The sense of unease caused by Robert Niven’s recent guano sculptures is a primordial one, we all agreed—the general fear, fascination and repugnance of excrement. We crinkled our noses and continued.

There is little in the world that induces the same sensual parallax as shit, the perceptual short-circuit of experiencing a fresh deposit, someone said. Indeed, in the mammalian world, shit uniquely looks like it smells and vice versa, from the over-ripe scent of a warm load to the metallic bite of a frothy puddle of its liquid counterpart. Faeces is an onomatopoeia of the senses, one of us interjected, an experiential double-whammy of pre-linguistic repulsion, a visceral manifestation of biology’s own ideas of heaven and hell. There’s no accounting for taste, one of us joked, trying to lighten the mood. We agreed that defecation seemed an inherent component of survival but the conversation left a palpably bad taste in our mouths.

As with many groups of friends, there was usually an underlying war of attrition beneath our words. Who would concede first? Those of us who tire ourselves talking or those of us who wear ourselves out listening?

The problem with rumor, like all sensational news, is that it always locates the shortest path between two sources. Little things have a way of sneaking up on us, little things like doubt, worry and then out-and-out panic. The failure of the relaxing tone of the TV announcer to provide any relaxation. It is common, we assured each other, that friends can generate a certain paranoia together, and that it is perfectly normal for one of us to explode now and again.

And later, as the effect became more pronounced, we made some diagrams to help us make sense of what was happening. Tainted meat, migration patterns, distribution routes, air-borne viruses, fertilizer, water and dust. Visual puns and invisible killers; offer and counter offer. And the ass and the mouth, someone added, the incessant eating, shitting and eating, the breathing, lungs filling and unfilling with filling. The tendency some of us have to dominate conversation, someone said. The tendency some of us have to halt serious discussion, someone said. We are dying, someone said.

Things were not always the same as they are now, among friends. We agreed that in many relationships like ours there survives an unbearable transparency of closeness, an electricity that sparks between us as we pass from one another, a sudden jolt of clarity from which most are unable to survive. What does this have to do with art? one of us asked. Birds are not mammals, someone added. And yet, said the joker, most of us enjoy our fowl game with a relish that can only be called condimental. We agreed the idea of Niven’s alabaster rubber-chicken-shit-bird was an unlikely segue into coprophagia, self-ingestion, and our disease, but a powerful one. Someone said: those of us who have explored the blanched granular snot of seagull scat can attest to the immediate olfactory recognition—the stubborn, if subtle, reek of fermentation that is synonymous with the early onset of cellular contamination—evoked by the very sight of it. Someone said: The birds are arriving in buckets.