You know the old adage about how consciousness operates? Tell a person not to think of elephants, and they won't be able to stop thinking about elephants.
There must be something to this, because before I went to see Chris Ofili's first Japanese exhibition, I tried to put elephants out of my mind. But once in the gallery, all I could think about was elephants -- or more precisely, elephant dung.
Ofili is one of the most talked-about artists in the world today because of elephant dung. Ofili's 2-meter-tall mixed-media work "The Holy Virgin Mary" features a black Madonna with a dollop of elephant dung massed over a breast and a pattern of cutout porno magazine rumps and genitalia serving as the background. About 18 months ago, the piece made its American debut at the Brooklyn Museum show "Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection."