toilet art (?)

Public toilets have become cultural artefacts in their own right. Because in our society excretory functions, like using the toilet or sex, are seen as ‘dirty’, it is inevitable that the avant garde, seeking to shock, will use toilets as ’art’, often in association with depictions of ‘sex’. It is easy to be alarmed by those women artists who appear to have bought into the whole ’male thing’ about the ‘dirtiness’ of bodily functions and, as a manifestation, the ’ladette’ who mistakenly imagines ‘girl power‘ to be like the boys seeking to shock their audiences, But when it comes to attitudes to street urination presumably they find they are not really one of the lads after all?

The artist, Sarah Lucas, included a full toilet bowl in her exhibition at the Arnolfini Bristol, while Tracy Emin hastaken this trend even further. ’Disgust’ is the operative word infusing such art, not its antonyms ‘delight’ and ’pleasure’ which are words seldom associated with excreta. Lucas’s work was part of an exhibition entitled ‘Minky Manky’. This oeuvre was entitled TX: Two Melons and a Stinking Fish, no doubt alluding to the fact that many men say that women’s genitals smell of ’stale fish’. In reality many women clean out toilets, put down lav seats, wipe the bottoms of the very young and very old, and clean up after male, elderly and/or careless family members. So such ‘art’ is probably more annoying to ordinary women who do not have the luxury of being disgusted either by sights or by smell, but simply have to get on with it (Curtis, 2000).

This genre of art has its precedents in the origins of ’Modern Art’ in the early twentieth century - for example, in DuChamp’s painting of a urinal from 191 7 entitled The Fountain. DuChamp saw himself as an anti-art artist (see exhibition ’DuChamp‘s Suitcase’, 30.8.2000). More extreme is the work of Herman Nicht, an Austrian, who undertakes public performance art involving blood and entrails, and also Damien Hirst and his sawn-up sheep. Is this their way of resolving the clean/dirty dualism? Efficient sanitation and investment in public toilets would seem a better way to do so.

The work of the late Helen Chadwick is far more healthy (Cullis, 1993: 23-4). In 1991 she produced a series of sculptures entitled Piss Flowers. These consisted of bronze casts of the fantastic shapes created by her pissing in the snow in Canada, and were intended to be both beautiful and a way of breaking down taboos about it being dirty or naughty for women to urinate in public (or urinate at all!). Avant garde artist Andy Warhol also went through a phase of producing ‘oxidisation paintings‘ based on himself and his friends pissing on canvas and chemically treating the stains to create interesting patterns.

>ref: inclusive urban design : public toilets.