The Poop Altar

Oh, we're in trouble now. We found a new website to give Perez Hilton and the Fug Girls some competition:

Trapped! | PoopReport.com

I refuse to poop in the men's room at work. Not because I am Shameful, but because for some reason men at my store can't seem to hit the toilet, but usually aim instead for the seat, the floor, or the wall.

So I normally poop when I get home, and rarely at work. But one night I couldn't take it anymore -- I had to take a shit. My co-workers know that if I poop, it"s common for me to do so in the woman's room, in the locking stall by the wall.

We had an electrical problem that night, so the lights were flickering in the bathroom, making it almost completely dark except for the light over the sink, which worked perfectly. I didn"t care. I hung the "Closed for Cleaning" sign on the door, went in, checked the paper levels, and locked the stall.

I was in there enjoying my poop as usual when I heard someone enter the restroom. I figured it was my coworker coming in to turn out the lights or something. How wrong I was. It was a woman!

One of our all-time favorite works of art...

Piero Manzoni (1933-63) - Merda d'artista (Artist's Shit), 1961

Voltaire's Monkey: For Those Days When Art Just Gives You The Shits

"Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist who died at the age of 29 in 1963. But before he went he got some excrement - his own - and put it in a tin can. 'Excellent!' he said, in Italian, 'I think I'll call it Merda d'artista!'

Manzoni's canned shit is well known now, or the idea of it is. It's an idea as powerful in the popular imagination as the idea of blank canvases. In fact the actual cans are not all that well known. There are many of them. Each one contains an amount of the artist's own shit. On the label it says 30 grams but of course no one can really tell. The labels are quite detailed and well designed, with the name of the work in three languages, plus the date, the artist's signature and the name of the collector who owns the individual can - all this is part of the look. PIERO MANZONI is printed on the label in light grey letters on a grey ground, with the name repeating so it makes a mantra of the artist's name, as well as a grey and yellow pattern.

When they were first sold they cost their weight in gold. Now they're worth much more. If one came on the market today it would cost about 30,000 pounds. So while a pile of them was shown in a vitrine in London's Serpentine Gallery recently, it was a pile of shit but it was nearly a million pound's worth. . .

Money, shit, art: the holy trinity. Manzoni took jokes to a higher plane than Duchamp, in that he elevated them to the spiritual plane which was somewhere Duchamp never really wanted to go....