Taking the piss
In 1964, Andy Warhol stacked together a mountain of Campbell’s Soup cans at an Upper East Side gallery in New York, simulating a supermarket display. Visitors bought autographed soup cans for $6 each. He would also silkscreen these cans, as well as Brillo boxes, Coca-cola bottles, and the like onto canvases in endless repetitions and numbing neon-colored variations of the same images.
For the 1970 Venice Biennale, Ed Ruscha plastered a room with printed chocolate. Yes, chocolate melted, laid across a silk screen, then transferred onto paper and layered on the walls. The chocolate melted in parts, aged, and developed a bloom; in short, it decomposed, as organic products are supposed to.
In 2019, Maurizio Cattelan slapped a banana onto a wall with duct tape, and everyone wondered whether it was indeed art, until someone decided it was food, grabbed it, and ate it. The work, of which there were three editions, was titled “Comedian.” But perhaps it was Cattelan laughing all the way to the bank when it sold at auction for $120,000 to a crypto bro.
Turning the ordinary into art
The world of conceptual art does like its jokesters. A century before Cattelan’s banana, Marcel Duchamp flipped a urinal, signed it R Mutt, and scandalized the New York art world. It didn’t help that he called it, quite cheekily, “Fountain.” While not his first readymade, it certainly was his most infamous, with many of his fellow members at the Society of Independent Artists in New York voting to reject the work for an upcoming exhibition, claiming it was aesthetically crude, perhaps even immoral.
While Duchamp did not quite elevate the urinal to the lofty heights of academic art, he did change the perception of modern art by taking an everyday object and stripping it of its quotidian utility, thereby compelling a reassessment of the object itself. As explained in an anonymous editorial in the May 1917 issue of “Blind Man,” the avant-garde magazine run by Duchamp and two friends, “Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance, he CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, and placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.”
And therein lies the art of the matter.
Admittedly, conceptual art can be one giant mindfuck at the best of times. Walk into a space at the Dia:Beacon and behold Walter de Maria’s “The New York Earth Room,” an artwork consisting of an “interior earth sculpture”—127,000 kg of soil just lying there. Since 1980. What are we to make of that?
From reverence to sacrilege
Yet one does wonder sometimes, is art just taking the piss?
Or, in the case of Duchamp, Warhol, and many other artists since, is art indeed a reflection of the times? A response, if not a mirror, to increasing consumerism and commodification, to growing automation, and even alienation, in the pursuit of individual definition and pleasure? Could it be an invitation to meditate on or confront modern-day realities, such as the fragility of nature, climate change, socio-economic inequalities, displacement, and the very temporality of life itself, so that the essence of a work lies not in its subject, but in its concept?
As Duchamp said of Warhol’s art: “If you take a Campbell’s soup can and repeat it fifty times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put fifty Campbell’s soup cans on a canvas.”
By the same token, one also had to wonder if Warhol himself was taking the piss when he was invited to curate an exhibition at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1969 and given unrestricted access to the museum’s storage. The museum had hoped that Warhol’s curatorial intervention would help RISD’s young generation of students appreciate the artistic treasures in its permanent collection.
Instead of highlighting the museum’s best pieces, however, Warhol seemingly picked random objects, arranging them on the floor like discarded merchandise in a junk shop, replete with broken chairs, torn paintings, chipped sculptures, unrelated items like umbrellas, and even shoes, displayed as haphazardly as they were found in the basement storage.
Needless to say, “Raid the Icebox 1” was certainly unorthodox. For many, it was an utter travesty. It enraged the community as being out of touch with the highly charged times; this was during the Vietnam War era, after all. It shocked the cultural elite who expected, I imagine, that art be treated with more reverence.
Taking a piss (literally)
Some scholars have argued that Warhol’s curatorial debut—and one of the very first instances of the artist as curator—was a form of institutional critique, overtly challenging institutional power and traditional museum practices of collection, display, and taxonomy.
Unless of course Warhol was just taking the piss.
Banksy, that other master of irreverence and subversion, seems to actually relish taking the piss out of the establishment, especially law enforcement. An early example of his brand of stencilled and spray-painted guerilla murals features a Royal Guardsman who appears to be caught in the act, so to speak, of unzipping his fly, ready to pee.
One wonders if he knew his latest oeuvre, sprayed onto the walls of London’s Royal Courts of Justice no less, of a protester on the ground being beaten by a judge in bewigged regalia with his gavel, would so outrage the authorities that they would immediately attempt to scrub it off. In doing so, they actually emphasized Banksy’s point even more forcefully, leaving a ghostly shadow that alludes to the frightening fascism spreading throughout the UK today, wherein a peaceful, nonviolent citizen’s action group is suddenly proscribed as a terrorist organization.
In his very effective way, Banksy seems to be telling Keir Starmer’s Labour government, “Piss off.”
From allusion to immersion, meanwhile, we have that polarizing 1987 work of art from Andres Serrano, called “Immersion (Piss Christ),” a photograph that depicted a small plastic figurine of Christ on the cross, submerged in a glass tank filled with—wait for it—the artist’s own urine. It’s clearly a piece floating in an acrid sea of symbolism: the smashing of religious iconography, a distrust of religion, and the artist’s own personal grappling with his Catholic faith, among others. Yet, the photograph’s reddish-gold glow gives it a strangely otherworldly beauty that makes it compelling, if shocking.
Unsurprisingly, the conservatives were pissed off.
