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December 15, 2008, 3:13 pm

The World of Art Museum Toilets, Revealed

By Jennifer 8. Lee


The bathrooms at the New Museum on Bowery are named the Jerome L. and Ellen Stern Restrooms, in honor of donors. (Photos: Rusel Parish)

Ever since 1917 — when Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal upside down, signed it with the fake name “R. Mutt,” and called it art — toilets (and urinals) have had a special relationship with art world. Think, for instance, of Willem de Kooning’s painting on a used toilet seat, or Jonathan Hartshorn, who placed some of his drawings in a bathroom at MoMA and photographed them for a performance piece called “Down to Nature.”


Urinals at the Tate Modern in London.

But the New York-based Art Museum Toilet Museum of Art (yes, that’s a palindromic mouthful) has assembled a collection of photos of toilets, bathrooms and urinals from fine art museums around the world, and is now inviting submissions from viewers.

In case you were wondering, the “museum” exists only online — and its Web site gently pokes fun at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, brazenly incorporating the Met’s famous “M” logo and the design and look of the Met’s Web site.

There is something voyeuristic and fascinating about art museum bathrooms. The online gallery spans cities as far flung as Perth, Australia; Kyoto, Japan; and St. Petersburg, Russia. For women in particular, who do not often venture into men’s rooms, there is a startling diversity in urinals: from the industrial (in the Hermitage), to the ovular (at the Tate Modern), to the bird feeder-like (at the Shanghai Art Museum). The pictures even offer new perspectives — figuratively and literally — on the everyday devices. For example, how many get to see a urinal from this vantage point?


Urinals at the Perth Art Museum in Australia.

“It’s such a private space for people, and the Web site, is taking a very private space and making it public,” said Rusel Parish, the New York artist who took and assembled most of the photos. World-class museums like the Museum of Modern Art and the Met can spend a lot of money on the museum bathrooms and restrooms, he noted. “It can often be an aesthetic place.”

The art museums have shown an evolution over time. “As the bathroom modernizes, it often becomes more organic in line,” Mr. Parish said. “It tends to become less rigid.” He also observed: “The toilets now in the museum, you don’t have to flush the toilet or turn on the water. You touch as little as possible.”

He added: “The more money that is spent on something, the less you particulate in the space. You might as well walk in and have everything taken care of.”

But there is still something powerful and emotive in the images of the bathroom, urinal and toilet. Perhaps this why the toilet/water fountain at the Exploratorium in San Francisco causes such conflict in visitors.


A bathroom at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Art and toilets have converged many a time since the Duchamp era. Last year, Davis & Warshow, an 83-year-old New York retail and wholesale distributor of toilets and other items, created a showroom to display its wares as artworks in a gallery might be shown. Individuals have commissioned custom urinals from artists for as much as $10,000. (Here is a slide show of some of the fanciest.) In 2005, the Queens Museum of Art put up an exhibition by Sa’dia Rehman that started a discussion about one of the most private acts, and the ways immigrants and their children bring their customs with them. Bathrooms, visual art and literature were combined two years ago in a gallery exhibition inspired by the work of the writer J. D. Salinger.

New York City remains a world museum capital, despite Los Angeles’s recent attempt to grab some of its glory. (Though we admire the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art for taking into account the vertically challenged in their urinal design.) But are we wanted to know, how did our museum bathrooms stack up?


A bathroom at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“New York, over all, fares very well,” Mr. Parish said, and he proceeded to give a rundown of bathrooms he had used or recorded, starting with those at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“The Whitney’s are fairly nice,” he said. “They are tucked away. They are pretty basic. They are not as aesthetically focused as the MoMA and the Met.”

As for the Guggenheim? “It is an older museum. It is a little less focused.

Some of the facilities are little less focused. It’s not the cleanest of all of the bathrooms.”


A bathroom at the Guggenheim Museum.

Some toilets clearly trumped the others in flourish: the New Museum arguably had the spiffiest, spunkiest and most colorful and stylish toilets of the bunch. They have a bright textile-like floral patterns in orange and blue. They, and the elevators, are the only intensely colored section in the muted palette of the museum. Or as the museum’s own materials describe it: “Bisazza mosaic covers the walls with hotly hued, pixilated hanami cherry blossom patterns.”

For the glam setting, we can thank Jerome L. Stern, a retired venture capitalist whose six-figure gift to the museum helped endow the bathrooms. Thus the museum’s four public bathrooms — the first things to be named in the museum’s $50 million capital campaign — are christened the Jerome L. and Ellen Stern Restrooms.

As Mr. Stern said at the time of the opening about his gift, “I’m 83, and I thought it would be nice to see my name in a place where I’m going to spend a lot of time.”


Urinals at the Museum of Modern Art.

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