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Dada Project


Fountain (1917)

After done the research of Dada movement and specifically focusing on Duchamp. I am profoundly inspired by Duchamp's Fountain because this work piece conversely overturn the traditional aesthetics and humourously left a message underlying the ceramic urinal. I am really admiring his witty idea of transforming how a daily object presents to let audience review its shape and form.


Based on this work, I am starting to re-think the relation between excretion and urinal (or toilet), because it metaphorically displaying a process of returning back a part of body to the nature, miniaturing the life process.


Therefore, I start to plan a project that revolving this idea and develop it through research.


Excretion

Excrement


Piero Manzoni/ Mocking



The first thing come into my mind is Piero Manzoni's (1933-1963) representative work, Artist's Shit (1961). He was an Italian artist who devoting on experimenting the works that relating to human's body production. I remember that he claimed that he canned his excrement in the cans and through the research of him, his works are actually attracting me.


Merda d'artista (1961)



Artist's Shit

Contents 30 gr net

Freshly preserved

Produced and tinned

in May 1961




This work was inspired by Duchamp's readymades, also might relate with his father, who owned a cannery, used to tell him, "Your work is shit."


In December 1961, Manzoni wrote in a letter to his friend Ben Vautier:

“I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in tins. The fingerprint is the only sign of the personality that can be accepted: if collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there's he artist's own shit, that is really his."


Bernard Bazile, Boîte ou­ver­te de Pie­ro Man­zo­ni, 1989

No one really know what did Manzoni put into the can (though Bernard Bazile did reveal one, the matter within the can was unidentifiable), and this makes the work seems more mysterious. Moreover, in my opinion, this work would be more ironic on puncturing what "art" is and the market that judging the value of an artwork.




Meanwhile, Manzoni also did a work called "Artist's Breath"( Fiato d'artista,1960), which also restate the value of the artist's body production.


"(Made the Artist's Shit is) an act of defiant mockery of the art world, artists, and art criticism."

Enrico Baj


Sen Dada/ Protest



I type up "urine art"and googled it after researched Manzoni's works, and the name, Sen Dada, really draw my attention, because I still remember the first time that I searched "contemporary art"when I was in middle school, his name was showing at the first line of the page. The encyclopedia in China regards him as the beginner of Chinese contemporary art, though it's hardly to find a formal introduction of him in Google. However, I found that he did a performance art and filmed as a three-hour video called, Pee On Han Dynasty Stones and Nuclear Islands (2012), which pushed the action of urinating link with the social background.



At a year after Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, Sen Dada tended to against the nuclear pollution with this artwork. He stood on the mountain that nearby the Tianwan Nuclear Power Plant and Chuanshan Nuclear Power Plant, which built in his hometown. However, both environment and geological feature were drastically changed after the government started running the plants.

Air pollution and chemical pollution entirely overturned this natural area to a disaster.

Also, he pictured the fairly undisguised process of this performance. As for me, the words like "blood", "eroticism", and "violence"are relating to the picture.

The Han Dynasty Stone

The artist also carried a cross, which may implying the suffering and pain that the people who living in this place were tolerating. As a man who born here, he used peeing to protest for returning the place back to nature. At this point, the action of peeing contains the personal emotion and social meaning. Hence, an action would be rather impacted in a certain milieu. Linking with social event would exactly change the meaning.



"I Poop You"

There is a report I also find in the Internet. In 2013, an exhibition called "I Poop You" was exhibited in San Francisco Bay Area and there are some pictures of funny artworks.



I think these works are inherited the element of Dada as well. The artist used the readymade such as photographs and toilet paper roll and slightly add or change them to create humour.



Gelatin (Gelitin)/ Confront



The Vienna-based art group, Gelitin, made four giant sculpture of turd in the exhibition, "Gelatin: Vorm - Fellows - Attitude", at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.


Gelitin, Vorm - Fellows - Attitude, 2018

"Their form of performance-based, interactive art has roots in the 1960s Situationist and Fluxus movements", said the exhibition’s curator, Francesco Stocchi, "and particularly in the Austrian avant-garde movement called Viennese Actionism, whose artists often used their own naked bodies as a canvas, and blood, milk or entrails as their materials. "

New York Times



I think they are pretty bold to invite the audience to get the rid of anything else, their jobs, social fames, etc., and directing facing the object and organs that everyone familiar with, which can find the shadow of Fluxus movement. Comparing to the Dadaist works, Vorm - Fellows - Attitude emphasises the interaction between the work and audiences. However, this work still have the rebelling gene of Dadaism. They used the exquisite blankets and nicely designed gallery space as the contrast to this "disgusting" matter, though it relates to everyone. As for me, the experience of "communicating" with the work would be accentuated through wear "naked clothes", which is really interesting.


Urine


Zapf de Pipi/ Conversion


Zapf de Pipi, Gelitin, 2005

Meanwhile, through the report of New York Times, I found a name of artwork that might relate with the topic, called Zapf de Pipi (2005), which was also done by Gelitin.


They did a 7-meter tall icecle that made with "metabolic wastes (such as urea), dissolved salts and organic materials". Comparing to the Vorm - Fellows - Attitude, this work is more leaning on converting the excretion to a delicate and suiting the public aesthetics object. The physical change of a matter would produce a totally different effect.



Andre Serrano/ Ritual



The urine also reminds me Supreme used to sell a series of clothes that printed the picture of a crucifix immersed in the urine. After researching that, I find it is done by American photographer, Andre Serrano, as a series called Immersions.


These series of photos caused a sensation and led to a controversy on the religion issue because he announced that he used his urine as the media, which seems somewhat offensive to conservative believers.



Immersions

1.Piss Christ, 1987

2. Piss Light, 1987

3. Winged Victory, 1987

4. Madonna of the Rocks, 1987

5. Ecce Homo, 1988

6. Madonna and Child II, 1989


Comparing to Sen's work, Serrano's pee is focusing on the religious issue and it's not showing as the action of peeing, instead more caring about the property of it, such as the colour.



In his previous works, death, body fluids and religious metaphor were the basic elements that revolved with his works. The body fluid then became as the media that gives a heavy, mysterious and ritual feeling to the viewers.




Afterwards, I realise that I used to read an article about blood and beauty in Cynthia Freeland's Art Theory. The reason why I think of this book is because it mentioned about Serrano's works. However, before looking at her analysis, I also find some relative statements.


"Rituals of many world religions involve rich colour, and pageantry. But ritual theory does not account for the sometimes strange, intense activities of modern artists, as when performance artist uses blood. For participants in a ritual, clarity and agreement of purpose are central; the ritual reinforces the community's proper relation to God or nature through gestures that everyone knows and understands. But audiences who see and react to a modern artist do not enter in with shared beliefs and values, or with prior knowledge of what will transpire."

Cynthia Freeland, Art Theory, page 19


To view back all of the works that researched above, I agree with what Freeland said because even the other contemporary artworks like Hirst's shark (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991) and Duchamp's Fountain, they all require a shared belief to understand what it is.


In the summary of Kant's philosophy of beauty, Freeland described that, "We respond to the object's rightness of design, which satisfies our imagination and intellect, even though we are evaluating the object's purpose“ (ibid., page 23), so our knowledge would be the premise of understanding the object's rightness of design.


Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996

"Some of the most infamous art of recent decades became controversial because of its startling presentation of human bodies and body fluids. At the 1999 Sensation exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the most controversial artwork ('Virgin Mary' by Chris Ofili) even used elephant dung. Controversy erupted about funding of the US National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the late 1980s after bodies were penetrated and exposed, as blood, urine, and semen became newly prominent in art Images like Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987) and Robert Mapplethrope's Jim and Tom, Sausalito (1977) (which showed one man urinating into another man's mouth) became key targets for critics of contemporary art." ibid., page 20


For Ofili's work, it also challenged the conservative believe, but also it gives me a sense of primal feeling, which let the figure of Virgin Mary travel to an older age because of the primitive figure and the elephant dung. Referring to Robert Mapplethrope's works, his was confronting the common morality.



"Art experts testified at the obscenity trial of the Cincinnati gallery that exhibited Mapplethorpe's work that his photographs counted art because of their exquisite formal properties, such as careful lighting, classical composition, and elegant sculptural shapes. In other words, Mapplethorpe's work fulfilled the 'beauty' expectation required of true art— even nudes with huge penises should be viewed with dispassion as cousins of Michelangelo's David."

ibid., page 24


Back to the content of Andre Serrano, she titled that part as "Defending Serrano", because the critic Lucy Lippard defended Serrano's works in Art In America (1990):


"Lippard's defence of Serrano uses a thee-pronged analysis: she examines (l) his work's formal and material properties; (2) its content (the or meaning it expresses); and (3) its context, or place in the western art tradition."


"Piss Christ— the object of censorial furor — is a darkly beautiful photographic image... The small wood-and-plastic crucifix becomes virtually monumental as it floats photographically enlarged, in a deep golden, rosy glow that is both ominous and glorious; The bubbles wafting across the surface suggest a nebula. Yet the work's title, which is crucial to the enterprise, transforms this easily digestible cultural icon into a sign of rebellion or an object of disgust simply by changing the context in which it is seen.

ibid., page 25


The interesting thing is that both the experts who did a trial for Mapplethrope's work and Lippard, when they use a systematic judgement of art on the artists' workpieces, it's hardly to deny they are the art. This point reminds me the experience of Duchamp, when he was staying in the circle of Cubist artists, his work, Nude Descending a Staircase NO.2 was asked to voluntarily withdraw from the Salon des Indépendences in Paris, because the committee could not accept the "offensive" attitude toward the nudity. Also, his anonymous work, Fountain, experienced the similar thing in New York. Relating with this point, does it because some people just have not refresh their limitation of imagination of art yet? Does the cause of controversy is resembling what happened to Duchamp's works? I think it requires the examination of time.


In addition, the author also compared to these contemporary art pieces with Goya's works. As great as Goya, he also recklessly applied the bloody scenes and the actual aspects that people may not want to mention about in the daily life, such as his The Disasters of War and Black Paintings.



Partial Summary

From the research of the artist and works that relate with excretions, I found that different actions and milieus will change the meaning of the art work and mainly they are used in two general pathways. Take the urine as the example, the work of Sen Dada and Robert Mapplethrope, urinating was a happening process in the work, which could be regard as the way to express thought. The second situation is that the urine was used as the media, or material like what Serrano did. The property or our impression of the excretion gives the artists a wide space to say about their ideas. For instance, because of the word "piss" appeared in the title of Serrano's work, it caused an immense sensation for people to argue about, as well as Mazoni's canned "shit"the contradiction between how they look like and what they exactly are, stimulates generation of doubt, anger, irony, re-question the meaning of beauty and etc..



Fluxus

When I was reading New York Times' report of Gelitin's work, "Fluxus movement" really caught my eyes because it reminds me one of my favourite artwork, TV Buddha (1974), which was done by Nam June Paik. Following with that, I thought about Zen and Buddhist philosophy of samsara. Through reading and looking more information, this subliminal feeling was getting stronger and stronger. Because I started to recollect the memory that once while I was peeing, my thought was fascinating by this process. I felt a dreadful loneliness and anxiety on account of I saw the bubbles that popped up were vanished one by one, which was alike the people who you know eventually disappeared from your life. I realised that life is just undergoing the resembled thing as urinating. In the end, everyone are gone as the urine is flushing away and then start a new cycle, which in Buddhism is called "samsara". Based on this epiphany, I tend to find out more resource about the Fluxus movement and Nam June Paik.

George Maciunas, Fluxus Manifesto, 1963

Based on the resource from Tate's website, wikipedia and theartstory.org, I make a list of the keep points of this movement.


Fluxus:

a latin word means flowing


Movement Leader:

George Maciunas


Time Span:

1959 - 1978


Purpose:

"promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art" (Maciunas)


Key Artists:

Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Henry Flynt, Al Hansen...


Main Root:

  • John Cage

  • Marcel Duchamp

  • Futurist, Dadaist, Neo-Dadaist

Major Centres:

  • New York

  • Germany

  • Japan

Key Ideas:

  • simplicity and anti-commercialism

  • chance and accident

  • humour

  • "anything can substitute for art and anyone can do it...the value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, mass-produced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all." (Maciunas)

George Brecht
  • "In Fluxus there has never been any attempt to agree on aims or methods; individuals with something unnamable in common have simply naturally coalesced to publish and perform their work. Perhaps this common thing is a feeling that the bounds of art are much wider than they have conventionally seemed, or that art and certain long established bounds are no longer very useful." (George Brecht)


Art Forms:

  • Intermedia

  • Concept Art

  • Video Art

  • Performance Art

Later Incarnations:

  • Performance Art

  • Land Art

  • Graffiti Art


1. Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964-1966

2. Robert Filliou, Optimistic Box #3 - So much the better if you can't play chess (you won't imitate Marcel Duchamp), 1969

3. Ben Vautier, Total Art Matchbox, 1966

4. Benjamin Patterson, Licking Piece, 1964

5. Nam June Paik, Zen for Film, 1965

6. Alison Knowles, Make a Salad, 1962


"Simplicity"

After looking at some Fluxus artworks, I think the point of interaction between the viewer and work is fascinating because I believe that art should have communication like this, and the interaction could provide an experience to help the viewer literally understand the "shared beliefs and value" as Freeland said. At the same time, these works truly accentuate the simplicity, a readymade, a simple video or action would bring up a very witty sense.


Nam June Paik/ Zen

Nam June Paik, 1932-2006

Research Nam June Paik is the next step after knowing a bit more about Fluxus movement. He is known as "the father of video art", because after the training of classical music, he was inspired by John Cage, the composer and artist who was profoundly influenced by Zen, and started to utilising visual, audio and electronic devices in his works. He was keen on humanising technology, perhaps he foreseen an Internet world which has linked billions of people's lives nowadays. I mainly research some of his works that have a distinct connection with Zen Buddhism.



Zen for Head (1962)

This is the first Paik's work that I saw two years ago, it deeply impressed me because that was my first time to see a person who use the body part that exempt from hands to draw things. As black-and-white pictures (the original one is a7-minute video that presented at at Stockhausen's Originale in 1961), his action reminded me using the blood to devoutly paint out his believe. This work is quite similar as what Mapplethrope did, there was a bit of ritual feeling within the work, but feels more oriental and peaceful than latter one.


Zen for TV (1963-1965)

This work marked as the birth of video art. Paik reduced the spectrum of screen to a line so that the pictures would only flash on that single line. At that time, the colour television was just been published in America for a decade, as a quite new technology, he felt the potential influence of it, "he questioned the conditions of the production and broadcasting of images by manipulating the medium"(https://www.mumok.at/en/zen-tv).


Zen for Film (1985)

Zen for Film inherited the thought of John Cage's 4'33" (1952), and for me, it implies the sense of meditation which aim to empty the mind to refine the spirit and perceive the world. In this approximately 20 minutes long video, only some dust will appear in the screen randomly, just like the scene that we may seen if take away any shape or colour, except the tiny dust, from the world.


TV Buddha (1974)


Although TV Buddha has various editions with diverse buddha sculptures and titles, this design of installation nevertheless is the most influential one to me, comparing to the other works. I think it exquisitely combined the readymade with tradition matter (Zen) and contemporary technology (CCTV and TV), creating the conflict between old and new, steady and dynamic. One interpretation described the meaning in a pretty serious way:

"In this closed circuit loop, the Buddha constantly faces his own projected image, caught in an eternal present tense and unable to transcend from his own physicality. "

theartstory.org


Admittedly, it is a brief and rational explanation. However, in my thinking, I would regard it more as the embodiment of Buddha's meditation and the spiritual observation of himself. The screen shows an untouchable world that seems like permanently steady, as the modern version of Buddha.


This work is not only creates a humourous feeling, but also can lead the viewers to expand their imagination because we are familiar with these stuff. It could be revealing out the issue between new technology, high-speed developing world and the spiritual status that people used to pursue.


Partial Summary, 22/11

Based on the previous study of excretion art, my target material gradually cleared and after looking at Fluxus, particularly Paik's works, there are some new ideas came into my mind. Specifically, I notice that the works are all including somewhat contrast thing in either physical or mental way. Therefore, to set the contradiction, or emphasise it by more distinct materials should be the way that I need to think about. Currently, I plan to use a urinal, video displaying and the theory of periscope to make an installation, which can invite the viewer to take a careful look at the urinal and to find the video of peeing from the outlet. To realise this idea, I still need to do some research about Buddhism and experiment the effect of periscope. Besides, I just tend to buy a mini video projector, in case the periscope and urinal does not fix with. The calculations and experiments will do after comparing the urinals' sizes.


Study of "Samsāra"


Samara in real life: Recycle System

The most direct sense that relating with both samsara and urine is the recycling process of sewage. To regard the urine as the part that used to belong with our bodies, when it eventually urinates out, it symbolising it enter into a new stage of "samsara".