The Most Dada Art Exhibit Ever: The Time I Wrote About Dog Shit on the Walls of the Rockford Art Museum
In 2017 I spent two days writing children's poems by hand on the walls of the Rockford Art Museum. All twenty-six of them.
I had a large box of expensive art markers supplied by the museum, and I tried to choose a color for each poem that worked visually with the illustration beside it. Sometimes this involved careful consideration of color, balance, and the relationship between text and image. Sometimes the decision was easier. “D is for Dog Poop” was written in brown. “U is for Urination” was written in yellow.
Nobody threw me out. I had permission.
In fact, this was part of Bittersweet Observations, a perfectly legitimate exhibition at a respected American art museum. There were framed illustrations by Jenny Mathews, other artists exhibiting serious work, museum staff, visitors, children, programming, a curator, and all the usual machinery of an actual museum exhibition. And right in the middle of it was a grown man writing about dog shit on the wall in brown marker.
I thought it was one of the great Dada art moments of all time. I still do.
The Dadaists Had It Easier
The Dadaists announced they were doing Dada. That's cheating.
If you walk into an exhibition that announces itself as Dada, you are prepared for Dada. Someone can put a urinal in the gallery and everyone strokes their chin because Marcel Duchamp has already explained the rules. I had a better opportunity. I could sneak Dada into a straight art exhibition. For kids.
I didn't set out to mock the museum or the people involved. I genuinely admired the Dada and Surrealist traditions, and I realized there was an opportunity here to combine two things that, as far as I knew, had not often been combined: children's literature and Dada.
The idea of writing the poems directly onto the museum walls was mine from beginning to end. I realized that if I could get them to say yes, the gates were open. They said yes. I'm not entirely convinced they thought through the implications.
I had.
The Monster Dictionary
The story actually began almost forty years earlier at Mary Morgan Grade School in Byron, Illinois, where in fifth grade we were assigned to write and illustrate a children's book. One might assume that a future poet and publisher would have attacked this assignment with enthusiasm. One would be wrong.
I procrastinated until two days before the deadline. At that point, having few interests that didn't involve baseball or monster movies, I decided an alphabet book would be the easiest possible solution. Twenty-six letters. Fill in the blanks. Draw some pictures. Turn it in. I called it The Monster Dictionary.
My teacher gave me a B and wrote:
“Not colored. Excellent ideas! if you would have put more effort into this project; the school could have sent this idea on to the Library of Congress.”
I later preserved her questionable semicolon for historical authenticity.
That note bothered me for decades. Not enough to become industrious, necessarily, but enough that the unfinished business remained.
Around age forty I was the general manager of Castaways, a dive bar underneath a bridge on the Rock River in Rockford. Among the people I met there was Jenny Mathews, one of the early members of the Rockford Rage Roller Derby. I asked Jenny if she'd be interested in illustrating a children's alphabet book about all the things kids hate. The working title was Atrocities From A to Z.
She said yes. I sent her the first poem, and she sent back an illustration. It was perfect.
Then she moved to Texas. We made another children's book long-distance while Atrocities went onto the back burner. Jenny eventually came back from Texas, we became a couple, and a scant eight years later the book was finished.
By then it was called Atrocious Poems A to Z. The finished book was written by me, illustrated by Jenny Mathews, published by Zombie Logic Press, and printed in Michigan by Edwards Brothers Malloy. It was a real children's book, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
Things Kids Love to Hate
The premise was simple: children experience atrocities every day. Adults don't recognize most of them as atrocities because we've forgotten what it feels like to be a child. Vegetables, haircuts, inoculations, bullies, sharing, liver, monsters, having siblings, stepping in dog poop, needing to pee at an inconvenient time. These things are ordinary to adults. To children they can temporarily assume the proportions of Greek tragedy.
That was the joke, but we took the premise seriously. The poems were intended to give children and adults a funny way into conversations about anxiety, bullying, sharing, fear, embarrassment, and the various indignities involved in being small and having larger people control much of your existence. I also worked lessons about poetry into the book: haiku, limerick, rhetorical questions, visual poetry, personification, oxymoron, portmanteau, and other literary forms and devices.
It was silly. It wasn't unserious. That distinction matters.
Twenty-Six Poems and One Very Cold Museum
Installing the exhibition was considerably less whimsical than looking at the finished wall might suggest. It was around 100 degrees outside. Inside the museum it was cold. Museums have to maintain conditions suitable for preserving artwork, which does not necessarily mean conditions suitable for a middle-aged poet spending two days handwriting an entire book vertically on a wall.
I had badly underestimated how long it would take. All twenty-six poems had to be written by hand beside Jenny's illustrations. My hands and arms became exhausted. I did yoga on the museum floor to keep myself loose enough to continue.
Meanwhile, people were working around me because the total installation involved creating a small forest inside the museum. I would periodically stop writing and help with other parts of the installation, partly because they needed help and partly because my body needed a break from writing on the wall.
I knew the exhibition would remain up for approximately three months. Potentially tens of thousands of people were going to walk past these words, which adds a certain pressure to penmanship. But living with a visual artist had taught me one of the great truths of art: anything can be painted over.
I believe I did make a mistake somewhere and part of the wall had to be repainted so I could do it again. I no longer remember which letter or what I screwed up. Nothing is permanent. Especially in a museum.
Brown
The museum held art classes, so there was an impressive assortment of markers available. I didn't simply alternate colors mechanically. I tried to look at Jenny's illustration, consider the neighboring pieces, stand back from the wall, and choose something that made the installation work visually as a whole.
Some choices were intuitive. Some were literal. “O is for Orange” presented few conceptual difficulties. Neither did Dog Poop. Brown. Urination? Yellow.
There was no manifesto explaining this. No wall text announced that the use of brown interrogated bourgeois assumptions regarding canine waste. I picked brown because dog poop is brown. I picked yellow because pee is yellow. Then I continued working.
This, to me, is the crucial difference between what happened at Bittersweet Observations and a deliberately advertised Dada exhibition.
Nobody had been warned.
The Kids Got It
The children seemed to understand the work immediately. Of course they did. They didn't require anyone to explain the premise that stepping in dog poop could constitute a catastrophe. They were still close enough to childhood for the scale of these events to make intuitive sense.
Some older visitors seemed to need permission. You could almost see the process occurring: Am I supposed to take this seriously? Is this allowed in an art museum?
Yes and no. That was part of the fun.
These were trivial things and these were enormous things. Both propositions could be true at the same time. Children already knew that.
Please Don't List Me
There is another strange part of the story. I asked not to be listed as one of the exhibiting artists.
This wasn't a conceptual gesture. I wasn't making some grand statement about authorship or institutional recognition. I was tired. At that point Jenny and I seemed to be doing three, four, sometimes five public events a week. We were in shows constantly. We were everywhere. I had reached the limit of how much public exposure I wanted. I couldn't find enough corners to hide in.
By the time Bittersweet Observations came around, I wanted to do the work and be left out of the rest. So I asked to be left off the artist listing.
In retrospect, this was a mistake. How many times in your life does a respected American museum invite you to write juvenile thoughts directly onto its walls?
My bad.
The absurdity becomes more apparent in photographs from the exhibition. There I am standing beneath an enormous version of my name mounted over the installation. So I managed the nearly impossible feat of having my name displayed prominently across an entire museum wall while simultaneously not being officially listed as one of the artists.
.jpg "Bittersweet Observations")
Dada could hardly have improved upon this.
I Thought I'd Gotten Away With Something
When I finished the installation, I knew exactly what I thought I'd accomplished. I thought I'd gotten one over on them.
Nearly forty years earlier, my fifth-grade teacher had looked at The Monster Dictionary and told me that if I'd put more effort into it, the school might have sent the idea to the Library of Congress. Now I had taken the descendant of that lazy fifth-grade alphabet book and written the whole thing on the walls of a respected American museum.
I thought that was magnificent. I still think it's pretty good.
But at 57, I see something else. I was so interested in completing my private argument that I didn't fully recognize the public opportunity I'd been given. That was a recurring problem for me. I wasn't failing to make things. I was making things constantly: books, poems, publishing projects, collaborations, blogs, fictional leagues, and private worlds.
What I often neglected was making sure there would be a durable public record that I had made them. I had confused being seen with seeking attention.
They're not the same thing.
Not Colored
There is one detail from my fifth-grade teacher's note that seems considerably funnier now than it did in 1979.
“Not colored.”
That was one of her complaints.
Nearly forty years later I stood inside the Rockford Art Museum with a box full of expensive colored art markers and spent two days correcting the deficiency. I colored it. Dog poop was brown. Urination was yellow. The other twenty-four required varying degrees of aesthetic judgment.
Eventually Bittersweet Observations ended. The exhibition came down. I'm sure the museum was delighted to paint over my poems. Another exhibition went up. I believe it involved motorcycles. I wasn't bothered. I've never had many illusions about permanence in my work. Museums change exhibitions. Walls get painted. One thing disappears so another can occupy the space.
Of course I went to the next show. I was required to be everywhere.
What survives now are photographs, the book, old blog posts, museum records, and memories. One of my contemporary posts about Atrocious Poems A to Z spends considerable time telling the story of my fifth-grade teacher, Jenny, the eight years we worked on the book, the Library of Congress, and the purpose of the poems.
Then, at the very end, I added an update:
“Oh, here's the part I forgot to say: my book ended up on the walls of a major American museum.”
I forgot to mention the museum.
That tells you almost everything you need to know about me at the time.
The Most Dada Art Exhibit Ever
So here is the part I don't intend to forget this time.
In 2017, as part of Bittersweet Observations at the Rockford Art Museum, I spent two days handwriting all twenty-six poems from Atrocious Poems A to Z directly onto the museum walls beside illustrations by Jenny Mathews. It hurt. I did yoga on the museum floor. I made at least one mistake and had to do part of it over. Children understood what we were doing better than some adults did.
I wrote a poem about dog shit in brown marker and a poem about urination in yellow marker. My enormous name appeared above the installation, spelled incorrectly, while I had specifically requested that I not be listed as an exhibiting artist.
I thought I had successfully smuggled Dada into a respectable museum disguised as children's literature.
Maybe I had.
But here's the part my fifth-grade teacher would appreciate. She told me the problem with my first book was that I hadn't put enough effort into it. She told me it wasn't colored.
Nearly forty years later, I spent two exhausting days writing the whole damn thing again on the walls of an American art museum.
In color.
There, Mrs. Liggett. I finished it.
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