Thursday, September 25, 2008

What is a Shit Show? Serrano Shows us the Ways.

It's so hard to feel inspired these days. The corporate world is an amalgam of depressed, overleveraged autumn-onset germ ridden sacks of shit; your neighborhood a trolling ground for this season's dumb-as-shit NYU girls in last season's Marc Jacobs; Election season reeks of horse shit.

And you think to yourself, Hot Damn, Girl, we are in a state of deep fucking shit. The shit stream runs so deep that you have been fantasizing about moving back to your parent's basement, where the ping pong table, bar, and chintz couches from when your parents first got married a hundred million years ago await, and you can mosey on up for dinner and BBC viewing with your father whenever you damn well feel like it.

When you're 24 and this is the stuff of your fantasies, you know that shit has hit the fan.

Andres Serrano gets this. In a perfectly timed gesture of art imitating life, his "Shit Show", a compilation of 66 photographs of, you guessed it, feces (appropriately titled: Bull Shit, Deep Shit, Holy Shit, and the like), has opened in Chelsea this month. Kids, If ever there was a Heartbreaking work of staggering genius in our lifetimes, this is fucking IT.

Because Serrano taps into the collective conscience, readily admitting to having concocted this idea while watching the nude wrestling scene in Borat. And who can begrudge him this? I think we can all attest to having seen God in this moment. He attests his inspiration further to Goya, who probably wouldn't be psyched at all for such a comparison, but guess what?! Serrano doesn't give a flying fuck! He said it anyway, because he understands that half of playing "the artiste" is name dropping other "artistes" that inspired you.

The guy just gets it.

And of course, there are the works themselves. This one is called Heroic Shit, because Serrano posits that it resembles the raising of the Flag of Iwo Jima.


Seeing the heoricism in a pile of shit: that's the sort of nationalism that would bring tears to John McCain's old dead eyes.
In not so many words, I heart this shit, and I will devote my time to cajoling you into loving it too. Alternately, this is the perfect opportunity to prove to your dates/visiting family members/frenemies how cool and subversive you are.
Hit this shit. Prepare to be amazed.
Kind Regards,
Girl

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