Shits

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Kiki Smith Tale, 1992
wax, pigment, paper maché; 160 x 23 x 23 inches

 

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Gelitin Vorm—Fellows—Attitude, 2019
‘Gelitin’s sculptures, presumably made of plaster and clay, were striking for their textures. Up close, the detail was fascinating, and I became intrigued by how the surfaces might have been achieved. At the same time, however, I was repulsed by the forms (because I knew what they were supposed to be?) and kept looking away, not wanting to touch them or even think about their connotations. So much for an exploration of materials and creative process—and maybe that was part of the point.’

 

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Steven Dickie SHIT!, 2018
HD Video, wool, glass, mic stand

 

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Aida Makoto Space shit, 1998
‘Space Shit (1998), a 2.3 metre x 3.3 metre oil and gesso on panel painting by Japanese artist Makoto Aida, depicts a lengthy piece of excrement floating through outer space. ‘I have a habit of placing human beings in a thought experiment that represents an extreme situation,’ Aida told Ocula Magazine in 2015. This habit is evidenced in other works such as Harakiri School Girls (2002), which uses a manga-esque style to depict high school students engaged in suicide by disembowelment.’

 

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Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg Shitting Boy, 2012
‘Metal wire, clay, fabric, silicone, putty, acrylic paint and glue.’

 

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Siobhan Meow Untitled, 1996 – 2012
‘Siobhan Meow is a New York City artist who uses her cats’ feces, urine and fur in her artwork. “I put a canvass down where [one of my cats] was going outside of the litter box, and he took to it, and started pooping and peeing on different parts of it. I threw some cat hair that I had swept up off the floor on it, and he pushed that around into different patterns,” she said.’

 

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Dash Snow EAT SHIT AND DIE, 2005
Fujichrome Crystal Archive print mounted on Plexiglas, found chair and vintage record player, US dollar bill, plastic mask, adhesive, “cocaine” and mirror.

 

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Rageborn Studio, LLC Muddy Heights® 2 (2016)
‘In Muddy Heights 2, you play as a person who has had a little bit too much to eat and needs to relieve himself by any means possible. Poop off various heights onto people and vehicles to score points. Complete level goals to gain cash to buy more food.’

 

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Paul McCarthy Complex Pile, 2007
‘Complex Pile is a 51-foot-high, 110-foot-long, inflatable sculpture of a twisted pile of excrement. Embodying his rare ability to leverage bad taste to infiltrate the well-mannered confines of the art world, Complex Pile mocks its picturesque surroundings.’

 

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Matthew Barney River of Fundament, 2014
‘Over five hours long, River of Fundament is a liquid spectacle of words and music, mercury and sulphur, molten iron, blood and faeces, polluted industrial rivers in New York and Detroit, a river in Idaho where sockeye salmon go to spawn and die. Rivers of shit run through it. I came out winded, ravished, appalled.’

 

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Pope.L Gold People Shit In Their Valet, 2014
‘Green, purple, gray, yellow on linen canvas’

 

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Sprinkle Brigade Various, 2017 – 2020
‘Sprinkle Brigade patrols the streets of New York in search of doggie dung to poke, prop and photograph. This is alchemy of the highest order – transforming ordinary dog poop into works of art.’

 

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Odd Nerdrum Shit Rock, 2001
‘Odd Nerdrum made the painting Shit Rock (2001), which shows three squatting naked women (reminding one of the three Graces) who sit with their backs toward the viewer and shit in a kind of canal reflecting their voluptuous buttocks. The art historian Kuspit, who dealt with this work in an article on perversion in art, made the following, rather cryptic comment on it: ‘Odd Nerdrum shows them defecating in what looks like homage to the sun. But the long stool looks like a penis, suggesting that Nerdrum also worships the phallic woman.’’

 

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Galen Olmsted Angel Shit, 2012
‘I make an analogous relationship between the ceramic extruder device and the sphincter, dragging the conventional notion of porcelain as pure down to porcelain as stain, as base material. My installations draw connections not from an obvious transposition of recognizable objects, rather I am interested in the formal results and the conceptual implications of the operation of the extruder, an industrial device that squeezes the porcelain into consistent tubular forms.’

 

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Wim Delvoye Cloaca, 2000 – 2007
‘When I started making the Cloaca machines [which reproduce digestion and defecation], a different type of industrial or scientific revolution was underway from the one that had fascinated Tinguely with its motors and new sense of mobility. The Cloaca were developed in a world in which germ technology, nanotechnology, and DNA had become the leading scientific reference points – in the age of Dolly the sheep, in other words.’

 

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Chris Ofili Shithead, 1993
‘A small and monstrous sculpture titled “Shithead” from 1993, made from human teeth and bunches of the artist’s hair affixed to a small clump of elephant dung, is, for my money, infinitely more disturbing than anything Ofili has made in the 21 years since.’

 

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Christopher Madden Dog Walk: dog poo bags, 2018
‘An art installation in the countryside that comments on the behaviour of some dog walkers. The work features an avenue of discarded dog pooh bags. The work was inspired by the experience of going on many walks in the countryside and coming across discarded black plastic dog poo bags: sometimes hidden, sometimes in full view. There’s a theory that the dog owners leave them there to be picked up on their return, however, many of them don’t do it. The work was created near St Ives, Cornwall.’

 

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David Attwood Human Shit, 2018
‘Does a clown’s shit smell funny? Mr Manzoni once told his son that his work was shit. Some time later, Piero put me in a can and sealed the lid. You couldn’t see me but you knew I was there. History has canonized me -and my being in that can, as a bit of a piss-take. The joke of a provocateur. But I suspect Piero’s shit was more about an intimate humility than anything else. And what’s so wrong with shit anyway? Within a humanistic framework, they say that shit is thought of as disgusting, abhorrent and uncouth, because, like porn, it reminds humankind of its inescapable animal nature. It reminds you of your animalness. I remember when Wallinger dressed up as an animal. A bear actually. He roamed the Neue Nationalgalerie by night, performing like an animal performs in their enclosure. A kind of self-appointed mascot to the city, but without obvious motive or campaign. What happens to mascots when they die? The shit costume is an obvious disguise, I know. It’s actually me in there, beneath the brown, meandering aimlessly, self-promoting, self-effacing, both there and not there, a walking smiling waving Artist’s shit. A mascot without obvious motive or campaign. And with what to do all day -don’t you have a job? Oh to be an animal!’

 

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Jean-Michel Basquiat Dog Shit in the Head of the Pope, 1981
wax crayon on paper mounted to card

 

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Kelly Heaton Shit Resistor, 2016
‘“Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want, and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.” Albert Einstein’

 

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Tala Madani Shit Moms, 2020
‘While the title refers to the colloquial term for women who in some way fail their job or role as a mother, it also literally designates her approach to the theme: smeared, somewhat shapeless female bodies appear as mother figures made of excrement.’

 

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Sam Goodman and Boris Lurie NO Sculpture (Shit Sculpture), 1964
‘Late one night recently, early in the morning in fact, I stopped over at Sam Goodman’s studio. I noticed he had been working on a sculpture which had been discarded in a corner of his studio. It came upon me at once that this was the sculpture that had to be done by someone at this particular time: expressed in artistic terms, it was the answer, in this spring of 1964 in this City of New York. This sculpture had to be done by Goodman only, nothing like it has ever been done before.

‘The artist, as if hopeless in the pursuit of a project so difficult, so full of explosive matter directed against its author himself, as well as the art-world around him, apparently had put the idea aside, in the realization of the hopelessness and dangers involved in its execution and presentation. I was blessed with an insight that permitted me to fathom the importance of that sculpture and to support and encourage the sculptor in the execution of his dangerous idea.

‘When I was imprisoned in a German concentration camp during the war, Jewish prisoners drowned a fellow Jew in the accumulated excrements of the latrine for collaboration with the enemy. The price of collaboration in art, too, is excremental suffocation.’

 

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Izabela Brudkiewicz Artist’s child shit, 2020
‘“Artist’s child shit”, April 2020 is a sculpture made of metal can with the child faeces content (120grams), paper and text, 8×35 cm. It is inspired by “Artist’s shit” by Piero Manzoni from 1961. This body of artwork is a starting point of an ongoing series of video re-enactments of master contemporary video art pieces with the addition of my children, created during the COVID- 19 pandemic, 2020. The series aims to explore how and to what extent the original context of the pieces is being changed by involving children.’

 

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Mike Kelley Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood, 1990
‘Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood depicts a naked man and woman (artists Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose) squatting over stuffed animals in sexual positions, creating what Kelley called a “fake pornographic” image. At the lower center of the photograph, the man uses what appears to be a toy rabbit to rub a dark substance against his buttocks. As art historian and critic Steve Baker explains, “the absence of color (in the photograph) increases the ambiguity of what is seen: the stuff smeared on the man’s body might be read as blood, feces, oil, paint, or something else entirely.” This ambiguity adds to the disturbing effect of the work as a whole, which marries its invocation of childhood purity with a depiction of adults displaying degraded, seemingly primitive and animalistic, behavior. For Kelley, it seems, the “innocence” of the title is a lie: “the stuffed animal is a pseudo-child, a cutified sexless being which represents the adult’s perfect model of a child – a neutered pet.”‘

 

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Leong Chengi Whose Shit, 2018
Oil on canvas

 

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Andres Serrano Shit, 2008
‘My intention in doing this project was to take a close-up look at shit. When, you know, shit is relatively small, to look at it close up, you have to magnify it a lot. When you get that close to something, you do abstract it. I was wise to see the depth of beauty and diversity in working with shit. And in that sense, I’m very pleased with the results. They even surpass what I expected.’

 

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Maurizio Cattelan Shit Insulated flask, 2021
Copper – Stainless steel

 

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James Ensor Alimentation doctrinaire, 1889
‘In the 1880s, the Belgian artist James Ensor made several works explicitly showing defecation and faeces. Well-known is his Alimentation Doctrinaire (1889), representing a series of authorities, such as a king, a general and a bishop, who sit on a wall and shit on the masses below them, while the sun above is vomiting. According to Canning, this piece was Ensor’s ‘most political statement and his most direct use of scatological imagery’.’

 

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Zhu Cheng Venus de Milo, 2010
‘A 24-inch high replica of the Venus de Milo, sculpted from giant panda dung, has sold for £30,000 to a prominent Swiss art collector. Zhu Cheng, a Chinese sculptor, created the statue with the help of nine 11 year-old art students in the central Chinese city of Chengdu, the home of a giant panda breeding centre. According to the Henan Business Daily newspaper, it has already been purchased by Uli Sigg, a Swiss businessman who owns the world’s largest collection of contemporary Chinese art, for 300,000 yuan (£ 30,000). Mr Sigg, who was formerly the Swiss ambassador to China, told the Henan Business Daily that he thought the statue was “full of creativity and innovation”.’

 

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GG Allin Himself, 1974 – 1993
‘After his release from prison, Allin skipped parole to go on another tour, footage of which was shot for Todd Phillips’s documentary Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies. The film contained graphic scenes from a performance Allin gave at the rock club Space at Chase in Manhattan’s East Village. A heavily intoxicated Allin stripped naked, defecated on the floor, wiped his feces on himself and threw feces into the audience. He also threw beer bottles, breaking a woman’s nose, and assaulted several other people in the crowd.’

GG Allin – Shit on My Prick

 

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Mattel Flushin’ Frenzy Game (2018)
‘Players take turns pushing down the toilet handle to roll the die. The number rolled indicates how many times you must plunge the toilet. Push down on the plunger, and if nothing happens, it’s the next player’s turn. But if “Pooper” launches from the tank, quickly try and grab him. All players can try and do this! The first player to grab “Pooper” earns one token. If the player grabs “Pooper” out of the air, he or she earns two tokens. Reload “Pooper” and continue playing until all the tokens have been collected. Then, the player who has the most wins.’

 

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Unknown Caganers, ?
‘The caganer is a small figurine of a Catalan peasant (identifiable by his red cap, called a barretina) who is shown squatting, his trousers around his knees, and a piece of swirling excrement on the ground beneath him. The caganer has a highly specific purpose — and it’s probably the last thing you’d think a pooping figurine would be associated with. Far from being offensive, the caganer is a mainstay of Catalan nativity scenes, usually appearing just outside of the manger.

‘The traditional caganer is not merely humorous, nor is it blasphemous, but rather it symbolizes a reciprocal relationship with the earth: through the act of excreting, the Catalan peasant nourishes the soil that, in turn, provides for him. It makes sense that such a figure would appear in Miró’s celebration of Catalan farm life. Catalan Landscape, in particular, is teeming with symbolism relating to fertilization and rebirth (the egg, the sun, the hunter’s oversized genitalia and act of ejaculation or urination). The caganer also characterizes our common humanity: everybody poops. This biological function is performed by all, no matter your class or social standing, and pooping cannot be ignored (even, in the case of the caganer, in the presence of Christ!).’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** The Black Prince, Howdy, G. My weekend doesn’t look too wildly exciting. Probably figuring out how best to get a vaccine as an American visitor. And a lot of file deleting. Sounds great, right? Oh, dialogue in fiction is what they mean? Well, you can sort that, right? Writing good dialogue can be hard though. The hardest part even sometimes. But also the most fun too. Weird. Enjoy your hopefully glorious weekend! ** Misanthrope, Always nice to know I have targeted your alley. I don’t think it’s quite as easy to get the vax here, but I’ll find out. My weekend looks to be pretty blah, but … hey. ‘There’s a lot of corrosion around the negative terminal’: Kind of a nice sentence. And, like so many nice sentences, full of misery, sorry. Good, good, about the seeming relative ease of getting your mom re-perfected. I hope by Monday you’ll be ready to play the solo from ‘Baby’s On Fire’ on that guitar of yours. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha. Nice Genet story there. Thanks, bud. ** Bill, Me too, re: Dali. I’ve often thought how much more exciting the world would look without Dalis and *ducks to avoid brickbats* Keith Harings hanging all over it. But I too liked his Lautreamont doodles while thinking ‘do they really need to be there?’ Well, a Coil oral history sounds like something of actual interest and need. A book photos from one of their concerts? Err, not so much. ** Dominik, Hi, D!!! Ah, I do have to say that when writers or filmmakers or whoever describe their work as Lynchian that’s usually a signal to dread their work. But I’m sure you fixed theirs if it needed it. Oh, to be a rabbit on Rabbit Island. Sounds dreamy. Sigh. Love eating a bar of spectacularly good dark chocolate and smiling and saying ‘yum’ after every bite, G. ** T, Hi. It’s trippy to think I was making this blog when you were out there all miniaturised with your beautiful locks and hairless upper lip doing whatever 6 year olds do. Not looking at weird blogs, for one thing. Ah, life! Yeah, fuck that special edition. When you just see the wooden suitcase, it’s exciting, and your mind goes wild, but then it’s opened and there’s just this fucking book inside. What a gyp. Congrats on the haircut. Condolences to your presumably still beautiful locks. Mostly, re: yesterday. One friend had to postpone our get together, but the other one didn’t, and I bought books, and I walked, and I ate a Chipotle burrito plus a big bag of chips and guacamole, and the result was a satisfactory level of satisfaction. This weekend should be a challenge on the dazzling front for me, but … hey, I’m alive, it’s Paris, who knows. I hope your weekend is intersected with many encroaching enticements. ** Keegan Swenson, Hi, Keegan Swenson! Welcome! Always –well, okay, usually — happy when my blog fucks up interesting people, so thank you. Oh, you might be able to get a galley. I’m not sure if they exist yet. Probably? Or a pdf. Hm. Try to writing to the promo guy Paul Oliver at Soho Press — poliver@sohopress.com — and tell him you want to write about the novel and need a pdf or galley, and that should work. Or get back to me if it doesn’t. Thanks, Keegan. Please come back any old time. ** Steve Erickson, Yep, I’m with you. That Goldie would end up remixing Ed Sheeran is just grim and I suppose not all that surprising at this point. I don’t know exactly how to apply for the vax yet. That’s my weekend goal. It’s very confusing here. And me being a non-citizen makes it doubly so. ** Brian, Hi, Brian! I think, hm, maybe long prose-poem is the most accurate characterisation of the Lautreamont? Yeah, I always get the feeling that putting the ‘the’ in front of ‘Coop’ is supposed to be a show of respect or something but it doesn’t feel that way. Watching ‘In a Year of 13 Moons’ when you’re feeling depressed is pretty intense. Further synchronicity alert: ‘In a Year of 13 Moons’ is my very favorite Fassbinder film and an all-time fave film of mine in general as well. I think treasure seems an accurate assessment of your Friday. No, like I said above somewhere in so many words, I just have ‘stuff I need to do and don’t want to do’ ahead this weekend so far. But if I see any nooks and crannies, I’ll scour them. I hope your weekend flies, sails, and inches by all at the same time. Love to you in return, fine sir. ** Okay. This weekend I give you ‘Shits’, the sequel to a post I did here a couple of years ago called ‘Shit’. And before you ask me why in the world I thought ‘Shit’ needed a sequel, I honestly have no idea. See you on Monday.