Cuba & Shit
Weekly evacuations from the creators of N.D.D.V.
Cuba is the only country that has created a corpus of pure shit-art worthy of the highest critical attention.
While Wilfredo Prieto secures all the grants from international foundations, the true masters of Cuban conceptualism carve nativity figurines out of bath soap and sell them in the subways of European capitals.
At the Thyssen and the MoMA, the curators remain fixated on Cuban artists from the 1980s—while not far from them lives and works the most extraordinary of conceptualists, the creatress of Cuba’s most radical political shit-art: Yanelys Núñez Leyva.
Shit is the substance that truly captures the ontology of the object—a fine art material that must first be transformed within the body through an alchemical process, then expelled into a flask, to later be collected and used.
In some cases, the morphology of the sculpted object remains intact—such as in the case of Alberto Delgado, who defecates onto a page of Granma, the official state newspaper.
The Marquis de Sade had his entourage of judges and prelates at the Château de Silling defecate into a latrine whose pit emptied into a courtyard where 200 children stood with their mouths open.
That sadistic image serves as the perfect anticipation of Castroism.
The structure of “poop,” or fecal matter, has entered the catalog of universal forms—enshrined in the emoji alphabet.
AI art, excreted by the machine according to the urges of its users, is a form of shit-art: evacuated, degraded—the excrement of artistic production—lacking the intrinsic intelligence required by artistic practice and the process of creating an object.
Poop Art instead of Pop Art.
But in Warhol’s early monoprints, and later in the silkscreens of his classic period, the central role of the means of production—independent of a creator—was already being sketched out.
Warhol: “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.”
Expect more from N.D.D.V.