The Fountain Just Keeps Flowing

Snore.

The National Post today reports, on the front page, a shocking new art exhibit. Thanks to generous federal funding, the UQAM gallery is currently featuring Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca No. 5, a machine that recreates the stages of human digestion. Patrons are then encouraged to buy the actual stools produced by the machine, each individually signed by the artist. No doubt not cheap.

It is a perfect example of a very well-established genre, working like a well-oiled timepiece. Key to the success of the art and the exhibit, of course, is that it makes possible the perfect shocked headlines—“taxpayers’ money being spent on s***!”, and all that. The shock and outrage are of course exactly the point. Great PR, drawing people to the exhibit and boosting the artist’s name and marketability.

And the sophisticates, those in the know, are able to effortlessly show their greater sophistication buy buying this s***. For them, it’s a complete no-brainer, conveniently allowing them to appear smart without having to actually, you know, think. They can trot out the tired old clichés they’ve been trained to say. “Every generation of artists tries to push the boundaries of what’s acceptable as art, which materials, which ideas,” explains the museum’s curator, Wayne Baerwaldt, justifying his no doubt substantial academic’s pay.

It works well for everyone; except, of course, it really is s***. There is just nothing else there. There’s nothing in the least new or shocking about it all; because the shock itself is predictable, familiar, and therefore feigned. As is the newness of it, the pretense of pushing forward some boundary. Just the reverse; it is plain evidence that art has not pushed forward any new boundaries for roughly a century. It’s all been done, quite literally, on an average of once every two weeks or so in every largeish city for the last hundred years. Who has not seen similar headlines about similar works of art more often than they can count? Urine-soaked statues, statues made of dung, nude artists, preserved body parts, and on and on. Shocking? Boring and predictable.

And, if you take away the shock value, what could really be more banal? What could be more trivial than s***? What could be more superficial than skin itself?

If there was a point to be made here, it was already made, completely, once and for all, by Marcel Duchamp with his 1917 “sculpture” Fountain, which was, quite simply, a urinal. That was it. Is there really anything in Delvoye’s Cloaca No. 5 that was not already fully expressed in Fountain, almost a hundred years ago?

It’s all a sham, then; it’s all a fraud. It works for funding agencies, galleries, and critics precisely because, not knowing what they are doing, they need something perfectly predictable to know it is art. This is exactly what Duchamp was protesting against, and even his work has been twisted to fit the gallery mold. It works even better for artists, because once established and identified as “artists,” they are able to churn out the expected product now without any real effort, and, even better, without talent.

Way to go, Pharisees!