(1 m2)
Room or Nonroom
The toilet is logically the smallest room in the house. It’s part of the hallway-entryway, past the bathroom but on the cusp of the main room, and constitutes a distinct room, the 3rd in the apartment: like most of the apartment, the room was completely redone when I moved in. Despite being terribly cramped (built for a dwarf who would have measured 36 or 38 on a tailor’s tape), it’s still completely separate from the bathroom. It’s a spatial question, deciding whether to keep the toilet area separate from the bathroom, so as to reinforce the idea of its being an autonomous zone, as it were; or rather to open up the space (however slightly) by removing the wall in question, at the risk of robbing the toilet of its precious independence, vis-à-vis the specific function of the area in question. I’ve opted for the 1st solution, following the well-known principle—to which I’m attached for reasons beyond the purely architectural—of the division of labor.
It Takes 1 Door …
In contrast to the bathroom door, the toilet door is shut more often than not; not completely shut, but rather ajar, in order to hide a room that’s only ever entered on 1 specific pretext. Moreover, it’s not easy to shut the door, which, like its neighbor, is made of a plywood so flimsy that it doesn’t quite click into its latch, undeserving of the name. No discerning eye could miss the cheapness here, though the more aesthetically inclined would note that, besides their poor quality, the other trait shared by these 2 doors is their translucent door handles capped by billiard-ball knobs (this 1 being red). This is how I’ve conferred a modern, cheerful note to the hallway-entryway where these 2 successive balls of color flourish. But considering that the 1st door is always open and the 2nd always closed, if I want to create this particular effect, I have to “prepare” the room by closing the 1st door, which happens mainly when I receive visitors, which isn’t often. Any apartment’s mise-en-scène depends on just this sort of tiny detail, but in such profusion that the profession of interior decorator (which I would find wholly intolerable) was thereby called into existence.
Potty Mouth
The white-tile floor is the same 1 that covers the bathroom; everything is white here, aside from the black toilet seat (an intentional decision), and the small kitschy orangey ’70s-style ceiling light I bought at the Vanves flea market, which disseminates a soft gleam favorable to a seated posture. This tricolor ensign (white/black/orange) designates a country that doesn’t exist: as a child, I used to draw made-up territories (islands, usually) that I relished reigning over, designing flags for them bearing rare or appealing color combinations, hoping to get as far away as possible from the French model. Did I already have “shitty taste” even then?
Inalienable Object No. 5
The toilet is the only room in my apartment wholly and impeccably governed by the inalienable object that gives it its name. A social distinction can be marked by the toilet’s space or layout, but the fact remains that it’s constituted by a unique and central element that makes this the most democratic room of all: extra space or a clever layout would be ridiculous, and so this room grants both the richest and the craftiest homeowners no advantage whatsoever.
Head/Ass Wipe
An alcove in the wall—on my left, once I’m situated properly—allows for 4 shelves that serve to elevate, a bit, this room otherwise marked by the baseness of its purpose. Starting at the bottom, the 1 within closest reach is intended for cleaning products, toilet paper, and bleach. I use a pink, soft toilet tissue that serves as a corrective for the beige, rough paper of my childhood, which I’ve never encountered anywhere else—not in prison, not in hospitals, not in the USSR.
Reading Room
The 3 other shelves serve to hold magazines, and I have to concede that their presence here in this room constitutes an homage—although a dubious 1—to their literary quality. If I keep them, it’s either because I’ve contributed some texts to them or because I’m interested in the latest news and the toilet is a good place to take that in—besides which, I do have a tendency to hoard. Shelf no. 3 is full of store catalogs, cultural-event programs, and various memorabilia like the April 1965 issue of Elle corresponding to the week I was born, found in an empty house in La Creuse and which I couldn’t not consider a sign—but a sign of what? Shelf no. 4, the uppermost 1, is bracketed on its left end by an old special issue of Libération titled “Why Do You Write?” and includes, among various orphaned issues of general-interest magazines, copies of cultural journals, which I read more or less attentively, such as Cahiers du cinéma, Art press, or 02, but also artist catalogs, entertainment listings, and interesting or didactic books about history or science, all of which points to 1 of my fundamental tendencies: polymathy. This passion, of course, runs into spatial limitations, due to its expansionist nature, and I have to struggle not to accumulate even more texts so that this semi-library of ephemerae stays reasonably organized.
A close look at these collections would show that most of their contents are not too recent; some are several years old. I have a particular absurd fascination for old news, not as in the historical past, but as in slightly outdated, even completely disconnected from the present moment, already gone stale. I’ve developed a rhythm of sitting down with a magazine from 2 or 3 years ago, neither ancient history nor wholly up-to-date, as befits these sorts of publications. Both my inclination to gloss over the here and now, and my moral disinclination to abide the friction of incessant information, are perfectly suited to the toilet.
No Context
Considering their heterogeneity, I’ve utterly failed in all my attempts to organize these magazines. Their wildly different origins and foci, and the fact that many of them are represented by only a single issue, resulted in a visual pandemonium that culminated in their being summarily stacked, vertically and horizontally, with neither rhyme nor reason: since I have no more space to keep them all together, I’ve been forced to clump some of them by height and cap those with heaps of other books laid flat in order to stuff the shelves completely. It doesn’t look at all nice, but what else can I do?
Bathroom Learning
It would be difficult not to draw some sort of connection between my desire to digest every form of knowledge and that other, less noble form of digestion to which this room is dedicated. Certainly there’s something anal about encyclopedism, is there not, and perhaps that’s the reason I’ve stocked my toilet with these indigestible scraps better known as periodicals. There are 0 real books in here, unless they’ve come in on short-term visas, like the Guide to Rugs or the Gospels in Slang.
The Smallest Room
In the left corner, 1 broom and 1 cleaning cloth coiling around it both stand sentry, doubling the toilet’s sense of closetness. A good home would store these miscellaneous items in an actual closet. By leaving these in plain sight, I’m simply reinforcing the room’s thanklessness.
Underbrush
More discreetly, at the toilet’s base, 1 small scrub brush stuck vertically in its small pail serves as a tiny echo of my push broom. Toilet brushes are the sorts of instrument that, in an ideal world, where neither urine nor excrement would remind us of our native condition by forcing a rhythm to our days, we would wish wholly absent, and yet they still insist on making their presence known. There’s 0 question that this toilet brush is the most disliked object in my entire apartment. There’s nothing I can do about that, but it’s nonetheless possible to raise its profile a bit, whether by repurposing it—a huge army of brand-new scrub brushes set in 1 of those white cubes that we call an art gallery—or by prettifying it. Having a lower-end model that I’m perfectly happy with, I refuse to invest in 1 of those fancier versions (you can even get them in Monobloc designs, with chrome bases that hide their bristles) that call to mind the sort of people who say “Shoot!” instead of “Shit!” when they curse—which only, by the way, draws more attention to their vulgarity. I prefer to embrace the total crumminess of this object; too much of an untouchable to be slyly prettified, too touching to be wholly worthless. Like an uninspiring C-list actor worthier of pity than of contempt, the toilet brush plays its role … diligently.
Down in the Hole
Every afternoon I throw my coffee grounds into the toilet: 1 of those rare moments when a specialty food (Sul de Minas from Brazil, €3.80 for 250 grams) comes into contact with the toxic. The basin turns black with the coffee’s dregs, and I could probably see the future in there, if I only knew the 1st thing about tasseography.
Eco-Friendly Economics
As I position the toilet-bowl cleaner block beneath the seat, beneath the bowl’s rim, in the exact spot where it’ll get the most water from the tank as it flows in irregular cascades, I consider that I am governing my kingdom as best I can. What a cruel irony it is, though, that this “eco-friendly” toilet should release a volume of water so paltry that I end up having to flush it 2 or 3 times!
Trompe l’Oeil
The utilitarianism of the items supra are countered by several attempts at an artistic completion of this scene setting, a locale I feel I’ve brought into perfect harmony by affixing, on the door’s inner face, 1 trompe l’oeil, a sheet of reflective aluminum measuring 24 cm × 25 cm in which I can’t even make out my own reflection. I’m fond of setting, alongside the rare official artworks I own, such occasional personal creations or decorations of uncertain status. For a while I kept a double photocopy of 1 photograph of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s bespectacled face on the door instead. I don’t know why I felt the need to attach this reproduction of a reproduction in duplicate. The question every clearheaded decorator inevitably asks: Am I making art or shit?
Vietato Fumare
When I leave the toilet door shut, those walking by always comment on 1 adhesive pictogram depicting 1 cigarette barred by 1 red line, which I adore for its simplicity. Its message doesn’t matter to me, because I don’t really care whether people smoke in my place, and/or whether they do it in my toilet. Smokers transform my apartment into a semipublic place, enacting a conversion between inside and outside: as on the street, I tolerate it. Isn’t the smoker my guest? In fact, my vinyl “no smoking” sticker makes the prohibited cigarette possible: all it takes is to mention a thing’s nonexistence to conjure up its ashes.
In Flagrante Decoratione
I believe I’ve made clear that my toilet has been the object of a certain aesthetic attention, but, aside from cases of willful decorative insanity, such as in des Esseintes’s or D’Annunzio’s home, I detest overdone apartments, and instead am haunted by the idea of an economy of means that might help me better recognize art for what it is. I can’t stand residences decked out in 1 single overbearing style, where everything’s been selected according to social and aesthetic imperatives, where everything is supposed to represent “good taste” even though that always just means “bad taste” in the 2nd degree (i.e., involuntary), or, worse yet, outright snobbery. Tastes change even faster than fashions, so I prefer the hazy concept of “creating an ambiance,” which befits a space that’s already had its use described by Théophile Gautier in his famous phrase: “The most useful place in a house is the water-closet.” Evidently, it’s because of this room’s most emphatic and unequivocal mission that I’ve felt the need to enhance its more welcoming qualities (in moderation).
Purely functional toilets are a bit harsh for a private apartment; they’re meant for public spaces with a high standard of cleanliness, as we might find in the United States or in some Nordic countries (but not in France, where institutions allow toilets to remain filthy because it’s unacceptable to so much as mention “filthy things”). Their crudeness is actually determined by their owners’ attention to cleanliness. And yet, trying to polish a turd, in the good old Freudian tradition, doesn’t require sanitary facilities to be adorned with glitter and sequins—I’ve even seen traditional toilets replaced with faux carved-wood “thrones,” better known as the “Throne of Dagobert,” with various built-in accessories (ashtray, music box)—quite the opposite: too much ornamental compensation for the fecal risks drawing 1 extreme toward the other. In essence, luxury flirting with the very shit it intends to mask. No, the toilet itself must remain underdecorated. Better to hew to the simplicity of contrast.
Shit Happens
True to my minimalism, I have no wooden or plastic toilet paper dispenser attached to the wall—implements in the design of which those trends I’ve already mentioned (ceramic flowers, painted pine, deodorant, printed designs, etc.) are by no means uncommon. On the contrary, reducing the container to its contents, meaning just the toilet paper, seems far wiser, if not far healthier: getting rid of frivolities means paying full homage to the paper itself: the barbaric sight of a bare roll set on the tank says: Here is the truth and nothing but the truth—which fits to a T my own definition of that method of excretion we call Literature.
Twin Towers
I grab 2 new toilet paper rolls; I hold them up and peer through them like binoculars. Then I set the 2 on the tank, 1 on top of the other, and I add 2 on the other side, then 3, then 4 more rolls, and the 2 towers rise in shitty sculpture, teetering ever closer to their undoing, just like 40 years ago, in those ads where my childhood doppelgängers brazenly unrolled toilet paper over an entire house.
Piss
There are 3 activities that give these sanitary facilities their purpose. 1st, being polydipsic, I urinate very regularly and with the relief inherent in all that is part and parcel of emptying myself organically, physically, and otherwise: I enjoy emptying my pockets of all the objects weighing them down, enjoy undressing quickly before making love, enjoy extracting various contents from all sorts of containers. When it comes to urination, there are 2 distinct schools of thought: the 1 that recommends doing so as noisily as possible, aiming directly into the basin, and then the contrary theory, expounding muted micturition: aiming for the porcelain sides of the bowl rather than the water it contains. Attached as I am to the corporeal inclination to exultantly liberate 1’s self from 1’s humors, I adhere to the 1st, thoroughly Rabelaisian, course of action. Nevertheless, I still feel some shame, and so, occasionally, for 1 reason or another—in polite society, for example—I curb my pleasure. Making noise while pissing—raining down with 1’s capacious watering can upon the water waiting below—releases a vertical tone that practically can’t be muffled. Public urinals in particular displease me, especially in France where they’re filthy, small, and designed for a promiscuity that’s not at all my style. Defecation and micturition should be carried out in absolute solitude—the 1st especially—and certainly of all the communal activities that would have to be undertaken in the phalanstery I sometimes imagine living in, it’s that 1 I feel the most resistance to doing in public. 1 of the most repugnant spectacles I’ve ever had the displeasure of witnessing (or rather, not witnessing, as I was so disgusted that I had to run away from the very prospect of having anything to do with it) took place in the public washrooms of a neighborhood in Canton. When I realized, upon seeing the long row of men’s heads sticking out over a low mud wall, that I would have to squat next to them in order to relieve myself, I practically heaved up all my organs.
Shit
Far too little has been written about the 2nd vocation, defecation: this rupture with our ordinarily upright posture, this isolation and concentration on the substances of which we are consubstantially made, deserves an appropriate setting. Ideally, 1 with a small window looking out onto nature, which homes in the countryside do offer. There’s something both touching and soothing about the idea of ridding myself of shit: a sweet death that leads to rebirth, a discreet desertion, a necessary evil that isn’t all that evil. In the toilet, where I usually pair physical actions with more cerebral 1s, I like to take my time. This makes me the perfect incarnation of man’s dual nature (corporeal and mental): reading here reconciles the highbrow and lowbrow functions of this space without any conflict. Though, sometimes, out of pure love for the thing, I don’t read anything at all, seeking no more than to enjoy the slow, intimate descent, in an illusion of torpor, of what Rimbaud immortalized in verse as “the heavenly praline.”
Cum
The 3rd vocation, masturbation, may be in thorough disrepute—yet shouldn’t it be considered a kissing cousin of writing, given that both practices see the practitioner ejaculating alone while thinking of others?—but it’s certainly enjoyed on the toilet, despite the fact that 1 could hardly think of 2 less complementary forms of matter than cum and shit: the 1, a component of life itself, arises from love, just as its scent arises from the chestnut tree, thanks to the miraculous accident that has graced its foliage with that same damp, fresh smell; shit, on the contrary, even in its name, reeks of foul compactness: it’s born in falling, whereas spunk comes in beautiful geyser-like spurts. (Granted that there’s some perverse joy to be found in its low character: shit is a burlesque of cum.) Onanism, despite being efficient and solitary, is participatory, the imagination running across a panoply of beloved faces during the process—bodies both clearly remembered and merely imagined. Still, its libidinal economy results in an additional small but unique pleasure: that of an erotic self-control verging on total mastery, whereas copulation always carries the risk of fiasco or deception. Masturbation is, by definition, minimalist: reduced and certainly reductive, but also reductionist in the way it avoids dragging in any other participants; humble, by no means a spectacle of note within the theater of the body, but full of a concealed intensity. Besides, those who consider aesthetic minimalism a simple “nothing” labor under a misapprehension, because nothing isn’t far from being everything: minor occurrences often producing effects far more devastating than purportedly and stridently “great” events; the art called “minor” often proving far more discreetly singular than the most celebrated works; subtle gestures generally superseding grand proclamations by virtue of their simplicity. And, by the way, the term “intellectual masturbation” is a pleonasm that doesn’t bother me in the least.
Too Fraught to Handle
I’m phobic when I’m in other washrooms, especially public 1s; I can’t bear to touch a door handle that 1,000s of other hands have already touched. I’ve gotten in the habit of opening my door at home from the inside by using my elbow. It’s tricky, but it’s doable (it requires some leather elbow patches → BEDROOM).
Up/Down/Fragile
Shutting the toilet door behind me, I’d like to reiterate that in my conception of life and literature nothing is above or beneath anything else, just as there’s no room in my apartment more essential than any other: the most contradictory intentions can result from the toilet’s being on the very threshold of the main room. Just as the Buñuel of The Phantom of Liberty swaps the proper places to eat and to shit, so I will now make my way to the kitchen, which is also the main room.
The Bell’s Ringing!
But now the doorbell’s ringing again. Still happy that I’m not about to see a man about a horse, I rush out of the toilet and open my front door, where of course there’s 0 sign of any human presence. Since I’m already there, I wipe my feet on the doormat (60 cm × 39 cm) before heading into the heart of my home.