About ToiletGraffiti
The purpose of toiletgraffiti.com is simple: to expose the privacy of bathroom stalls and share the politics, poetics and profanity with the world.
Why toilet graffiti?
I’m a creature of habit. Years ago, in university, I often found myself in the same bathroom, in the same stall. I reveled in the conversation that evolved in that stall, silently, on the walls. Today I can’t remember what that conversation was even about, but it opened my eyes to a fascinating venue for social dialogue: the toilet.
Toilet graffiti ranges from the profane to the prophetic to the poetic. The public toilet is a fascinating place, where people can anonymously scribble their thoughts on the walls of a toilet stall, and reach potentially thousands of readers. With toiletgraffiti.com they can now potentially reach millions of eyes.
But why do they do it?
Robert Reynolds writes that, “The establishment has billboards, newspapers and television: the people have the walls.” Perhaps graffiti is the democratic form of communication. “Most history has been told from the point of view of aristocracy. But graffiti gives information about society not recorded in the formal annals.”
If this is the case, then what can we say about the subject matter found in toilets, a public yet entirely private sphere? Topics range from political discourse such as, “somewhere in Texas a village is missing it’s idiot”, to sexuality, where someone may advertise that they are “looking for man on man sex.” We can even find people polling for information, asking questions like: “What are you doing, shitting or jerking off?” (All are words I’ve personally read in toilets). If Reynolds is right, are these the types of things we feel have been left out of the “formal annals”?
One of the most common types of toilet graffiti is the “I was here”. John, Suzy, C.J., they were here, in this stall, sharing the same space, the same circumstance as you are when you read it. Perhaps you reply, “So was I”. This need to document our existence is not new. It’s as old as humankind, when a prehistoric human painted the outline of his hand on a cave wall, which is the same act as the modern, “I was here”. Perhaps that cave was his toilet as well.
Graffiti occurs all over public space, from expressway bridge supports to the ground we walk on, even on our own bodies as tattoos and henna art. What can we say about the popularity of graffiti in public toilets? We can’t help but read it, no matter how disturbing or dirty it may be. They’ve got us trapped. Their message is hitting us at our most vulnerable, pants around our ankles, buttocks pressed against a plastic seat. The message gets in.
The question remains largely unanswered. Toilet graffiti is a way of documenting one’s existence. It is counter culture, bypassing standard, modern communicative mediums, and brings your message directly to the people, your people, the ones who share space and circumstance with you. But yet, these answers don’t give us the whole story, they are only parts of the whole. Perhaps these answers are the “formal annals” themselves, and only get us farther from the truth. So what is missing? The words and images themselves. Toiletgraffit.com brings these modern cave paintings to the wider public in hopes that the sequence of words and images will mesh together, create a cohesive whole, the elusive answer.
Until then, grab a camera and let’s together chronicle the phenomenon of toilet graffiti.
