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ART ARTICLES
Toilets in Modern Art
by Angelique van Engelen
Travelers tend to frequently take the cleanliness of toilets
as indicative of how civilised a country might be. Modern
artists pretty much do the same thing. Defining a "threshold
of civilization" by means of a toilet pot is however
by no means simple. Neither is it likely to lead to a
conclusive, once and for all outcome. On the contrary.
When we are faced with a toilet pot as the focal point
for debate, arguments rich of historic content emerge.
Arguments that we realise we digested somehow only as
and when we enter into the debate.
The first toilet to make its way into the art world was
pushed to its rightful place by means of a trick, which
is, if you think about it, the only way to do it. Toilets
are embarrassing, not shocking. If an artist manages to
outshock the embarrassment he’s likely succeeded
in getting the specator to the point where he is transferring
his emotions to the spectator’s mind, not merely
associations of excrement. The spectator would never make
this adjustment if he wasn’t somehow confronted however.
So in 1917, Marcel Duchamp, stagemanaged a necessary coup
both on the public and the art world itself when he, under
the pseudonym "Richard Mutt", purchased a porcelyn
urinal, scribbled, or rather ‘splashed’ the
pseudonym on it, placed it on a pedestal and entered it
as a sculpture in an exhibition organized by the New York
Society of Independent Artists. The piece was rejected
by the jury without discussion as ‘no work of art
by any definition’.
It took a few decades, but this act was eventually confirmed
as the birth of concept art, even though the artist might
have never meant anything more than to show what art had
become. He resigned himself to doing nothing. Many of
his ‘ready made’ art objects have been stolen
or destroyed and resistence in society to anything Duchamp
was seizeably big. It was only until the 1960s -since
the rise of the Concept Art movement- that the concept
of ready made art became an accepted art form.
In the magazine ‘The Blind Man’, Duchamp defended
his toilet on the basis of him chosing an ordinary article
of life, and placing it so that its useful significance
disappeared under a new title and point of view. Creating
a new thought for that object made it into art. “Whether
Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has
no importance. He chose,” Duchamp argued.
At this present day the debate has evolved some more and
now there’s regular debate about whether art is actually
not so valid if it doesn’t boast at least some degree
of placid vulgarity. The Russians Ilya and Emilia Kabakov
might offer some ideas. These two Russians are the undoubted
king and queen of out-of-all-proportion installation art
that deals with the bleak side of Russian everyday life.
Many of their works are represented in the collections
of many of the world's major museums. In 1992, they too
created a toilet work. ‘The Toilet in the Corner’
is an exact replica of a Soviet toilet provincial style
for an exhibition in Germany’s Kassel, named Documenta.
The massive installation was built outside the exhibition
building in the German city just like they would have
been in provincial Soviet Russia. The toilet marked an
important point in the Kabakovs’ careers, who had
lived outside Russia for a number of years when they made
the toilet installation.
The work was inspired by the collapse of the Soviet Union,
which to the artists minds demanded an embracing of the
genre ‘total installation’. This is the first
work in which Ilya Kabakov encompassed an entire range
of personal memories and reproduced them. His toilet shows
shabby walls of white lime, covered by obscene graffiti
in which toilets without any doors are placed. They epitomize
the Russian idea of civilisation even more because they
were communal, just like ordinary people's residences.
People believe that in exile, Ilya Kabakov's work has
become more unified and total.
Kabakov and his wife created more than 200 installations
in a number of different countries. They are concept artists
closely associated with the Russian NOMA group and steer
clear of producing pop art, a strong contemporary art
movement in Russia. Kabakov does not want his work to
look as if it could be included in an advertisement. He
has chosen to focus on the ordinary everyday life in an
old fashioned effort to chronicle its bleakness. “Too
banal and insignificant to be recorded anywhere else,
and made taboo not because of their potential political
explosiveness, but because of their sheer ordinariness,
their all-too-human scale”, as one writer puts it.
The Toilet in the Corner is now on permanent display in
the State Hermitage.
One Belgian, Jan de Pooter, also more or less a contemporary
concept artist, is also driven by the urge to document.
He has made an inventory of the collapsing public urinals
of his home town Antwerp. He also made a portable urinal
and christened it "pisse-partout". It is a portable
device that allows one to have a pee at any place in complete
serenity... In creating his ‘urinal art’, De
Pooter isn’t the first to draw public attention to
the public conveniences in the city. They even derive
their official name "Vespassiennes" from the
Roman emperor Vespacianus who lived in 68 AD. On this
ruler’s list levying taxes on public toilets throughout
his empire came after building the Colloseum, ending Nero's
misgovernment and persecuting the Jews. When he got complaints
about it he used the famous words: (pecunia) non olet!
Money does not smell. Which was rather a civilized thing
for the time.
About the Author
Angelique van Engelen is a freelance writer living in
Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She writes for www.contentClix.com
and also contributes to a blog writing ring http://clixyPlays.blogspot.com |
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