RAT Two or Three Other Things To Which We Believe Mr Wilder (Thank God) Never Sunk

[MMA <Diogenes_@compuserve.com>]

Item,  from the Sunday NY Times Book Review of  EXPLOSIVE ACTS:
Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Félix Fénéon and the Art & Anarchy of the
Fin de Siècle.

        'Shortly before the end of the book, two photographs show the
diminutive painter grinning cheekily as he 
        defecates on a beach. Even at this late stage, he is a complete
stranger. So little of his personality has 
        emerged that we can only wonder: was this self-abasement,
exhibitionism or a demonstration of a favored 
        dictum, ''L'art, c'est de la merde''? 

And these, from C. Carr's "The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments"
(http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9838/carr.shtml)

        31. 1971: Chris Burden performs Shoot, in which he has a friend
shoot him in the arm with a rifle. 

        32. 1972: Vito Acconci performs Seedbed, in which he masturbates
under a ramp at the Sonnabend Gallery. 

        33. 1974: In I Like America and America Likes Me, Joseph Beuys
lives in a gallery with a coyote for four days. 

        34. 1975: In Interior Scroll, a naked Carolee Schneemann pulls a
paper scroll from her vagina and reads 
        its text on "vulvic space." 

        35. 1975: Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader attempts to cross the Atlantic
in a small yacht as part of an art project
        and disappears at sea. 

        38. 1984: Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh cut the eight-foot rope
that has tied them together at the waist 
        for a full year; during that time, they had never touched each
other. 

        39. 1984: To illustrate "the obsolescence of the body," Stelarc
suspends himself over East 11th Street by 
        18 fish hooks stuck through his skin. 

        46. 1989: Annie Sprinkle inserts a speculum onstage and invites
spectators to look at her cervix.


And finally this, from http://www.benbest.com/philo/diogenes.html:

        Insofar as Diogenes was known as "The Dog" throughout Athens, at a
feast certain people kept throwing all 
        the bones to him as they would to a dog. He played a dog's trick
and urinated on them.... Someone took him 
        into a magnificent house and warned him not to expectorate,
whereupon having cleared his throat he 
        discharged the phlegm into the man's face, being unable, he said,
to find a meaner receptable.