Passion or paycheck, profession or play, beauty or the butt? We tackle the art world’s opposing objectives to redeem or exploit our excrement, the politics of status (and Brad Pitt’s pet rat), the importance of whimsy, and how every poo has a story to tell. Join Shawn Shafner (The Puru) in conversation with Dan Roberts from the National Poo Museum on the Isle of Wight, just south of London. Imagine a room full of polished crystal balls lit beautifully from below, and inside each floats a delicate turd. Created by the Eccleston George art collective, Dan charts the museum’s journey from the Swedish elk pat that started it all, to the BBC reporter who made it legit by harvesting meerkat scat on TV. An odd collection of crystal-balled caca becomes so much more by reminding us that anything--no really, anything--may just be possible after all.
Also mentioned in this episode:
NYU Tisch, An Inconvenient Poop, Nigel George, Sweden, shameful shitter, chronic constipation, starving artist, cognitive dissonance, taboo, shock, death, mummies, community-based sculpture, tricycle, Portugal, Mary Overlie, Viewpoints, Anne Bogart, original anarchist, doing the unnecessary, impulse, New School, Anthropology, judgment, Flux, tattoos, risk-averse, social contamination, sociology, anthropology, Roland Barthes, William Ian Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, Karen Finley, queen of dung, resin, social release, matter out of place, Victorian era, diapers, incontinence, International Women's Day, international sanitation crisis, menstruation, Delhi, open defecation, zoo, sharing economy, bird pellet, cloaca, uric acid, microbiome, co-evolution, Scientific American, data manipulation, pigeon poo, Nitrates, stoma, stigma, Marcel Duchamp, fountain, Sigmund Freud, Paul Spinrad, Re:Search Guide to Bodily Fluids, nose picking, IBS, Crohn's, fecal transplant, transgender access, library