Editor's note: Some readers might be offended by the following column.
Money talks and BS walks, they say, but in Northern California, it just squats.
I haven't seen the particular exhibit yet, but a Jan. 8 Associated Press report by Sarah Andrews had the straight poop, noting that "Poetical Gut" by Spanish artist Antoni Miralda "features ceramic figurines of the pope, nuns and angels with their pants down, squatting over their bowel movements."
The work, on display at Napa Valley's Copia, a new tax-supported food, wine and arts museum, also sports statuettes of Santa Claus, Popeye and Fidel Castro "in similar poses," according to the Jan. 5 Los Angeles Times.
"Poetical Gut" is part of the larger exhibition "Active Ingredients," which, claims Copia Director Peggy A. Loar, provides "an intimate look at today’s cutting-edge art" and "showcases how some of the world’s leading contemporary artists address society’s fascination with the culture of food and issues of social responsibility in a world rife with both hunger and abundance."
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Catholics aren't buying it, though. Or rather – thanks to tax dollars siphoned out of their wallets – they are.
"Catholics in the state of California are paying to have their religion depicted in a way that's offensive," Patrick Scully, a spokesman for the Catholic League of Religious and Civil Rights, told the Times. Perhaps seeing shades of Chris Ofili's dreck-bedecked portrait of the Virgin Mary, haloed by images of vaginas clipped from porn magazines, Scully added, "This exhibit is insulting. It's gratuitous. It's unnecessary."
But far from gratuitous, explains Loar, "These figurines symbolize the cycle of eating and fertilization of the earth, which is a requisite for future existence."
Maybe, but taken with modern art's wild fetish for feces, it's difficult to see.
Going back, most notably, to Salvador Dal?, painter of such works as "The Great Masturbator" and "Sodomy of a Skull with a Grand Piano," coprophilia and muck-meddling has been a reoccurring theme. Dal?, for instance, struggled greatly to get the poop smear on the main foreground figure in his "Lugubrious Game" "just right," so it would look as if the guy had (sur)really soiled himself.
In his autobiography, Dal? highlights the film (it is a rule that "artsy" flicks must be called films, not movies) "L'Age d'Or," which features detailed scenes of a defecating woman. He also, among other examples of excretory embellishment, includes the unpleasant detail of his preparatory step before courting his wife – namely rubbing himself down with an ointment of boiled fish glue and goat goop.
In reviewing the Dal? autobiography, George Orwell said plainly, "It is a book that stinks." What Orwell might not have imagined is that the stench would hang so long in the air.
Slate's Jodi Kantor recalls a 1997 exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum, "which included ... videos of a half-naked man dressed as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer frolicking with nude female 'elves' as they defecated, stirred the excrement up with chocolate, and ate it."
Strangely fond of elephantflop, Ofili once filled a large brown paper sack full of Dumbo dung and put it on a display pedestal with the title "Bag of S---" and in 1998 Ofili won the prestigious Turner Prize for a painting called "The Adoration of Captain S--- and the Legend of the Black Star Part Two," which features an obese black pop star bursting out of his sparkly suit.
It is these sorts of images – hyped in the press – that form the context in which we evaluate "art" like "Poetic Gut."
The irony in the current controversy is that the figurines find their roots in 18th century Spanish Catholicism when Catalonians would stash caganers, as the squatting statuettes are called, in nativity scenes.
"It's really only a game," said Josep Maria Joan, director of the Toy Museum of Catalonia. "The caganer is not supposed to steal Jesus' spotlight in the manger scene." The idea is that the figures symbolize fertility and good fortune. As Joan told Andrews, "it's logical that when traditions like this are exported they can be misunderstood."
I don't know … you think mixing feces and faith might create misunderstanding? Maybe just a little bit. It's clear that reverence isn't always the motive for fashioning dung-dropping dolls, as Andrews reports Catalonians have begun making Osama bin Laden caganers. In America, where there is a near-constant irreverence in the art world for anything Catholic, heaping hooey on top of existing disrespect is almost guaranteed to produce ticked-off Christians.
"The fact is you won't see any museum showing an American Indian defecating because those images are important to people and they're sensitive," said Scully. "But when it comes to Catholic imagery, it's open season for the arts community."
Just think: My young son's dirty diapers could be tossed one by one, or I could save them up until I had enough to make an 18-foot statue of the pope, "Poopy Pontiff," and win fame, fortune and the accolades of fellow artists like … Chris Ofili? Scratch that idea.
Said Orwell of Dal? – an observation that applies well to the current bevy of scat-slingers and dung dabblers – "Mere moral disapproval does not get one any further [than Marxist criticisms that such art is just 'bourgeois decadence']. But neither ought one to pretend in the name of 'detachment,' that such pictures … are morally neutral. They are diseased and disgusting, and any investigation ought to start out from that point."
Related columns:
Dung near art: Analyzing
modern art's fecal fetish.
Dung near art, part 2:
Giuliani's trouble for financially protesting Ofili - whose name, you'll
notice, curiously resembles offal.