On all things golden

Golden showers as a subject of contemporary art. Piss as a way to narrate queer history. Watersports as the deepest expression of intimacy. 

This project is over a year old now! I remember that in the beginning I was a little worried, thinking how would I manage to bring myself into something which is more explicit than writing about rope or leather. Rope or leather are of course still sexual  – but they can very easily be perceived by the mainstream through a desexualised cultural lens. "But how would I write about piss?" I'd thought back then. As I remembered this a couple of weeks back, I thought, "well, why not". Enjoy xx

In the early 1990s, American artist Monica Majoli produced a series of untitled oil paintings which depicted gay orgies. In one of them, we see an arrangement of figures in the dark expansive room, some wearing leather hoods: crouching, standing, lying down, pissing on each other. Using the traditional technique of layering binder and oil paint developed in the Northern Renaissance, Majoli painted piss orgies and other sadomasochistic and fetishistic activities. Aiming to provoke a visceral response in the viewer, she explored the nature of desire, consciousness, arousal, repulsion, sexuality as part of queer life – and, inevitably, queer loss and grief.

A blonde-headed figure in the bottom right corner, as if illuminated by a soft glow, appears looking absent minded or semi-aware of the viewer. It is the artist’s friend, Paul Wood, who appears in a few paintings from the same period. “The male sex scenes began when a close friend of mine started to go to underground piss parties and became increasingly involved with S/M sex,” Majoli wrote of these works. “I had always been fascinated with his anonymous encounters with men. I envied the nonverbal quality and the absolute sexual abandon of his experiences. AIDS confused all this – and I began to wonder about his decision to pursue this despite the consequences. The impetus behind doing these paintings was that I felt he wouldn't be alive. I really thought he might be gone in a year’s time, I had no idea. Part of the reason was to memorialize him. It seems an odd thing to memorialize someone in this way”.

I have come across this quote by Majoli in Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art by American author Andy Campbell. Piss kink is a foundational feature of one more chapter – Yellow, Or Reading Archives Diagonally – which has the author exploring The Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago. Campbell takes yellow, the colour of a handkerchief piss-lovers wore to cruise, and traces it throughout the archive. He soon discovers that yellow contains many meanings, many shades and textures – same as the erotic depiction of piss.

“I erred on the side of an expanded and inclusive definition of yellow, not just the colour itself, but the word, as well as black-and-white illustration and photographs of golden showers. Doing so ensured that I encountered the colour (or its proxy) in a variety pf objects during my summer at the LA&M: in hanky codes, drawings of watersports, newsletters for watersports fetish groups, advertisements for poppers, description of the light in leather bars (in both erotic pulp fiction and non-fiction), and in consistent reference to the liquid ingestible most often sold in leather bars – beer,” he writes. “Together, these associations with the colour yellow trace an evocative line through the body: from inhalation and ingestion to urination. As such, a generalized portrait of the leather body and some of its potentialities emerge from the adjacent placement of these documents and objects. Such a performative assemblage of the archive is meant to reflect a sampling of the hallmark of leather visualities and spaces.”

Watersports, golden showers –  any kind of erotic activity involving piss – can be a foundational drive of one’s sexuality. For the rest of us who like to experiment, piss is always a possibility – regarded with curiosity or indifference, shame or doubt. But through Campbell’s research and Majoli’s art, piss suddenly becomes a language to talk about memory, intimacy, grief and history. Like other forms of leathersex or fetishistic practices, watersports can be limited to what it is – but can also have thousands of interpretations. Most of these are subjective – stories which run through our bodies, down the skin and into anonymous drain holes.

A few years back, I came across a short pornographic clip on Twitter: a 6-second video of a beautiful femme performer, on her knees with a mouth open. In the shot, there were also a muscular thigh, a cock, a hand which belonged to someone else – and a thin gentle stream of piss that slowly filled her mouth. The video was on a loop: her mouth infinitely filling up and empty again, nothing before or after. It might as well have been a Victorian fountain in a moonlit park. I liked the simplicity, the wide-eyed openness. Next, I typed a few things into Google and found out that piss is practically sterile. Once you get to this point, you ask yourself – well, what’s the reason not to do it, beyond societal norms and expectations?

The first time I pissed into someone’s mouth, we were in a tiny bathroom of a cheap hotel in Paddington. Walls were covered with marble-patterned plastic film, and the two of us could barely fit in there. As I mentally tried to make myself relax, I pushed my hands into the walls and thought that the whole thing was funny, amusing, intriguing.

I’ve never thought of piss as something degrading. Separated from a particular BDSM dynamic, I find it intimate and sensual. It always makes me think of pissing in parks or forests. The way fluid of your body temperature quickly disappears into the ground. The smell of moss and grass, and all the fragrant things. The pleasure of physical release, and of being removed from mundanity. You’re suddenly alert to your surroundings – smells, sounds, light, whether you’re alone or with someone – fixed in that brief moment of vulnerability, exposure, or power.

Piss play as a sexual act, erotic practice and cultural narrative is often about the tension between the public and private, and pushing the boundaries of social norms. In the 1990s the cult lesbian photographer Phyllis Christopher produced a series of photographs depicting queer women pissing – often proudly, joyfully, in the middle of the road or on the beach. Same as her depictions of lesbian sex and LGBTQI+ protests, those were documentations of queer life and identity freed from shame.

In the work of London-based duo The London Vagabond, piss is both a reflection of the authentic power dynamic and the tool to push for an uncensored representation of kink and BDSM. In the book titled Excessive Gratification, it even becomes a way of exploring urban space as you follow the adventures of Toilet in different areas of London.

At the same, the artistic potential of watersports often spans beyond the ecstatic shock value and visceral emancipation. Once the regular, even mundane, act becomes erotic, the ghost of the erotic potential will always be there. The minor contraction of muscles connects to the altered state of mind. That way of relaxing your body. The feeling of it dripping down your leg. Cold tiles, eye contact. The power of deviant memories and deviant imagination transcends space and time.

In 1998, Alexander McQueen called his Spring-Summer show Golden Shower – which has to be renamed Untitled when the sponsors disapproved of the lasciviousness of the former title. “Models walked down a runway made of water-filled Lucite tanks wearing tight snakeskin dresses and tailored intarsia suits. They were dressed in all white for the finale and were treated to a shower that made their mascara run and their all-white clothes see-through,” as recalled in Vogue US. Drenched white dresses were illuminated with bright amber light – imagination did the rest.

Eva Gold’s sculpture Liquid Gold (2022), which I saw at Nicoletti Contemporary in London, incorporates light too. A foil-covered urinal with small etchings of empty chairs and faceless kneeling figures is bathed in the piss-coloured glow from two tube lights above. Being in its presence makes one relate their body to its scale and function, to fantasise and project, to be drawn in by the soft glow on one's skin. Come close enough, and the experience is yours too. 

I can feel the cold black tiles under my feet, post-scene endorphins still rushing through my bloodstream. I am worried for a couple of seconds, but then my mind is blank. Just the feeling of release and the sound of liquid dripping on your chest and hard black cold floor, smooth like rock. Your eyes closed, you breathing, maybe a slight moan which indicates an erotic reaction. I look down on you and your face is so beautiful. Every bit of it is perfect. I think of the cold tiles and the cooling down piss, and it makes me aware of time. We kiss and I feel myself on your skin, in your mouth, and I’m filled with something like elation and wonder. I think that maybe it’s the most beautiful thing we’ve ever done. I don’t love piss for the sake of it – I love it as a language, as a form of deepest intimacy.

Images: 

1. Monica Majoli, Untitled (piss orgy), 1990. 

2. Alexander McQueen Golden Shower show, Spring-Summer 1998, Vogue.com. 

3. Eva Gold, Liquid Gold, 2022 at Nicoletti Contemporary, London. Photo: Mark Blower.