http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/23/international/europe/23TOIL.html

[Note the British Toilet Association reference near the end. - JL]

Blushing While You're Flushing, and All for Art's Sake
By SARAH LYALL

Published: December 23, 2003

LONDON, Dec. 22 — "Is this the toilet? I've been hearing about it," the young man with the half-smoked cigarette said eagerly, bounding down the street. But when he got to the actual bathroom — encased in a one-way mirror, so that the people inside can see out, but the people outside cannot see in — he had a sudden, crippling attack of nerves.

"Not me!" he announced with unexpected vehemence, as if an invisible force was preparing to lasso him and drag him through the bathroom door. A deep red blush began to crawl across his face. "I'm not embarrassed," he said. "It's just not my sort of thing." Then he scurried away.

It has been in place for only a few weeks, but "Don't Miss a Sec.," a contemporary art installation that is in essence a mirrored outhouse on a construction site near the Thames, has been raising heated, even violent emotions. While it may provide a fine opportunity to indulge in voyeurism and exhibitionism at the same time — like going to the bathroom in the bushes, if the bushes were in the middle of the street — in reality the experience is proving prohibitively unnerving to some.

"I'd worry that there's an act of subterfuge," said Martin Dukes, who found that he was, frankly, too scared to go into the bathroom. "You flush the loo and suddenly the mirror is reversed, and everyone can see in." He decided against it.

Matthew Southwell, another passer-by, called the toilet "disturbing." Trying to explain the public's squeamishness, he suggested that it had to do with what he called "British reticence about toilet behavior," a trait that is neatly undercut, he added, by the country's robust attitude toward the humorous implications of the bathroom.

"Well, it's a weird split personality thing," Mr. Southwell said. "You don't want anyone to know you are going to the toilet, but you crack jokes about it all the time."

As conceived by the artist, Monica Bonvicini, the piece was not meant to be a Rorschach test for people's attitudes toward toilets, but a comment on the contemporary art scene as well as a way "to subvert the hierarchical nature of modernist architecture," said Matt Watkins, the creative director of Broadway Projects, the sponsor of "Don't Miss a Sec."

The title refers to the chattering and gossiping that goes on at art openings. Ms. Bonvicini imagined what it would be like to be able to use the bathroom during an opening, while not having to miss out on anything. To further her vision, she constructed a rectangular box whose walls are the sort of thick mirrored glass used on limousines or in police interview rooms.

Inside, Ms. Bonvicini's piece has a simple prison-issue toilet and sink that, when used, inspire a strangely peaceful notion that you are separate from the world, but part of it, too. With your pants off.

"When you use it, it seems like you're sitting in the open air," said Vicky Thornton, the project architect for the huge construction site at the Chelsea College of Art, where the bathroom has been placed. She found the experience unexpectedly liberating. "I didn't feel like I was exhibiting myself, but I felt like that's what it would be like if you didn't have to wear any clothes," she said.

In the realm of the weird, the toilet is at the normal end of the spectrum in this racy city.

The Turner Prize, given to a contemporary artist each year by the Tate Britain (the gallery is around the corner from the toilet), was earlier this month awarded to Grayson Perry, a transvestite sculptor whose vases depict bestiality and child abuse and whose photograph while accepting the award — in a frilly, Raggedy-Ann style dress and thick makeup, standing next to his proud wife and son — appeared on most front pages the next day. Last week, The Times published a long article about two performance artists who put on various costumes (businessman, commando) and crawl along the street in central London.

In this context, there is nothing radical about the one-way-mirrored toilet, except for the roiling emotions it provokes.

Toilets are unquestionably a complicated issue for the British, starting with how to describe them. Though such distinctions are falling away, the word "toilet" traditionally had lower-class connotations and was avoided by others at all costs. Aristocrats preferred the blasé "loo," while the nervous middle classes were instructed that the euphemistically elaborate "lavatory" was correct.

"It's a very personal issue, which is why this glass cubicle, from a toileting perspective, is a little bit inhibiting," said Richard Chisness, director of the British Toilet Association, which lobbies for more and better public bathrooms. Any obvious bathroom on the street has the same problem, whether its walls are see-through or not, he said.

"People don't like to be seen going in and out of a telephone-booth-like cubicle," Mr. Chisness said, "because then people know they're going to the loo."

Mr. Chisness is not the world's biggest fan of "Don't Miss a Sec." "I didn't see any baby-change facilities there, or facilities for those with special needs," he said sternly. But it is better than nothing. "Anything that encourages more toilets in more locations — obviously, the B.T.A. welcomes it," he said.

(Thanks to JedH)