Ever notice how it's the little things in life that amuse us so much? More to the point, ever notice how it's the silly little idiocies in life that amuse us more than anything else? Well, this is not as much ''the little blog that could'' as it is ''the blog that enjoys going up the down escalator in your local mall.'' Will it have anything of real importance? No, probably not. But enjoy the ride never the less!

 
The Blog of Eternal Stench

Every now and again, I come across an article that leaves me with a wry smirk on my face for the remainder of the day, and wondering to myself how it is I didn’t burst out giggling incessantly while reading the article.

A few months ago, I came across an article about a visiting work of art in Toronto, and when you get right down to it, it is the world’s first fully-flatulent artwork. It digests food too, but with the growing paranoia of how machines may one ay take over the world, it’s probably safer and more politically correct to focus on the fart jokes.

I have been meaning to put this down for posterity in my little bit of nowhere for a while, but never got the chance. Well, wait no more! It was an article written by Toronto Star visual arts critic Peter Goddard, and dates back to March 25th, 2004. I present this to you now, without edit or abridgement:


POWER PLANT ART MIGHT RAISE A STINK

Digestive installation eats twice a day.
“Cloaca” created by Belgian Wim Delvoye

Unlike most artists, when Wim Delvoye produces a piece of crap, he’s thrilled about it. Excrement is like love, says the Belgian artist from his home in Ghent. “Like love, shit has the power to transcend race and gender. Like love, shit has the same colour. Even as a child, I thought about the unifying power of shit.”

Without doubt, Delvoye has carried through on his childhood dreams. He’s become the wizard of human waste, the maestro of merde. The “Wim Delvoye: Cloaca - New and Improved (2001),” installation at Harbourfront’sThe Power Plant starting Saturday, is nothing more or less than the world’s first free-standing man-made digestive system.

(The cloaca is that orifice found on reptiles, birds, and some fish that provides an exit mechanism for both faeces and urine.)

In fact, Cloaca looks like something from a high school science fair, a pristine collection of glass vats holding enzymes, and polished metal tubing - an “engaging sculpture” is Harbourfront’s demure description - that leaves one wondering why it’s not at the Ontario Science Centre.

“We want to make it as transparent as possible,” says Delvoye. “If there’s an electric cable, we want you to see the electric cable. We can control the machine from the computer in our studio.”

On second thought, maybe the Science Centre wouldn’t work. Objects there tend to have some sort of utilitarian value while Delvoye is proud that Cloaca has no use whatsoever. “What it actually produces is not shit by meaning,” assures pro-Cloaca critic Gerardo Mosquera. “And at the very end its meaning is its own existence.”

“But if it has meaning, it has no useful function,” Delvoye says. “From a practical point of view it has no use. I feel more like a priest for Cloaca, than someone who (uses it to) ask questions. It’s Cloaca that poses the questions.”

So don’t underestimate Cloaca, aesthetically or gastronomically. It was designed to handle the best lunches the Lakeside Cage and other lakeside restaurants can stuff down its hungry tubes. Following a twice-daily hearty meal, Cloaca digests and excretes waste on a conveyor belt once every afternoon. The offal is scooped and flushed by Power Plant attendants.

The Muhka Museum in Antwerp sold Cloaca doo in 200-gram bottles. Unfortunately, the installation came down with flatulence and began stinking up the joint. The staff revolted and went on strike. A section of the roof had to be opened, “to let the gasses out,” said a museum spokesperson.

Before summoning up outrage over Cloaca - a streamlined edition of an earlier 2000 version that cemented Delvoye’s reputation - one needs to be warned that it comes wrapped in much serious critical commentary. Several paragraphs from Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, introduce the Cloaca catalogue. (A stylized Mr. Clean on its blue cover links us to Delvoye’s interest in playing with logos and branding.)

“You can’t claim that shit is immoral after all!” thunders Kundera.

Ever since the heyday of such Renaissance types as Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, poop has had a moral presence in painting, usually associated with satire. More recently, there’s been the body-as-waste-as-art of German anatomist Gunther von Hagens and his shows of preserved bodies - including Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917) otherwise a rather average urinal.

Poop is a wake-up call for a world given over to perfumed tastes. If you exclude the current generation of body-juicing artists, Cloaca’s true mentor is Piero Manzoni, who in the early 1960s sold cans labelled Merda d’Artista supposedly containing his own bodily waste. (In an earlier work, Delvoye created a series of mosaics featuring tastefully arranged images of human faeces, reportedly his own, too.)

Like Manzoni, Delvoye wants to demystify art by going to extreme lengths to democratize it. To this end, Cloaca is as much about art politics - and politics in general - as about art. “What’s been really interesting over the years is how cultures react differently to the machine,” says Delvoye. “In America, there were always health concerns, like what if children get infected by some strange bacteria. In Germany, which has perhaps a more protestant view of things, it was about the food.

“They were concerned that Cloaca wasn’t concerned about the Third World and people dying from hunger. But I think that Cloaca is a machine that can be understood by any culture, and by people who don’t participate in our canon of Western culture. Lower classes can enjoy it. It’s a machine that poos. That’s very universal.”


But now you all are probably either shaking your heads in bewilderment, or else smirking and wondering how you didn’t manage to burst into giggles during this article. I am of the thought that Goddard, who wrote the article, despite sounding very lofty in his critique and analysis, had his tongue firmly in cheek throughout the entire writing of it.

Admittedly there’s not a lot I can comment on without sounding silly, childish or just plain stating the obvious. Although I find it disheartening to know that upper classes of society just can’t appreciate a good fart joke or “machine that poos” the way the lower classes can. I suppose for all that shit has done for is, it still (pardon the phrasing) has a long way to go.

I also wonder how many of those “Religions of the World” shirts that sum up their basic tenet with the use of shit (ie, Taoism - shit happens; Rastafarianiasm - “Let’s smoke dat shit!”) were sold courtesy of Cloaca’s hype.

In a world where shit now poses the questions, brings people and cultures together in hitherto unimagined ways, and asks us to define the very meaning of morality and our existence, I suppose we should be now asking not what our shit can do for us, but what we can do for our shit. Would the answer be “to flush it”, or did I (alas) just state the obvious?


Today’s Moment of Zen: “Even as a child, I thought about the unifying power of shit.”

posted by Phillip at 7:37 AM