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Gallery of the Loo
An ongoing exhibit at Moose McGillycuddy's
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April 05, 2007
The body of work overwhelmed me. Rows upon rows of frames of various
sizes hung in seemingly every square inch of wall space. I could do
nothing but gape, perching on my seat with one fist tucked firmly under
my chin in resolute contemplation. Enthralled as I was by the sheer
magnitude of it, I couldn't help but think of a recent article I'd read
by Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker, describing an exhibition of feminist art at the Brooklyn Museum.
Much like that exhibit, the one covering the walls all around me in
the women's restroom of Moose McGillycuddy's in Kihei is a kind of
"suite of galleries," with art of mixed media separated into four
stalls. At first glance, the extreme eclecticism of art in such a
heavily inundated exhibit as this results in a look and feel that is
paradoxically homogenous.
Also like the exhibit in Brooklyn, Moose's displayed art—at least in
the ladies' room—also has thematic conflicts it cannot resolve:
"politics versus taste, virtue versus pleasure, aggrieved conviction
versus disposable wealth." Although in this case, the bulk of
images—mainly photographs and Photoshopped photographs—in Moose's
bathroom seem to be separated into three distinct categories:
celebrities in ironic situations, everyday people with bizarre physical
conditions and animals deliberately posed in a kind of species-specific
karmic justice.
Schjeldahl writes, "The best artists help us forget where we are,
even as they may snugly fit a category," citing an example of a
particular female artist's commentary on the conditions of womanhood he
felt was "both cartoonishly obvious and, in its aesthetic power,
exhilarating." For me, this is best displayed in Moose's ladies' loo by
a photograph of a woman chugging a pitcher of beer while on the toilet,
and another of a woman, also relieving herself, this time while
squatting on a urinal, and last, but not least, a photo of a woman in
the midst of spray-painting the side of a new car with the words "Hope
she was…"
Schjeldahl also describes another piece at the Brooklyn feminist
exhibit as having a "funny, spooky intelligence" that "stands out in an
ambience of strained ambition." I think of this as I peer into a
Renaissance-like portrait of Jack Black, a photo of Anthony Hopkins
holding a drawing of Bambi, and still another of wild-haired Nick Nolte
as Mel Gibson in a faux Braveheart movie poster which reads, "Every man dies, not every man really lives."
There are other notable images—a girl with a live tarantula crawling
out of her white panties; a couple assuming the position in the dryer
of a laundromat; a penguin windsurfing on a turtle; a squirrel atop an
acorn 10 times his size; a mugshot of Kermit, smoking. I wonder what
Schjeldahl would say about them.
For as Schjeldahl asks of the feminists' exhibit in Brooklyn whether
its imperative will be "to advance what women corporately want or to
promote what a gifted elite of women does," so too does the art on
display in the women's lavatory at Moose McGillycuddy's. MTW
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