Why Is Western Art History Full of People Peeing?

Urine took on a less magical and more aggressive role in the 1800s and 1900s. As a result of the introduction of public bathroom kiosks, which “made urination and defecation into private acts,” as Lebensztejn explains, the pissing figure was endowed with a new power to shock and disrupt. In 1887, the radical painter James Ensor assaulted his critics with an angry etching, The Pisser,also known as A Man of the People. In it, a man pees on a wall marked with the phrase “Ensor est un fou” (“Ensor is a madman”).

In the 1960s, the Viennese Actionists fused performance with the iconography of urination to attack bourgeois, post-World War II culture, which they regarded as suffocating. “The aesthetics of the dung heap are the moral means against conformism, materialism and stupidity,” one of the movement’s founders, Otto Muehl, once said.

In his 1969 work, Piss Action, he urinated in front of an audience to make his point. He was later forced to leave Germany for his actions, while his collaborator Günter Brus, whose performances incorporated urination, defecation, and masturbation, was jailed for six months.

Around the same time, piss also cropped up in the work of several photographers who explored sexual freedom and the fight against its repression. Robert Mapplethorpe celebrated homosexuality and S&M in his work, among other less provocative themes (portraits, flowers). In Jim and Tom, Sausalito (1977), one man pees into his sexual partner’s mouth, or gives him a “golden shower.”

Andres Serrano tapped into heterosexual male fantasies, on the other hand, with Leo’s Fantasy (1996), part of his “History of Sex” series. In it, an anonymous woman, whose face is cropped out of the photograph, urinates into a man’s mouth. The scene is slick, cold, and artificial, like trendy porn of the ’90s.