Bathroom Vignettes: Scenes in a Bathroom
The Great American Bathroom Novelist
September, 2006, I was a part of the Art in Odd Places Exhibition in the lower East Side of Manhattan. I performed two of my bathroom vignettes, one being bathroom racquetball, the other a new performance for the exhibition, called ‘ The Great American Bathroom Novelist ‘ Over the period of three days, I sat with a typewriter outside of the bathroom in the Tompkins Square Park Library and continuously typed up bathroom readings. The pages were inserted into small blank books and then placed inside the bathroom in a magnetic magazine holder right outside the stall. The audience was invited to go into the bathroom during these ‘ typing hours’ and read from the selection of bathroom novels inside the facility.
A Few Words About Bathroom Reading
The average time spent looking at reading material in the bathroom is 2.4 minutes. My bathroom novels are adjusted accordingly to this statistic. You will discover that the reading selections inside the bathroom will depict a beginning, middle and end very quickly, with or without reaching a climactic point. This is a true characteristic of modern bathroom novels.
When a bathroom reader flips through a certain type of reading material, they will simply browse through it, reading the parts they desire during the short period of residence inside the bathroom. The bathroom novels available are conducive to this kind of behavior. You may pick it up and start reading at any point in the novel and finish at any place you choose. They are designed for a short, concise read, meanwhile allowing a reader to be able to follow the story from any point.
Language for each novel is collected at random from other major types of reading selections that tend to frequent the bathroom space. The material is collected much like the way someone would come across the words while skimming through the pages. Magazines, adventure novels, romance novels, science fiction, newspapers, how-to books among other nonfiction topics are all used for source material. The vocabulary of each selected genre of literature is arranged and sporadically placed on a office rolodex; flipped through during typing. The word shown on the rolodex card must be utilized during the next two or three sentences.
The reading material available in the bathroom will be updated daily during typing hours. As the current ‘bathroom novel’ is being written, pages will be added. The books themselves serve as a series and will contain numerous stories and tales, available to the public.