Man in Cubicle, Releasing the Demons

If a guy takes a dump in a museum, is it art?

I’m in the lower-level men’s room in the Hirshhorn Museum when this thought occurs to me. After viewing the Warhols (a quadruple self-portrait and umpteen screen prints of Marilyn Monroe’s lips in various colors), several works by Mario Merz (constructions of neon tubes, photographs, and other objects based on Fibonacci sequences), and the ultra-realistic sculptures of Ron Mueck (a super-sized, sullen, hairless man; a just-slightly smaller than real old woman curled fetal and peeping hauntingly from beneath a bed sheet; a newborn boy, actual size but made tiny by his crucifixion on a bare white wall), I have learned to question my own perception of art.

So, I think, it’s a valid question. Andy Warhol spent his waning days pissing patterns on sheets of polished copper. Was this art, or just the piddlings of a half-sane cipher with an overabundance of copper sheeting and a weak bladder? William S. Burroughs mounted T-shirts bearing his portrait and played Dirty Harry on them with a .45 Magnum. Was this art, or a break in the boredom of growing old in Lawrence, Kansas? Or was it the bizarre penance of a life-long junkie who shot his wife to death while playing “William Tell”?

I’m no Christian, but if it’s art for a guy to paint a picture of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung, then it’s art for me to have a quite satisfying BM in the basement men’s room of the Hirshhorn. Actually, I thought that it was a good painting, but was there no mud available? But wait a minute…

If no one else sees it, is it still art? After I flush it, is the exhibition over, the art defunct, or is the act of flushing in itself a continuation of the artistic endeavor?

Outside, 200,000 citizens of the world are protesting war, while I sit serenely in a museum, enjoying my solitude, reveling in my thoughts. Are these acts art? Or must a famous movie director film the story to make it so?

As I leave the Hirshhorn men’s room and ride the escalator up to the gift shop, a new thought occurs to me. Art is whatever one believes to be art. In a way, everything is art or has the potential to be art.

But in my case, it was just a dump.

© 1996 Chris Ofili, "The Holy Virgin Mary"

© 2025 Brian G Parker