Controversial art exhibit raises a stink. exhibition dedicated to excrement

Calgary Sun ^ | 06/13/03 | CP

[bedolido]

OTTAWA -- Here's a scoop that has Canadian Alliance MP Chuck Strahl holding his nose.

A contemporary art gallery in Ottawa, supported by federal tax dollars, is staging a multimedia, interactive exhibition dedicated to excrement.

The five-week show, which opens at an Ottawa art gallery next Thursday, is called Scatalogue: 30 years of crap in contemporary art.

The Saw Gallery received a two-year, $72,000 operating grant from the Canada Council for the Arts last year, but no council funding was earmarked specifically for Scatalogue.

A media release for the "living, interactive archive" says the exhibition is "a critique of the conservatism affecting most galleries in the country.

But Strahl, the Alliance critic for heritage, says it is the spending of tax dollars that is out of control. "It's the kind of thing that drives taxpayers crazy. I think Canadians find that kind of stuff neither poetic nor artistic," said the MP from B.C.'s Fraser Valley.

"It takes the old joke objects you buy at the joke store to a new level. Some people think it's funny to leave imitation crap on somebody's sheets. This has been left on the taxpayers' hands and I don't imagine they're going to be too amused."

Curators Jason and Stefan St-Laurent did not immediately return phone calls.

[Billthedrill]

Art isn't, in fact, becoming more daring, it's becoming more infantile.

[Zavien Doombringer]

[XRdsRev]

Sounds like a crappy exhibit to me.

[alloysteel]

Fecal matter is still fecal matter, no matter the motivations of the "artist" who arranges the stuff into different poses and forms.

There is a reason that latrines are a basic part of sanitation, even under the most primitive of conditions.

Cats bury their own excrement. Is this artist more intellectually challenged than a cat?

[irgbar-man]

Curators Jason and Stefan St-Laurent did not immediately return phone calls.

I am fighting the urge to make a homophobic comment with every fibre of my being!

[pankot]

A natural for the Clinton Presidential Library!

[RichInOC]

A lot of modern art is crap. These guys are simply more honest about it.

[New Horizon]

Thanks for NOT posting pictures.

[bedolido]

Just seems to me that these guys are just laughing (all the way to the bank) because people are just so stupid. I also think the real exhibit is in the people that go to see it, not the (aledged) art they came to see.

[maxwell]

"Interactive" exhibit?