Pissing in Public
The Latvian Capital Riga is clearly not accepting any reminders of the poverty of the Communist years. Old people, in particular, bear visible marks of long deprivation and it must be only a question of time before even these traces of the past are erased. Slums have already been banished from the historic inner city. The centre has a fresh and prosperous look.
Many derelict places, which hidden from view now serve as public toilets, are an anomaly in the clean, modern town and will soon have disappeared. My proposal is therefore to cultivate urination in Riga. This would involve a change from covert urination in shady corners to officially regulated pissing in public. Riga does admittedly have a few proper public toilets complete with lavatory ladies, but legally sanctioned urination in public view would be a cultural about-turn for this city. It accentuates a modern urban necessity: controlability.
Riga is so preoccupied with its metamorphosis that there is as yet no sign of the marginal phenomena we associate with the decadent lifestyle of large western cities. Everyone you see is neatly dressed and behaves impeccably. No lager louts, no protesting minorities or fringe groups, no artistic underground, no graffiti, no blobs of chewing gum on the pavement, no litter.
In Amsterdam, as in other Dutch cities, public urination is a socially accepted phenomenon. Since 1880, the streets and canal banks of Amsterdam have sported scroll-shaped screens called krullen (‘curls’). These offer a minimal degree of privacy in which men can relieve themselves while reducing the public nuisance of its unregulated counterpart. Amsterdam has a long, proud tradition in which the krullen have proved their value as street furniture. Nowadays, too, the mobile designer urinals deployed at times of peak demand are proving an effective remedy for unregulated urination. Pissing in public is a well-tested Dutch product that has reached noteworthy aesthetic heights.
The artistic apogee of Amsterdam’s urinary history was in 1925 when Hildo Krop designed a splendid pissoir for placement on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, where it is still in use. The book Straatmeubilair Amsterdamse School 1911-1940 (Street Furniture of the Amsterdam School 1911-1940) notes: “Krop made a standing figure with clenched fists raised in the air. The open mouth makes it clear that the man is singing a militant anthem. Krop’s socialist outlook on art and on society is expressed unmistakably by this small sculpture.”
The official Amsterdam City Sculptor Hildo Krop (see illustration, p.19) was known as an ardent supporter of communism. The ideals of communism as interpreted in the Netherlands of the 1920s are in my view perfectly epitomized by this image of the singing proletarian urinating in freedom. That is why I would like to have a copy made of Krop’s urinal and place it permanently in Riga. There, the urinal would be an ambiguous evocation of the social histories of two entirely different countries that are now reaching out to one another within Europe.
Latvia meets Holland in a urinal. What finer way could there be to celebrate freedom?
Source: Hans van Houwelingen, clarification accompanying design for ‘Pissing in public’, 2003
|
