Body Fluids in Art

Body Fluids In Art

An occasional trend in contemporary art is to use body fluids in art. Examples include:

• Artist's Shit (Italian: "Merda d'artista") (1961), by Piero Manzoni, in which the artist canned and sold 90 cans of his own excrement to be sold for their weight in gold;
• Andy Warhol's Oxidations series, begun in 1977, in which he invited friends to urinate onto a canvas of metallic copper pigments, so that the uric acid would oxidize into abstract patterns;
• The controversial Piss Christ (1987), by Andres Serrano, which is a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine;
• Self (1991, recast 1996) by Marc Quinn, a frozen cast of the artist's head made entirely of his own blood;
• The Home-Coming of Navel Strings, an installation by Noritoshi Hirakawa for the 2004 London Frieze Art Fair, which consisted of a young woman who read a novel by Philip Pullman and defecated next to her chair every morning;
• Piss Flowers, by Helen Chadwick (1991–92), are twelve white-enameled bronzes cast from cavities made by urinating in snow (though this might not be characterized as the use of bodily fluids in art, just their use in preparation);
• Performances by Lennie Lee involving feces, blood, vomit from 1990;
• Many paintings by Chris Ofili, which make use of elephant dung (from 1992);
• Gilbert and George's The Naked Shit Pictures (1995);
• Hermann Nitsch and Das Orgien Mysterien Theater use urine, feces, blood and more in their ritual performances;
• Franko B from 1990 blood letting performances;
• Bogey Ball (2002–2004) by James R Ford;
• The Value of Blood by Phil Hansen (2006) was made using 500ml of the artists blood to draw a portrait of Kim Jong-il on 6,000 bandages;
• Exhibiting in New York City and Chicago galleries, contemporary artist Jordan Eagles has been encasing cow blood in clear layers of synthetic resin for a few years;
• On episode 113 of the television series Mythbusters (2008), the hosts showed that the art of dorodango can be performed by substituting animal feces in place of mud.

However, there have been rarer uses of blood (and perhaps feces) for quite some time. Pete Doherty has painted with blood, while Marcel Duchamp used semen in his Paysage fautif ("Faulty Landscape") of 1946.