Theater, Distilled
Warning (NSFW) It’s lewd, sexual and vulgar — as it should be 🍆💦
Have you ever witnessed the birth of a new piece of art?
Real, capital ‘A’ art* *?
Not some shit your grandma or friend made.
John Waters may be in the process of birthing a piece of art right now — it’s a work that simultaneously explodes in scope, and distills every function of the Theater to its bare essence in a master-class of interrogating Performance. It’s also a piece that by its queer nature, and, in the historical function it appears to reference, will continuously attempt to hide — especially from straight people—while sitting stoically in plain sight.
Waters is bequeathing his art collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art (B.M.A.) and has requested it rename two of its public restrooms in his honor. The latter part is the object of our focus. I am not looking to explain John Waters’ intent, but instead use a queer lens to muse on his recent act and offer a reading through which a public may revel in what could be a new work of Art.
Waters’ public explanation for renaming the restrooms is simple, saying the request thematically matches work he collects.
However, like with most art, what has been produced should be the object of a viewer’s interrogation — since it’s the object, in this particular case the restrooms that will soon be sanctified with Waters’ name, that will survive in the museum long after the artist is dead. Lucky for us, he offers a hint about how to read his act: He suggests it’s in line with the gesture used in Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (below).
A few disclosures before embarking on our investigation:
While I will explore the technical, cultural and historical aspects that allow this work to be possible art, this argument will not delve into what allows a certain queer male eye to see/read/question/analyze this work, in near real time. For curious straight readers or dense queer readers: The reading is made possible by a certain queer male drive towards pure joy— a drive that is closely related to a filthy fantasy of a musky locker room. Lastly, I am not a professional historian, art historian or art analyst, but this is basically how my queer eye interprets this shit:
Tools of Our Investigation
The work should be investigated and analyzed through the use of Duchamp’s urinal paint brush. On the surface, Waters employs the use of Duchamp’s ‘readymade,’ ordinary objects—often pre-manufactured—used by artists as vehicles for discourse. The process borders on an alchemy of thought, making viewers confront the artist’s object and interpret it in a new light—and in the process spring new thought into life.
While Duchamp’s crude object strikes at sculpture and the underpinnings of art — with its speculated gesture referencing a veiled Madonna* from the Renaissance or a Buddha through an object of urination — Waters’ work, which seemingly builds on this idea, appears to go further. Waters’ act catalyzes, for a queer eye, an explosion of questions about history, repression, queer agency, performance, and wonder. (I will elaborate more on Duchamp’s urinal paint brush in my technical notes.)
So what does Waters do? How could his act be interpreted? The most obvious place to start is by tingeing our observational lens with a heavy dose of vulgarity — the kind of vulgarity common in Waters’ other work.
SMACK IT WITH VULGARITY!
For observers unfamiliar with his other work, he’s been called the “Prince of Puke,” “the People’s Pervert,” and his own moniker, the “Pope of Trash.” To get a sense of it: He quickly earned a reputation after his 1972 film Pink Flamingos for an infamous scene where Divine, the starring drag queen, eats literal dog shit.
SMACK IT!
So what could be so shocking about a public toilet?
Armed with Duchamp’s urinal art brush and Waters’ propensity for work that shocks, our question about the shock of a public toilet is the springboard for our investigation. We will start by covering our ‘toilet’ with layers of queer HISTORY.
SMACK.
IT.
(Queer readers familiar with tearooms in American history may skip this next section on history)
The Tearoom — An Exceedingly Short History
In order to contextualize our investigation and understand what might be perceived as the “shock” associated with a public restroom, we must familiarize ourselves with the concept of the ‘tearoom’ in queer American history.
While Waters’ seeming nod to a tearoom may lack shock to a queer or sexually progressive audience, it will generate it in audiences naive to ideas of public sex. Or in Waters’ own words, his act is one that will make people go “crazy.”
In queer American history, a ‘tearoom’ was a public restroom where men, many of whom were married to women, were able to engage in sexual encounters with other men. Some thrill seekers nowadays are still open to finding a similar risqué rendezvous, but with the advent of technology, juridicial and political progress, the concept and ritual of the tearoom has largely dimmed into the recesses of history.
Eric Cervini’s introduction to The Deviant’s War (above) details the fear-driven ritual of the tearoom as a nexus for his narrative history of Franklin Kamedy’s life — a gay rights activist and astronomer whose career was derailed due to a 1956 San Francisco arrest for lewd conduct and loitering in a public restroom. According Kamedy’s account in Cervini’s book, the interrupted encounter with a man who “touched” Kamedy lasted “less than five seconds.”
The persecution of men who had sex with men, or even men who wanted to show affection with other men was not limited to the tearooms. Historical records show men were arrested for congregating in bars, or even for holding hands— and many of these arrests were readily published in tabloids and newspapers. Such publicity in those times could easily lead to a loss of employment. Cervini notes that between 1945 and 1960, about one million American homosexuals were arrested for “sodomy, dancing, kissing or holding hands.”
Among the people caught up in these arrests are people we now see as heroes, including the lead organizer of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, Bayard Rustin (above). Rustin, who died in 1987 and led a very colorful political life, was officially pardoned this year.
While sodomy laws and morality statutes were slowly repealed starting in the 1960s, sodomy laws weren’t fully banned until 2003 with the Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas.
It is this FEAR of state prosecution, publicized shame, religious condemnation, social stigma, familial alienation and losing access to gainful employment that forced queer people to stay in the closet.
Tearooms were slowly replaced by bars for the general queer community. In a few cities large enough to support a wider spectrum of queerness, bars were supplemented with bathhouses and sex clubs that allowed patrons to “reenact furtive assignation in dark” areas designed to mimic spaces like tearooms.
But all of these ‘new’ public venues, which were still the targets of police raids, remained largely inaccessible to men unable to gamble the liabilities of exposure to authorities or publicity in the media. For these men and their adventurous accomplices, the ritual of the tearoom was a last resort for some much needed sexual relief.
Waters’ Magical Disappearing Act
Theater, Atomized
With Waters’ vulgar flair, a Duchampian urinal paint brush and an apparent nod to queer history, Waters quickly unloads directly in our eye — thick with spurt after spurt of questions that leave us in a state of awe matched only by the experience of a sexually repressed virgin’s first moneyshot.
Proper art interrogation and interpretation is driven by questions. The questions generated from this particular act could be endless, but these are some of the first that instantly burst from my mind’s eye:
What is sexual cruising in its most reduced form — is it a dance? Is it pure performance?
What kind of moves must be made in order to trust your fellow cruising ‘actor’ to engage in this covert ritual?
Is this how queer men accessed real sexual relief with a person of their preferred sex when they had no apps, bars or bathhouses?
When a closeted straight man summons the tearoom, is he putting on or taking off a mask? Is the closet a mask he wears in real life? Where is he really performing? Does it matter if he performs in either space?
How is it that all these ‘actors’ know what physical moves to summon this unadorned and fleeting theater?
Waters’ act creates the barest of performative stages: A furtive theater out of the ritual of the tearoom. It’s a stage that, as its name suggests, does not want to be discovered and could easily disappear if an unwelcome intruder spots it.
Waters’ act forges the memory of a lost performative space into the sanctuary of the art museum. He takes a space born of repression and reappropriates its memory of lewd courtships— cementing that memory into a historically reverent ledger of culture.
This furtive theater is one where actors’ roles were negotiated not through verbal language, but through gazes, movements, touches and gestures. Where a wordless dance was executed, doused in fear—fear of the ritual being exposed, or worse, of prosecution by the state. It memorializes a thrilling dance that stretches across time and space beyond the reaches of 1950s America, repeated by generations of terrified men engaging in acts that could, in some places around the world or other in other centuries, lead to their death. It’s a theater driven by a universal script deeply encoded into the actors: an innate instinct to fuck…or at the very least to touch.
By picking a restroom that is still in use, Waters has also created the possibility for this minimalist performance space to reapparate from thin air — but it’s also a space that will disappear as soon as any willing actors exit or are interrupted.
By permanently transforming the space at the B.M.A. into an essentialized stage, with a universally known unwritten script, and Waters’ plaque serving as the stage’s guardian and omnipresent passive Director, Waters distills Theater and Performance down to the level of the fleeting subatomic particle — a sort of transformative reduction worthy of a master alchemist… or a wizard.
This idea of embedding hidden meaning into work isn’t something new to Waters. Waters has referred to Hairspray as a “Trojan horse” that “never got caught” — referring to its ubiquity in school theaters across America despite its call for two male actors to sing a love song to each other and directing “white teen girls date Black guys.”
For those not in the know, Waters’ new theater will always be elusive— and it will only ever appear to actors willing to engage in a clandestine play. It’s a theater that will constantly be hidden, while in plain sight.
I pity museum patrons who encounter the restroom and only see the name plaque outside the restroom. For naive audiences, the limit of thought is likely something along the lines of “Silly! A restroom that honors someone!” — if they even get that far.
The denser or more distracted the museum patron, the more likely the decontextualized plaque will go unnoticed, allowing the theater to vanish completely.
It’s a magical disappearing act worthy of praise — especially since it is that uninterrupted shrouded theater the ghosts of acts past would have wanted during their performance on stage.
Technical Notes
Since we have gone beyond the looking-glass, it’s time to revisit the more technical aspects of our Duchampian urinal paint brush — a headspace where Waters’ object achieves a metaphorical boiling point that transforms the dingiest of spaces it into something like Art.
On the surface, and without penetrating any thought, Waters’ work goes beyond Duchamp’s simple gesture of a Madonna. The newly erected theater is a corporal space, a literal sac within the halls of the institution that serves as something like a sex gland for the museum’s body—intended for visitors to physically touch and with which to engage in a private manner (at the very least, for a regular private shit or piss). It’s also a space for viewers to wonder about the historical snapshot it captures: a memory of a people struggling to be.
It’s a space that interrogates the underpinnings of Performance and distills an entire form of art, the Theater, down to a fleeting atom.
In terms of art’s historical timeline, gestures, execution and scope of ideas explored, the time between Duchamp and Waters’ pieces also match certain expected evolutionary advances in the field. Duchamp’s execution of a rudimentary gesture in Fountain, which points to beautiful vestigial work, is befitting of a historical order of increasing exponential complexity expected a century before Water’s latest readymade. In this sense, the two pieces serve as markers against which to reference advances in artistic thought.
While Duchamp’s 1917 toilet may feel primitive to our modern eyes, it was helping herald a new religious movement in art inquiry and interpretation that allow our modern eyes to forge a lens through which to see Waters’ furtive theater.
Like Duchamp, Waters CHOSE his readymade object — an object that Waters had little to do in physically crafting. But unlike Duchamp, Waters wasn’t rejected from an unjuried exhibition— he’s skipped that step and entered the canon of the museum. (Duchamp’s original “Fountain” was a submission to an exhibition that advertised itself as allowing anyone to display work as long as they paid a fee. Duchamp’s “Fountain” was famously rejected despite having paid the fee). Waters has found a way to not only to have a work penetrate the walls of the museum, but physically attach itself to its walls permanently.
Unlike Duchamp, Waters is employing the unwitting plaque-makers (presumably museum staff/contractors), to mark the wall outside the bathroom with his name. The nameplate also creates something like a loud and oversized artist’s signature on a canvas… thematically conforming to Waters’ other work (loud and unapologetic flamboyant).
This leads us to our last serious point of inquiry: If the artist’s signature is so loud, how does it jive with a work that wants to disappear when spotted?
Here is where we separate Waters’ ephemeral theater from the art generated. The piece/work*** is the renamed, contextually loaded, but fleeting theater, which can stand alone without the art. The art*** is the breadth of the comprehensive act that encompasses the work (ie: the breadth of the act includes the evolution of the Duchampian paint brush, the penetration of the museum’s walls, the etching of Walters’ name outside the restroom walls, the interrogation of Performance and distilling of the Theater). While the furtive theater is an object which will likely always be cloaked away from the vast majority of patrons, the art will be loudly marked as a signature etched directly onto the cavernous walls of the museum— a literal writing on the wall — that most patrons may also still miss.
It’s almost as if the theater’s longings are ignored by the art, because paradoxically, the art longs to be seen. Like all art, or ideas with an eagerness to be born into the realm of public discourse, Waters’ art is driven by a yearning to mark culture in history through aesthetics— to be appreciated decades or centuries after the artist is dead. In a stroke of genius, Waters has figured out how to make his work survive at least as long as the nameplate outside the restroom survives.
Like Duchamp, Waters challenges us to examine and question what we’re looking at with a new lens. We are staring at something that is both atomically and fleetingly small, and massive in terms of objects closer to a cosmic timeline of history. (Cosmic timeline: This is a timeline on which ideas and real Art lives, relatively unencumbered by the timeline of ordinary people’s individual lives. If you still don’t get it, think of the Mona Lisa— when was she painted? What commoner from that era is still vividly remembered in popular memory? Can we remember a common cook, baker, or candlestick maker from that time? Or is that timeline reserved for people like kings, philosophers, and cultural movements? Where are you on this timeline now?).
Waters, who has impregnated a museum with work, is thus birthing new thought into life. This, dear reader, is finally where we climax into the realm of a possible Art.
While I may be full of shit for wanting to see what my queer eye observes, I want to believe in something like Art. Through this seeming work of queer reappropriation, artistic excellence, and thought-creation, he’s created something to shoot for — with the added magical bonus of a real life Room of Requirement that only appears when it’s REALLY needed 🍆💦.
Waters has seemingly reclaimed, for queer memory, a space that reeked of persecution, fear and urine— and transformed it into a cloaked theater that emancipates a queer dream… that probably still reeks of urine.
-Adrian Arizmendi, @arizerg
This work is dedicated to my friend Gavin. May it help him see something that seeks to conceal itself from him.
Notes:
**Art: I don’t use the word ‘art’ or the title of ‘artist’ lightly, but I use them in this argument because I think the work merits it. I believe true art is rare (ie: When I speak/write deliberately for myself, I prefer to use words like ‘work,’ ‘painting,’ ‘sculpture,’ ‘drawing,’ etc.) and the title of artist is even rarer (ie: I prefer to use titles that describe functions derived from modes of production such as ‘painter,’ ‘producer,’ ‘director’, ‘photographer,’ ‘writer,’ etc). For me, the term ‘artist’ is reserved exclusively for producers that are outliers in the field of aesthetics— a producer whose work borders on a level reserved in other fields for titles such as doctors or philosophers. The work of true artist is one that should be read like a text— a text that might have few, if any, words, but is overflowing with meaning and spirit. If you still don’t buy my argument, the reader should remember we began with a disclosure that the reading of Waters’ work in near real time, by some queer men, is made possible by a drive toward pure joy similar to that of a dirty fantasy that’s closely related to a musky locker room.
***Work vs. Art:
Work: physical, decontextualized objects; the production of creatives, from the apprentice/student to the Artists/professional. Not all work becomes Art.
Art: The manifestation of an idea of cultural importance in an object of work; OR, the work infused with the spirit of meaning, culture.
