Stomach Churning Art

Duke Ellington is sometimes attributed with the famous quote “There are only two kinds of music. Good and bad.” A variation of this statement passed through my mind upon watching this piece on Lance Ozanix, a man who creates what he has decided to call, eloquently I may add, “barf art”.

Mr. Ozanix ingests a specific, secret, colored concoction which he then proceeds to vomit back onto a canvas. Sometimes he ingests several colors to create a “multi tie-dye look”. He also adds foods to the mix for different textures. His pieces have sold for “as much as five thousand dollars.” By all accounts, he seems to be doing quite well within his little niche.

Now, certainly there have been more shocking, perhaps more nuanced instances of artists using bodily fluids and functions as art. Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista or Artist’s Shit comes to mind. Manzoni collected his own feces putting them in 90 numbered cans. Each can contained 30 grams of feces, labeled as “100% pure artist’s shit” in Italian, English, French, and German. He then sold them for the price of their weight in gold which is now between, roughly, twenty five and thirty five thousand dollars.

The viability of selling such excretions for massive sums of money is not my point here, however. Indeed, neither is it a matter of whether or not work like Ozanix’s should be labeled as art. As someone who bullshitted through successfully completed four years of art school, I feel that the answer can be nothing other than an emphatic “yes.”

Beyond that though the question is, really, moot. To all those who are willing to continue the discussion, whether it be about film or feces, video games or vomit let me say to you: you can have it, I really do not care. You can put anything you want on a wall or project on a monitor or place on a pedestal in the middle of an empty Soho gallery illuminated by track-lighting, and you can call it art. My only question is: is it good?

Skitzo Ripley’s Believe It or Not [YouTube] : poetv