Excremental Art: Small Wonder in a World Full of Shit
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5617/jea.4335Keywords:
horrific, defecating, Peter Sloterdijk, art, abjectAbstract
The representation of urinating and defecating people by artists is a rather old phenomenon, for they pop up in the work of, for instance, Rembrandt. For the twentieth century the same can be observed, however with this remarkable difference with past ages, that the number of artists (playwrights, painters and performance artists to mention only a few) working with shit (as well as with bodily fluids and matter) enormously increased. Especially in the second half of this century it became very popular to use shit in plays, paintings and performances. This paper deals with the question, whether the artworks of so-called shit artists working in the West generally speaking are just a kind of wild manifestations of decadence and the abject, as so many people claim, or that they are meant to bring across a particular message with regard to the society and culture in which they are produced. On the basis of the work of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and others the hypothesis will be launched that one cannot understand this remarkable blossoming of shit in the arts without taking into consideration the fact that we are living in an era of neo-capitalism, which implies a horrific transformation of consumption goods bought with the help of money (this eternal companion of shit) into all kinds of waste and ordure.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal, for non-commercial purpose, no derivatives are permitted. (Please not that this license has been used since 1.10.2018 and will be used in the future. Articles published between 1.1.2017-and 30.9.2018 are licensed under CC BY license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).