A walk through the poop

Giant turd sculptures in an exhibit in Rotterdam

In this peculiar exhibit in Rotterdam, you are invited to get naked when you enter by putting on a naked costume featuring different shapes and sizes of male and female genitalia. The reason for that is to get visitors out of their clothes without undressing them. In addition, all people look the same. Then you can walk through the turds.

As reported here, there were four giant turds inside the 16,000 square feet of museum space. One mammoth piece of feces was reminiscent of a long, winding steel sculpture by Richard Serra, known for his large-scale sculptures. One was a brown spiral. Another resembled an enormous chocolate chip. Yet another featured intertwined layers with a gap in between that you could have crawled through if you had been brave enough.

The 16,000-square-foot museum room included four enormous turds. One enormous human poo resembles a lengthy, twisting Richard Serra sculpture. One looked like a brown spiral, while another, looked like a very large chocolate chip. All four sculptures of poo were placed on elegant Persian rugs, seeming like welcome-home presents from a huge dog.

The piece by Gelatin, a Vienna-based art collective known for breaking taboos, provoking nervous laughter, and familiarizing with bodies and their excretions, was on display at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam with the name “Gelatin: Vorm — Fellows — Attitude“.

Before the opening, the sculptures were constructed in situ for two weeks in the Boijmans’ huge contemporary galleries by the collective’s four artists, Wolfgang Gantner, Ali Janka, Florian Reither, and Tobias Urban. Huge plaster casts were initially built by a group of volunteers, who then manually coated them in thick brown clay.

Any museum exhibit that shows feces to its viewers as art must be prepared for at least a small amount of scandal. The Boijmans’ director, Sjarel Ex, claimed he had no issue with that.

Mr. Ex declared that he had no reservations about commissioning the project. He claimed there were numerous ways to interpret the show.

“You can approach it from the field of sculpture, you can approach it as an installation that was tailor-made for these big rooms”, he said, “and you can see it as a provocation and then explore what side of you is provoked. That’s also very interesting. You can also see it as an intimate experience you keep only for yourself”.

The work of Gelatin is frequently crude, grotesque, and ludicrous; it is frequently repulsive on purpose yet with humor. The performers placed themselves in a circle, naked, with lit candles emerging from their anuses, creating a “human birthday cake”. They broke into the World Trade Center illegally in 2000 and put in a tiny balcony on the 91st floor (a stunt that lasted a mere 19 minutes or so). Their 2005 works featured a 180-foot pink toy bunny that they left to rot on the side of a mountain in the Italian Alps and a sculpture created from frozen urine.

According to Francesco Stocchi, the exhibition’s curator, their brand of performance-based, interactive art has roots in the Situationist and Fluxus movements of the 1960s, particularly in the Austrian avant-garde movement known as Viennese Actionism, whose artists frequently used their own naked bodies as a canvas and blood, milk, or entrails as their materials. Gelatin has had numerous international exhibitions since 1993, most notably at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. Other venues for his work include the Venice Biennale, the Greene Naftali Gallery in New York, a cave in Puerto Rico, and the Greene Naftali Gallery.

“They tend to use two powerful tools: humor and simplification”, said Mr. Stocchi, who is Boijman’s curator of modern and contemporary art. “Simple doesn’t mean to make it easy but to have clarity of intentions. The intention is to confront ourselves with our own fears, or our own preconceived notions or taboos, which we can also call prejudices. When we have prejudices, what can we do? We can discuss it. So the exhibition is an arena for discussion”.

For the modern Bodon Wing of the museum, which was constructed in the 1970s to house colossal art, minimalist installations, and land art pieces, Mr. Stocchi invited Gelatin to produce their piece of art.

The Boijmans van Beuningen is best known for its extensive collection of early Dutch and Flemish paintings, which includes works by Renaissance painters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch who explored grotesque hybrid beings, people, and animals engaging in all manner of coarse behavior, and drolleries. Additionally, the museum houses a collection of surrealist works.

“If you look into the work of Gelatin, you see that they very often refer to those artists”, Mr. Ex said. “The strange performances that they do and even the costumes, you put on one of their costumes and look like you come from one of those paintings. It’s not a re-enactment of Bosch or Bruegel, but it’s a kind of mentality that belongs to this museum”.

Mr. Ex claimed that he had foreseen that the performance may generate a sensation and that some guests would have negative reactions. However, in the weeks since the display began, Dutch art critics have generally been favorable toward the pieces, notwithstanding some unfavorable remarks on the museum’s Facebook page.

“We are a free space, so we can do things that are silly and also maybe a sign of bad taste”, Mr. Ex said. “This is a museum, here is a place where artists work and we have to defend the freedom of showing things, so there’s a bigger side to it”.

But, he added, “So far, my experience is that people just enjoyed it and had fun with it”.