Something strange is happening in the bathrooms of hipsters. I noticed it about 5 years ago when I first moved out to the west coast, I went to use the lavatory of a friend of mine to discover that he had transformed it into a vestry. The bathroom was decked out in kitch Jesus rejects. Sacred heart there, last supper here, crosses of all manner: wooden to florescent, and other velvet renderings of our saviour. At the time I took it with a shrug “Well this is...different,” but I have since had the experience repeated often enough now that I feel safe calling this a trend, and a trend that I believe foreshadows deeper rumblings of the soul than any American Apparel hoodie can speak to.
Allan Watts, in an essay entitled Murder in the Kitchen, spoke of how there are two rooms in our North American society where we acknowledge our humanness: the kitchen and the bathroom. He contrasted that with the living room, a space that exists purely for presentation, the space where we deny our existence as animals. As one friend of mine put it: No one farts in the living room. And if they do they are scared for life.
I think Watts is on bone in this description, and I believe that there is something quite profound in the growing religious iconography of washrooms. The bathroom is a space that we deny in our daily lives, it is a space that is for the body, and in our culture the bulk of our existence is spent in our heads. This creates an “anything goes” opportunity in the washroom. Indeed I think we can look upon this as some sort of cultural barometer, where the subconscious of a generation is being revealed.
And what is being revealed? What does this speak to? I believe that it does simultaneously speak of the hunger for God, as well as the fear of God. Here the broken God is shown in the most crass, low-brow form of art that Value Village has to offer, yet hung in the most intimate setting of the home. There is the typical critical-distance that is maintained in this post-modern generation, where the action is meant to be ironic, but why Christ and why so often?
We could just take this at face value and say that it is the ironic posing that we have become accustomed to in an age that lives in fear of sincerity, but I do not think so. I think something is sending shoots out into the counter-culture that has grown weary of defying and defining everything. And this could very well be the only safe expression of the Holy Spirit that hipsters can come up with.
Allan Watts, in an essay entitled Murder in the Kitchen, spoke of how there are two rooms in our North American society where we acknowledge our humanness: the kitchen and the bathroom. He contrasted that with the living room, a space that exists purely for presentation, the space where we deny our existence as animals. As one friend of mine put it: No one farts in the living room. And if they do they are scared for life.
I think Watts is on bone in this description, and I believe that there is something quite profound in the growing religious iconography of washrooms. The bathroom is a space that we deny in our daily lives, it is a space that is for the body, and in our culture the bulk of our existence is spent in our heads. This creates an “anything goes” opportunity in the washroom. Indeed I think we can look upon this as some sort of cultural barometer, where the subconscious of a generation is being revealed.
And what is being revealed? What does this speak to? I believe that it does simultaneously speak of the hunger for God, as well as the fear of God. Here the broken God is shown in the most crass, low-brow form of art that Value Village has to offer, yet hung in the most intimate setting of the home. There is the typical critical-distance that is maintained in this post-modern generation, where the action is meant to be ironic, but why Christ and why so often?
We could just take this at face value and say that it is the ironic posing that we have become accustomed to in an age that lives in fear of sincerity, but I do not think so. I think something is sending shoots out into the counter-culture that has grown weary of defying and defining everything. And this could very well be the only safe expression of the Holy Spirit that hipsters can come up with.
While I do agree that this trend, and yes we can call it a trend, is a medium for people to express something, this something could be more the expressing of their humor and frustration with the endless iconography that litters the landscape of our second hand stores. By this I mean that using religious iconography for decoration is, to me, humorous when done by anyone. When you see people re-using these products for an ironic hipster wallpaper maybe they mean to suggest that the products seem to connect them to something besides God, a way to exercise their frustrations in a peaceful, humorous way. But take this lightly, for it comes from a non-Christian view point. Recycling is next to Godliness
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