Cloaca is the name given to a special series of machines that have recreated our flesh-and-blood processes of chewing, digesting, and excreting using the exact same materials of peptin, creatine, symbiotic bacteria and the like. The latest edition weighs a few thousand pounds.
Believe it or not, there are people who will pay $1,000 for a vacuum-sealed piece of Cloaca's poop accompanied by a certificate of authenticity describing what the machine "ate" to create it. There is a lot of text devoted to the project in Dave Praeger's Poop Culture, but I think this passage sums it up beautifully:
Cloaca demonstrates that in modern art, cachet overshadows aesthetics.
One can believe that Cloaca lowers art, or one can believe that Cloaca elevates poop. Behold the machine: huge complex, unfathomable, with advanced computers required to monitor complicated chemical processes beyond the comprehension of the museum-goer watching the turtlehead emerge -- all this to recreate what happens in our gastrointestinal tract! How wonderfully mysterious and intricate is the human body! How remarkable that a process requiring so much equipment and electrical power and money and real estate happens so effortlessly inside our abdomens in an area the size of a basketball! Cloaca has pushed art, technology, and biology to their extreme, but the human body easily outpoops it.
So why shouldn't poop be in the museum? Art celebrates and criticizes humanity, after all, and what are humans but six-foot-tall pooping machines? Is anything more relevant to the human condition than the poop we all experience? Is anything a better representative of the species?
I apologize that the video below is so obnoxious, but it was the only one I was able to find on the subject.
More logos plus images of the various machines are on the artist's website.
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Sadly, this is the last post I had lined up in the Poop Mondays series. Hope you enjoyed and were not completely disgusted.
