The Museum of Ordure is a speculation on the roles and dichotomies of the museum where the contradictions of the civilising processes are in the context of the real politique. Its aim is to reveal an underbelly where the collective unconscious breaks out into the world. It follows the traditions of exposure from the middle ages through to the present day. Naturally enough it is itself an element of the conditions it examines.

Beginning with the most basic human endeavours we come quickly to the point of excrement; as all that which is regularly voided from the body. Survival is dependent on the ingestion of material sustenance, food, (although there are claims that it is possible to live on air), and its intimately connected discharge of waste materials. Shit has been relegated, and tabooed. Since Thomas Crapper’s commercial exploitation of the invention of the water closet in the nineteenth century we deposit stools into water which are then immediately flushed away. We hardly glimpse at or have any contact with what we produce, and are conditioned to regard it as extraneous and noxious. It tends to smell offensively because the management of the human body is often perfunctory and casual. This in itself is a subject for consideration. To what extent is the body knowingly polluted? And why? Is the body polluted also by fetishised engagements with mental and physical hygiene? Can the “body politic” ever be anything other than a polluted body? Is art a form of pollution?

Ordure is an ever present shadow signifying to all that is deemed unworthy. Unwanted, discarded debris induces choking urbanisations, smearing land and urban scapes alike. It thrives in the sway of the brutalising exploitation of natural materials and processes usually dealt with elsewhere, (where labour markets are cheap). The interchange is filled with abrasions, natural disasters, and human sacrifices. The world as a rubbish dump. Aesthetics profits from such profilgacy.