I was searching for the conceptual works of Marcel DuChamp — not the bathroom — when I stumbled upon a toilet smack in the center of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
It wasn’t DuChamp’s ready-made sculpture, The Fountain, which is still celebrated for controversy caused after patrons of the arts first encountered the porcelain urinal staged at a palace exhibit in 1917. It was Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa’s plastic bidet that he built for Panasonic in 2008.
The advanced piece of plumbing is tucked away in the corner of a new installation [Things in Themselves] that looks like an IKEA-meets-MUJI showroom. The exhibit — featuring ottomans, stools, toasters, and myriad other objects of mundanity — is a retrospective of Fukasawa’s expansive career in minimalist design.
Fukasawa is a champion of the “super normal.” That means he makes products that prioritize ease of use and visual simplicity, inspired by human habit and the concept of “design without thought.”
That philosophy is, ironically, one of the most thoughtful means of invention. Fukasawa’s toilet considers every human need: It boasts integrated bidet spouts, seat warmers and automatic cleaning capabilities. It’s forged out of plastic to remain as compact and lightweight as possible while retaining those features. Aesthetically speaking, the appliance could easily go unnoticed outside of a museum. The sole playful element of design caught by my common eye was the way the toilet tilts forward, signaling a self-awareness of its relative intelligence over other latrines.
But the obsession with universality hits on a level of hypocrisy latent in Fukasawa’s style. His notion of “super normal” is preceded by the Mingei, an early 20th century folk-craft movement in Japan that was marginalized by the industrial revolution. Mingei, as I understand it, is about the beauty of utilitarianism embedded in “ordinary people’s crafts” by nameless or unknown artisans. The integrity of that culture seems fundamentally at odds with the suave indulgence of Fukasawa’s designer goods — especially when those goods are on display in a museum exhibit dedicated to Fukasawa as a singular artist of functionality.
Of course, Fukasawa’s design approach really exists within the context of modern-day consumerism. Perhaps “super normal” is less an homage to the past as it is an alternative to today’s industry of generating superficially extravagant, shiny or restyled objects for monetized attention instead of use (take the iPhone as a soulless example of that monopolistic norm and this previous exhibit of designer chairs at the Philadelphia Art Museum as an instance of intellectual fun).
Fukasawa’s toilet touts a meta prowess through its subtle protest of disposability; the flushable device is supposedly innovative when it comes to saving energy (thanks to heat recycling, light sensors and water reduction technology) while serving as an easy-install way of disappearing human waste both literally and figuratively.
In Japan, high-tech toilets are everywhere, from hotels to bus stations. The smell of progress hasn’t made it over here to America, where a toilet like Fukasawa’s is likely to end up in the home of someone who identifies as culturally “normal,” but is not “ordinary” in economic status.
It must be the bootstrapping American in me, but I was bored by Fukasawa’s inventions of invisible efficiency. While political unification is sorely needed in our country, the polarizing wealth gap has bred an opportunity for cross-class criticism like the duck-tape banana that sold for six million in a prank not dissimilar to DuChamp’s urinal subversion. Such stunts are the exact antithesis of Fukasawa’s considerate and precise design. And yet they foster a collective engagement with the art that allows the idiocracy (AKA me!) to enter the fold.
Tourism in Japan is soaring. It’s not hard to fantasize about escaping into an alternative imperialist country with elite food, a comparably polite population and superior infrastructure — especially when our sidewalks here in Philly are smeared with human shit in lieu of usable public loos.
But the reality is that I find irate enchantment in the fact that my apartment’s shitty toilet must be flushed at least three times in order to clear out for the next person. Call it contaminant Stockholm syndrome, but the simplicity of the Swedes and Japanese is not for me. The third time is, unfortunately, always the charm.
Naoto Fukasawa: Things in Themselves, Philadelphia Museum of Art, through April 20. 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Nora Grace-Flood is the bureau chief for Midbrow Philly. She was previously a staff reporter at the New Haven Independent covering homelessness, land use and municipal politics as well as a corps member with Report for America.
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