Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing

11. Entangled with a User: Inside Bathrooms with Alexander Kira and Peter Greenaway

229 11 Entangled with a User Inside Bathrooms with Alexander Kira and Peter Greenaway Barbara Penner I N T H E PA ST decade, it has become common for scholars to study toilets through the analytical lens of “discipline”: following Foucault, they are concerned with the question of how such spaces articulate and uphold various forms of social difference.1 This chapter, however, considers discipline in another, more literal sense and explores instead what toilets reveal about the disciplinary limits of architecture itself. As the historian Hayden White noted in Tropics of Discourse, “Every discipline [is] constituted by what it forbids its practitioners to do,” although in this case it is more apt to say “by what it forbids its practitioners to speak about” or even how it allows them to speak.2 Toilets threaten to contaminate the purity of architectural discourse—its discipline —by contaminating the divide between high and low, matter and spirit, temple and outhouse, on which it still implicitly depends. In one recent polemic, the coeditor of the New Criterion, Roger Kimball , dismissed toilets as an unthinkable subject of serious academic enquiry: “But really: a book about the ideology of public toilets? Has it come to that?”3 It has. As this chapter establishes, toilets have not been invisible in art and design discourse—far from it—but they have been spoken about in very particular ways in order to contain their taboo aspects. The first section of this chapter explores the ways in which toilets have been “cleansed” within architecture, specifically through the modernist language of formalism. In the second and third parts, this 230 Barbara Penner chapter turns to two projects which challenge this cleansing process and reveal the nature of what others avoid: architect Alexander Kira’s groundbreaking attempts between the 1950s and the 1970s to investigate toilets from the perspective of use and filmmaker Peter Greenaway ’s dazzling 1985 film 26 Bathrooms, which exposes the usual restrictions of expert discourse and portrays, in contrast, a reinsertion of bathrooms into the routines and rhythms of daily life. Through these two works, this chapter seeks to identify what can be gained by discussing toilets within academe. What is gained by such disciplinary acts of “contamination”? Striking Lines Although a discussion of strategies of spatial purification could easily begin at almost any point in the history of civilization, the cleansing of architectural discourse is most overtly linked to the cleansing drive of modernism.4 To start with a discussion of modernism is appropriate in more ways than one, as we immediately find a toilet appliance at its foundations: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Its history is so well known that it needs only a brief rehearsal here. In 1917 in New York, Duchamp submitted a standard-model urinal to the Society of Independent Artists for an exhibition. His only alterations were to rotate the object ninety degrees, to name it Fountain, and to sign it, “R. Mutt 1917.” Rejected from the show itself, the piece came to be known through the Dada journal the Blind Man, in which, beside Alfred Stieglitz’s iconic and artfully lit photo (made at Duchamp’s request),5 an editorial made the claim that continues to reverberate today: “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.”6 Although this gesture and proclamation have undoubtedly been crucial for the rise of modern conceptual art, this particular scandal is also revealing about the visual language of modernism. Even though Duchamp later claimed that he never selected his “readymade” Entangled with a User 231 objects on the grounds of beauty (the choice of readymades, he said, was based on “visual indifference”),7 almost immediately an aesthetic argument in favor of the urinal was articulated. The ceramicist Beatrice Wood in her memoirs recalled the defense of the urinal by Duchamp’s patron and friend Walter Arensberg in the face of a fellow judge’s repulsion: “A lovely form has been revealed, freed from its functional purpose, therefore a man clearly has made an aesthetic contribution.” Significantly, he continued, “If you can look at this entry objectively, you will see that it has striking, sweeping lines.”8 In the decades to come, it became...