Monday 3 January 2011

Making Shit. Making Hitler

Often people ask me how I make my shit. my literal shit. that is beautiful. Like Hitler's moustache. Have you ever looked at your own poo in the toilet and got a little Dali on it? Poo can reveal some of the most incredible natural forms compressed by your very own gut. Dali could see bodies in rocks I wonder what he could see in faeces? Why am I talking about this...

Well it's because often people associate shit and faeces with negative things, disease and that. Wash your hands after going to the toilet, rid yourself of the germs, germs are bad. But beyond this there is something quite intriguing. Chris Ofili stuck elephant shit onto his paintings?! Is shit actually something quite beautiful beyond its smell.

If we apply this to crap art... Well, the materials in crap art are basically rubbish! Appreciated at the same value as garbage. If that is the case then how is it that Tim Noble and Sue Webster make such good money? or do they..? To sell through Gagosian I'm sure they are, but anyhow... not my point of discussion. Rubbish and rubbish made good. good crap. good hitler.

Two dried out sticks of wood. Some paper clips.


Little bit of gaffer tape. Wood is dry so it will safely stick.


Newspaper and tape to built up the shit body, followed by a layer of Modroc plaster of Paris to make the figure pretty strong.


Paper clips at bottom keep it standing upright like forks. Beneath I work on head using scrunched up ball of newspaper and tape and go over with fresh modelling clay. I add a nice little neck so later when it dries it will be attachable to the body. The neck can have tape tied over it important to bare in mind.


After a long story short this is hitler. The jacket is made from newspaper with white gaffer tape over it. This in itself creates a nice material, sort of papery but strong, shiny and smooth. It can also be cut allowing particular shapes and patches to be created and stuck into place.


I then painted the shit crap sicko red, as I said I would in earlier posts.

I love Hitler, occasionally his head has been found broken on the floor. I find it funny like a hindsight, or retrospective of what was to await his fate and what his fate ended up being. Sometimes he looks better decapitated. to add to the shitness of the art. The materials are so bad they break but that is what I like about this art, it is temporary. It will fade. Don't kid yourself. It is unelitist. But he is so cute anyway. cute like a piece of crap shit that he was.

Elitism buys into lifelong materials. Unelitism buys into now.
bourgeois hooks and talons - in tarot the hangman, holding onto something caught upside down by the foot.

No longer do I take this art so seriously. Let it be what it is. Let the artist be what he wanted to be. Not caught, not trapped, trapped for too long. Just flow have fun, live life in the world. Go paint bananas with kangaroo pups and eat spinach on a boat in Amsterdam whilst sailing off to the Bermuda triangle to warp into another hyper space.

Making shit. Making Hitler.

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