A philosophical meditation
Both museums and toilets represent modern civilization. However, since people primarily need to use the bathroom, building toilets is more important than building museums or art galleries. If making art is universal, then the need to pee or poop is even more universal.
Museums hide the messy reality behind art to create refined, educated people. Similarly, modern toilets hide our waste so completely that people now buy special drops to hide bathroom smells. Toilets come in different styles and designs, each reflecting different values and politics.
As explained here, countries like China and India built toilets as part of becoming modern nations after colonialism ended. The idea of cleanliness has always been connected to racism and colonialism. Public health concerns seem innocent, but during crises, they often blame certain groups—Jews, Chinese, Indians, Black people, Latinos, Arabs—for being “dirty.”
Theory and practice should go together. However, Duchamp’s famous urinal artwork separated them, creating today’s debates about the relationship between art theory and actual art-making. His Fountain (1917) only became art when it stopped being a working urinal.
After artist Joseph Beuys said, “everyone is an artist,” claiming that anything could be art, it stopped being shocking. When people complain, “nowadays everything can be art!” they’re acting like critics who decide what counts as art. Saying “It’s not art!” makes the complainer feel more important. If they said, “It’s not art! It’s shit!” they’d face a problem that artist Piero Manzoni understood: something can be both art and shit at the same time.
Luckily, Duchamp chose a urinal instead of a toilet for his artwork, which saved later artist Bruce Nauman from dealing with poop in his 1966 sculpture. Spitting water like a fountain angel is acceptable, even attractive. But spitting poop would be disgusting—imagine the outrage if artist Andres Serrano had used poop instead of urine in his controversial 1987 Piss Christ. Even Manzoni had to seal his poop in cans. Even in our anything-goes culture, some boundaries still exist. The troubled relationship between art and theory seems connected to our discomfort with bodily functions.
If bringing urinals and bodily waste into museums challenges traditional art, what happens when we bring theory into bathrooms? Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi has an answer. When asked where to find the Dao (the fundamental principle of existence), he said, “in piss and excrement.” Can we find wisdom in waste to better understand how art and theory relate? To explore this, let’s examine these toilets.
Louis Vuitton toilet
Why buy an expensive purse when you can have a Louis Vuitton toilet? This luxury toilet belongs to the world of knockoff products called shanzhai (meaning “counterfeit” in Chinese). Originally referring to fake mobile phones popular in early 2000s China, philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote a whole book about shanzhai culture. As China modernized and gentrified, authorities tried to eliminate shanzhai as outdated. But this effort failed. Despite government crackdowns on counterfeits, shanzhai continues thriving in China and the Global South, especially in poor areas hurt by capitalism. Shanzhai survives among the world’s most disadvantaged people.
This is why researchers study shanzhai through economics, sociology, and anthropology, focusing on “low-end globalization”—the making and selling of fake products. Once we see shanzhai as just another commodity, it loses any claim to being heroic or democratically hopeful, as Han had wished in his philosophical study.