At a prominent art school in southern California, one encounters students who are brilliant, funny, amazing, future colleagues, friends in many cases already. Now in the bathrooms at this prominent school, as in any quasi-public institution, one might presume that a short stretch of cubicle wall is wide enough to guarantee anonymity, to allow you to fart freely, to defecate, to scratch an itch, all in the privacy behind the locked door. But no, the students, as keenly observant as they’ve been taught to be, identify your shoes visible below the lowest edge and, as with Star Trekkers and New Civilizations, this their five year mission, they seek out their teachers. In the bathroom, even. They call at you, with neither fear nor shame, through the cubicle wall, to remind you - do you have your date book with you? — we need to schedule an appointment. Well, excuse me, say I to myself, my hands are already occupied. Now several things are in operation in this exchange:
Firstly, my pleasure at the presumed sharing of homosocial intimacy, the comfortable familiarity of bathrooms that are not co-ed. Secondly — rounding out a good and solid ambivalence — my discomfort at their disavowal of an agreed upon convention — that behind the toilet door the ‘I’, that I otherwise am does not exist. Thirdly, a complication of the second, the reason I prefer to think of myself as a piece of unidentified lumpen flesh is the better to disassociate myself from that which a moment before was of me - my urine, my blood, my fæces (indeed, to say ‘my’ is out of place here) — even though, implicating me, it, the fæces, the urine, the blood, is still warm with the heat of my living. In this I participate in a hierarchy of value that posits me the educator outside mere embodiment, my power sustained by the veiling of my phallus, my vulnerability, my bodily self, the personal. Indeed in many institutions, faculty and students maintain separate facilities. Lastly, and to bring this full circle, to consider actually defecating in the cubicle next to one’s student and thereby acting upon the fantasy of anonymity is about as likely as throwing in your day job because you sing Liza Minelli in the shower in the morning. That is, to actually take a dump would breach all unspoken codes of etiquette and forever sunder the fragile connection required for just a bit of idealization, a little transference, that frisson so necessary to good education. And thus both parties ambivalently subscribe to a fantastical split between individual embodiment and institutional commonality/ anonymity that is in fact the hallmark of the modern. Against such things, including speaking of these tacit bathroom rituals, there are taboos that are not to be transgressed lest the phantasmatic division between individual autonomy and its "complement", institutional or mass anonymity, be revealed as sham. Such are the dilemmas one encounters in the non-spaces that are institutional bathrooms. This then, my toilet paper, is, not to wipe that interface clean, but rather to smear the sticky goo that stubbornly persists on its edges and, trashy is as trashy does, to rub my fingers in it.
In a recent issue of Critical Inquiry Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner observed that ‘there is nothing more public than privacy’. Today I wish to examine a corollary that ‘there is nothing more private than being in public’. The dialectic of the modern splits the private from the public, — how can one be singular and manifold at the same time? — 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 (and here I am drawing on Berlant and Warner’s analysis, Sex in Public) whilst maintaining a monumental public-ness, erected without any of the inevitable dirtiness, out-of-place-ness, that personal touch might entail. 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. In Pollock’s analysis she identifies the ways in which access to those spaces is gendered and classed. My emphasis here concerns the ways in which these liminal spaces provided for the convergence of intimacy and public-ness — 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, the bar and the brothel, 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 again of the bathroom of public and semi-public space. With every sanitary flush, with every gleaming knob and valve, with each raised and lowered seat, the bathroom and its plumbing at once dispel and articulate the embodied anxiety that is integral to this splitting of sensibility. With every clean wipe of the toilet paper, every glint on the surface of the porcelain, we deny that which ineluctably fails us, a vision of our modern selves as discreet, non-porous individual subjects.
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. Plumbing allows you efficiently to forget about the fact of your personal self. One quick flush and you’re gone. But, paradoxically, plumbing also connects you to every other denizen in that 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. That is, plumbing, that which physically divides and unifies the sovereign individual and the modern city/state, mirrors the split between the body and the body politic. When you’re sitting there in the stall of the bathroom of the museum or university or governmental building or the union office or the train station or the hotel or the café or restaurant, 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. Both venerated and the site of irrational fear, the toilet and the bathroom accrue the ambiguous charge of this hygienic and repressive modernity. Ambiguity is crucial to the machinations of the modern (as Berlant says, ‘Hegemonies are nothing if not elastic alliances’), and the public bathroom, though in many ways inflected, is always iconographically present. But don’t take my word for it. Consider for a moment, the bathrooms at the movies — as we sit in the darkened theater, our individual subjectivities collectively forgotten.
Murdered, massacred, sucked into its apparatus, the figure of the human comes unstuck, 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. The bathroom, the basement, the sewer, the swell of down-pipe dripping with unnatural unctions, these are the cinematic non-spaces wherein personhood is let go.
And what of plumbing and art? Marcel was not wrong in identifying the urinal as catch-all for more than just men’s piss. Yet even Duchamp, inverting the form, still kept his ‘arse to the wall’. Here too the eager celebration of the power and influence of the toilet is underpinned by a complex anxiety. Plumbing as the symbolic taking up of our body into the body politic, our (non-)selfhood flushed through its veins, is something that modernists of all persuasions implicitly acknowledge.
Consider the words of that evangelical modernist from Vienna, Adolf Loos, these taken from his 1898 essay, "Plumbers":
Instead of spending money on art, let’s try producing a culture. Let’s put up baths next to the academies and employ bath attendants along with the professors… The plumber is the pioneer of cleanliness. He’s the State’s top tradesman, the quartermaster of civilization, the civilization that counts today.
Reprinted in Münz and Künstler, Adolf Loos, Pioneer of Modern Architecture, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966, p 221
Commentators in the trade journals of plumbing and sanitary engineering of the past century seem also to have recognized the power of the potty, the lure of the ‘loo. One such commentator remarked:
'It is hardly an exaggeration to summarize the history of four hundred years by saying that the leading idea of a conquering nation in relation to the conquered was in 1600 to change their religion; in 1700 to change their laws; in 1800 to change their trade; and in 1900 to change their drainage.'
1946, Abel Wolman, 'the Sanitary Engineer Looks Forward' in Water and Sewerage Works, Nov. 1946
So the argument made by tradespeople and engineers and architects alike, goes 'there's no truer sign of civilization and culture than good sanitation'.
And with this, of course imbuing it with irony, the Dadaists concur:
As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.
From The Blind Man, no. 2, May 1917, p 5. Edited by Pierre Roché, Beatrice Wood and Marcel Duchamp
In short, in the twentieth century hygiene is the new religion and the toilet its icon.
According to Octavio Paz’ formulation (cited in Albrecht Wellmer’s the Persistence of Modernity), beauty was once bound to one of two realms, the sacred — religious art — and the secular — craft. In the process of industrial modernism, craftsmanship is supplanted by industrial design and art becomes independent of religious purpose. Some vestige of religious beauty persists in what in Benjaminian terms 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, modern beauty is the shortest distance between the design of an object and its utility, a kind of evolutionary theory for design, a survival of the most fitting. — Thus, only if an industrial object is pared back to its essential form can it be elegant. As a modern icon, a ‘madonna of the bathroom’ (to appropriate one view of Duchamp’s Fountain), the toilet is such a beautiful thing. Yet, as we understand of theories of evolution, survival has at least as much to do with being fit enough as with being fittest. So too for our toilets, they must be functional enough, clean enough, shining enough, to stand the associations with which, in the modern, they are burdened. They may be ‘piss elegant’ but they’re always sullied by the inevitable traces of human usage, the ordinary spillage of quotidian life.
And if the toilet is iconic then the sacrament is reversed: in the Eucharist we imbibe the blood and body of the Christ figure. Here, in inversion, we present our blood and shit and piss before the mantle of the almighty, modernist aesthetics. This means we offer our bodies as holy sacrifices symbolically to be taken into the shrine; if the Lord enters our bodies in the pre-modern ritual, we, as Lords, enter the body of the State and Metropolis in the modern ritual that is the adoration of the cubicle. A century of plumbing shows me this new religion. My piece, Century, draws upon my photographic archive of bathrooms in public places. I chose 100 bathrooms 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, they are often mis-colored, sometimes out of focus and always uncanny. Though familiar to any visitor to these different public spheres, these images are denatured by the play of my own desire to document and arrange them in a grid of their imperfection, color by unbalanced color. A return of the repressed. I think of Century as an index of intimacy in public, and the beautiful failure of both terms.