Last week, on a spectacularly sunny day in Los Angeles, I dragged my boyfriend into the dark for Jon Rafman’s Proof of Concept show at a gallery with an unbelievably Sprockets-sounding name—Sprüth Magers—across from LACMA.
In one of Rafman’s videos, we follow a Sim-like character is imprisoned and forced to escape a horde of violent protests. As the character runs through a labyrinthine prison, they stumble into a public restroom where two people are hunched over adjacent toilets, clutching each other, their vision obscured by virtual reality goggles. I ruminated on this vignette in particular while we wound around the rest of the show, haunted by how repulsive this would be in practice, yet intrigued by how possible it felt. I immediately recalled the unsettling news piece about Meghan Trainor and her child star husband having toilets side by side. Though the story of Meghan T and Junie from Spy Kids did not report VR usage and felt more like an admission of an anomalous new level of codependency, I interpreted the scene from Rafman’s video as an erosion of personal space that feels like a new societal norm — the kind where we’re in close physical proximity to others but increasingly disconnected from them. Privacy is no longer prized, which is lucky, because it’s been all but annihilated unless you’re paying out the ass for it, and we’re taught to be grateful for this modicum of intimacy: that you can be in the same physical space and not truly engage with what's around, for better or for worse.
Maybe it’s the Southerner in me, but I’ve always instinctively recoiled from anything involving the restroom. Euphemisms children use to diminish bodily functions, a neighbor’s sign about not letting your dogs “piss” in their garden, even my own cat using the litter box – I’m easy to ruffle. However, with any sense of propriety, you either use it or lose it, and I soon overcame the more acute version of this aversion because I needed to pee into a gigantic metal trough in front of my English teacher in Shenzheng, China, at age sixteen. Call me old-fashioned, but when I can afford it, I still crave a wall, a moment off display before rejoining the world.
In recent years, we’ve only become more hyper-focused on physical identity – gender, race, sexuality – while also engineering new ways to estrange ourselves from one another entirely. It’s a dissonance I can’t get over: we celebrate what’s going on above the shoulders (emphasis on mental health, DEI vs. “diversity of thought,” IQ, the cult of genius) while magnifying what’s below them (pervasive discourse re: gender reveals, egg freezing, gut health, gains, those guys who break their legs to get taller). But the middle – the utilitarian body as it exists day-to-day, the house of the spirit – is often absent from the conversation unless it’s rendered symbolic, productive, or extreme. Maybe the closest we come to rewarding both flesh and function is when we give Oscars to people who transmogrify into fatter or skinnier versions of themselves, a celebration of actual mind-body collaboration.
This brings me, as always, to my close personal friends, The Kardashians. I’ve been watching this family for almost two decades of my life, and every time I turn on the television, I am awed both by what they look like and by what they’re selling. While Kourtney and Kim look almost exactly as they did when the show began, Khloe looks like a different person entirely (Amy Schumer once said of the Kardashians that the face that they were born with is “merely a suggestion”). This is not new insight, but what captivates me is the way their dogged perservarance towards optimizing both physicality, cleaved into two camps (beauty and health) —Kourtney’s vagina gummies, Kim’s body shapewear, Kylie’s lip kits, Khloe’s migraine medicine, Kendall. Flesh is function, and function is flesh.
I’m thinking of my BFF Kim because of a gift that was given to her by her oldest child, North West, last year – a gold-plated necklace that read “Skibidi Toilet.” North is 11 years old and has Kanye West as a father, so I’m inclined to believe that she thought this was a troll and nothing more, but I decided to look into what the fuck she was on about and it turns out to be ingeniously poignant. Skibidi Toilet is a grotesque YouTube series where disembodied heads screech from toilets and battle post-human figures, who have electronic devices (cameras, speakers, televisions) for heads. It’s easy to write it off as slop, and slop it may be, but it maps well onto our cultural moment. The menacing Skibidi Toilets – heads without bodies – are stuck in a loop, insistent on their presence and relevance in the world they inhabit, but, deprived of their original function (as toilets), they are devoid of substance. The so-called heroes of the series – the surveillance-headed Cameramen and TVmen – are hardly human themselves. Their heads are instruments of capture, not thought.
I feel like TVMan the minute I turn over in bed and start looking at my phone – there is a glut of information, with no way to process it thoroughly enough to use in our lived experience. If I wanted to, I could spend entire days without moving a muscle: embodiment is becoming less a necessity and more a tangential function. As has been the case throughout modernity, there is socioeconomic emphasis and reward for cognitive output, but our brains are simultaneously being drained, washed, rotted by applications that apply only towards the un-real. Who cares if you’re engaging in tandem toilet use? You won’t even notice. Is it possible that our collective goal is now to eliminate the knowledge of each other doing our requisite disgusting things, to dominate our bodies while dissociating completely, to keep our eyes trained into our own Google glasses — as long as we’re in it together, apart does it even matter?
What we’re seeing — whether through Rafman or reality TV — are iterations of a world where the physical is both hyper-visible and entirely abstracted. As I was walking to the library to write this essay, I passed an advertisement for something called Titless Mylk, which I assume is a dairy-free alternative, but which struck me as unavoidably existential. What does it even mean to have tits, if they can’t be mylked? I’m trying to veer away from neurosis here — my lived experience has taught me that having nipples doesn’t require them to be utilized — but it seems our culture keeps looping us back to questions of form, function, and excretion. My aversion to not thinking about what happens in the restroom is not unique, I know, as we all have some level of distaste for what happens outside of the “human envelope” — my question is, as we grow more and more comfortable with the merging of humans and machines, which functions will we choose to keep sacrosanct, in order to preserve the form? If everything else is out for display, what will we want to keep private?
Naturally, I’m gonna invoke Duchamp here, an artist I have enough passing knowledge of to understand that he’s into toilets and symbols. Fountain asked us to consider whether a functional object, displaced and recontextualized, could become art. A century later, as the Kardashians have pioneered and exemplified, we’ve reversed this premise: everything functional can be content, content itself is art, and reality itself has been displaced.
Rafman’s art resonates with me because it is not all Sturm und Drang (Sprockets!) – it’s a resolute acceptance that we are not going to get out of this unscathed, so you might as well try to find something to laugh about. Humans will always find ways to connect, even if the ways we’re doing it are increasingly deranged. The twin thoughts of holding another person during that particular act (see, I can’t even say it – I’m The Problem) and wearing Google Ray-Bans make me want to eat the gun, but I guess if it’s our only option, c’est la vie. Isn’t that what we’re doing already anyway?
