As we said in our Packit Toilet demo video, “people don’t like to talk about poop or pooping.  They use numbers...”  Well, we don’t like to talk about pee either; we call it “urine” or "that stuff."  But because we’re in the business of manufacturing an ultralight toilet kit, and we make that kit specifically to get people to stop pooping in the wild places and leaving it on the ground, we DO talk about poop and pee - in those exact terms.

And now a foray into Dave Praeger's book Poop Culture, How America is Shaped by its Grossest National Product.

Dave writes that 87 years “after the Society of Independent Artists violated their own vision for The Big (Art) Show” of 1913 “with their refusal to exhibit Fountain (by Marcel Duchamp), the sponsors of England’s renowned Turner Prize surveyed 500 artists, critics, dealers, and curators, to determine the 20th century’s most influential work of art.  The first choice of 64% of those surveyed was Duchamp’s Fountain.”  And it’s still influencing artists in 2007.

Fountain is a literal urinal attached to a stand.  The kind men (and some women) pee in.  It caused an uproar and was taken out of the exhibit in 1913.  Duchamp, nearly a full half-century before Warhol, created works of “art” from "a coffee grinder, a bicycle wheel, and a bottle rack."  He called them “readymades.”  “Mass produced objects elevated to the level of art by the artist’s merely saying so. 

“Readymades force the viewer to consider concepts beyond the aesthetics of the piece, such as the roles of the artist in creating it, the museum in validating it, and the viewer in choosing to trust either or both.”

When Picasso started painting abstracts, people hated them.  It was the dealers and critics who began the process of turning Picasso into an internationally famous artist.  Picasso, as he is known today, as we’ve seen his rather modest paintings soar into the millions of dollars, is a product of modern marketing agencies and techniques: the creators of markets. 

We at Ultralight Wilderness Toilet happen to like some of Picasso’s work, but much of it is repetitious and boring.  It doesn’t excite; it doesn’t disturb, like some of his earlier abstract paintings did.  All great art is disturbing in some way.  It should make us at least slightly uncomfortable while viewing it.  Like Fountain made people uncomfortable.  Why does real art have this affect?  Because it’s telling us something about ourselves that we either don’t want to know, or once we know it, don’t like the feelings we get from knowing it.   Yet real art tells us things about ourselves that somehow deep down we know we NEED to know about ourselves.  People are still terribly uncomfortable viewing a nude, male or female, painting or photograph, in 2007.  Our own bodies and the bodies of others are somehow still a threat to us.

Which brings us to Pierro Manzoni.

In 1961, “Pierro Manzoni exhibited 90 cans of his [own] poop in an art gallery in Albiola, Italy.” This wasn’t poop, this was art, because he said so.  “Each can comprising Merda d’Artista was signed, numbered, and wrapped in a label like a can of tuna....Each can was on sale during its exhibition, priced by weight based on the current price of gold.  From that base price (around $1.12 a gram in 1960) the value shot up forty-one years later, the Tate Modern in London paid $34,100 to acquire Merda can #004.” That computes to $1,137 a gram - which may help us get at least a tiny hold on the power of modern marketing.

It’s nearly impossible for us to deal with the stuff that comes out of our own bodies.  We cringe and cower and pretend it doesn’t exist.  We flush the toilet and away it goes - we care not where.  We just don’t want to have to deal with it.  

Which brings us to Wim Delyoye’s Cloaca.

“Wim Delyoye’s Cloaca is actually a series of 5 increasingly complex machines that turn food into poop....Cloaca Original was a relatively inefficient exploration of the concept, taking forty hours to convert a meal from food into poop”  But with version number 5, the conversion of food to poop is down to “as little as 6 hours.”  Certainly faster than most human digestive systems.

If the Cloaca is brought to your town or city, you can purchase a can of it after the show, which many people do.  Again, there's a fascination with the stuff we hate. 

“In 1999, British artist Chris Ofili scandalized New York (yah, that New York) and enraged then mayor Rudolph Giuliani with The Holy Virgin Mary, a portrait of a black Madonna” produced with porn images and splattered with elephant dung.  We cannot handle the thought of a person, let alone the Virgin Mary, being anywhere near dung.

We’re all still dealing psychologically with the Puritans and their deeply repressed lifestyle.  Of course it goes back much further than the Puritans, but the Puritans settled in the new world with the intent of purifying themselves (having failed to do so in Europe).  Everything that was considered unclean, certainly that which came out of our bodies and smelled, as well as the “dirty savages” and the "dank and dark wildernesses" all around them, had to be purified or exterminated.  Rather than acceptance of the body and all that goes with it, there was an attempt to cover it up, to deny its very existence, to smother it with ritual practices, dogmatic thinking, and judgmental attitudes.  The way we perceive our own bodies and their waste materials TODAY is part of that legacy.

It’s our intent here at Ultralight Wilderness Toilet to try and get people to take responsibility for their own poop and pee.  We’re not asking anyone to like that responsibility.  We’re asking them to accept it in their own self-interest, and to become aware of its potential harm to the glorious wild places and the wild things that inhabit them.  ”Alimentary, Dear Watson.”