Welcome To The Place Where Shit Happens!

Welcome to the place where shit happens!

A five-minute read on art history’s homage to the loo, from Hieronymus Bosch’s porta potty to Maurizio Cattelan’s golden throne.

There is a simple trick that can make a menace lose its fright immediately. Just imagine them sitting on a toilet pooping. The Danish artist group Superflex, participating in this year’s Venice Biennale, has made a series of works, the Power Toilets, that depart from this idea. They consist of exact replicas of toilets, secretly accessed and photographed, from global sites of power such as the United Nations Security Council headquarters in New York, the JPMorgan Chase headquarters in New York, or the Council of the European Union in Brussels.

Superflex Power Toilets 02 — Superflex, Power Toilets/UN, installed at Park van Luna, Heerhugowaard, 2010.
Photo: Isabelle Hennings Bachor

Superflex Power Toilets 01 — Superflex, Power Toilets/UN, installed at Park van Luna, Heerhugowaard, 2010.
Photo: Jeroen Musch

The artists state on their website that “Power Toilets attempts to redistribute power by opening the world’s most inaccessible places to the public. In doing so, the work invites users to question the relationship between original and copy, exclusivity and inclusivity, and, ultimately, the infrastructures of power and its everyday manifestations.”

With iterations currently installed in Ghent (BE), Heerhugowaard (NL), and Gwangju (KR), Superflex has not been the first – but maybe the most lavish – to question those relations through ways of depicting or installing lavatories, and so we took the occasion to research and assemble some of the most iconic, sanitary pieces of art for you in the listing below.

With Don’t Miss a Sec’., Monica Bonvicini satirically references glass-walled Apple stores and Mies van der Rohe’s pavilions, by installing a public toilet in a perfectly reflective cube. Used as mirrors by passing pedestrians, it turns out to be made of transparent glass, and therefore, the user of the facility won’t miss a thing that is happening outside, whilst having an intimate moment on the inside. An opposite direction of voyeurism takes Jonas Dahlberg’s series of Safe Zones (One being permanently installed at Moderna Museet in Stockholm). These works imitate surveillance, making viewers suspect that they will appear on screen, as soon as they use the bathroom. (Spoiler: the camera’s live stream only shows a miniature copy of the actual latrine).

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More arty, fake, or real urinals that deserve mentioning are: Maurizio Cattelan’s 18-karat gold throne America installed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, for which visitors regularly waited more than an hour in line to pee; Sophie Reinhold’s Water of Life, a term that comes from “urine therapy,” the belief that drinking the so-called “middle stream” of morning urine has health benefits; and Fountain (Buddha) by Sherrie Levine, who is known for copying famous artworks, in this case, Marcel Duchamp‘s Fountain from 1917.

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Speaking of Marcel Duchamp, his work needs no introduction. It has changed everything.

If you want to know how the French artist landed this coup, read The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp by Elena Filipovic, with Duchamp on the cover holding a toilet-bowl-as-pipe in his hand.

Marcel Duchamp 01 — Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, at 291 art gallery, with entry tag visible. Photo: Alfred Stieglitz

Marcel Duchamp 02 — Cover of The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp, by Elena Filipovic

As mentioned at the beginning, the act of urinating and the confrontation of power and hierarchies have fueled many artists’s practices. Therefore, this incomplete list can only mention a few of those works here, that must have led to outcries and irritations at the time. The following surely are amongst them.

Self-portrait photography has been an essential element of Sarah Lucas‘s work. In Human Toilet, I, the British artist rejects any glamor that usually centers around the self-depiction of artists, here instead suggesting that her body is at best a passageway and, at worst, a repository for human waste.

Sarah Lucas 01 — Sarah Lucas, Human Toilet, I, 1996. Courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts

Sarah Lucas 02 — Invitation card, Sarah Lucas, Is Suicide Genetic, 1996. Courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts

In Basel, Richard Serra’s Intersection on Theaterplatz is often called “the most expensive public toilet.” Probably less known amongst the people of Basel is David Hammons’ Pissed Off, from 1981, performed on Richard Serra’s T.W.U., in New York, captured by Photographer Dawoud Bey. Story-telling platform Archive of Destruction pointedly wrote: “Perhaps Hammons was just marking his own territory, using humor, puns and ‘low-level’ street talk to cut through what he considered to be the bullshit of the art world.” More smelly works of art worth mentioning here are Piero Manzoni’s Merde d’artiste, consisting of 90 tin cans of… insert title here. A more minimalistic and aesthetic approach, but in no way less direct, took Henrik Olesen with his untitled, epoxy-resin wall work in the form of a milk bottle that gets its color from the artist’s urine.

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For those readers who haven’t lost appetite yet, we highly suggest the 16th-century painting by Hieronymus Bosch titled The Garden of Earthly Delights, and especially the interactive exhibit, with audio tours across the large-scale painting, including the “diabolical bird with a pot on its head and jugs for shoes, sitting on a giant potty chair.”