Say Whaaaa Wednesday... The Beauty in Elephant Dung

I have noticed my posts have been flooded with controversies in art; the absurd never fails to spark my imagination and reestablishing my conception on the glorious freedom of artistic expression. I recently came across a British painter named Chris Ofili whose artwork is best known for its rich, complicated and very much scintillating images of Religious figures adorn with glitter and, here’s the interesting medium, elephant shit. His work is less painting than painting like objects, and is fascinating to look at.

Ofili’s Nigerian heritage strongly influences his paintings and it was one particular piece titled The Holy Virgin Mary that involved a lawsuit, former mayor of NYC Rudy Giuliani and a mob of angry Christians. The painting was exhibited in 1999 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art as apart of the “Sensation” exhibit where young British Artists toured their work from Berlin to NY. The painting is a black African Mary surrounded by female genitalia cut from porno magazines, and elephant dung. The shit was formed in shapes to resemble the cherubim and seraphim; commonly seen in images of the Immaculate Conception. Giuliani threatened the museum to take the offensive piece down or he’d withhold the city’s funding towards the exhibit and museum itself; he overtly labeled the piece to be “disgusting” and “sick”.

I think the painting is lovely. Ofili’s use of bold color, shades of purple and blue look the way our souls feel when trying to understand our own imagination in the dark. It revels in early European Modernism and I can’t help but hear the voices of Harlem Renaissance poet’s whose low voices mumble the absurd within the dark, smoky confines of a underground jazz club. There is A LOT of art out there that does not deserve any kind of recognition as being labeled “art”. However, I find Ofili is venturing into a world where there exists a hierarchal struggle between the method and the artistic merit their work embodies. Elephant shit or not, The Holy Virgin Mary is strikingly beautiful and does make a bold statement, I find, that lacks any sort of insulting connotations besides the fact that animal feces tend to stink, rather bad. Could he have used a different medium to create such a piece? Absolutely. Though, what kind of fun would we have discussing a painting that was created strictly using traditional methods; talking about elephant dung is a lot more enchanting, no?