Prophetic Shit
How techno-fecal art predicts the future
Art comes from a number of places including the body aka the deep: a boundaryless space plugged into a vast database of knowledge; a library of Babel. Strange signals coming from inside this database are felt by the imagination and turned into art.
In theory, the deep can predict the future because this sub-self assembles the facts ahead of the rational mind who can hardly keep up or focus on anything at all. For many examples of how artistic visions prefigure scientific and religious ones, see Leonard Shlain’s Art and Physics or Thompson and Abraham’s The Geometry of Angels.
Look at avant-garde art today: some of it incorporates human shit. How is ‘shit art’ prophetic?
Robert Keagon: “The subject of one stage of consciousness becomes the object for the subject of the next.”
Marshal McLuhan: “The previous environment becomes a work of art for the new invisible environment.”
Belgian artist Wim Delvoye creates “biological machines” called Cloaca that physically turn fast food into feces that is collected, packaged, and sold as art. “Each of these Cybershits are unique pieces of art.” At first they sold for $1,000 each. Now they go for more.
The word cloaca refers to a hole and “purifier”, literally “sewer,” as in the Cloaca Maxima “Great Sewer” in Rome—named for the local goddess, Cloacina, an avatar of Venus. It refers to the “anus” of a bird, reptile, and amphibian, who do everything out of one hole (technically not an anus).
In some exhibitions, Cloaca is installed next to stained-glass windows, and we get the sense of shit-machines existing with divinity. The art gallery feels like a church and a scientific laboratory.
Machines have always collaborated with humans to produce art. Art critic and professor Gal Nissim (2023) thinks a lot of shit art today reconsiders humans as “machines that produce waste.” Are we machines? Or is she calling art, shit? Cloaca’s logo looks like a combination of Coca Cola and Ford, which further leads the imagination into factory lines, conveyer belts, and machines that duplicate human activities.
How is this prophetic?The installation brings together many ideas reflecting the world today, right now.
“Performing feces, being shit…” Nissim says new art tilts towards “interspecies co-creation,” and so, if it’s prophetic, it’s saying prepare for interspecies co-creation! Get ready for a post-human, different-than-human, more-than-human collaboration—with bacteria? With A.I.? With aliens?
It’s a report on the now that anticipates the future. Delvoye thinks Cloaca is about bio-engineering and the cyborgization of the human body. Could it be an illustration of cultural historian William Irwin’s Thomspon’s prediction:
The defining element of our new culture will be a symbiosis between art, science, and the dark and fluid movement of all we choose to ignore as pollution and excrement.
Two more artistic examples: John Todd and his New Alchemy Institute had the “instinctive genius,” according to Thompson, to create living machines that “specialize in turning “waste” into a resource.” We should note that scientists have already developed jet fuel made entirely from human poop, calling it “bio-crude.”
Then there is Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr, who created The Tissue, Culture & Art Project in 1996. They explain that,
In times of ecological crisis, there is a vital need for seriously playful artistic interventions.
One work is titled Sunlight Soil Shit (De)Cycle (3SDC), a “compostcubator” that uses horse shit to provide the necessary heat to maintain a small flask of disembodied mouse cells. It’s a “messy, biological device,” whose pyramidal structure looks like a temple and bomb shelter smack dab in the middle of an art gallery. It’s an assemblage of different species, and a comment on lab meat and “cellular agriculture” — growing animal products without the animal.
‘Shit art’ has been around for a long time, but in the 1960s it took a distinctly mechanical turn. Piero Manzoni was the first to can, label, and sell his own feces, in order to, as he put it, “tap mythological sources and realize authentic and universal values.” He tautologically called his project Merda d’artista/Artist’s Shit, and successfully challenged the idea that “everything the artist creates is art.” What’s more personal that one’s own feces? His project is the inevitable evolution of Duchamp and Dada, and also characterized the very spirit of capitalism: turn nature into a commodity to sell as art.
There are 90 cans, each exactly 30 grams, sold for the price of gold at the time. (There, he’s tapping myth and alchemy). Now they’re sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars each; one of the 10 most expensive feces in the world. And yet, do Manzoni’s cans even contain what they advertise? How would we know? We’d have to ruin the sculpture to find out. Alas, we’ll never know: Schrödinger’s scat!
Does it matter? One of Manzoni’s cans was “accidentally” opened, and it turned out to be filled with plaster, (full of shit). Are we outraged!? Do we want our money back? They’re still signed, one-of-a-kind readymade sculptures and ephemera from art history. Priceless, really. Do they lose their aura, or gain a new one? (This was before Worhol made his soup cans (1962) and Brillo boxes (1964)).
Be it plaster or poop, he turned it to gold. Manzoni had the “Midas touch,” explains Gerald Silk (1993), he was a magician, and died shortly thereafter, in 1963, never seeing how influential his cans would become. Artist’s Shit echoes into the art world today in many ways: Influencers sell their farts and other excretions, and someone by the name of White Male Artist makes $HT Coins, NFTs, where they eat the diet of a famous artist and then can it like Manzoni. Delvoye’s machanical shits are also a direct nod to Manzoni.
Conclusions
In these artworks, waste is anointed, shit alchemized. Artists take a ubiquitous, behind-the-scenes actor and shine a light onto them. It’s an articulation of how “the previous environment becomes a work of art for the new invisible environment.”
What is this techno-shit heralding? What is this new invisible environment? After looking into all the interdisciplinary data available, artist-scientist Michael Garfield concludes that “the future is disgusting” — and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing! All art is a report from the deep, a report on the now that anticipates and precipitates advances in science, technology, and religion. We’re integrating our shadow. We’re confronting our demons. We’re getting dirty.
Cloaca and other techno-fecal artworks at the leading edge are divining a future where there’s a reconning. Humans will have to finally deal with our shit—physical, psychological, and spiritual—we’ll have to “taste the waste,” turn it to “gold”—or be doomed.