Indecent Creativity and the Tropes of Human Excreta

AbstractThis essay explores depictions and descriptions of bodily excretion in light of theories of creativity and artistic practices. References to physical effluxes and excretions by early seventeenth-century Northern painters, I argue, pursue sixteenth-century concepts which connect lower body parts and physical activities to visual perception and human production. The visual arts were inclined to reflect on such ideas not only because of ubiquitous metaphors comparing the absorption of intellectual matter and their subsequent mental digestion to the conversion of food, but also because waste products had a fundamental role in artist's workshops. The dual quality of excrements as indecent waste and as fertilising manure was predestined to mirror concepts of imitation, and lead to a reconsideration of the general relation of artworks to the products of nature.Keywords: Galaton; Gegorio Leti; Peter Flotner; scatology; Sebastian Stoskopff; urinationThe publication of David Foster Wallace's The Suffering Channel in 2002 most likely marks the very moment when the art world became saturated by scatological artworks: sculptures and paintings thematising excrement had become a conceptual genre in their own right, making it necessary to address this class of artworks in yet a different genre ‒ literature.In fact, Wallace wrote the novella at a time when ‒ with the exception of Wim Delvoye's startling Cloaca (2000) ‒ highly promoted artworks such as Marc Quinn’s Shit Head and Shit Paintings (1997/1998) and the oeuvre of Andres Serrano had successfully capitalised on these ideas, and had been feeding the mainstream art market with blunt reinterpretations of provocations raised decades earlier, for instance by Andy Warhol's Oxidation Paintings (1977/1978), Paul McCarthy's Shit Face Painting (1974), and especially by Piero Manzoni's multiple Merda d’artista (1961). Yet, the continued success of the genre proves that the perception of human excretion as indecent had not changed over time. The Suffering Channel revolves once again around the question of decency: the story narrates a journal's difficulties in publishing an article on the fecal creations of a fictive sculptor, Brint Molke, and the artist's shy resistance to publicity, which results in a distressing performance of his art of defecation, and eventual death.