BERN, SWITZERLAND — Regardless of how many canines are in the neighborhood, it’s not every day that a giant inflatable dog poo winds up in your yard – but when it happens, it’s the kind of thing that gets noticed. It certainly didn’t avoid notice in late July when precisely that wound up in the yard of a Swiss children’s home.It wasn’t difficult to trace the enormous air-filled turd, given that American artist Paul McCarthy had an exhibition going on at a nearby museum.
The “East of Eden: A Garden Show” exhibition runs from May through October and includes the delicately entitled “Complex Shit.”
As one might expect, Complex Shit is precisely that – and keeping the shit together is just as tough as one might anticipate, given that the puffed up dog dropping in question is as big as a house and requires cables and moorings to keep in place. During poor weather, the big doo-doo is supposed to deflate.
Alas for everyone involved, it didn’t quite work out that way.
Instead, Julie Steiner, director of the Paul Klee center in Berne told the Agence France-Press that a gust of wind caught the exteriorly displayed piece and pulled it from its moorings. The bouncy impersonation of doggie dung fluttered more than 200 yards, downed a power line and broke a window before settling onto the children’s home grounds.
The entire exhibition features a wide variety of installations, including sound sculptures in trees and a soccer field with no goalposts. Whether Complex Shit will be able to takes its rightful place once again among what the museum’s website calls “interweaving, diverse, not to say conflictive emphases and broad spectrum items” that “form a dynamic exchange of parallel and self-eclipsing spatial and temporal zones” is unknown.
