Cloaca: Shit That Is Art

The grand irony of PoopReport.com is that it conceals genuine intellectual thought in the guise of stories about crap. For this reason, I was very excited by the recent Cloaca exhibit at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC -- it used the guise of intellectual thought to get people to spend time looking at crap.

Cloaca is a giant machine that makes shit. At one end of the machine, they pour 2.6 gallons of water and a meal from a fancy SoHo restaurant. 27 hours and 33 feet later, a nozzle squirts out a well-formed piece of crap.

Images of Cloaca, borrowed from Wired Online [1]..

Cloaca is a computerized mechanical system designed to mimic the human digestive process. The machine, which eats better than the majority of us, chews the food using a meat grinder and a garbage disposal, then passes it through six reactor chambers that use various chemicals to do the job of a digestive system.

At 2:30 PM every day a crowd gathers, and the machine dutifully drops a shit onto a conveyor belt. The crowd cheers. Hooray for shit.

Created by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, Cloaca harks back past Piero Manzoni's Merda d'Artista [2] to Marcel Duchamp's 1917 Fountain -- a urinal placed on a pedestal, considered to be art only because it was in the museum's gallery and not its bathroom. Duchamp got us to question the meaning of "art" -- was something art because it was beautiful or meaningful, or was something art simply because a museum said so?

Or, to put it another way -- why is it art when this machine shits on a conveyor belt in a museum? And why don't the cops think its art when I take a shit on the sidewalk outside the museum?

As Duchamp teaches us, there are two ways to look at Cloaca: Cloaca is shit that is art, or Cloaca is shit that is shit.

As shit art, Cloaca has engendered some important thinking. But as shit shit, Cloaca has played another role: making fools of the literati. From the outsider's perspective, it's pretty funny to watch a bunch of book-learnin' types waiting breathlessly for shit, and then applauding when it arrives. Cloaca makes the wildest stereotypes of intellectual snobs a complete reality.

Once I stopped laughing at the museum patrons bending down to look closer at artistic dookie, I started listening to what they were saying. And they're saying some interesting things. For instance:

"By replicating one of our most crucial biological functions, Delvoye forces viewers both to consider our social discomfort with such functions and to question the elaborate cultural mechanisms that we have constructed to keep them from view."

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, 1917.

"Cloaca also deliberately challenges our notions of what constitutes a meaningful or educational display. Just as society is unable to recognize that anxieties and discomfort about feces are connected to broader cultural taboos concerning the body and its imperatives, so we cannot yet imagine an educational mindset that would treat feces objectively, as if one were studying insects or cloud patterns."

"In its most essential reading, Cloaca directly confronts the contemporary state of confusion regarding when or where human life begins and ends. Through a monumental simulacrum tracing the path made by what we eat from the mouth to the anus, Cloaca forces us to see this process as something more than simply mechanical and catch ourselves in the act of self-identification."

"Cloaca brings together trends in contemporary art that are usually considered separately. At one extreme is a growing interest in how art and technology intersect, particularly with regard to where life begins and ends, and the impact of artificial intelligence, robotics, software, and bioengineering on cultural production. At the opposite end of the critical spectrum is the investigation of abjection as a fundamental part of the human condition."

All these thoughts are valid. Whenever my parents wonder why they put me through college just so I could start a poop site, I try to convince them what these thoughts show: that poop plays a significant role in our culture. And anything that contributes to the deeper understanding of poop in our society is positive from the PoopReport perspective.

It's fun to laugh at the idea of people sipping wine and discussing the cultural ramifications of diarrhea. But beyond that, the questions Cloaca raises lend credibility to what we're doing here at PoopReport: if you accept Cloaca as a thought-provoking exhibit, then you accept the intellectual merit of this site.

But while Cloaca has no further value if you think it's just a meritless waste of resources, at least PoopReport still gives you funny stories about dudes who shit their pants.

-- Dave [3]

Like Dave? He's featured in The Journal of Ass Production [4]!