It seems the more technologically advanced we become, the more we covet the streamlined body–fat-free, hairless, and odorless. It makes you wonder when we’ll amputate our very limbs. To what lengths will we go to make the flagrant fragrant? Must we be hoary before we give in to being hairy?
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These are among the questions raised by Girl Germs, an installation by artists Annie West and Mary Del Monico opening Friday at Randolph Street Gallery. The exhibit simulates the private domain of the bathroom, where the transformation from louse to lynx takes place. The viewer will feel right at home among the towel dispensers, soap dishes, and Kleenex boxes, and will doubtless have an opportunity to peek into the hostess’s medicine cabinet. But the artists say that sanitary products have made the body a public forum, magnifying the cultural abhorrence of “filth” associated with bodily functions and the desire to achieve “purity” through the use of depilatories, deodorants, and douches.
Although Del Monico and West are reluctant to give away too many secrets about the Chicago incarnation of Girl Germs, past installments have found them dressed in lab coats and pink gloves, periodically cleaning the exhibition room. They will only say that the installation at Randolph Street will inhabit two rooms and all of the senses. Because of its proximity to the gallery’s lavatory, the installation will replicate the sterile, industrial atmosphere of the public potty, rendering absurd the polite misnomer “rest” room. West says the shiny institutional atmosphere is a “metaphor for control” and the consumer culture’s usurpation of individual authority.
