Porcelain [a. F. porcelaine, a Venus shell, cowrie or similar univalve; hence the dense polished substance of these shells, and (from its resemblance to this) china-ware; ad. It. porcellana (13th c. in Marco Polo)... the fine cockle or muscle shels which Painters put their colors in...]
1. A fine kind of earthenware, having a translucent body and a transparent glaze.
b. fig. With allusion to the fineness, beauty or fragility of this ware.
1640, Brome, Sparagus Gard. v. viii. She is herself the purest piece of Purslane
1875, Tennyson, Q. Mary II i, That fine porcelain Courtenay, Save that he fears he be crack'd in using... should be in Devon too.
— The Oxford English Dictionary
If, without scandalizing anyone, I was able to enter the sewers, handle putrid matter, spend part of my time in the refuse pits, and live as it were in the midst of the most abject and disgusting products of human congregations, why should I blush to tackle a sewer of another kind (more unspeakably foul, I admit, than all the others) in the well-grounded hope of effecting some good by examining all the facets it may offer?
— Parent-Duchâtelet, 19th c. sanitary engineer, on the study of prostitution1
I'll trade you for your candy some gorgeous merchandise
My camera, it's a dandy, six by nine, just your size,
You want my porcelain figure,
A watch, a submarine,
Black lingerie from Wien,
I sell my goods behind the screen —
— Marlene Dietrich2
Porcelain. The name of the ceramic used for toilets is the same name used to describe a baby doll, a woman’s face, the pearl of womanhood, the exquisite corpse that is femininity in patriarchal culture. Venus rode the waves upon her porcelain shell, and painters used that self-same vessel to mix the colors by which to create her likeness. The associations between porcelain and the feminine are centuries old, so naturalized as to seem unremarkable.
But what of the twentieth century’s incarnation of this persistent association? In the annals of the modern, plumbing and ‘woman’ are juxtaposed in a tender and horrific embrace. Modern plumbing, sewers, toilets, and the like, are consistently cast as female: from nineteenth century sanitary engineers to the films of Hitchcock to the boys in the neighborhood of my youth (and this fact become known to me only much later), the boys whose charming sobriquet for girls was: muck-holes. Even Duchamp’s urinal has been described as the ‘Madonna of the Bathroom’.4
And like woman, the toilet in the twentieth century has been both revered and reviled. Virgin and whore. Idealized and disgusting. In a patriarchal culture ‘woman’ is body as ‘man’ is mind. Under modernism, this woman-as-body has become synonymous with the plumbing and drainage of the city; and both figures bear the contradictions of modern life.
The dialectic of the modern wants to split the private from the public, the individual from the mass. It presumes that split; relies on it to keep a place for everything and everything in its place, shoring up intimacy in the hallowed sanctity of coupledom-domesticity whilst maintaining a monumental public-ness, erected without any of the inevitable dirtiness, out-of-place-ness, that personal touch might entail.5 Inevitably, however, the personal does touch the public and a psychic charge accrues to the places where these different registers of modern entitlement converge. Like sticky stuff to a wall, like shit in a public bathroom, this charge attaches to the intimate ‘non-spaces’ of modern public life. Griselda Pollock identified those interstitial spaces for modernity in nineteenth century Paris: the brothel, the bar, the theatre.6 In Pollock’s analysis she identifies the ways in which access to those places is gendered and classed. Here again the figure of ‘woman’ – specifically the sex-worker – becomes a cipher for the complex workings of modern anxiety around sexuality, disease, embodiment and the incommensurability of the public/private split. Her work places allowed intimacy and public-ness to converge. – Intimacy here meaning sex, conversation, the badinage and flirtation that may precede sex – and public-ness – the spectacle of commodity culture and the circulation of money that is lube to it all. These were places wherein that irreconcilable pair, intimacy and publicity, or, if you like, sex and money, come together. But the brothel isn’t the only place in which the individual and the mass butt up against each other, so to speak.
Think of the discomfort around the bathrooms of public and semi-public space. Plumbing, with every sanitary flush, with every gleaming knob and valve, every glint on the surface of the porcelain, is meant to allow you efficiently to forget about the fact of your personal self. One quick flush and you’re gone. The public bathroom is meant to be clean, devoid of matter-out-of-place – shit, piss and homey decoration – devoid of signs of the very human presence for which it is intended. But with each raised and lowered seat, every splash of urine, every tear of toilet paper littering the floor, the bathroom and its plumbing point to the impossibility of keeping intimacy, the personal, out of the public. Thus, paradoxically, plumbing also connects you to every other denizen in the communal rush to separation. In this the fact of a necessary cleanliness gives way to a symbolic cleanliness in which the shine and sparkle of smooth, white fixtures creates a flare, a flash, that covers over the irreconcilable conflict. But when you’re sitting there in the stall of a public bathroom, caught with your pants down, such separation is undone. Small wonder these are the places used for the exchange of gossip and sex and cigarettes, contraband, violence, illicit encounters of all kinds.
Consider some of the most common and widely circulated images of bathrooms in public: the bathrooms in movies. As we sit in the darkened theater, our individual subjectivities collectively forgotten, we watch the toilet be the setting for murder, mayhem and terrifying denouement. In popular film the bathroom, the basement, the sewer, the down-pipe swelling with unnatural unctions, these are the cinematic non-spaces wherein personhood is let go: the figure of the human is murdered, massacred, sucked into the plumbing’s apparatus [FIG. 1], its tenuous grip on the fantasy of stable subjectivity loosened, dispersed, annihilated, only to rise again, undead indeed, from the drains and sewers of cinema.
And we watch the bathroom be juxtaposed with a woman’s gaping/ screaming mouth, her dead eye, her bleeding body, from drain to misogynist drain, one hole substituting for another.
Fetishized and vilified, adored and feared, the bathroom is truly a modern icon. According to Octavio Paz’ formulation,7 beauty was once bound to one of two realms, the sacred – religious art – and the secular – craft. In the process of modern industrialism, craftsmanship is supplanted by industrial design and art becomes independent of religious purpose. Some vestige of religious beauty persists in what in Walter Benjamin’s terms8 is the aura of the work of art, while at the same time functionalist aesthetics deem that for any industrial object to be beautiful, its form must properly follow its function. That is, only if an industrial object is pared back to its essential form can it be elegant. The toilet is such a beautiful thing.
A century of plumbing shows me this new iconography. But it also shows me its undoing in the ordinary spillages of quotidian life. My photographs for Porcelain draw upon my archive of bathrooms in public places, taken over a span of twenty years in the public institutions through which we modern folks move in the name of mobility, democracy, shared and contested opinions, shared and contested communities. The images are from both hemispheres, many continents and include the bathrooms of universities, museums, trains, planes, shopping malls, union offices, hospitals, libraries and the like. As documents of the private spaces of the public sphere, the photographs are necessarily taken on the run. Out of balance and snapped like the locking of a not very secure door, Porcelain comes from my desire to dispel the ghosts of a modernity that was misogynistic, phobic, terrifying and comical: I want to point out its fears, and laugh, flushing them down the toilet.
Notes
Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, quoted in Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 15
Marlene Dietrich, ‘Black Market’ on Her Complete Decca Recordings, Los Angeles, CA: MCA Records, 1982, Side 2, Track 1
‘Porcelain’ is adapted from Margaret Morgan, ‘Toilet Paper’ presented to the College Art Association Annual Conference, Los Angeles, CA, February 1999
Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992, p. 30.
See Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘Sex in Public’, Critical Inquiry, Winter, 1998, Volume 24, Number 2, pp. 547-566
Griselda Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ in Vision and Difference, New York, NY: Routledge, 1988, pp. 50-90
Consider: Psycho (1960), The Conversation (1974), Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), Friday The Thirteenth (1980), Nightmare on Elm Street (1985), The Blob (1988), Pulp Fiction (1994)
Cited in Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 95-97
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations (English trans.) New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1985, pp. 217-251
Think of the discomfort around the bathrooms of public and semi-public space. Plumbing, with every sanitary flush, with every gleaming knob and valve, every glint on the surface of the porcelain, is meant to allow you efficiently to forget about the fact of your personal self. One quick flush and you’re gone. The public bathroom is meant to be clean, devoid of matter-out-of-place – shit, piss and homey decoration – devoid of signs of the very human presence for which it is intended. But with each raised and lowered seat, every splash of urine, every tear of toilet paper littering the floor, the bathroom and its plumbing point to the impossibility of keeping intimacy, the personal, out of the public. Thus, paradoxically, plumbing also connects you to every other denizen in the communal rush to separation. In this the fact of a necessary cleanliness gives way to a symbolic cleanliness in which the shine and sparkle of smooth, white fixtures creates a flare, a flash, that covers over the irreconcilable conflict. But when you’re sitting there in the stall of a public bathroom, caught with your pants down, such separation is undone. Small wonder these are the places used for the exchange of gossip and sex and cigarettes, contraband, violence, illicit encounters of all kinds.