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A
man walked into a Pole. The Pole said, “Welcome to my bathhouse.”
A woman with a prosthetic penis walked into a Pole. He said, “You
call that a pole?” She said, “I’m here to watch and be
watched.” He said, “Come on in, sir.”
The girls are here
to wash and be washed. The boys are here to watch, be watched. A woman,
Katarzyna Kozyra, took her camera to two bathhouses; the fruits of her
steamy endeavors are ripe and ready in List Auditorium through this Sunday.
The exhibit includes
two pieces the artist constructed from covert footage taken inside Eastern
European bathhouses. The first, from 1997, was shot in the largest woman’s
bathhouse in Budapest. The second piece from 1999 is entitled “Men’s
Bathhouse” and was honored at the Venice Biennial. In this piece
the artist disguises herself as a man complete with facial hair, chest
hair (boobs covered with a towel), and a prosthetic polyurethane penis—all
to penetrate the sanctity of men in the buff’.
What follows is a
dialogue between A, B, two men, moderated by M., myself.
M: Okay, a lot of
the people depicted in this installation are… well, past their prime.
Let’s start by connecting the bathhouses to death.
A: I think the obvious connection is with the ‘showers’ in Nazi
concentration camps. The important parallel is the segregation between
males and females. You don’t normally focus on the fact that when
thousands of people were murdered in Nazi gas chambers they were not only
naked but grouped by sex. Any contemporary Polish artist adopting the
subject of modern bathhouse behavior simply can’t avoid this historical
connotation. To think— even in mass extermination, sexual difference
was the final social performance, maybe even the enabling performance
for the Nazi’s to carry out their sentence. It’s revolting that
this social division was as palpable for the murderers as for the murdered.
B: Exactly. When you’re in a bathhouse, in a public bathing situation
in this day and age, men still fixate on each other’s bodies in a
way that women don’t—that’s Kozyra’s whole point.
If we want to get really Freudian here—when a man encounters another
naked body he’s really looking for its penis. The little boy wanting
the Other to have a penis, wanting his mother to be the same as him. This
is why men look at women.
A: That interpretation certainly works into her thing, the fact that you
said “little boy.” Like I was saying earlier, the height level
of the camera, especially when you go into the women’s bathhouse,
can almost (but not) be a little boy looking at older women from the waist
down. It’s almost as if this little boy is looking for a specific
old woman (the one with a penis), like he’s lost until he finds her
(him).
B: Kozyra’s camera was hidden in the bag, and she rested it on the
bench next to her, but she allowed it to remain at that level, like three
feet off the ground.
A: Especially in the women’s bathhouse in the handheld section.
B: So what exactly did she document? The curator’s introduction said
Kozyra concluded that women were much less self-conscious in the bath
houses than they are in socialized public life, and that the bath house
acts as an escape from the strictures of society, where they are totally
relaxed and kind of introspective. Where they are not looked at. Whereas
men go to the bath houses to look at other men and to be looked at.
A: I just think she misses the fucking point on that one. She is close
but she misses it. I don’t think men go to the bathhouse to look
at other men and to be looked at. I think that men go to the bath house
for the same hygienic reasons as women, but it’s just that one of
them is more comfortable—men in general are more comfortable looking.
B: Yes, because women are acculturated to be looked at by men all the
time. I think that’s part of her argument. To bring it to the ‘great
masters’… John Berger in Ways of Seeing talks about this very
issue; there’s this one portrait by Rubens that Berger likes, where
Rubens is painting his wife, and she’s dressed in furs, and she’s
not presenting herself for a man’s gaze, she’s just standing
there. And she’s unselfconscious, and it’s great. Like these
women in the bathhouse.
A: The women are relaxed; they’re not being looked at. The bathhouse
as a classical setting is making progress, as far as the classical subject
matter of naked bathing women. In technical advances, video, as well as
capturing the naked body in new ways.
B: And you saw the men were more solitary than the women in the bathhouse.
They had this habit of establishing their territory where they would sit
down and look around at other men. The women were totally engaged with
their own bodies, with their own experience. They were totally unselfconscious…
especially the older ones.
(pause)
B: Remember the whiteness of the flesh?
A: For the men the light was really cold, the women were really warm.
B: The blue light for the men, yellow for women. What about the kind of
Orientalism of the men’s bathhouse, with those blue ceramic tiles,
the arches?
A: Yeah, the question for me about the Orientalism is whether it sets
this in a time period. The idea is that naked people are timeless, are
just naked people. In general people look the same, and so the bathhouse
could almost be a period piece, fresh architecture. Like a costume drama
with everybody naked.
B: Except for hairstyles. That lets you know it’s the late 90’s.
A: Yeah. Except for hairstyles.
B: But this transhistorical, this—Frederic Jameson says that when
you set a movie in a place that is transhistorical in this way, you’re
engaging in the postmodern. You’re taking the vaguely Orientalized
aesthetics of the Turkish bathhouse and you’re throwing people into
it, and they’re having their modern interaction against this weird
pastiche almost like a painted Hollywood backdrop…
A: Although the main difference for me, between this and a Hollywood set,
is the sense of volume in the bathhouse. Maybe because it’s a still
shot and Kozyra held it for such a long time. You wouldn’t shoot
a Hollywood set this way. She’s not even showing the fact that this
is a gorgeous bathhouse. To me this makes it more beautiful. You see solitary
people alone in this cavernous space and you also, of course, you see
the dicks.
B: There was something gritty and dirty about it. It felt kind of subterranean.
A: The grotto.
B: The grotto feel, exactly. It was really naturalistic. Can we talk about
the folds on the women, the older women?
A: Ugh. The pink bodies and their little—
B: That little puckering in the groin, in which folds sort of cascade
into it, both from below, from the thighs, and from the abdomen above.
A: You guys probably brush your teeth a lot. And you’re chewing gum,
and you haven’t been brushing, and you’re bleeding, and there’s
gum on chewing gum action. You take the gum out and it’s pink with
like this red streak on it. The legs of these women are like the chewed,
ruddy, raw gum… it’s revolting but still unbelievably captivating.
B: What about the men though?
M: The women were much older than they were.
B: Those two young women in the polish bathhouse seemed extraordinarily
self-conscious about their nudity. Even in this women’s space, they
weren’t able to divest themselves of that being-looked-at-ness. Whereas
the old women just didn’t give a shit! Just looking at their flesh,
the way it hung, you’re also looking at the muscles literally relaxed
you know? They’re totally relaxed.
A: Just that fleshy thorax, you know? Those monkeyish arms and skinny
legs and appendages, and that fleshy abdomen area. At least for a young
person I think age transcends sex here…
B: So let’s talk about the video of the men’s bathhouse. What
did you think of the fact that Kozyra made herself into a man to infiltrate
it?
A: That shot of her applying the plastic male genitalia to her— I
was turned on by that. It was an intimate view of her. The fact that she’s
making this video means that her sex is active in some way. It’s
the only shot of a pussy in action. It’s being disguised, it’s
being used in some way. She’s putting a dick up to it. Even though
the dick is inside out. There’s some kind of dry-fuck friction of
the two genitalia up next to one another.
B: I found, complementarily, the subversive derring-do of her invasion
of the bathhouse as a man to be arousing. She’s wearing a towel over
her breasts. And she sits down there as a man, on the bench, in the men’s
bathhouse and when none of the men are looking, we see her adjust her
package. That’s fucking hot.
A: Do you identify with the artist?
B: I’m attracted to women with phalluses, women with ‘power’.
A: I think this video has nothing to do with a powerful woman, this has
to do with a woman hiding behind a constructed penis. This is a band-aid
penis, this is not about power. It’s about a disguise. The second
bathhouse is about adding on, prosthesis.
B: And this second one is ‘art’ where the other is documentary?
A: With the male bathhouse Kozyra’s falling into the continuum of
sensationalist Art. The first is a vaguely anthropological endeavor, the
second—someone paid her to do it. The idea of the second video was
inspired by a ‘concept’. Woman changes sex to observe the men
observing each other. And in the men’s bathhouse she says they want
to see and be seen, but her opinion is influenced by the fact that she
was present in the tapings dressed as a man, not only watching the other
men as people she should not be watching; she was also anxious about being
discovered, people blowing her prosthetic cover. Literally blowing it.
People are looking at the dicks.
M: Ever been with a man before?
A: Not since I was three.
B: You should try it. Well, have you guys ever gotten naked in a bathhouse?
M: Fuck yeah! It’s called 10,000 Waves. It’s amazing. The reason
you have to go there is because, not only is it in New Mexico, the furthest
place you could get from a traditional Eurocentric bathhouse location,
but it’s a transplantation of some so-called version of Japanese
culture into the southwest, complete with a supposedly Japanese conception
of gender and sexuality.
B: Is it at least tiled?
M: No way! It totally conforms to this weird 80’s aesthetic. It’s
like corporate 80’s New Mexico. And my parents got naked there! The
most amazing thing for me about this specific bathhouse is that it provoked
my relatively conservative parents into temporarily exchanging their ‘normal’
sexuality identity for an equally constructed Japanese-Santa Fe one, at
least for a few hours.
A: Were you naked with them?
M: Fuck no! I was like fucking 12 years old.
B: You saw them naked?
M: I’ll never forget the day.
Seth and Joey talked
and drank beer, Chris Bell B’03 pressed record.
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