How one of America’s most celebrated multimedia artists turned toilet stalls into theaters of the absurd—and why it matters
There is a museum in Norway where a visit to the bathroom is the main event. At the Kistefos Museum‘s building, known as The Twist—a dramatic, bridge-like structure that spans the Randselva river in Jevnaker—the twelve toilet stalls have been colonized by Tony Oursler, one of the most inventive and provocative multimedia artists working today. Step inside a stall, lock the door, and the walls come alive with projected faces: talking mouths, blinking eyes, and forms that appear unmistakably vaginal and anal, all reciting scripted monologues that veer between humor, Freudian confession, and political provocation. Eyeballs on spheres watch from the ceiling. The room hums with bodily sounds.
Welcome to Scat Skat Skatt—arguably the most committed act of scatological art in recent memory, and a work that forces a serious question: what is this stuff actually doing, beyond making you laugh nervously with your trousers down?
The world’s most spectacular toilets
The work was unveiled in September 2019 and emerged from a characteristically unusual brief. Christen Sveaas, the Norwegian collector and founder of the Kistefos Museum, had a stated ambition: to commission the world’s most spectacular public bathrooms. Oursler, who had long nursed an idea for a bathroom-based installation, met that ambition more than halfway.
The title itself announces the work’s layered intentions. “Scat” references jazz scat singing—the improvisational vocal style pioneered by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, in which the voice becomes an instrument freed from semantic meaning, producing pure sound. “Skat” nods to the scatological—the domain of excrement, bodily waste, and the functions we are trained from infancy to perform in private and in silence. And “Skatt” is the Norwegian and German word for both “treasure” and “tax”—a financial and cultural imposition, something extracted from you whether you like it or not. The triple pun is not merely a joke. It is a program.
What happens in the stalls
Each of the twelve stalls contains an individually scripted video performance. As the Kistefos Museum describes it, Oursler employed a kaleidoscopic filming technique that zooms tightly onto the lips of actors, distorting and fragmenting the face until it reads—unmistakably, grotesquely, funnily—as a genital or anal orifice. The mouth becomes the body’s other openings. Speech becomes flatulence. Language and excrement are revealed as cousins.
This is not accidental. Oursler has spoken of the work as an exploration of what Freud called the “anal stage”—the early phase of psychosexual development in which the child’s world revolves around control, retention, and release of bodily waste. In Freudian theory, this stage is formative for personality traits related to control, order, and authority. By staging this drama in an actual toilet, Oursler literalizes the metaphor: the bathroom is always already a Freudian theater. He makes it explicit.
The scripts themselves range from intimate to political. As one observer noted after visiting the work, “irony and humor are mixed to criticize, with this reductionist image, the media”—and the vocal improvisations, echoing the scat singing of the title, are punctuated by bodily sounds that blur the line between speech and flatulence. Meanwhile, the eyeballs in the ceiling complete the scene’s paranoid geometry: you are watching the watching; you are also being watched, even here, even now.
A serious tradition of dirty art
Scatological art has a longer and more distinguished history than its subject matter might suggest. Rabelais used excrement as a weapon of social satire in 16th-century France. The Surrealists—Salvador Dalì, most enthusiastically—were drawn to the scatological as a portal to the unconscious. Piero Manzoni‘s Merda d’artista (1961), ninety tin cans containing what was claimed to be the artist’s own excrement, sold at the price of gold by weight—a blunt equation of artistic production with bodily waste that still provokes and amuses.
Paul McCarthy, who emerged from the Los Angeles art world at roughly the same time as Oursler, has been the most sustained practitioner of scatological performance and installation in contemporary art. Mike Kelley—Oursler’s close friend and CalArts contemporary—worked in adjacent territory, using abject materials and the imagery of childhood regression to probe shame, repression, and institutional authority.
Oursler’s approach in Scat Skat Skatt is more comic than abject—closer to Rabelais than to McCarthy. He does not use actual waste materials, nor does he rely on disgust as his primary register. His scatology works through suggestion, projection, and pun. The horror is conceptual rather than sensory: you are not repelled by what you see so much as unnerved by the logic it implies.
The body, the taboo, and the political
One of the work’s most pointed moves is its feminization of the projected orifices. In a culture that polices the female body with particular ferocity—regulating its sexuality, its reproductive functions, and its right to privacy—placing projected vaginal forms in a public bathroom and giving them voices that speak without shame or apology is a provocative gesture. The bodies here talk back. They are not objects of scrutiny but subjects of discourse.
At the same time, the anal imagery carries its own charge. The anus is perhaps the last great taboo of the body—more aggressively policed than the genitals in public representation and associated with humiliation, punishment, and the lowest register of humor. By projecting it at eye level in a museum context, Oursler performs a kind of leveling: this too is part of us, part of the body we bring into the gallery, into the museum, and into the world of culture and meaning.
The political monologues embedded in the stall performances deepen this dimension. The rhetoric of power—of control, extraction, and authority—is mapped onto the body’s most controlled and most shameful functions. The triple meaning of “skatt” (treasure, tax, scat) is not just a bilingual joke but an argument about how power is extracted from bodies.
Why is it also very funny?
None of the above should obscure the fact that Scat Skat Skatt is, at its core, extremely funny. The absurdity of the situation—a world-class museum commissioning the world’s most spectacular toilets and a celebrated artist projecting talking genitals onto toilet stall walls—is deployed with deliberate precision. As Artnet notes, Oursler consistently applies “humor and irony to his wide range of work,” and this piece is the fullest expression of that tendency.
The jazz scat reference is key to understanding this register. Scat singing is joyful, ludic, and virtuosic—it takes the voice to its limits not in service of meaning but in service of sound and feeling. Oursler channels that exuberance into his toilet theater, insisting that the body and its functions can be treated with the same delight, the same improvisational freedom, that jazz musicians brought to the voice.
This is, ultimately, a very old idea. Carnival, as theorized by the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, was the medieval culture’s periodic inversion of hierarchy—the body, the low, displacing the high, the official, and the sacred. Rabelais was Bakhtin’s great example. Oursler is, in this light, a contemporary carnivalist: using the bathroom, the lowest room in the museum, to upend the protocols of culture and remind us that the body is always in attendance, always making itself known.
The larger practice
It would be a mistake, of course, to reduce Tony Oursler to his toilets. He is, more broadly, an artist of screens and projections—known above all for his uncanny installations in which human faces are projected onto small sculptural objects like stuffed dolls and spheres, creating the eerie impression of disembodied, speaking beings. Artnet describes him as an artist who “explores the psychological and social relationships between individuals and visual technologies.” His 2016 retrospective at MoMA, Imponderable, drew on a personal archive of over 15,000 objects related to the occult and the technological sublime. He has collaborated with David Bowie and Sonic Youth, exhibited at the Venice Biennale and documenta, and his work is held by the Centre Pompidou, the Tate, MoMA, and dozens of other institutions worldwide.
But Scat Skat Skatt shows that even within this wide-ranging practice, Oursler is capable of the radical narrowing of focus—the commitment to a single, disreputable room and what it contains—that produces genuinely surprising art. The bathroom has always been a space of private truth. He simply turned the lights on.