The Art of 'Poop'
KönigPrüße
The Art of 'Poop'
By Jabari Asim
washingtonpost.com
Monday, May 23, 2005; 9:15 AM
WASHINGTON -- All art aspires to the condition of music, right?
Walter Pater advanced that notion way back in the 19th century,
and usually it's not hard to see what he was getting at. I can look
at the endless loops and whirls in a Jackson Pollock "drip" painting,
for instance, and easily hear a tenor sax furiously riffing away.
Same goes for Jacob Lawrence's epic celebrations of black laborers --
muscular, kinetic images whose rough-hewn lyricism recalls the blues.
Even in the work of a young hotshot like Kehinde Wiley, who combines
portraits of streetwise youths with religious iconography from the
Renaissance, I can hear the gospel-infused hip-hop of Kanye West's
chart-topping "Jesus Walks."
A certain untitled work by Tom Friedman, on the other hand, gives
me pause. I looked it up on the Web after reading about it in The
Washington Post. The work, which the Post described as "a two-foot
white cube with a barely visible black speck set right in the middle
of the top surface," failed to attract a minimum bid of $45,000 at an
auction held at Christie's in early May. The black speck, I should add,
was not paint or charcoal or chalk, or some other material commonly
associated with art. The auction catalogue provides a helpful description:
".5mm of the artist's feces." Really. I tried hard to come up with a musical
analogue for this (BEG ITAL)messterpiece(END ITAL) and all I could think
of was "Shaving Cream," a novelty hit from my misspent youth. A sample:
(BEG ITAL)An old lady died in a bathtub
She died from a terrible fit
In order to fulfill her wishes
She was buried in six feet of ...
Shaving cream, be nice and clean
Shave every day and you'll always look keen(END ITAL)
I'm no Puritan when it comes to art, and I admire other examples
of Friedman's oeuvre that I've seen on the Web. I'm also aware
that the scatological approach is nothing new. I remember thumbing
through my wife's conceptual art textbook in college and coming
across Piero Manzoni, who in 1961 packaged his droppings in
cans and made them available as signed, numbered "editions"
of "Merda d'Artista." Thinking back, I initially worried that I had
somehow imagined Manzoni's escapade, but my fears were
allayed when I encountered a handy compendium of such
stunts at poopreport.com. Don't you just love the Internet?
There's also British artist Chris Ofili, who in 1996 got in trouble
with New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani over his portrait of the
Virgin Mary, which was partially composed of elephant dung.
These days Ofili is enjoying a warm critical embrace for his
quite innocuous watercolor portraits of black women,
but back then he was quick to point out the merits of working
with waste. He has created other works of art from that material,
the names of which, unfortunately, can't be quoted here.
A 1999 profile in Salon.com had him singing the praises
of poop. "Elephant dung in itself is quite a beautiful object,"
he said. "But a different sort of beauty. And I want to bring
the kind of beauty and decorativeness of the paintings
together with the apparent concept of ugliness of the
(excrement) and put them together and try and make them exist."
Friedman's artistic goals don't sound all that different.
"I wanted to find a material that you could present the
smallest amount of and it would have the most impact,"
he told the Post's David Segal.
Ofili could tell him something about impact. An Englishman
became so enraged by Ofili's show at the Royal Academy
in London that he dumped a wheelbarrow of manure on
the sidewalk outside the exhibit. The point of his protest, he
said, was to prove that "modern art is a load of" --
uh, shaving cream.
Friedman's piece provoked no such furor at Christie's.
Could its failure to sell be a sign that American art patrons
have lost their tolerance for post-digestive art? Could a similar
lack of patience soon develop among the general citizenry?
Just think what would happen if we all suddenly declined to
buy what so many of our so-called leaders -- masters in the
fine art of bull-slinging -- have been trying to sell us.
It would give "waste disposal" a whole new meaning.
Š 2005 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
Linus Minimax
> white cube with a barely visible black speck set right in the middle
> of the top surface," failed to attract a minimum bid of $45,000 at an
> auction held at Christie's in early May. The black speck, I should
add,
> was not paint or charcoal or chalk, or some other material commonly
> associated with art. The auction catalogue provides a helpful
description:
> ".5mm of the artist's feces." Really. I tried hard to come up with a
musical
> analogue for this........
There's been some interest over the past five-ten years in ultra
minimalist ("barely audible" or "93% silent") electronic music.......
can't dig it myself but I suppose it's some kind of meditation on the
sense of hearing. Maybe that lines up the anal logue. My band
Slobbering Anus is not YET pretensiously minimalist enough to mime this
speck. We're more like Mondrian and Pollock doing 'covers' of each
others' paintings, using their 'natural pigments' as paint.
KönigPrüße
.5mm of poop! I agree that the least poop is the best poop,
unless of course the artist is going for the poop and then it
should be the essence of poop and lots of it, too.
A veritible plethora of poop.