Stand to Pee / Solo Exhibition / Berlin (2015)

Stand to Pee / Solo Exhibition / Berlin (2015)

Today, in our digital age, it has become common sense that we are driven towards perfection of our organs. We are not only striving to overcome the limits of their function, we are aware that our tools and technological gadgets are the means for that perfection. Yet, one of the historical stages in this regard was doubtlessly the control over fire. According to Freud, this event of gaining control is irreducibly connected not only to the human capability to stand peeing, but also to homosexuality and the gender divide. From Freud’s perspective the act of standing to pee on fire  was, also because of the anatomical exclusion of woman, a sexual act amongst man, “an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition.” Accordingly, the condition to gain control over fire was only possible, if the already standing man would be able to repress their own homosexual desire and lust, to extinguish the fire through lustfully urinating on it. “The person to renounce this desire and spare the fire,” Freud writes, “was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use.” In analogy to this condition, Freud also believed that the historical fact, that woman had, for a long time, been made guardians of fire, was connected to their anatomic inability to be sexually tempted to pee standing. With the historical enfoldment of our desire to reach a perfection of our organs and to overcome all anatomical limits, however, not only all such differences between man and woman or sexual preferences seem culturally to loose their significance. The fate of our bodies is, as Baudrillard once noted, to become prostheses. And as prosthetic organisms that are intrinsically connected to our technological gadgets we are also about to become shameless. In a clean and hygienic, transparent and yet utterly controlled digital world, the ugly smell of our excrements and excessive waste seems to be gone. The fire controlled by digital code, seems eternal and since the sexes have already been hacked the differences between gender are as obsolete as the taboo and the prohibition to pee standing. As a cultural peeing device contemporary art remains one of the last remnants of shameful peeing.

Philipp Kleinmichel