In a move hailed by environmental activists as “visionary” and by most other New Yorkers as “the worst thing to come to New York City, and that includes the hideous CitiBikes,” a well-known graffiti artist has decided to work exclusively with dog diarrhea for his work.
H8cha is a graffiti artist who specializes in murals depicting under-appreciated aspects of New York City. H8cha has created most of his work with spray paint, but after reading of its many negative environmental effects on Wikipedia, including “ toxic chemicals, such as chlorofluorocarbons or volatile hydrocarbon gases to spray the paint unto a surface, in addition to kidney stones” he knew he needed to make a change.
His decision was to use something more, shall we say, natural: dog diarrhea.
“Here I am pointing out the things that people complain about in New York City, which I think they should really be appreciating, such as the smell of week-old pot roast marinating in a garbage bag in August,” said H8cha, speaking while bottling a particularly nasty explosion from an Upper East Side Rottweiler. “But really, I’m part of the problem in that I’m polluting this city when I should be using its natural resources in my art.”
“Dog diarrhea has the right consistency for graffiti, and it’s surprisingly abundant in this city,” said H8cha. “I guess too many people are feeding their dogs dollar pizza slices or street meat, which is enough to wreak havoc on the ironmost canine intestines.”
His work includes drunk fraternity guys in the East Village on weekend nights, people walking out of the subway stations while looking at their cell phones, and whiny Jews in delis, all of which, despite a general negative perception toward them, H8cha feels add color and character to a city.
While his art was formerly full of colors available in spray paint, the dog diarrhea limits his palette to brown, green, brown-green, brown-green-red, and black. “It’s made me think outside my normal comfort zone as far as colors go, because dogs rarely poop the rainbow, except for the Weiner Dog in Williamsburg that got his way into a bag of Skittles.” H8cha pointed to the depiction of a Times Square elmo on a wall in the Lower East Side as an example of a rare “colored-explosion” from one of the city’s dogs.
New Yorkers who have seen H8cha’s works undergo a similar reaction. At first, curiosity and a visual attraction pull users in to observe the work. Upon closer inspection, however, questions such as “do you smell that?” and “how many times do I have to tell you to stop eating nachos because you keep passing gas?” arise among spectators. When they get close enough to discover the actual ingredients of the murals, bystanders often gag, twitch, vomit, run or, on several occasions, Instagram.
Mayor Bloomberg, who was asked about the graffiti recently, hailed H8cha’s work as “representing everything that’s right about New Yorkers’ care of their surroundings,” adding, “We can’t get people on Park Avenue to clean up after their dogs anyway.” Greenpeace, a leading environmental group, released a statement saying, “We believe the use of spray paints is one factor that will inevitably bring about the destruction of the Earth, perhaps in the next 9 months when the toxic East River overflows its banks and floods Manhattan, so do you have a minutes today to fight global warming?”
H8cha has currently created four diarrhea murals in Williamsburg, Times Square, Astoria and Central Park West (see if you can find it!). He claims his next project will be on Staten Island “once I can feed enough dogs Hot and Crusty scraps to bottle more materials.”
