MAIN SPACE EXHIBITION
JUNE 8 – JULY 7, 2001
RECEPTION: FRIDAY, JUNE 8, 2001 AT 8 PM
ARTIST MEET AND GREET: SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2001 AT 2 PM
LOCATION – STRIDE GALLERY
722, 11 AVE S.W, CALGARY, ALBERTA
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
For her installation at the Stride Gallery, THE SCATALOGICAL REMAINS OF THE DAY, Mariko Paterson will be covering the wall with ceramic works made to look like cat feces. These works will arrange themselves much like bathroom graffiti, and will be comprised of visual punney and phrases, which convey feelings of displeasure and frustration. As well, the floor will be covered with cat litter, to emphasize that by confronting the phrases and feces, the viewer is encouraged to retreat, rethink, relive, and relieve oneself before exiting. Through a balance of humor and intelligence, Paterson looks at the moments of our lives that signify compromise, failure and discontent, and hopes to make light of our misfortunes.
Paterson’s previous works have utilized humour in a similarly central way. She has consistently examined stereotypes and cultural signifiers, and foiled them against traditional ceramic practices and forms. Her works are idiosyncratically personal, yet they speak of broader, accessible experiences.
ARTIST BIO
MARIKO PATERSON is a Ceramics instructor at the Alberta College of Art and Design and has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Most recently she participated in Utilitarian Clay: Celebrating the Object, in Tennessee, and in the Biennale Nationale de Ceramique in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec.
EXHIBITION TEXT
THE SCATOLOGICAL REMAINS OF THE DAY
JUAN IVOIRE
Once upon a time, Mariko Paterson made decorative objects that were gently ironic and elegant, but things have changed. No tender flowers brave this exhibition, which is aggressive and more than a little dégoûtant. Why would someone known for her highly crafted, historically savvy ceramics turn to squeezing out replica cat feces and energetically savaging long-repressed vexations? Faced with aggravation, we generally buck up and ignore waves of dissatisfaction, ennui and powerlessness that mount in response to parental nagging, job prospects gone sour, loan officers who prefer those with “real jobs” or apartment managers who never rent to anyone with spiky hair. Why do we ignore memories of abject misery that surface unbidden whilst wading ankle-deep in gravel laced with–need we say–crotte de chat? Well, Ms. Paterson just might have the answer in her elegiac installation, The Scatological Remains of the Day. Surprisingly, this exhibition locates itself within a stream of merde, crotte, caca, feces, poo, crap or plain old shit that appears with some frequency in the art historical corpus. Fecal matter can signify the divine, grotesque, satirical, political, embodied or even realist aesthetic. How is this? Jaune Ivoire, noted pataphysicienne (as designated by local artist Mireille Perron, following Alfred Jarry, author of the appropriately scatological Ubu Roi) is about to pull on her Miss Manners-style pink garden gloves, wade in and get to the bottom of it. In the words of another renowned pataphysicienne, the eminent ephem: “On est dans la merde ici!”* (*trans: We are in deep shit here!)
Even before Freud described the anal stage in terms of infantile attachment to bodily waste, theorists linked art and decoration with neurosis, likening painting to the smearing of excrement. Adolf Loos makes this patently clear in his “Ornament and Crime” (1908) when he writes: “One can measure the culture of a country by the degree to which its lavatory walls are daubed.” Jeanne Randolph explains Freud saw neurotic symptoms as disguised communication, linked with primary processes originating in the unconscious of the patient. For Freud, artistic production represented the conscious discharge of accumulated aggressive and erotic psychic energy in order to achieve “intrapsychic quiescence” or pleasure. This model applies not only to twentieth-century work: art informel, abstract expressionism, certain genres of performance art or pranks such as Piero Manzoni’s canned artist shit. Medieval Christian folklore about the Devil also demonstrates distinctly anal preoccupations. The poet Dante equates the portal between Hell and Purgatory with the Devil’s anus, and the stalwart Luther visualizes his battles with Satan in terms of noxious farts and threats to stuff the Devil up his own butt “where he belongs.” In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s malodorous Yahoos exhibit preternatural obsession with effluent from their alimentary canals. Endowing it with magical and medicinal powers, they regale new leaders by drenching them head to toe in excrement. Hmmmm–I don’t recall that reference in the annual report of a certain multi-national Internet giant! Albert Boime sees even eighteenth-century neoclassicism in terms of anal-sadistic eroticism, as the rebellious son’s “sublimated expression of the Oedipal wish projection” to blind, castrate or wound the oppressive father/patriarch. The flip–and equally Oedipal–side of this most temperate art form is the political caricature, the “imagined absence of parental prohibition.” Here, Hell literally breaks loose with farts, turd-bombs, water canons shaped like clysters (for delivering enemas, the fashion passion of the 17th century: Louis XIV reportedly indulged in up to four a day), devils as giant anuses and soldiers depicted as crocks of shit. Warfare in this period was carried out as much in the fetid imaginations of artists as on any battlefield.
This latter reference ties anti-authoritarian scatological fantasies firmly to ceramics, which, of course, are made from material hardly distinguishable from fecal matter. Less-than-polite French slang refers to the clay cylinder used to throw pots as “un étron d’argile”–a turd of clay. Nor is this the only obvious link: as reported by the ever-respectable Dr. Judy Sterner, pot sherds are used as toilet paper in West Africa, and doubtlessly elsewhere. Chamber pots–found once in every home and often graced with lewd inscriptions–support this connection. Letting loose their contents in a “golden shower” upon the heads of imagined enemies, les pots de chambres make their appearance in work by even so decorous an artist as William Hogarth. Human and animal excrement both were valuable commodities used for everything from fertilizer to tanning to salt production. A despised yet necessary class of worker, the vidanguers or human waste transporters, mucked out household privies until bourgeois decorum and new methods of potty training, as much as concern about disease, spurred the nineteenth-century sanitation reforms. The demand for sewer systems and water closets stimulated industrial ceramics, putting out of work itinerant night-soil collectors and small-scale potters alike. As fastidious citizens, we now have less and less to do with our own ordure, and general awareness of bodily functions rests on intimacy with our pets. Perhaps through them we reenact our childhood fascination with defecation in ways now immodestly advertised on television and in supermarket aisles. As we stoop to scoop the litter box, do we recollect the clay origin of kitty litter?
Does Mariko Paterson reject idealist Kantian aesthetics to embrace even matters that disgust her, imbuing them with moral worth? Does she join those legions of rebellious bed-wetters, san-culottes shit-hurlers and fart-wielding devil-slayers to jar our false rapprochement with those situations that genuinely irritate and enrage us? Like pre-contact Aztec penitents, who swallowed their excrement to purify themselves of sin and evil, does she invite us to “swallow” and process the shit life deals us, the many annoyances large and small? In undertaking this personal ritual of cleansing and renewal, does she not also re-invigorate the Northern European tradition of carnivalesque humour that somehow enables us to bear it all? Indeed she does.
JUANE IVOIRE is a dilettante painter, writer and frequent collaborator with Calgary artists. Her own tastes run more towards flatulent texts and images of exotic waterfowl.
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