12 square metres and toilet

The toilet © Ilya & Emilia Kabakov

I owe my discovery of Ilya Kabakov's The toilet to a postcard. As I didn't see his replica of a russian public toilet in the flesh, it took time to understand what I was looking at : a table dressed with plates and glasses, some chairs, in fact a domestic interior with strange architectural sense - tiny windows, unusual partition walls and lime scale on their top. At first one makes sense of what is recognisable, the sense of familiar holding attention, until the nauseous lime scale echoed a sense of dirt, things old and rotten, things that have no place at home.
When the sense of smell took over the visual sense - taste of urine-smelling food -, images of homelessness, survivalism, keeping normality in degrading environments emerged.
For the visitors of the Documenta, the revelation had gone the other way round : after queuing in front of a rough toilet, they found a homely place without smell or filthy graffiti but paintings on the walls, sofa, children playpen and the rests of a dinner. 
I can't tell what prevails from the experience : the thought that the familiar may carries dark secret, a new sense of home from finding domesticity in the least expected place.
Kabakov's staged interiors transcend his position as a russian artist living in the West, he describes them as total installations and their effect, one of engulfment : they hold us with their sense of familiar and tell more than we thought about our intimate world.





















12 Square Meters © Zhang Huan © The Asia Society

Promiscuity and collectivism, the plea of totalitarian regimes, when the boundaries between public and private spaces remain blurred, recall a performance by Zhang Huan. 
An iconic image by photographer Rong Rong shows him naked and covered with flies as he sits on a smelly latrine : after hours of keeping the pose, turning into a peaceful enduring monk, he enters a pond, cleanses and disappears.
Five years after Tienanmen, Zhang Huan breaks away from two censorship rules : nudity and politics, reflecting on the rise of forced infanticides and abortions. 
Ten years later, the chinese writer Chi Li describes similar conditions in the Wuhan : constant queuing in transports and at work, sharing and fighting at communal rooms, lack of privacy and  one-child policy.