On, 'Pissing in an Ocean Filled With Piss': 

 

There are few gestures in contemporary art more exhausted than critique. It arrives loud, righteous, and well-argued, only to be quietly absorbed, flattened, and displayed under soft lighting. Pissing in an Ocean Filled With Piss (2025) is born precisely out of this exhaustion. The work does not pretend to escape the system it indicts; instead, it urinates directly into it, fully aware that the liquid will immediately become indistinguishable from everything else already sloshing around.

 

The sculpture takes Duchamp’s urinal not as homage but as a problem that refuses to die. Fountain, once a scandal, is now an etiquette lesson. Every art student learns it early: the readymade, the provocation, the audacity of relocation. What remains less discussed is how thoroughly that gesture has been metabolised. Duchamp’s urinal is no longer a threat—it is infrastructure. Pissing in an Ocean Filled With Piss accepts this premise and pushes it to the point of farce. If the readymade is already institutionalised, then the only honest move left is repetition so excessive it curdles.

 

Materially, the work is deliberately contaminated. Laser-cut Perspex with inkjet print carries the cold precision of contemporary display: clean edges, optical clarity, the promise of legibility. This is immediately undermined by the presence of a found urinal, the most overdetermined object in modern art, dragged back once more into the gallery not as revelation but as residue. Around it orbit found miniature plastic groceries—absurd, mass-produced stand-ins for consumption, scarcity, and the theatre of everyday survival rendered at toy scale. These objects do not symbolise; they clog.

 

The most confrontational element, however, is also the most literal: plaster mixed with the artist’s urine. This is not shock for shock’s sake. It is an insistence on bodily consequence in a field that has become increasingly comfortable with frictionless critique. Writing, arguing, publishing, and posting are clean acts. They leave no smell. Urine, by contrast, stains, degrades, and refuses neutrality. By embedding it into the structure of the work, the artist collapses the distance between intellectual position and physical trace. The body is not speaking about the system; it is leaking into it.

 

The title says everything that the work refuses to over-explain. Pissing in an Ocean Filled With Piss names the futility of singular intervention within a saturated field. No gesture, however sincere, remains uncontaminated for long. This is not nihilism; it is diagnosis. The ocean is not polluted because of one act, but because pollution has become its condition of possibility. To urinate into it is not to worsen it, but to acknowledge the scale of the problem.

 

The work emerges directly from the frustration following the publication of Death of a Salesman in Art Africa, an article that named, critiqued, and dissected systemic failures within the art world. Like so many critical texts written by artists, it did not rupture the system it addressed. Instead, it was absorbed—circulated, quoted, aestheticised, and ultimately neutralised. The critique became content. The anger became a footnote. Pissing in an Ocean Filled With Piss is what happens when writing no longer feels sufficient, when language itself begins to feel like another form of decorative labour.

 

Importantly, the work does not position itself outside this cycle. Its price—R12,000, a thousand rand for every edition Duchamp allegedly made—is not incidental. It folds market logic directly into the gesture, exposing how even refusal must pass through valuation. The number is a joke, but not a harmless one. It points to how historical myth, repetition, and commerce conspire to turn even the most radical acts into tidy arithmetic.

 

That the work has found its way into a salon show is not an unfortunate irony; it is the point. The salon is the perfect stage for this gesture: a space of accumulation, visibility, and polite excess, where difference is flattened into adjacency. Here, the work performs its own thesis in real time. The critique does not sit outside the system, throwing stones. It hangs on the wall, fully complicit, daring the viewer to acknowledge how quickly discomfort becomes decor.

 

What distinguishes Pissing in an Ocean Filled With Piss from mere provocation is its refusal of transcendence. There is no fantasy of escape, no belief in the cleansing power of exposure. Instead, the work insists on staying in the mess, on marking itself as part of the problem it describes. It understands that contemporary art does not need more declarations of purity. It needs admissions of contamination.

 

In this sense, the sculpture functions less as an artwork than as a condition report. It asks what it means to continue producing critique in a world that has become exceptionally good at absorbing it. It questions whether making “another work” is an act of resistance or simply another contribution to the slurry. And it answers, with brutal honesty, that it is probably both.

 

To piss in an ocean filled with piss is not to give up. It is to act without illusion in a world that wreaks of a neglected porta potty.