Latrinalia - Learning From the Scrawls in the Bathroom

March 15, 2006 — -- It's the one private moment one has when out in public.

The visit to the latrine, the bathroom, the commode is a time for eureka moments, private thoughts, emptying of contents, and fixing of the unruly hair or smudged mascara as well as a time for many people to scrawl their deep thoughts on bathroom walls.

"It's a time when you are able to vent and be open," said Alex Kotch, a Brown University senior who put together a sound installation called "No one will see us."

The show is a culmination of two months of studying bathroom scrawls around his university campus. He enlisted some female friends to go to the women's bathrooms around campus and parts of Providence, R.I.

Kotch, a music concentrator at Brown, was first inspired when he looked around while using the men's bathroom at the Rockefeller Library last fall.

"I noticed a lot of provocative writings in there, and I went back and grabbed my notebook and took notes," Kotch said.

The installation includes a wide range of messages that run the gamut from crude to philosophical musings. Other items include "sex tips for inquiring froshes," appeals for advice, requests for dates, and personal interest surveys. Kotch described the installation as "worthy of the R rating."

The graffiti, read aloud by women and men in corners of a room, transforms the writing to a living installation, according to Kotch.

Bathroom-graffiti study or the study of Latrinalia -- a type of deliberately inscribed marking made by humans on bathroom or restroom walls -- has intrigued people for decades. And as with the study of anything, the Internet is providing sites to satisfy those wanting to look at bathroom poetry, art, and crude works of personal reflections.

"It can be seen as raw poetry," said New York University Creative Writiing professor Carole Song. "At it's best it is poetry mixed with art that can really capture a moment in time."

At Graffitiproject, http://www.graffitiproject.com, Unity Stoakes and Ray Dolber have created an outlet for bathroom-graffiti voyeurs everywhere.

The site contains images of graffiti from bathrooms all over the country.

"I have been watching and reading bathroom graffiti for years, and enjoying the cultural significance of what people are saying," Stoakes said.