JEFF: Yeah . . .
KARL: And it would sort of be saying, you know, it’s the shit on telly, like ‘arghh, not this shit again’. We have a lot of repeats at home.
JEFF: Right. I think it’s true, and I think it’d be funny for people and they can relate to it. I think it’d be cool. I think you have one there.
JEREMY: So we need to find a piece of poo that is basically severed in half perfectly so it fits right up against the TV, you think?
KARL: Right. So it actually looks like it’s coming out. Let’s buy that, then. Oh, look, toy butterflies. Maybe something coming from an ugly poo, like a caterpillar to a beautiful butterfly.
JEFF: I like the idea of butterflies. People think of them as a beautiful thing, so there’s a contrast there which I think is kind of funny but . . .
KARL: It needs the ideal piece of excrement, though.
JEREMY: Yeah, unless it was one that looked like a cocoon and it was coming out of the cocoon, it might be too, you know . . .
JEFF: It might be too scientific.
KARL: It’s not easy, is it?
JEREMY: No. I mean, we go back and forth for weeks on a few ideas, until we finally get it right. Even then you’ll put in all the work and the time and do it and it’ll be kind of anticlimactic.
JEFF: We always said it’s like fishing. Some days you go out and then you might get scant or sometimes you might get something suitable to mount over the fireplace, so you just don’t know.
I then saw a tub of Plasticine and an idea hit me with the title for the piece coming instantly. We paid for the few props we had picked up, and off we went onto the streets of New York, a city that’s full of interesting things to do and yet here I was hunting down dog shit, the stuff I couldn’t get away from when growing up.
KARL: Because you’re around dog shit a lot, you wouldn’t know what type of dog has left that shit, would you? You’re not at that level?
JEFF: Well, that’s a heated debate. But the truth of it is we’ve seen small dogs lay out a beast, and we’ve seen big dogs lay out something small. So I don’t think there’s a way to match the shit with the species.
I asked this question as I had a mate called Simon who had a dog that you could link to the stool, as it ate anything that was in front of him. If you stood in some crap and there was a toy soldier in it, you knew it came from his dog. I suppose at least there was some kind of perk to standing in it. At least you got a toy. It was like a very early stage of the Kinder Egg.
Jeremy and Jeff got out a map that they had designed showing all the hotspots where people very rarely picked up their dog’s mess. I said their map was like a ‘shat nav’ system, but I don’t think they use the word ‘shat’ in the States so they didn’t know what I was going on about. To be honest, there was no need for a map as my nose could do the job. The place stank. Suddenly, everywhere I looked there were lumps of shite.
The place really did have a problem. New York is known as the city that never sleeps but round this part of town it was the city that never sweeps! One of the things that does my head in these days is when people walk into you cos they’re not watching where they’re going due to them reading an email or text on the move. Some people even read a book while walking from A to B. There was no way people could do anything but focus on where they were stepping in this neighbourhood.
It was annoying to think that there was a shovel hanging up in the Museum of Modern Art doing nothing. It was needed here.
KARL: And it’s definitely all dog?
JEREMY: Well, there have been some instances when it was human. You know it’s human if it’s up close against the wall. Because it’s physically impossible for a dog to press its ass against the wall.
KARL: So is that still game?
JEREMY: No, we stay away from that.
KARL: Fucking hell. What’s going on?! People are shitting on the streets.
I think this will end up being a problem in the UK as we seem to have sorted the dog shit issue at home by having loads of bins especially made for dog waste, but I’ve been in situations when I really need to go to the loo and there’s no public toilets around. I’ve been in loads of cafés and asked to use the loo, and they only let you use them if you buy something, which you don’t always want to do. It used to cost a penny. That’s where the saying ‘I’m off to spend a penny’ comes from. Now it may as well be ‘I’m off to buy a panini’, as that’s what you have to do. No wonder the country is becoming obese when you have to buy food to empty your bowels. I think human crap on the streets is going to be the new problem we’ll be facing at home.
Jeremy pulled a banana skin from his bag and edged the skin up close to a dog turd, so it looked like a brown banana.
JEREMY: To be very honest, I think this one is grossing me out a little bit. Some ideas don’t work. This one, I think, might be a little bit over the top for me. It could have been a great idea, but I think it’s . . . disgusting. It’s over the top.
JEFF: Don’t be so sure.
KARL: But if you call it ‘Pootassium’, because a banana is full of potassium, I think it takes away the harshness.
JEFF: That’s pretty good. I think Karl is right. Karl more than gets it . . . haha!
KARL: Are you getting enough pootassium?
JEREMY: Pootassium is really funny, it is really good. You saved it.
JEFF: I want to put that one up on Instagram.
I really wanted to get my idea started but was struggling to hunt down the right-shaped pieces I needed. No turd was the same, so I knew what I required must be out there. I even started to hang around a couple of dogs that looked like they were about to unload on the off chance they dropped off what I was looking for. I wouldn’t like to be a dog as I wouldn’t like to only be able to empty my guts when my owner takes me out. On top of that you have to do it while they stand there waiting. It puts me off when I go into the posh toilets in a restaurant where they have some bloke hanging about there waiting for you to come out and hand you a towel to dry your hands. I feel like I’m being timed. I always end up cutting it short.
I kept looking. Some were shaped like Twiglets, some like pretzels and others like walnuts. What I needed were a few loose pieces for my idea to work. As mad as this was, it felt like a lot more work than the boxing painting I had done with Ushio yesterday. While I was looking for the stools I required, Jeff and Jeremy had pulled out another prop. It was a pair of novelty 2015 New Year glasses and they were placing them on a dog poo that would act as a nose.
JEFF: Maybe. I mean it’s a little thin. So we’re gonna go right over the top here on this one. (getting camera steady) Then we’ll take a photo of it this way. And we’ll call it the ‘Happy New Year Shit Nose’.
JEREMY: Mainly we use iPhone cameras because the nicer cameras usually pick up too much of the detail, and when we print those out, it looks disgusting.
KARL: That one should be called ‘Happy Poo Year’.
JEFF: Happy Poo Year! Even better.
All my searching finally paid off. I found the droppings that would work for my piece at the back of a car park. Three small pieces, a few centimetres apart. I got out my Plasticine and rolled the first piece into a short stubby tail and stuck that down onto the tarmac a couple of centimetres away from one of the pieces of crap and then made another slightly thicker