The latest installation by American artists Paul McCarthy and Jason Rhoades is full of allusions to philosophy and art history. Since the end of October, the duo have displayed pure shit in many forms, yet the aim of the exhibition is not so much to shock as to reconstruct a historic collaboration. All the feces deposited in the public toilets by visitors, curators, the hoi polloi, and VIPs—the entire international art scene—over the opening weekend of this year’s Documenta was presented as a gift to Jason Rhoades by two Kassel art students, Jan Northoff and Benne Ender. McCarthy and Rhoades then filled seventy-centimeter-high glass bottles with the excrement. These “shit plugs” are reminiscent of the oversize, Christmas tree–shaped “buttplugs” invented by McCarthy for his 1978 sculpture
Plug Chair and recycled in a series of sculptures from last year. Next to the approximately one hundred shit bottles (which evoke a forest of fir trees) we find Shit Sleds, 2002, colorful rubber discovered in the backyard of the Hamburg Phoenix-Works, piled on the floor. Catalogues lie welded together on a wooden crate. With these different piles the forty-seven-year-old McCarthy and his younger colleague play their favorite game: making waste products into perfect accidental sculptures. Their occasional collaboration derives its inspiration from French Situationist Guy Debord, who was one of the first to collaborate with artists from other generations. In direct homage to him, McCarthy and Rhoades have also reconstructed a series of collages Debord made in 1959 with Danish artist Asger Jorn. The combination of high and low culture that so fascinated Debord here paradoxically reaches a high point, with this exhibition of shit.
Translated from German by Emily Speers Mears.
