What does it mean to eat your art? On November 20, cryptocurrency billionaire Justin Sun bought Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” – famously, a banana channel that is stuck to the wall and needs to be replaced when they all rot – for $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction. As my colleague Valentina Di Liscia reported, Sun sent an email stating that he plans to “personally eat the banana” as “part of this unique artistic experience.”
Sun probably considers eating the banana radical, but others might argue that the truly radical – even revolutionary – act would be wasting a 49-cent banana for which you overpaid by more than $6 million. In any case, consuming the banana does not make the art disappear. Just ask Piero Manzoni. It just becomes a pile of shit.
In his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” Georges Bataille argued that heterogeneous social existence involves “elements impossible to assimilate,” that is, that which exists for itself and must be expelled from the state in order to to function. as a homogeneous sphere. According to Bataille, ‘the heterogeneous world includes everything that results from unproductive expenditure’, including ‘the waste products of the human body’, but the sacred must be classified as heterogeneous alongside human waste, because figures such as ‘kings or medicine men’ are by definition outside the social realm. This creates a similarity between desecration and divination, in that they are mutually removed from the digestive tract of the socius.
Manzoni’s 1961 multiple “Artist’s Shit” took shit to the next level by sealing it in a can and presenting it as art, but Bataille’s essay goes further by suggesting that the sacred is inherent in shit. ‘Artist’s Shit’, but also works such as those by Mike Kelley Garbage drawings series (1988) or GG Allin‘s performative defecation and Allin’s inspiration, the pre-Columbian Codex Vaticanus Bare, for example, expressions of the divine otherness of the profane. At the same time, heterogeneous matter plays a crucial role in the operations of the state through its necessary expansion.
In itself, Cattelan’s “Comedian” is a homogenous subject, no more than an official of the state apparatus that maintains an exploitative capitalist system, despite the temptingly subversive purchase of art materials from a Dollar Tree on Staten Island, near the old Wu Wear store . Sun’s role in this “unique artistic experience” has been called controversial and cynical, but in light of Bataille’s theoretical findings, eating the banana has the potential to change everything.
If Sun’s plan is to use his body as a processing plant to make multiples of shit to sell at the New Museum when it reopens next year, and use the proceeds to plant banana trees that can be ethically harvested by circus monkeys who can’t roller skate, and then donate the bananas to underfunded schools for lunches, maybe we all owe him an apology.
