visual codec archives »
one shot project »
one shot specifications »
one shot purchasing »
about us »
contributors »
submissions »
contact us »
Talking Shit (Among Friends)
By Lance Blomgren
The sense of unease caused by Robert Niven's recent guano sculptures is a primordial one, we all agreed—the general fear, fascination, and repugnance of excrement. We crinkled our noses and continued.
Progress, "Collected Guano"
© Robert Niven (2006)
Image Courtesy of the Artist
There is little in the world that induces the same sensual parallax as shit, the perceptual short-circuit of experiencing a fresh deposit, one of us said. Indeed, in the mammalian world, shit uniquely looks like it smells and vice-versa, from the overripe scent of a warm load to the metallic bite of a frothy puddle of its liquid counterpart. Faeces is an onomatopoeia of the senses, someone interjected, an experiential double-whammy of pre-linguistic repulsion, a visceral manifestation of biology's own ideas of heaven and hell. For example, "Fuck don't mean shit in most brown showers." There's no accounting for taste, the joker among us said, trying to lighten the mood. We all agreed that defecation seemed an inherent component of survival, but the conversation left a palpably bad taste in our mouths.
As with many groups of friends, there was usually an underlying war of attrition beneath our words. Who would concede first? Those of us who tire ourselves talking, or those of us who wear ourselves out listening?
The problem with rumour, like all sensational news, is that it always locates the shortest path between two sources. Little things have a way of sneaking up on us, little things like doubt, worry, and then out-and-out panic. The failure of the relaxing tone of the TV announcer to provide any relaxation. It is common, we assured each other, that friends can generate a certain paranoia together, and it is perfectly normal for one of us to lose control every now and again.
And later, as the effect became more pronounced, we made some diagrams to help us make sense of what was happening: tainted meat, migration patterns, distribution routes, air-borne viruses, fertilizer, water, and dust. Visual puns and invisible killers; offer and counter-offer. And the ass and the mouth, someone added, the incessant eating, shitting, and eating, the breathing, lungs filling and unfilling with filling.
The tendency some of us have to dominate conversation, someone said. The tendency some of us have to halt serious discussion, someone said. We are dying, someone said.
Things were not always the same as they are now, among friends. We agreed that in many relationships like ours there survives an unbearable transparency of closeness, an electricity that sparks between us as we pass from one another a sudden jolt of clarity from which most are unable to survive.
What does this have to do with art? one of us asked. Birds are not mammals, someone added. And yet, said the joker, most of us enjoy our fowl game with a relish that can only be called condimental. We agreed the idea of Niven's graceful, alabaster rubber-chicken-shit-bird was an unlikely segue into coprophagia, self-ingestion, and our disease, but a powerful one. Someone said: those of us who have explored the blanched granular snot of seagull scat can attest to the immediate olfactory recognition evoked by the very sight of it—the stubborn, if subtle, reek of fermentation that is synonymous with the early onset of cellular contamination.
Someone said: The birds are arriving in buckets.
