November • 22 • 2020
Jay Buchanan
Ekphrasis on Loo Paper

Gerhard Richter, Loo Paper, 1994, cibachrome photograph on white board, 27 3/4 × 26 in, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX.
The thing about loo paper
is it’s decidedly un-special.
Like it’s so ReadymadeTM
it’s literally made
to wait till you…
need it
Sure, not all of it is created equal,
But
all of it:
Adheres to a ubiquitous structural character
which calls up superficial psychoanalysis
(when is a roll just a roll?)
encourages single-use consumption
(think of the trees)
abstracts its myriad less-than-palatable use cases
(Ch-Ch-Ch-Charmin’)
simplifies shipping solutions
Knows a strange intimacy
I mean
the things the loo paper knows
and
Faces the same fate.
It’s all there
Hanging from the wall
Reeling from last use
Ready for pulling, using, flushing
a painting
a roll
just waiting
for the painter
to come
to photograph it
pour one out for Marcel D., friends
Fountain casts its
(cute, gimmicky, revolutionary, quotidian,
imposing)
shadow
I don’t think I realized
The virus meant Business
until the toilet paper supply chain
disintegrated
like the absolute worst
of the product it moves.
Doomsday-Prepper
flocks, droves, hordes
big box stores
“I better get some” before the Joneses
or
Shit Creek
The performance of plenty
yet unbroken in my lived history
save for some gas shortages under W.
before then I
had no idea what the bare shelves of a Target looked like
and they scared me
so I did get mine
more than my fair share
sitting home alone
beside Mt. Loo Paper
(and feeling guilty about it)
I realized I’d been had!
Like Andy’s Tunafish Disaster
Black and white photo
authenticate individuate sanitate
take some everyday thing and
wrap it up in sex
the momentary rupture of the
plastic-lined, uniform
crisp, inviting, desirable
grid of the supply chain
trucks upon trains upon boats
fantasy of always enough
It’s all about reproducibility, huh?
We take our labor of abstraction for granted.
Somebody’s making more money that way.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, porcelain, 1917, replica 1964, 24 x 14 x 19 in, Tate Collection, London.

Gerhard Richter, Klorolle (Toilet Paper), 1965, oil on canvas, 27 9/16 x 25 19/32 in.

Andy Warhol, Tunafish Disaster, 1963, silver paint and silkscreen ink on linen, 53 1/2 in. x 69 1/2 in, Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA.
• • •

Jay Buchanan is an emerging poet, art historian, and performance theorist based in St. Louis. He studies performing objects, broadly conceived, working primarily in new materialism. His art scholarship is forthcoming in ASAP/J. He is also Managing Director of Idiosynchrony, a podcast qua collective sonic artwork.