Bird
Feces as Digital Fine Art
May 24. 2009
As an artist, I also get outdoors by training for
marathons. Several weeks ago, on a
stretch of highway that I have run for decades, I noticed some bird poop
on the roadside asphalt. Of course I have
seen abundant droppings under overlying tree branches before.
But at that particular instant, inspiration struck the creative mind.
Maybe it was the long miles, dehydration, and the hot Hawaiian sun. The dried splats of white, green, yellow and gray looked to me like
paint. As a digital artist, I
mentally “cut & pasted” them unto my current abstract digital
artwork. Below are the results.
Indeed, the bird droppings complement my abstracts, rendering the
original compositions to backgrounds for the poop.
The other day, straight out of cyber-space via email, a professor of Moscow University introduced himself and said he was interested in my online digital art for a book he was planning to write. He invited me to do the English version while he wrote in his native Russian. He said more about digital art as a new contemporary art form needed to be written in the Russian language.
After we became acquaintances, I told him of my latest
“digital art” using bird feces. He
surprised me by commenting that in the early 1950’s some Russian artists
included cock feces to materialize their art.
This made me ponder about the relationship of feces and art making in the
past.
I recalled that the late Italian artist, Piero Manzoni,
canned his own feces in 1961, making Western art history. It was conceptual as well as Pop art. Anything, indeed, could be declared "art" by the
artist. In Manzoni’s case, the
canned excrement was also a political stab at the traditional (and proper) art
establishment.
I also recalled using my own dung as art material.
When I was a toddler, locked up in a “play pen” that I could not yet
climb over to physical freedom, I once took handfuls from my soiled diaper and
made a mess all over the pen. Boredom, protest, and creativity made me do
it. My mother later said I also had it all over my
face and in my mouth. Talk about total
immersion in one's work! Such
exploration at an early age signaled my later lifelong experimentation with
another art medium, that of digital tools.
So Feces Art, or “Shitty Art” existed before my new “cyberpaintings” that include nesting birds’ natural function. So what makes these works different or special? What makes them historical?
I believe
they are the first photo realistic replication of bird poop to be incorporated
into digital fine art. The
artist’s intent is that, at first glance, the bird markings appear merely as
splashes of paint within an abstract painterly field.
Then shock and awe occurs when the spectator realizes it’s
realistically rendered bird feces, familiar to all around the planet that drive,
walk, or sit in the shade of trees.
The use of bird feces as subject matter by me is historical for digital fine art. The act also incorporates Pop Art's spirit into contemporary digital fine art.
