In 1800, Spanish jurist and amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola discovered art deep within the walls of the Altamira cave systems. The markings, notable for their polychromy and advanced techniques to capture texture and movement, represented animals, landforms, humans, and abstract figures. It was the first discovery of ‘cave art’.
Modern science dates Altamira’s art as far back as 35,000 BCE. Since then, cave paintings have been found across the globe, some even older.
These artworks are significant for many reasons. Their preoccupation with the human hand tells us that human consciousness and reflexivity are not a recent development. Clearly, the making of representations and the use of creative forces is a fundamental human impulse through which consciousness is both enacted and interrogated.
We want to mark our existence, and we want to be known. On the walls of a bathroom on Level 3 of Fisher Library, another unknowable human hand has written, “Is this all that will be left of me?”
Bathroom graffiti has been interpreted as a recreation of the cave painting. A 2012 article from the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality understood it as another representation of the need to mark our existence and communicate identity. When rock art was first discovered, the cave shifted from a crude dwelling arrangement to a site of ritual and communal significance. So too, public bathrooms offer more than a poorly manicured place to relieve oneself. Despite the negative modern connotations of the word ‘graffiti,’ it is derived from the Greek term grapheon, meaning simply, ‘to write’.
It sounds like a reach, but think about it. Within the public bathroom, there’s complete anonymity, total freedom of expression. The knowledge no one can ever trace anything back to you — that once you leave the stall you cease to exist as ‘author’ and become just another voice for somebody else to interpret — is freeing and deeply unsettling. There’s a transience in the empty cubicle doors swinging shut, in shoes echoing on tiled floors. It reinforces the impermanent and insignificant nature of our existence.
This week, I set myself the enviable task of touring as many female bathrooms on campus as I could. I looked for what people were saying, and what it tells us about our personal and student identity.
The Law Library latrines were arrestingly barren. Disappointing. But I suppose it’s a good thing that our future lawyers have genuine respect for public order.
More puzzling was the appearance of stickers showing AI-generated foxes dressed in royal garb that are displayed in increasingly elaborate patterns in the Wentworth Building, Education Building, and Nanoscience Hub. A comment on the absurd state of current political affairs?
A 2022 study of public toilet graffiti in the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences found that graffiti in a given bathroom tends to share cohesive themes. Each new ambiguously authored statement contributes to a communally built structured dialogue. Further, the public bathroom is traditionally gender-segregated, allowing uninhibited expression and performance of gendered identities and concerns.
I was fascinated by the markings on an old paper towel dispenser in the Woolley Building women’s bathrooms. “I didn’t love him but he was all that I needed,” someone has written. Another: “This doesn’t save the daughter from the mother’s fate.” There’s “Know your worth ♥,” “Your outfit is slaying today ♥”, ‘BEAUTY COMES FROM WITHIN,” and “You can do it!”, to which someone has responded, “No I can’t.”
Unsurprisingly for a building primarily inhabited by English majors, I found numerous literary references to books by women authors. Notably, the famous “Nolite tes bastardes carborundorum”, from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a bold statement of feminist resistance against an oppressive government. There is also what seems to be original poetry from students:
‘For the day is you
And the light is you
And the sun is you
And all the beautiful beautiful awaiting life is you.’
All of this was written on top of and around each other: different pens, colours, handwriting. It reminded me of the layering of female voices and experiences in the girls’ bathrooms on nights out. We stand repainting our lips with soft, deft strokes. We darken our eyelashes, and in the corner of the mirror, my friend’s cat-eye liner looks like a shard of glass. Behind us, strangers give out sex advice and swap Instagrams.
The bathroom is a space of community that is, by its very nature, fragmentary. We pass in and out of these spaces as we pass in and out of different versions of ourselves. Much has been said about the increasingly fragmented nature of the self in the modern era, but I think that it’s always been that way. Especially for women; we’re constantly shifting, curating versions of ourselves that other people will deem ‘okay’. We’ve got to look right, study right, eat right, love right, work right, mother right. It’s hard sometimes to feel like a whole person. I see my body in fragments, I do my makeup in fragments, and I write in fragments. But sometimes, in the girls’ bathroom, I see other versions of myself and my experience reflected back at me.
These fragments are elusive, but they’re all we have. We can never know anything, least of all ourselves, as a whole. Human bodies rarely appeared on the walls of ancient caves, but rather, fragments of the body. It’s the human hand, by which we see and understand ourselves as creators, by which we press into pigment or curl around a Sharpie to ask, again and again, Who am I?; What will be left of me?
