Still Life with Privacy: #bathroomart

Zac Zimmer, Writer, UCSC Assistant Professor Literature

This is the paradox of #bathroom art: it reveals the public restroom as an intimate space; yet it denies the voyeur.  #bathroomart turns the medium on itself. It does so in that most quotidian hall of mirrors: the public restroom. These hashtag bathrooms are the dressing rooms of our virtual self.  Sometimes we are offered a glimpse behind the scenes, but often the camera only begins remembering after we’ve left the room. The bathroom is one of the few spaces where we still exhibit a bit of control over our privacy, even though we habitually enter them with surveillance devices in our pockets and purses. There is some vague yet intuitive concept called “dignity” that demands privacy in that particular space above all others. All images that emanate from thatroom are assumed to be purposefully released. It is where we freshen up our avatars, and occasionally we broadcast directly on location.

#bathroomart reverses the field of the bathroom selfie, and broadcasts obliquely from the water closet instead. It documents the aesthetic bathroom, the bathroom with intention. The images are not retouched portraits, those testaments of self-curation that are plotted out point by point and filtered pixel by pixel. Even as myriad amateur models pass through these rooms, putting on and taking of their faces, #bathroomart focuses the lens on the chamber itself.

How do we negotiate a curated restroom, a space that demonstrate clear aesthetic intention, in the age of ubiquitous spectacle? That a bathroom can be considered as a contemplative space is perhaps our species’ most material example of the luxury and pleasure we afford ourselves. Comfort and security as we drop our britches and knickers. That is a vulgar and profane way to describe what, in other, more modernist contexts has been described as a room of one’s own.