one right there, we gotta decorate it’. Everything is really thought out. There are three principles to it: having a great idea, finding the perfect piece that suits the idea, and then giving it a really great name.
The plan was to go shopping first and buy some props that would be added to the poo to bring it to life and make it art. On the way to the shop we came across the first small pile of dog dirt. They stood and chatted while not taking their eyes off it, just like Blake the art critic looked at the art in the Museum of Modern Art.
JEFF: It’s a possibility but the size isn’t there. We could do something with it but it’s just . . . you know. It’s not jumping out at me.
KARL: How long would you say that one has been there?
JEFF: I think it’s newborn. That’s a newbie.
KARL: Is that from this morning, then?
JEFF: It’s got a brush of rain on it. Maybe like an hour of rain or something. So it could have come last night.
KARL: So that doesn’t excite you?
JEREMY: I think it’s a dud.
JEFF: If it’s fresh and it has a tacky ordure, you can just go straight with the sprinkles. But in a case like this, I know that if I put the sprinkles on there, then it’s not gonna stick. So, there is a little bit of a cheat we use, but it works.
JEREMY: It’s called Spray Mount.
KARL: Oh right, like a type of spray glue. It’s quite an expensive hobby this, then?
JEREMY: It gets a little pricey. Money is no object, though, when it comes to this.
KARL: Now the sprinkles are on it, do you take a photograph?
JEFF: I don’t think we necessarily need to photograph this one, cos this is a standard, a basic hit. Unless it’s like a cascade of shit, you know what I mean, like a real prize winner, then we might photograph it, cos it means something to us. But this one is just kind of routine. It just leaves a mark so when somebody comes around and sees it, they’ll know the Sprinkle Brigade has been here.
At this point, I wasn’t sure whether it was art just yet, but what I liked was that the sprinkles made it stand out on the pavement, which meant there was less chance of someone stepping in it. When I was a kid, standing in dog shit on the estate was something that happened around three to four times a week. I think I spent more time cleaning out the tread on my trainers than I spent cleaning my teeth. Thinking back, a popular toy back then that every kid had was stilts. It’s likely they came into fashion as a way of avoiding getting shit on your shoes. Honestly, it was everywhere. The local park had ‘Keep Off the Grass’ signs, but I don’t think this was an order, it was more of a warning, as it was like a minefield out there. Everyone goes on about Michael Jackson being the creator of the moonwalk, but he wasn’t, everyone round our way was walking backwards like that scraping shit off their shoes.
We went into a toy shop, and I got looking for props that could help turn dog muck into a piece of art. I followed Jeff and Jeremy around the place to get an idea of the sort of things they look for. Jeff picked up a plastic eagle.
KARL: So you’d just place that on the poo?
JEREMY: Yeah, kinda perched up on it like a wooden post.
KARL: Like a log?
JEREMY: Yeah . . . you know, like the big wooden logs that come up in the ocean. I’m really excited about that. I hope we can get a piece in a puddle, in the position that we want it. Like it’s almost like, in the ocean. Really romanticise it.
The first thing that grabbed my eye was a small wooden TV which must have been for a doll’s house.
JEFF: What are you thinking?
KARL: I’m thinking . . . shit coming out of the TV.
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
