Piss

A Short History of Piss In Art

by Dave Dyment, 2001

1. Arguably the most important artwork of the

20th century, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain

(1917) is an upturned porcelain urinal that he

purchased at a plumbing supply store, signed,

and exhibited. Much has been made about

Duchamp's use of "found objects" but little

connection has been made to its representation

of one of the earliest forms of self-expression.

2. Reading a Dadaist manifesto to a small crowd

in 1918, poet Tristan Tzara demands "the right

to piss in different colours."

3. Jackson Pollock, also known as "Jack the

Dripper," urinates in Peggy Guggenheim's

fireplace during a party. It has also been

suggested that Pollock was a bed wetter and

that his drip painting style references early

pissing contests he held with his family. No less

than five paintings by Pollock are titled Number1.

4. In 1958, a Parisian crowd of upwards of

3000 people pay $3 each to attend the

exhibition The Void by Yves Klein. The audience

is served a cocktail and led inside the gallery,

where they find only bare walls. The police are

called and a small riot ensues. The next day,

everyone who drank the cocktail pisses blue.

5. At the Festum Fluxorum in Dusseldorf, 1962,

Nam June Paik debuts his Fluxus Champion

Contest. A group of men stand in a circle and

urinate into a bucket while Paik stands nearby

with a stopwatch. The man who can continue the

longest is rewarded by the group singing his

national anthem. The first champion comes in at

just under a minute.

6. A 1968 score by artist Larry Miller called

Patina asks the performer to "urinate on an egg

until it has a nice patina or until it explodes."

7. In April 1970, at the Museum of Conceptual

Art in San Francisco (which he had founded

earlier in the year), Tom Marioni presented Piss

Piece. The artist stood atop a ladder and pissed

into a pail beneath him. The work was presented

as a sculpture. He later produced a similar

soundwork called Yellow Sound for Kandinsky

(1991).

8. In the late seventies, Andy Warhol began

producing his Oxidation Painting series by having

young men come into his studio and piss on large

canvases prepared with copper paint. A parody

of Pollock, for certain, but just as likely chosen to

indulge Warhol's voyeuristic tendencies.

9. 1981: David Hammons is arrested for public

urination after territorial pissing on a steel

sculpture by Richard Serra. The series of

photographs documenting the event is titled

Pissed Off.

10. British art duo Gilbert and George explore

the idea of pissing as fraternity in many of their

large colour canvases, most clearly in 1983's

Friendship Pissing and Urinight, both images of

men pissing criss-cross.

11. Although his work regularly features bodily

fluids, such as menstrual blood and semen, when

Andres Serrano photographs a crucifix

submerged in a glass of urine in 1989 and titles

it Piss Christ, he sets off a storm of controversy.

In the months that follow, many opportunists

package their own piss products including Piss

Pope, Piss Bush, and (my favourite) Piss Don

Knots.

12. For Piss Flowers, 1991, British artist Helen

Chadwick and her husband David Notarius urinate

into heaps of snow and produce twelve whiteenameled

bronze casts from the resulting

cavities.

13. Tony Tasset's I Peed My Pants from 1994

is a life-size portrait of the artist confronting the

viewer with a large stain in the crotch of his khaki

pants. The expression on his face is one of both

defiance and shame, inverting the common

pissing-as-machismo theme.

14. In a show she curated from the permanent

collection of a decorative museum in 1994,

Sophie Calle places a red plastic bucket in a

cabinet of ancient chamber pots. A taped

recording explains the significance with a highly

personal and poignant story of her holding her

ex-husband's penis as he pees.

15. Combining his interest in architecture and

activism, Toronto artist Adrian Blackwell installs

Public Water Closet (1998), a public toilet placed

at the busy intersection of Spadina Avenue and

Queen Street West. The door is outfitted with a

two-way mirror, allowing the user to see outside

but not be seen.

16. In 1998, Janet Murray mounted a botanical

installation in the public restrooms of Toronto's

Metro Hall. The self-cleaning water systems of

the toilet and urinal provided the plant life with a

sustainable ecosystem.

17. Visiting the MoMA to give a lecture on High

Art/Low Art in the late nineties, Brian Eno

manages (through a narrow slit in the glass

display case) to piss in Duchamp's Fountain.

Andy Warhol : Pïss Paintings 1978


voir :
Yves Klein et son urine au bleu de methylène, 1958
http://deathandageing.blogspot.com/2006/05/yves-klein-yves-klein.html

et aussi :
Niagara Falls & Cranberry Leaves, Davide Balula, 2011
(Cocktail diurétique à base d'eau prélevée sur les Chutes du Niagara)