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Fecal Art. EWWWWWWWWW
Jun. 20th, 2003 11:15 amMany types of feces featured in exhibit
Canadian Press
Jun. 18, 2003 01:10 PM
OTTAWA - The final frontier in contemporary art, so it would appear, has been behind us all along.
From a wooden Brian Mulroney statue holding a turd in his outstretched hand, through performance video of actors frozen over public toilets, genuine soiled trousers, freeze-dried dung and cow pie clocks from Utah, an exhibition of all things excremental tackles art's "last remaining taboo," according to curator Stefan St-Laurent.
Scatalogue: 30 Years of Crap in Contemporary Art, opens Thursday at Ottawa's SAW Gallery and St-Laurent hopes the five-week show shakes Canada's art community to its very bowels.
"It's certainly a unique show in Canada," said the Moncton-born performance artist, who came up with the idea along with his twin brother Jason to celebrate the gallery's 30th anniversary.
The only other art exhibition focusing on the fecal that St-Laurent knows of was staged in San Francisco in the late 1980s.
"We started talking about how conservative even artist-run centers were becoming today," the 29-year-old said Wednesday at the basement gallery in an old downtown Ottawa jailhouse.
"In most cases, if you go to an artist-run centre, go to a public museum or go to a commercial gallery, you can come into contact with the same artists. We came up with this idea because we were thinking: what's the last remaining taboo in contemporary art?"
Even before it opened, the show attracted controversy.
The gallery receives 75 percent of its funding from the Ottawa city, Ontario and federal governments and Canadian Alliance MP Chuck Strahl called it a waste of taxpayers' money. He later, however, responded to St-Laurent's invitation to the opening with a kindly note saying he was just having some sport.
Nonetheless, said the curator, "it's always nerve-wracking to have a wide national debate on the validity of art and state funding."
And while he clearly courts controversy, St-Laurent said it has more to do with feces than finances.
"I think it's about certain people who live in this western society who can't really deal with their own excrement."
The exhibits range from the overtly political to the simply gross.
The Mulroney piece, carved by aboriginal artist Ron Noganosh of Ottawa in 1990, is entitled The Same Old Shit and needs little explanation.
More challenging is the pop art of Gilbert and George of London, whose 1983 poster features giant, bright yellow poops floating above the two gay artists - whose open mouths are also bright yellow.
More obscure yet is David Diviney's Moon Floss, a two-legged chair wearing a pair of white men's briefs that are filled to overflowing with brown material. The Lethbridge, Alta., artist's work is supposed to say something about alcohol abuse.
Then there are the actual khaki pants worn by Calgary's Mikiki and Don Simmons, a pair of performance artists who thought they'd make a statement by visiting the staid Glenbow Museum after eating a mess of laxatives. Things quickly got out of control and the ensuing debacle, St-Laurent recounts with post-modern irony, was deeply humiliating for the artists.
In fact, there's a comical quality to the exhibition, with art imitating life imitating art imitating life.
One of the stated themes of the show is to expose the "commodification of contemporary art."
Yet among the three rooms in the gallery is the Scatalogue Boutique, where patrons can buy T-shirts, cow pie clocks ($30), monogrammed toilet paper ($10 a roll), and postcards - including one called Alberta Flame, showing a Mountie on horseback beside a giant dungpile in the Centennial Flame with the Parliament buildings and Peace Tower in the background.
"We were curious to see if we could build this exhibition that would draw in a larger public through this controversy, have them come in and discover this work for themselves and, finally, see how this really controversial exhibition is really about the human condition," said St-Laurent.
"I think that will knock people over."
Canadian Press
Jun. 18, 2003 01:10 PM
OTTAWA - The final frontier in contemporary art, so it would appear, has been behind us all along.
From a wooden Brian Mulroney statue holding a turd in his outstretched hand, through performance video of actors frozen over public toilets, genuine soiled trousers, freeze-dried dung and cow pie clocks from Utah, an exhibition of all things excremental tackles art's "last remaining taboo," according to curator Stefan St-Laurent.
Scatalogue: 30 Years of Crap in Contemporary Art, opens Thursday at Ottawa's SAW Gallery and St-Laurent hopes the five-week show shakes Canada's art community to its very bowels.
"It's certainly a unique show in Canada," said the Moncton-born performance artist, who came up with the idea along with his twin brother Jason to celebrate the gallery's 30th anniversary.
The only other art exhibition focusing on the fecal that St-Laurent knows of was staged in San Francisco in the late 1980s.
"We started talking about how conservative even artist-run centers were becoming today," the 29-year-old said Wednesday at the basement gallery in an old downtown Ottawa jailhouse.
"In most cases, if you go to an artist-run centre, go to a public museum or go to a commercial gallery, you can come into contact with the same artists. We came up with this idea because we were thinking: what's the last remaining taboo in contemporary art?"
Even before it opened, the show attracted controversy.
The gallery receives 75 percent of its funding from the Ottawa city, Ontario and federal governments and Canadian Alliance MP Chuck Strahl called it a waste of taxpayers' money. He later, however, responded to St-Laurent's invitation to the opening with a kindly note saying he was just having some sport.
Nonetheless, said the curator, "it's always nerve-wracking to have a wide national debate on the validity of art and state funding."
And while he clearly courts controversy, St-Laurent said it has more to do with feces than finances.
"I think it's about certain people who live in this western society who can't really deal with their own excrement."
The exhibits range from the overtly political to the simply gross.
The Mulroney piece, carved by aboriginal artist Ron Noganosh of Ottawa in 1990, is entitled The Same Old Shit and needs little explanation.
More challenging is the pop art of Gilbert and George of London, whose 1983 poster features giant, bright yellow poops floating above the two gay artists - whose open mouths are also bright yellow.
More obscure yet is David Diviney's Moon Floss, a two-legged chair wearing a pair of white men's briefs that are filled to overflowing with brown material. The Lethbridge, Alta., artist's work is supposed to say something about alcohol abuse.
Then there are the actual khaki pants worn by Calgary's Mikiki and Don Simmons, a pair of performance artists who thought they'd make a statement by visiting the staid Glenbow Museum after eating a mess of laxatives. Things quickly got out of control and the ensuing debacle, St-Laurent recounts with post-modern irony, was deeply humiliating for the artists.
In fact, there's a comical quality to the exhibition, with art imitating life imitating art imitating life.
One of the stated themes of the show is to expose the "commodification of contemporary art."
Yet among the three rooms in the gallery is the Scatalogue Boutique, where patrons can buy T-shirts, cow pie clocks ($30), monogrammed toilet paper ($10 a roll), and postcards - including one called Alberta Flame, showing a Mountie on horseback beside a giant dungpile in the Centennial Flame with the Parliament buildings and Peace Tower in the background.
"We were curious to see if we could build this exhibition that would draw in a larger public through this controversy, have them come in and discover this work for themselves and, finally, see how this really controversial exhibition is really about the human condition," said St-Laurent.
"I think that will knock people over."
