Current Exhibitions

June 2022 – July 2023

Bathroom Sink, 950 Starlight Rd. by Jordan Douglas

Coming Clean takes a look at how and why we humans wash ourselves. From bourgeois enameled bath tubs to the sand baths of nomadic desert dwellers, from baptisms to bath houses, humankind has developed an enormous variety of strategies in response to the persistent impulse to make ourselves “clean.” Is the state of being dirty a perpetual one? How do we experience corporeal impurity, and what daily habits and rituals afford us the feeling of being free from it? And what other kinds of non-corporeal impurity does this recurring washing and scrubbing imply? Lady Macbeth’s endless hand washing begs the question: Can we, indeed, ever “come clean”? 

But bathing is also about pleasure. The delights of a hot soak or a cold dip have been celebrated in poetry, paintings and song. The smooth feeling of skin after the dead layers have been scrubbed away, the flushed tingle of flesh after sweating or soaking makes us feel new again. The sensual experience of cleansing ourselves brings us back into the body, pulling our attention away from endless to-do lists, worries, the constant chatter of our multi-tasking brains. Tender ministrations to our surfaces – our skin, hair, nails, teeth, the inner whorls of ears, the spaces between toes and behind knees, our elbows, shoulder blades, and buttocks – becomes a celebration of the wonder that is the human body, and an offering of gratitude for its integrity. Ahhhhhh, we say as we slide into the water and feel the world and its cares dissolving away. Washing is relief.

Cleaning also proffers clarity, even elegance. We appreciate a “clean line.”  We’re happy to start a new endeavor with a “clean slate.” In a time of pandemic, rife with fears of contagion, the very idea of cleanliness becomes a kind of talisman of protection for our bodies. Yet, compulsive hand washing can be a torture imposed by an imperious obsessive brain. And for kids, adult insistence on washing is ridiculous and oppressive, ignorant of the joys of getting dirty, playing in mud, slathering hands in paint, rolling in the grass. In the end, our daily ablutions accompany us from birth to death, a steady practice that shapes our days. The custom of washing the dead prior to burial, a part of so many cultures, means that cleansing often is the very last thing that happens to us. And so the Museum of Everyday Life invites you to consider cleansing and bathing and soaking and washing, in the now, and at the last.