PISS
Catalogue

Piss is polarizing.

A waste material, stored in the bladder, and released in a stream; Around 90-95% water, urea, creatinine, uric acid and other dissolved proteins, hormones and byproducts of our metabolism. Nearly all humans pee at least once a day or are confronted with it otherwise. We can’t stop it and everybody does it. So why wouldn’t there be art showing (or using) it?

Despite the fact that bodily fluids don’t seem to be a popular water cooler conversation, most people might recognize a few pissing figures and seminal pieces, which have managed to engrain themselves in pop culture. For instance, »Manneken Pis« is perhaps one of the most recognizable fountains worldwide, a huge tourist attraction and the basis of many local myths.

Urine has always been a topic in artistic works since ancient times, while the depiction of and relation to pissing has continuously varied throughout history, according to time, place and social and cultural meaning imbued in this biological process. It is showcased in etchings, paintings, sculptures (especially fountains), installations and performance art.

The associated themes can range wildly from religious depictions, mythological sagas, caricatures, and metaphors for class and gender. But in some of urine’s artworks, Rembrandt’s »Waterende vrouw« for example, pissing is just that, a thing we do, because we have to. A liquid, worthy of being elevated to artistic relevancy, because it is a part of our day and a part of us. It is truthful and real. Piss sometimes is just piss.

Sometimes however, piss isn’t just piss. Historically, it can stand for fertility, ejaculation, masculine virility, boyish cheekiness and a humorous gesture. An interpretation so common, it got its own name–the »puer mingens«.

But the modern reevaluation of the art world and our customs of perceiving saw the twentieth century put urine into new and even more provocative contexts. Piss, as a frequently private, dirty and unhygienic substance, became a way to subvert and revolutionize our social, aesthetic, political and cultural nature. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp’s »Fountain« quickly established itself as perhaps one of the greatest transgressions of the “definition” of art. References to urine throughout the 1900s range from Duchamp to Andy Warhol, Robert Mappelthorpe, Erwin Wurm and Pablo Picasso, who soon began to not just depict piss, but use it as the medium of their work.

This catalogue seeks to understand the ways urine affects us and the way our lived experiences imprint on our view of our pee. It casts a historical net of over 2.500 years to showcase the wide variety of visuals, unusual utilizations and the possible meanings of piss to confront and question often unspoken, private habits and established societal structures.
Piss as piss and not-piss.