Toilets as Modern Art
The Centre Pompidou in Paris, also known as Centre Beaubourg, is one of the world's major museums of modern art.
It contains two pieces in which toilets are considered as art.
One piece of toiletological art is Marcel Duchamp's Fontaine, executed 1917-1964 as the explanatory placard tells it.
Apparently what happened is that in 1917 Duchamp laid a urinal flat, signed it "R. Mutt", and called it an art piece.
It was submitted to an exhibition but not accepted. The original was lost, apparently thrown out (which seems likely as it was something the artist had found discarded in the first place).
Then, in the 1960s, he was commissioned to make a number of replicas.
On 4 January 2006, Pierre Pinoncelli, a French performance artist, attacked the version at the Centre Pompidou with a hammer.
Unlike the other "interventions", he used a hammer. The others used a more obvious and appropriate form of assault....
The second piece of toiletological art seems to me to have much more thinking and degree of art or at least design.
Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999), designed and built the sanitary block Savoie in 1972-1974. It's a modular bathroom with tub and shower, sink, and toilet, built of polyester reinforced with fibreglass.
The unit is included in the museum's section on industrial design.
The intent of the design was to support economical and efficient construction while providing pleasant living conditions.
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box."
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet, by Julie Horan, contends that civilization began with the toilet.
Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Laura Noren and Harvey Molotch, has essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and architects on the importance of the toilet, especially for urban dwellers.
Latrinae Et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World describes the toilets of the Roman Empire from Iberia to Syria, and from North Africa to Hadrian's Wall in Britannia.
Toilets, Bathtubs, Sinks, and Sewers: A History of the Bathroom, explains the history of personal cleanliness and hygiene to children in grades 5-8.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
In December, 2010 I registered the toilet-guru.com domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
