Hmmmm, first off, thanks for the link. Secondly, I'm wondering if bringing it further to light is a good move. Jerk clearly wants some exposure for his shit by leveraging the efforts of quite a few other people.

The person who organized the show has now taken the majority of the day visiting sites and cleaning them. I'm pretty sure after all the work she did last week organizing the event that she doesn't need this. I kind of had a feeling that these things would get messed with, but for some reason I was thinking more along the lines of a particular group of unruly high school children...

Wow, how did he ever make the conceptual leap from 'porta-potti' to 'little pieces of poop?' Great minds at work...

OMG. How juvenile. Good of you to call him on it and to name names.

Not a direct question to anyone here, but do we distinguish between graffiti on public property versus public art? Is one ok while the other is not? Should artists respect other artists' art much in the same way that graffiti artists respect other graffiti artists' work?

I'm curious about how it all works. Me? I think this move by Jenkins is ridiculous. Thanks for writing about it.

FYI... Jenkins has removed the images from his Web site and issued an apology:

http://www.xmarkjenkinsx.com/fresh_shit.html

Kriston, I hadn't heard of Jenkins before, but I followed your link to his web site and his work is really good. The thing w/ the shit sounds crappy, but the images of it have been wiped off his site.

> ...the images of it have been wiped off his site.

So to speak.

I just saw this discussion and thought I'd throw my 2 cents worth in...I've been looking online for images of the tape poops and have been unable to find any, but I did see the actual sculptures. They were hilarious! You'd walk by and see a chained-up port-a-potty with a humongous glistening poo outside, like someone just couldn't hold it any longer. (I did not see anything painted on the exhibits themselves.) I really didn't see it as a comment on the exhibit's contents at all. It was an installation in a public space, and one that actually inspired me to go back and check out the work inside the johns (which I also enjoyed). I was disappointed that the poops were gone, truth be told. It had been an unexpected chuckle for me that evening. I do thank you for putting a name to them, though...after looking through Jenkins' site, it appears I only have to keep my eyes peeled and I could come across some whimsical surprise just about anywhere!

as i posted on mark's blog (comments which have since been taken down), his turdwork is fun, if too easy and sophomor(on)ic. but it's one thing to remix an installation by placing something in front of it, and a completely different steaming plate of poop to paint on the original artist's work, as was done in at least one case.

and to address briefly David's question, above, i don't think there are rules about defacing any artist's work, even graffiti artists', but in the public art arena you reap what you sow. in the 80s there was a tagger named CAP who went around tagging the work of other graffiti artists with small quickies; violence ensued. and, if you're going to disrespect someone's work don't blog it. finally, destructive guerrilla art does a disservice to guerrilla artists.

As I said, I didn't see anything painted on the outside, but I didn't actually go inside the port-a-potties at the time because they were closed...maybe it was added later. If so, it's gone now because I've actually been inside each one by this point. That's pretty gutsy to paint inside since he would have had to get the key from the gallery! I'd just assumed he did it in the middle of the night. Yeah, he definitely crossed the line if he was messing with the insides. I'm glad it didn't permanently damage anything.

Postumo, I saw these pics on his sites when they were still up and have seen the exhibits in person. I also saw his mixed blog comments before they were turned off and that among them, you called him a shithead. Your other remarks weren't terribly impressive either and I think Jenkins made the right call to leave conversations about it open in other forums like this one.

From what I saw in these pics, Jenkins wrote "hot poop" on the outside of a Don's John in an "acrylic paint" above one of his art "poops" (probably to draw attention to it). Also, from the pictures, there was no art on these Port-a-Potties, just a sign about the exhibit and a chain. The artwork was on the inside and so he definitely didn't deface any of the artists' work. Also, while you may see Jenkins' as doing it in his name as stupid, I think it instead proves that his intention was not to disrespect the art.

Did he go too far? Maybe, but I think he was just exploring frontiers and testing art-on-art boundaries. Some line got crossed that afterwards he wasn't comfortable with and he checked himself and even apologized. I saw this blog's author wrote that it was big of him to do so.

Finally, I think this Found Sound exhibit that perhaps you, Postumo, are a part of, isn't that well thought out. If you're going to have public art, it should be accessible not chained up when the gallery isn't open. If there was a commentary being made by Jenkins about this, he might have been artistically poking fun at the inaccesiblity of this public space installation. I also agree with the author in one of his earlier posts that screen projections are wonderful (and increasingly popular) installations because they are immediately accesbile to all.

Public space art whether it be Pandas, galleries with outhouses, tape turds, screen projections, etc. are an exciting frontier for art. You're right, there are no rules just reactions, and the chaotic nature of public space is what makes it exciting. Jenkins is one of the few artists in DC doing this. BORF is another. Postumo, you ought to get out there and have some fun instead of being bent on trying to shame Jenkins and name-calling. That is what is too easy and sophmor(on)ic.

Finally, Jenkins a disservice to to guerilla artists/street artists? It took a lot of strength to do what he did under his own name with his established reputation in this city. I'm sure he'd knew he'd catch shit for it, but exploring boudaries is where the real art is and where Found Sound is not except in relation to this interfacing. Its hard for your ordinary artists who seek gallery success to understand this, but real artists, which there are terribly few, don't care about this sort of thing too much.

I think he ought to take the apology down. And rather than excusing Jenkins for this installation, I applaud it.

I'm a big fan of Jenkins work, follow it closely, and am and even bigger fan now.

PS: CAPS, I respect him too for bringing something new to the game. Sometimes art on art is violence, and its that much more interesting because of it.

Thanks for the comment, d-g-p. To this point,

If you're going to have public art, it should be accessible not chained up when the gallery isn't open

I guess there has to be a compromise? It would be cool to listen to them at night, I agree, but the installs have audio equipment inside. They'd be gone by morning.

Kriston,
Night--sure would have been nice, but more than that, with most galleries keeping short hours, the project is more "closed" than "open" to the public (and the chain does well to emphasize that). Also, having to go into the gallery and get a key even when its open? Sounds almost like paranoia. Sound installation as public art is a great frontier to explore, but unfortunately, "Found Sound" fails to meet criteria for calling it "public" or even "semi-public." It of course shouldn't reflect on the artists any more than the artists who painted Pandas.

A good example of public sound istallations were Cai's booms which I initially thought were terrorists attacks on the city. Now that's accessible!

In a perfect world, as they say. But I was told by one artist that some kids came up and started tipping the Port-O-Let over while he was installing the work. As in, 0 minutes after the piece went up, someone started messing with it.

So it might have been purer had the artists/galleries simply opened it up completely, and that's always the goal, but I think that far fewer people would actually hear the works that way. I'm betting that stuff would've been taken pretty quickly, which would obv. shut the show down.

Not sure I follow your Panda analogy. Don't know if I want to re-open this can of worms, but—FS accommodates artists working in their chosen medium in a way that, oi, Pandas definitely didn't.

Yeah, tuff stuff, alot more to consider on several levels, and lends even more respect to artists like Christo who can compromise and still pull it off gracefully. A favorite exhibit of mine in DC this past year was Cai Guo-Qiang's piece in the Directions gallery. Not so much the burned paper, but the little books that discussed his public projects that failed to realize themselves. Really gave insight into this artist's dedication.

So you saw Cai's Tornado? I thought that was a really amazing work. Speaking of compromises, the Kennedy Center wasn't the first area institution that Cai worked with on that piece. From what I understand that first institution just wasn't able to pull off the logistics.

I also thought that the Cai "Directions" show was pretty amazing.

I didn't see it, and didn't know it was him until the day after. But really, I'm happier it turned out that way. Like I'd said in my earlier post, at the time it was going off it woke me from my sleep, and a bit out of it I thought maybe the city was under attack. I don't consider myself a fearful American, but in that moment I certainly was.

I've often wondered what it would be like to be a citizen in one of these cities like Iraq or Yugoslavia being bombed. Cai's explosions although not likely intended, provided me with that experience and for an artist to be able to do something like that, well I wouldn't have thought such a thing was possible.

The next day, learning that it was him, I had a good laugh about it and kind of thanked him in my head too. But yeah, what I know of his work I've been really impressed with and wished I'd had the time to make the trip up to see the suspended cars with their exploding colors of light. Amazing mind, and certainly one of the great artists of our times.