chain-smoking, alcohol-drinking, Commie-killing All-American male. A lying half-breed that once epitomized the verility and strength of the American people, now reduced to being trapped in ice like a no-talent actor in a pandering science-fiction Hollywood fantasy. That Williams, an American icon, was put in this sad state by a son who shared a name with another American icon – John Henry – almost seems too fictionalized. It threatens to propel this story into the realm of urban legend.

But, sadly, this is no folk tale. And this is not a betrayal felt only throughout the Williams family. The image of Williams’ pained face is the face of baseball itself. It is the face of lost innocence, the face of scandal and greed that brought a children’s game kicking and screaming into clay-footed adulthood. And it is but a microcosm of the betrayal felt by the American people at the hands of its government in these trying times. A proud warrior, beheaded. A proud game, denuded. A proud nation, defeated. These are the truths inherent in the greatest of art, and these are the truths offered by Edwards’ challenging work.

But, of course, this is a nation that goes for the easy answers – instead of honoring this challenging piece, baseball instead chooses to direct its gaze on the fingerpainting of one Zach Duke. If this addled autistic claptrap is what Duke has to offer the world of art, then let me suggest that he donate his time and body to a project I am currently working on, in conjunction with renowned artist Damian Hirst, called “Bifurcated Pope In a Coke”. Suspending his body in a partially bisected can of gut-rotting sweetness seems all too fitting for one that produces such garbage. And it would also be a promotion from having to toil for the lowly Pirates. It does not matter, though – time will out the good and dismiss the banal, and Edwards’ challenging work will live on.

Photographer Andres Serrano is best known for his works “Piss Christ”, “Blood and Semen III” and “Piss and Blood”