indispensable duties
OPENING SAT 17TH OCTOBER 4-6PM
RUNNING 17TH OCTOBER TO 7TH NOVEMBER
STUDIO DOCUMENTATION
Y3K
205 Young St.
Fitzroy
Melbourne
Australia
3065
OPEN 12-6PM THURS-SAT
y3kgallery@gmail.com
(+61) 401 12 12 12
(+61) 419 57 92 17
Y3K
205 Young St.
Fitzroy
Melbourne
Australia
3065
OPEN 12-6PM THURS-SAT
y3kgallery@gmail.com
(+61) 401 12 12 12
(+61) 419 57 92 17
7 REASONS WHY YOU TAKE ME FOR A STOOL
Plato used to always worry about shitting. He believed that one
lost some of their soul in flatulence. He advised against eating
beans.
PASS THE DUCHY
The Duchess of Orleans also knew her shit. In a letter sent from
the Chateau Fountainbleau dated 1694, she referred to the
installation of Parisian public toilets in exclamation: “You are
indeed fortunate to shit whenever you may please and do so to you
heart’s content! … We are not so lucky, here. I have to hold on
to my turd until evening.”
VOTING MEMBERS OFF THE BOARD
Society represses shit. Every effort is made to keep shit out of
sight. It is is marked as useless the moment we flush it down the
toilet. It is a lack of foresight. Shit is a resource overlooked.
It can have a nonutilitarian role because shitting is a function
that unites us all. To openly admit to shitting can be emotionally
healthy. Let's hold hands and say it together now and vow: “I
doo”.
SHIT FOR BRAINS
In childhood, we love befriending our shit and sharing it with our
friends. But as we mature, the act of defecation becomes an
intimate and private moment. Through the physical act of shitting
in solitude, we reveal ourselves as human because when we shit we
are not divine. Sitting and shitting connects us back to the
organic and natural world. However, we probably talk more about how
shit things are rather than actually shitting. Thus, we expel more
shit from our mouths than with our arses.
WITH RESPECT TO NEGOTIATING THE RELEASE OF HOSTAGES
Artist Misha Holenbach does not use real shit himself. Instead, he
gets his hands dirty by searching through junk, or useless shit:
wooden table legs, mannequins, pink bits and rubber poo. As a set
of found objects and images rearranged and deranged, the work
avoids a banal imitation of shit. However, these found objects, or
fake shit are not as fake as they seem because shit is the ultimate
simulacra, a copy of a copy.
POP!
In a lineage that extends through Jim Shaw, Andy Warhol and Marcel
Duchamp, the rallying around the already readymade repositions
things for freer symbolic enterprises. In the re-presentation of
shit, Misha touches upon the etymological origins of faeces, which
derives from faex, the Latin for dregs. He is using the dregs,
things humans have casted away; shit becomes a metaphor for the
unwanted.
By putting these outcasts back together with ready mix, the images
of the objects do not return to us as they normally should; they
lose their original function. With this method, he is breaking our
own need to put the image back together in a fixed or familiar way.
He strips back the structure of meaning – and this brings about a
danger: the readymades return as phantasms and representations of
abstract ideas. A Hush Puppy becomes a Push Poopy (complete with a
14 inch butt plug and a shit on its head). Doodoo becomes Dada.
I HAVE SOME MAD BEEF TO SETTLE
In a world dominated by an endless shit of information (.gifs,
blogs and reality tv), the installations of Holenbach gain a
physical presence to the collecting of images, a process normally
ephemeral, online and open-ended. With all of the excess entailed
by our search engine obsession, it is a relief that there is
something real enough at the end of the image search. A solid is
made from liquid. That's the shit!
Timothy Moore
EXHIBITION IMAGES
