Piss now, ask questions later

‘Performative male.’ ‘Women in male-dominated fields.’ ‘Girl math’. ‘Mob-boss wife.’ ‘Trad-wife’. ‘Office siren’. These days, TikTok taxonomy spills so easily into IRL vocabulary. It might, at first, seem banal, flippant, or even a bit of fun, but this is what allows the binaries of gendered roles to embed so deeply. They shape the way we talk, think and perform.  Femininity is split and rebranded into micro-trends that reinforce views of women that we thought, hoped, were long gone. Meanwhile the manosphere metastasises and seduces young men to align with these views – divisions are monetised and aestheticised. Despite the seductive rhetoric of progress the old refrains still exist: don’t take up space. Be malleable. Be agreeable. Smile. Look hot while doing it. And above all: never let the mask slip. Don’t shout, don’t sweat, don’t digest. So what does it mean to be a girl? 

Enter ‘Stream’, a timely pairing at Cob Gallery that rewinds to 1995 – long before the phenomenon of corporate girl bossing. Artists Rut Blees Luxemburg and Sophy Rickett took this same question, quite literally, to the streets. Their parallel series – Luxemburg’s Chance Encounters and Rickett’s Pissing Women shows the two artists, who worked side by side on their separate projects, taking it in turns in front of and behind the camera, blurring the boundaries between author, subject, and accomplice. Both series present the women not as muses or passersby, but as agents of disruption – the pair are co-conspirators. It’s a sort of friendship that we all aspire to “We often worked together, cross-referencing, inspiring each other,” as the exhibition text states. 

Rickett’s Pissing Women depicts figures in corporate dress up (contemporary translation: ‘office siren’) urinating in the streets. One figure stands, legs apart,as she gushes against the concrete stone of the Waterloo Bridge. The city of London hums threateningly in the background, the austere and oppressive architecture of the unmistakable MI6 building looms. In Chance Encounters, Blees Luxemburg assumes the role of puppeteer, capturing herself and Rickett as they infiltrate the city’s corporate matrix – approaching and chatting up city workers under sodium light, flipping emblems of power and machismo on their head and subverting the gaze. Both artists stage their interventions, infiltrating spaces like London’s financial district and the foreboding Secret Intelligence Headquarters. Menacing structures of state power become playgrounds, concrete into choreography. It’s a teasing of the architecture and its occupants and a middle finger up to machismo. There’s a Margaret Atwood quote: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman.” But if I were walking around MI6, I don’t think I’d just have to worry about the man inside my head.

In TikTok speak, it’s safe to say that both Blees Luxemburg and Rickett successfully graduated in the school of ‘women in male-dominated fields’. As someone who hasn’t been unknown to define herself as a ‘ladette’ (verb; a young woman who behaves in a boisterously assertive or crude manner), seeing ‘Stream’ felt like discovering a religion. If ‘Stream’ had created a Pinterest board in my mind (which it did), the pop culture moments of ‘accidental feminism’ pinned are as follows:

Amy Winehouse brushing off a post-Brits interview with Denise van Outen with a shrug and a deadpan: “You look fit though.”
Madonna leaving a hotel with then-husband Guy Ritchie, casually clutching an XL strap-on like a handbag.
Dobby – Mark’s kooky love interest in Peep Show –  leading him into the women’s toilets and saying, “Well, it used to be all pink and tidy, and then feminism happened and we all started pissing on the floor.”

My summer has been dominated by festivals, AKA queuing for toilets in public parks while scorning the ease of male access. One hazy summer evening in the corner of the notorious London Fields public toilets, girls anxiously waited in an exponentially multiplying queue, clutching their crotches in desperate attempts to not break the seal. One man gleefully skipped past, smugly bypassing the unsavoury queue towards the near-vacant urinals; revelling in his first-class ticket to pisstown with a chortle to his pal, “WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING.” One girl shouted towards him. “WHAT’S FUNNY?” She erupted, the queue overcoming with a wave of solidarity. “Prick!” someone chimed in agreement. This example of the disparity between the genders here is one that is a thorn in our sides, the architecture literally built to favour one body over another. Although, of course, all gender is a performance (a lá Judith Butler), knowing this isn’t much of a solace and doesn’t stop the feeling of being like a body ground for someone else’s consumption. So, there’s nothing more transgressive than the literal digestive system of a woman. Similarly, one must not shit, or have desire, or age! Easy peasy! Rickett’s photos mark territory in the way a dog does; this city is ours too. We’re all just animals at the end of the day. Piss now, ask questions later…

What’s also prevalent in ‘Stream’ is the pair’s shared insomnia: they capture a nocturnal city, which for most women has always been a danger zone – somewhere you move through with anxiety and keys lodged between your fingers. I have a pair of heeled cowboy boots which I love to wear as they make a perfectly loud and satisfying clip – clop sound when I walk against the hard concrete. During the day, it feels like I’m walking along the streets like a Sex and The City character. By night, they become a burden, an alert that there is a woman walking alone. 

Luxemburg and Rickett form the beginnings of a girl gang – insomniac co-conspirators gliding through the city like assassins.They don’t glorify the urban night, although their photographs are totally cinematic, but they reclaim it with confrontation. One of the photographs in the show is Blees Luxemburg’s A Modern Project, (High Rise) (1995). The image has become iconic, largely thanks to its second life on  the cover of The Streets’ Original Pirate Material. Luxemburg’s high-rise is likely etched into the subconscious of anyone born before 2000 with a taste for Brit-era kitchen sink prose. The image itself evokes something insectile – the tower block glows like an ant nest, a pulsating organism of late-capitalist life glimpsed from the outside. The brutal high rise structure of hierarchy and control, seemingly a contradiction to the. It runs in sharp subversions at play in ‘Stream’, where Luxemburg and Rickett slip between the cracks of the city’s strictures tutting two fingers up and definitely not pissing into the wind.

It’s also important to emphasise the hilarity of the photographs. Rickett’s photos are totally incongruous, (although they shouldn’t be) Blees Luxemburg’s parodying performances are deadpan and witty. It reminds me of the tired myth that women aren’t funny. They are perceptions that hide in the microaggressions of everyday social interactions. Every so-called ‘unladylike’ action becomes a quiet repudiation. ‘Stream’ presents this provocation with a dare-devilish charm, enacting the sort of behaviour that your grandma might clutch her pearls over and declare ‘uncouth’. It’s not rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but a transgressive, phallic act of reclamation. 

‘Stream’ may have been born in the pre-TikTok era, but its spirit feels just as important now as it did 30 years ago. For those treading water in an algorithm-driven identity playground, its message is a call to arms. Later that day after visiting Cob Gallery, I realised I’d been humming an earworm since my visit: X-Ray Spex’ Oh Bondage! Up Yours! And honestly, I think Sophy Rickett and Rut Blees Luxemburg might be to blame. So, in honour of the late, great Poly Styrene, I’ll let my parting words be hers: 

“Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard –
But I think: ‘Oh bondage – up yours!’”