What does it mean to eat your art? On November 20, cryptocurrency billionaire Justin Sun bought Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” — famously, a banana duct-taped to a wall, to be replaced as each one rots — for $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction. As my colleague Valentina Di Liscia reported, Sun sent out an email blast stating that he plans to “personally eat the banana” as “part of this unique artistic experience.”
Sun presumably sees eating the banana as radical, but others might argue that the real radical — even revolutionary — act would be wasting a 49-cent banana for which you overpaid by more than $6 million. Either way, consuming the banana doesn’t make the art go away. Just ask Piero Manzoni. It simply becomes a pile of shit.
In his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” Georges Bataille posited heterogeneous social existence as concerning “elements which are impossible to assimilate,” that is, that which exists for itself and must be expelled from the State in order for it to function as a homogenous sphere. According to Bataille, “the heterogeneous world includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditure,” among this “the waste products of the human body,” yet the sacred must be classified as heterogeneous alongside human waste because figures such as “kings or witch doctors” are by definition set off from the social sphere. This creates a correspondence between profanation and divination in their mutual expulsion from the digestive track of the socius.
Manzoni’s 1961 multiple “Artist’s Shit” raised shit to a higher level by sealing it in a tin can and presenting it as art but Bataille’s essay goes further by suggesting that the sacred inheres in shit. “Artist’s Shit,” as well as works like Mike Kelley’s Garbage Drawings series (1988) or GG Allin’s performative defecation and Allin’s inspiration, the pre-Columbian Codex Vaticanus B, for instance, are 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 expulsion.
In itself, Cattelan’s “Comedian” is homogenous matter, no more than a functionary of the State Apparatus perpetuating an exploitative capitalist system, despite the seductively subversive sourcing 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 engage his body as a processing plant to make shit multiples to sell at the New Museum when it reopens next year, using the proceeds to plant banana trees to be harvested ethically by circus monkeys who can’t roller skate, and then donating the bananas to underfunded schools for lunches, maybe we all owe him an apology.
