Human civilisation is founded on garbage. Not only that, but our cities, which serve as a metaphor for our contemporary civilisation, are constructed over vast sewage systems. Not just because excrement is necessary for our metabolism - but also makes life impossible. Furthermore, we only understand what culture is when we establish a distinction between it and garbage. No light exists without shadows, and no cleanliness exists without filth. To be capable of thinking that we're civilized humans, we require an uncultured antithesis.
To get rid of and to demonstrate human intellect - people need faeces. Crap is essential to how we, as contemporary beings, view ourselves. Poops follow us for the rest of our lives. We are born "between dung and pee," and it is at this very instant that we struggle with the subatomic particles that begin. We learn the social syntax of disgust, hygiene, and a feeling of what is pleasurable and repulsive in the world of scents through our excrement.
We quickly pick up on the taboo nature of the term "shit" and learn how to employ it as a weapon, a provocation, or the laugh track of our nasty jokes. We discover the borders, openings, and muscles of human organs by learning to control, hold, or surrender to our bowel movements throughout the anal stage of development. And as we age, we converse with our waste. Shit impacts our perceptions of culture, community, wellness, decency, humour, and identity from birth till death.
Norwegian-British photographer, curator, and artist Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty work out of Oslo. Lill-Ann began her photographic career with a Kodak Instamatic camera, then had a protracted and passionate love interest with a vintage chrome Hasselblad, finally transitioning to an iPhone in her latter years.
By degrading the filthy victim figuratively, the shit-thrower reduces him to his lowest form. The victim of the shit thrower then disintegrates in the other person's faeces and becomes an extrapolated component of the perpetrator's body. The shit thrower embraces and expels the other in identical paradoxical behaviour.
Perhaps we are recollecting the carefree stage of childhood during which we weren't yet, bound by the abdominal urge and were free to poop whenever we damn well pleased. Perhaps we occasionally have dreams about that fucked-up lost utopia.
So, the root of shit is integral to how the west understands civilisation; the extent to which it is visible indicates where a nation stands on a spectrum of civilizational development. The harbingers of an advanced industrial society are practical subterranean canalizations and lockable individual toilets. If they are lacking, it is instantly assumed that the civilizational level is lower. The fact that the Latin term for faeces, excrement, has a root with the meaning for a mystery, secret, isn't it quite symbolic?
Shit is a secret and enigmatic substance. It is a pervasive - yet opaque, like subatomic particles, speculative physics concept designed to explain the distribution of mass in the cosmos. Crap is the antithesis of culture; it's the malformed offspring of civilisation that one conceals in the cellar from their neighbour. When we release it, we do so in a quiet, frequently windowless area so that it can be flushed into the recesses of funnels after first being hidden deep within our bodies.
What made this most commonplace for human materials into the resources needed in art, fiction, and film at this specific time? The idea that poo can be mundane but capable of questioning our late capitalistic culture may be the basis for the faecal's current revival. Shit becomes the remaining boundary in an overly regulated, little-explored world that is focused on peak effectiveness and seamless operation. It is a seemingly pointless and worthless substance that defies being included in the realm of market economics as a burger for people every day.
Day after day, every individual invests a substantial amount of their precious time into producing something that is then instantly disposed of. The point is that one wastes approximately a year of their life on activities that don't make anything that can be presented or sold. Crap, a lumpy substance in the workings of our economic machinery, is ludicrous and redundant per se. Its existence casts doubt on the idealized depiction of the logical, profit-driven Homo participants get instructed.
We are, metaphorically speaking, constantly surrounded by shit, which may also help to explain our heightened fascination with shit. After all, the modern consumer world is rife with items that were haphazardly made, have nothing in the way of spiritual or physiological nourishment, and are thrown away almost immediately after production. To persuade people to buy "relics of late capitalism", constant nonsense keeps gushing out our TVs, radios, laptops, and advertisements.
Real shit has largely vanished from our lives, but it seems that it has been replaced by mediated and industrially created nonsense. When an artist spends a lot of time and effort building a machine for the industrial creation of crap, advertises it with a mascot that mimics (of all things), and then actually sells the machine's waste to willing consumers, they are only pushing the market economy's guiding principle to its nadir. Shit might also be the key to comprehending our consumer society since it serves as the archetype and model for the fetish objects of our world of commodities.
Flora Rosset | 06:07 PM
Sat, 11 Mar, 2023
Paris, France
Artpendix Press
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