While Delvoye has a cleverly absurd machine to justify his existence (in spite of himself,) the audience isn’t so lucky–we don’t produce anything except the dollars that commodify the world around us and the demand that sustains a much larger shitting machine.

i agree with you on the signage criticism. interpreting this piece is so much more interesting than having it’s concept be spoonfed (shovel-fed?) to you. more importantly, i grapple with many more – and more extensive – readings of it without the signage!

i guess the artist really wanted his piece to speak to consumerism, though. (after all, he titled it “Cloaca No. 5,” echoing Channel No. 5…) so i guess we’ll have to shelve the debate as a matter of personal preference.

on another note, though, your article prompted me to think abotu andres serrano’s “shit” show again (at yvon lambert gallery last year). if you didn’t see it, the exhibition was of large scale, highly detailed close-up photographs of the artist’s (and his wife’s) shit… all set up against nauseatingly saccharine candy-colored backgrounds (like this, for example: http://steinskog.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/248705228.jpg)

it spoke to the art world, yes. but i felt that it also spoke to politics. before the show opened, serrano did some serious advertising/hype-raising work by plastering the city with mysterious stickers that read “SHIT IS COMING”—an act of poetic terrorism, in a way.

for me personally, the “shit” show related as much to the state of the contemporary art world as it did to the presidential race, to war, to our downward-spiraling economy—and serrano achieved that without explicit signage.