"Shit" at Baron/Boisante - various artists - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, March, 1997 by Susan Hapgood

It's a good thing this show didn't smell, because no one would have stepped in the door if it had. In the small, one-room gallery was a dense concentration of scatological art dating from 1961 to the present. Some of it was made from the real thing and some was replicated; all of it was produced as art. The classics--Piero Manzoni's cans of Merda d'artista, George Maciunas's compartmentalized inventory of excrements, Mike Kelley's drawings of fecal ooze, among others--were on view along with lesser-known but equally irreverent works by a who's who of contemporary artists including Bruce Nauman, Gilbert & George, Dieter Rot, Tony Tasset, Rosemarie Trockel and Paul McCarthy. The show was accompanied by a poster with witty essays by Ingrid Schaffner and Therese Cafaro. Formal comparison was beside the point; it was the transgressive approach that counted. Although the use of shit in art may not be quite as outrageous as it was a hundred years ago, when Alfred Jarry's play, Ubu roi, opened with an actor proclaiming "Merdre," the motivating impulse probably remains the same. According to the art historian Gabriel Weisberg, an expert on scatological art, there was a desire to shock the audience, to achieve artistic freedom by shattering boundaries set by traditional standards of taste and decorum.

When shit is made into an object or an image, there is a challenge to the collectible commodity. One of the best, and most vile, examples was a work by nearly forgotten artists from the '60s, Sam Goodman and Boris Lurie, whose pile of excrement made of extruded, painted plaster was among the more realistic works on exhibit. Not sumrisingly, you don't see many of these around, even though there was a whole show of them in 1964. If you have a hankering for multiples, you can buy McCarthy's beautifully packaged set of 10 different piles of shit made from enamel on cast aluminum.

Predictable allusions to Freudian theory abound, especially in sculptures by Rot, tasset and Raimund von Luckwaldis. It is hilarious to learn that Rot made 200 sculptures like the pair on view by repeatedly pressing animal dung into a quaint chocolate Easter-Bunny mold. One imagines the artist deriving therapeutic satisfaction from manipulating the stuff, while simultaneously making literal the Freudian equation of shit and money. Tasset modeled the 3-foot-wide coiled brown form that sat in the middle of the gallery's floor. It looks like something a giant four-year-old would eagerly produce from a 50-pound lump of clay, except this big kid's creation has been cast in iron for posterity. Von Luckwaldis fashioned a softer, smoother version: a perky, Disney-like turd on a pedestal that holds up a mirror to the viewer, forcing a bit of self-assessment in the face of his taboo humor. Nearly all of these artists are indebted to Manzoni, the master of turning shit into gold. He made the analogy explicit in 1961 by pricing 90 cans of his own excrement by weight, according to the market value of the precious metal.

Other approaches to the subject were evident as well. In Maciunas's erudite Excreta Fluxorum or in Rachel Harrison and Jonathan Horowitz's Piss and Shit Chart, which records the time and duration of these artists' bodily functions, there is a mock-clinical accuracy which seems to contradict the involuntary organic excretion of waste by animals. Counterpointing all this naughty humor, this play of civilized versus uncivilized, clean versus dirty, is the fact that shit is common to us all. And in some non-Western cultures, it's even stigma-free. Not Vital, who is fascinated by the positive associations other cultures have with animal dung, is at work on a project that involves collecting dried cowpats from the fields of his native Switzerland and having them cast in bronze. He plans to make 1,000 of these, and to channel the proceeds from their sale to fund the creation of a hospital for burn victims in Nepal. Vital says his whole project is about transformation.

Scatological art is a topic so full of potential that it was the subject of a 1990 College Art Association symposium and an issue of their Art Journal two years later. The overriding impression one took away from this show was that shit remains irresistible subject matter for artists who wish to challenge good taste and stuffy attitudes. One can only hope that some institution will have the courage to expand upon this excellent small survey of 24 works.