Dog Poo Sculpture Takes Flight

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It's... Art?

By Jessica Nosek

American artist Paul McCarthy’s exhibition of a giant, inflatable pile of dog poo at a Swiss museum raised quite a stink in summer. The outdoor piece, titled “Complex Shit,” turned out to be just that when it became airborne and floated more than 200 meters, taking down a power line and breaking the window of a greenhouse before eventually coming to rest in the garden of a children’s home. The piece was equipped with a safety feature that should have deflated the work during a storm but apparently the mechanism had crapped out. The poo-art was scooped up and returned to the museum garden where it remained on display until October. The greenhouse it damaged, incidently, is now referred to as “the brownhouse.”