At Home: Wet Paint
?The medium is the message,? famously said Marshall McLuhan, and while the expression is typically applied to a communications setting, It’s equally relevant in the world of visual art; the choice of pastels, charcoals, oil paints, or ink can change the impression given by an artist’s work. For one Montreal artist, the medium conveyed a stronger message than the picture itself?and he’s allegedly gotten in trouble for it.
As the Toronto Sun reports, Nikolai Kupriakov used feces to paint ?a portrait of Judge Claudine Roy . . . to protest her dismissal of his lawsuit against Quebec’s ministry of culture.?
After creating the artwork on canvas outside of a Montreal courthouse several weeks ago, Kupriakov ?received a letter from police,? and he claims the police are ?bullying? him for the controversial artwork.
The letter requested that Kupriakov ?undergo mental exams as part of a review of his gun license?; Kupriakov, a ?shooting enthusiast since he was a child,? insists the police action was motivated by censorship.
Around the World: Beware the Fatberg
In a similarly scatological vein, experts recently discovered a 15-ton mass in London sewers, and it wasn’t traditional excrement. Dubbed the ?fatberg,? the blockage was made of congealed grease and wet wipes?a disastrous and costly combination for a sewage system, but one That’s become all too common in today’s throwaway culture.
As NBC News reports, the mass, which was ?the size of a bus,? was causing sewage backups in Kingston, Surrey. Had it not been removed, a representative from the Thames Water company told reporters, they ?could have had sewage popping out of manholes all over London.?
While wet wipes seem to be flushable (and some are even labelled as such), they ?can lurk underground for much longer than an ordinary sheet of toilet paper.? Wet wipes don’t break down as quickly, and when they meet cooled, solidified fats, the fats stick to the wipe and continue to aggregate. A press officer for Thames Water told reporters that ?you can reach into the fat and you can pull out a wet wipe and it will be sturdy.?
A recent company slogan, ?Bin it ? don’t block it,? hopes to encourage residents to stop flushing wet wipes and grease.
