Urination and its discontents.
"Urination and Its Discontents" is an attempt to answer why various twentieth-century artists have made works that use or are about urination. Andy Warhol's act of "pissing" onto a canvas in his Oxidation Paintings is related to homosexual "sex clubs," but also to the iconoclasm of Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Duchamp, and Pollock. Freud's idea that civilization began with the renunciation of the "homosexual competition" of urinating on the fire is discussed and compared to Ellis's idealization of the erotics of bodily functions. Weinberg suggests that artists follow Ellis instead of Freud in undermining the boundaries society places on what is clean and dirty and what is sexually permissible.
Weinberg
J
J
History of Art Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520.
D005060:Europe; D049673:History, 20th Century; D018451:Homosexuality, Male / Q000266:history*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008512:Medicine in the Arts; D014481:United States; D014554:Urination