on view in bioscientific imaginaries: kathy high

Kathy High, Kathy As Bowie, 2015. Photographs by Eleanor Goldsmith; Make-up by Jeanna DiPaolo

 In 2015, Kathy High sent a letter to performance artist and musician David Bowie requesting “a throw-away item … your poo.” Specifically, High proposed an exchange of his stool sample for photographs of the artist made up as Bowie, re-enacting important moments from the musician’s career. High sought to undergo FMT (Fecal Microbiata Transplant), in which the stool of a healthy donor is inserted into the colon of the patient—in High’s case, to manage symptoms of Chrohn’s disease. A longtime Bowie fan, High wrote to Bowie based on desire and admiration as opposed to medically confirmed compatibility. While the exchange could not be completed because of Bowie’s death in 2016, the project raises provocative questions about the relationship between self and other when they connect through physical transplant, love, or both. Would the artist embody some ineffable facet of Bowie if she absorbed his biological material into her own body? Or had she already done so by way of psychic influence? Together, the photographic likeness between High and Bowie and the proposal for FMT invite viewers to consider the possible ways that others profoundly impact our own identity formation.

Kathy High, History of Shit, 2017. Written texts, historical objects, photographs. Research collaboration with Guy Schaffer with Oliver Kellhammer

 History of Shit builds on the work of French psychoanalyst Dominique Laporte, who published a book by the same title in 1978. Laporte traced the development of waste management practices to argue that modern sanitation —which creates the illusion that individuals are wholly separate from their excrement—directly shaped the modern psyche. The collection of texts and objects on view stem from a related research project in which Kathy High investigated questions related to shit, such as, how have we contained it, discarded it, used it? How have attitudes changed from public open toilets to private bathrooms? Why do we have so much shame around our shit? Why is shit a fetish for some?

 Many of the objects in History of Shit—photographs, glass colons, journal entries—relate to Challis Underdue, a queer feminist researcher who pioneered the theory of “excrement vitality,” which held that the complexities of individuals’ excrement mirrored those of human society writ large. Underdue is a speculative fiction created by High and her collaborators: to imagine Underdue’s existence posits a subversive counter-narrative to a history of science from which mentions of sexuality, gender, and shit are largely absent.                                               

Thanks to the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia for their support to this project with the Wood Research and Travel Grant

 The historic images are used by kind permission of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Images range from 1600s to 1900s. Copyright 2020 by The College of Physicians of Philadelphia