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On Kathryn Shriver’s […] and a room of one’s own:
Secreted in various crevices within a bathroom in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Stanton Heights, there are three words: Luxury Privacy Space Stepping into the room, luxury rings with the most immediacy. Upon entering, your gaze is swarmed from all sides by objects calling for attention. Porcelain, pearl, glass, silver. Framed on the ceiling and wall, glass beads are meticulously woven into tessellated polyhedrons. A shimmering, beaded sheet, its main weave accented by several ivory patches in a design reminiscent of hound’s tooth, drapes down from the alcove that would typically house toilet paper. Tiny round floor tiles mimic the woven beads and, here and there, are inlaid with them. With its silver hooks, pearl pieces, and high-sheened striped satin wallpaper, the room’s light seems to be always in flux, its glints continuously shifting. Taken from A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s fictionalized essay exploring gender and the creative process, these three ingredients--luxury, privacy, and space—are, according to Woolf, necessary to cultivate the “the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity” which characterize our longstanding cultural institutions. Women, she notes, have historically been hamstringed from acquiring these things due to the restrictions and encumbrances of social mores: "Certainly,” she writes, “our mothers had not provided us with anything comparable…our mothers who found it difficult to scrape together thirty thousand pounds, our mothers who bore thirteen children to ministers of religion at St Andrews.” The importance of favorable material conditions to enduring and extraordinary works of literature leads Woolf to famously proclaim: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Built into the entryway bathroom of a home in Pittsburgh’s Stanton Heights, Kathryn Shriver’s […] and a room of one’s own] is an installation piece that pokes playful fun at Woolf’s thesis by simultaneously exaggerating it and exposing its blind spots. Although the space gives the impression of lavishness, beauty, and (due to the purpose the room serves) privacy, at the same time, one also feels that it is willfully bellyflopping in its attempt to inhabit the gravitas which luxury and beauty are expected to bestow, or to maintain a level of inconspicuousness necessary for privacy. A faceted glass doorknob, installed in a hole too large to accommodate it, leaves a generous sliver through which one can easily peek. Privacy, it turns out, is not actually that private. Nor is space that spacious; the room is somewhat cramped, about the dimensions of two phonebooths. With scrutiny, even luxury doesn’t hold up, as the room’s trimmings, flaunting themselves to the point of absurdity, come across as desperate and inept. Spindly silver hooks betray a devotion to daintiness that undermines their intended purpose; one wonders if a towel, or anything other than frail decorative chains and ornaments, could ever hang from them. Rather than expensive, refined orbs, the bathroom’s pearl pieces are elongated and lump-like, evoking bone and animal teeth as much as they call to mind wealth and elegance. A covering for the toilet paper, beaded into a mesh-fine sheet and fringed with pieces of pearl, drapes over the roll, as if in dignified protest to the commodity that, though necessary, is most uncomely: “Granted, we must wipe our asses with wadded-up paper… But must we really look upon it besides?” Even though it is meant to serve one of the more unglamorous and utilitarian roles within the household, in this bathroom, luxury haughtily undercuts functionality. Not only does the piece comically strain in its attempts to embody luxury, privacy, and space; part of its fun comes from the absurdity of the basic premise that it is an art piece at all. Why make the room of defecation, excretion, washing, tweezing, shaving, dripping, brushing, scrubbing, humidity, mold, soap scum, and slime in overlooked nooks into an art space, let alone one of such decadence? Debatable it is whether Woolf—who in her letters objected to the descriptions of scatological acts in James Joyce’s Ulysses (“First there’s a dog that p’s–then there’s man that forths”)—would have appreciated her essay’s title being wryly co-opted and applied to a bathroom. But within Shriver’s joke, she is also conducting an examination of the way in which domestic spaces operate as sites for enacting, challenging, and renovating social structures, such as class and gender norms, or the expectations and conditions we place on creative practitioners and works of art. In The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity, Stephen Vider discusses how [S]tarting in the eighteenth century, American understandings of gender, sexuality, and the built environment were tightly bound: private domestic space was frequently understood to define, confine, and protect the feminine body and female sexuality. Yet home was also a site of principal contradiction— it was defined as "female space," yet still determined, controlled, and largely designed by men. Through this lens, we can see Shriver’s piece as a kind of lavishly padded cage for a decidedly pristine brand of femininity, highlighting the optimistic yet limited nature of Woolf’s thesis when it is made to inhabit a world where ownership remains mostly in the hands of wealthy, white, masculine elites. This interpretation—wherein a privileged and immaculate (read: white) version of femininity is extravagantly coddled and safeguarded by society—also introduces into Shriver’s work a subtle critique of self-serving, non-inclusive white feminist politics that fixate on gender while willfully dismissing matters of race and class. On the other hand, the bathroom also functions as an observation about performance within the domestic space. In The Queerness of Home, Vider also notes that, despite being envisioned as a private area since the late eighteenth century, the “domestic space is not naturally or imminently private; rather it is a stage of performance, variably private and public” in which the “public-private divide not as a simple binary but a fractal distinction: the public-private divide reproduces itself within itself.” Rather than a “sealed private space,” the home functions as a “portal to the public.” Shriver’s piece embodies this tangled public/private dynamic, emphasizing that human life is hardly ever so neatly confined to binaries. The bathroom is frontloaded in the ostensibly private space of the home, but its true, public function is intimated by its ostentatious fixtures and the fact that it is positioned immediately off the entry, as if to keep at bay visitors whose needs might otherwise permit them to travel deeper into the residence, to the places where actual intimacy and privacy are safeguarded. Within the bathroom itself, this dynamic plays out in miniature: the shining arrangements of beaded polyhedrons are overlaid with wood frames or conventional square tiles, just as we confine our boundless private lives within rigid, public-facing containers. Like the visuals of a kaleidoscope, the public and private are constantly shifting, folding into and emerging from one another. Woolf herself was well aware of the "fractal" nature of the public/private divide, noting in A Room of One’s Own that, according to Jane Austen’s nephew, Austen had no separate study and likely composed most of Pride and Prejudice “in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party.” According to Vider, these sorts of arrangements became quite common among working-class families starting in the eighteenth century. These families understood how a "proper" home was supposed to look, but they didn’t or couldn’t always follow the rules exactly—repurposing rooms or furniture pieces, for example, in the face of economic limitations: the parlor that doubles as a bedroom, or the dining room table that gets most of its use as a surface for sewing and ironing. Seeing domesticity as a performance, Vider argues, “reveals how domestic conventions, spaces, and objects both assimilate subjects and provide a potential means of resistance and revision.” If we accept Vider’s premise that the domestic is “a potential means of resistance and revision,” then Shriver’s piece emerges as more than just a wry jab at self-serving white feminist politics, or a self-effacing joke about fake-it-till-you-make-it aspirational wealth. Consider the piece as an attempt to rewrite social structures in this way, and it becomes an unexpectedly hopeful work, making an earnest statement about the persistent, everyday nature of creative practice. In repurposing a spare restroom as a gallery space, Shriver has made a similar gesture to those eighteen-century families who used the lavish, outward-facing objects in their homes for private acts of utility. To the question of “Why make a bathroom into an art space?”, the piece shrugs, admitting: “This is the space I had.” And, while the bathroom is a place for routine and unglamorous bodily maintenance, anyone with a creative practice knows that making art is as much day-to-day drudgery as it is mystic inspiration (not to speak of prestigious accolades). If you have ever made a piece of art (or for that matter, cleaned a bathroom) you know that the sparkling, Finished Work our audience/visitors behold is just the accumulation of many messy, banal, and imperfect moments. In this context, Shriver’s piece represents a profound devotion to creative practice as its own reward; a dogged refusal to burn-out in a society characterized by cartoonish wealth inequality and a general hostility to both the arts/culture institutions and the offer of material security and dignity which Woolf asserts are crucial to creative work. More and more it seems that, if creativity and care are not being underpaid or defunded outright, their institutions are tellered and tillered by corporate interests which disproportionately undercut any positive impact even the most radical art might have (e.g., “Come see an exhibition featuring ten of the art world’s most inflammatory avant-garde upstarts! Brought to you by Palantir….”). To engage in creative practice for the process itself, despite all assertions of its futility, is to enact the relentless inspiration Woolf praised in John Keats, who “tried to write poetry against the coming death and the indifference of the world.” This point is highlighted by the transient nature of the installation; even though […] and a room of one’s own occupies a home rather than a gallery space, the house is set to be sold and most of the bathroom’s fixtures ultimately dismantled (with the notable exception of its tacky silken wallpaper). A striking feature of Shriver’s creations is the way that, even though they are obviously handcrafted items, they also manage to evoke organic structures. With their symmetry, repeated patterns, and tightly beaded, multi-planed surfaces, the formations of polyhedrons alternately evoke the petals and seedheads of flowers, scales on the skins of fish and snakes, the surfaces of crystals, or the honeycombs of bees. Glance above you, and the white light fixture cover with its spiraled tiers looks like a canonical seashell. The lumpy pearl and silver pieces have the uneven look of volcanic rock, something melted down and reformed anew. In their mimicry of nature, the pieces contextualize creativity as an enduring, organic process, in contrast to a society that in many respects feels increasingly constructed and structured in ways that inhibit inquisitive and imaginative thinking. With its expiration date nearing, […] and a room of one’s own inverts the claims it wears on its face: though the circumstances may be decidedly unideal, even dire, creativity will strive to exist. Even without a room, even without money, it will push to find expression and embodiment, regardless of whatever unnatural and inhospitable frames society might impose over it, the way grass grows toward the sun through cracks in the pavement. Woolf concludes her own essay at a similar place, maintaining that a woman who is every bit the equal of Shakespeare will eventually emerge if only women keep writing fiction, and so that “to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile.” For some, to do otherwise is to expire before you have died. Essay by Ben Shurtleff Photos by Sean Carroll Special thanks to Jeremiah Miller and Alex Abrahams |
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