Sitting at a Juan Valdez Café on 57th Street, looking out the window at 2 payphones, the Hammacher Schlemmer store across the street, SunSpot Tanning Salon, Belmora Pizza, Vitamin Shoppe, Crush Wine & Spirits, Le Colonial, Liberty Travel, peter louis salon, GOTTAHAVEIT.com, and assorted other assortments of humanity and cultural detritus.
I went to the Fisher Landau Center for Art, which is near my apartment, and saw an artist’s commentary regarding a photo he took from a high floor using a telescope. The picture showed an urban area with buildings and a park, but for some reason the commentary drifted toward the solitude of public bathrooms and how a Katchor-esque amateur sociologist would spend his days examining the behavior of individuals who thought they were invisible to the world, who thought that closing the stall door to a public toilet released them from the documentary pressures of continuous performance in our modern surveillance society.
I have thought about that myself. Stepping into a single-occupancy restroom in a pizza place or a coffee shop I am more than a little astonished that no video or electronic surveillance seems to exist in these rooms. Are these the last such places in our lives that one can expect his actions to escape history?
The artist’s commments about the amateur sociologist were, I assume, either metaphorical or in the spirit of some sort of cultural commentary. On the other hand I can also imagine that today’s technologies and their capacity to make every glimmer of uniqueness immediately cliché could drive the amateur sociologist to secret extremes such as monitoring the behavours of ordinary people takinig their daily dumps in public restrooms — places which, after all, make no promises of privacy.
