Where creativity meets connection
Today has prompted the question, ‘What is art, really?’ If a man sticking a blob of Blu-Tack on a wall can draw admiration from critics, perhaps scribbling profundities on it can be equally creative.
“Why do we consider art to be something that's hung in a gallery rather than carved into a toilet seat?” asks US comedian, Caitlin Cook. “In my opinion, the best art is something that creates a discussion, makes you think about stuff in a different way or makes you look the world with a different perspective.”
One-half of the musical comedy duo 2/3rds of a Threesome, and one whole writer of the albums Zinger-Songwriter and Betty Pitch, Cook originally grew up in California, before living in Chicago and the UK, and then settling in New York. It’s not much of a surprise to learn she studied Art History at Oxford, although slightly more to discover she followed this with a Masters in Maritime Archaeology. “I don't use that bit in my day-to-day life… A lot of people go to uni and get useless degrees. Somehow, I've managed to use one of mine to make a show about bathroom graffiti.”
“You have really vulnerable confessions.”
“You have really obscene things. You have repeated themes. You have really vulnerable confessions. You have really poignant, beautiful lyrics and pieces of poetry.” Rather than cram all her findings into a TED talk or laborious research paper, she’s noted down all the musings. Then turned them into a collection of songs.
These form the core of her acclaimed musical comedy show The Writing On The Stall, which is returning to Britain after several sold-out Off-Broadway runs, national tours, and last year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
What started as an obsession turned into a personal rebellion against how pretentious the art world can be. “I found this piece which said: ‘Since writing on toilet walls is neither for critical acclaim nor financial reward, it is the purest form of art. Discuss.’ I really loved that.” From here, she began looking at writing on walls through a new lens, increasingly fascinated by the motivations by the people who left it.
Blending comedy, music and theatre, much of the show is very funny and quite silly, it also takes us back in time to prehistoric acts of mindful vandalism. “Cave painting are the oldest form of art that we really have any record of. It's cool to be able to use that degree in a comedic way.”
Most people leaving their mark on a wall wouldn’t consider what they were doing making art. Yet they're leaving a little insight on their life for someone else to ponder. “It's a fully anonymous art form, and we'll never know exactly what someone was thinking that day and what they did with their lives.”
This journey to becoming a champion of graffiti began quite early. Cook would do stand-up in London while studying and, as anyone on the circuit will tell you, there’s quite a lot of waiting around in a procession of venues.
“Who hasn't sat in the bathroom and seen something written on the wall?”
“A lot of these places were dive-bars, with a lot of graffiti. I started to get fascinated by it. Then, my male friends would go into the men’s toilets and tell me if there was anything good in there. I started creating this little archive.” Submissions for this have blown out of all proportion, especially since she went viral on social media. “Whenever a video blows up, I get flooded with DMs from people sending me their own bathroom graffiti. It's a universal thing, who hasn't sat in the bathroom and seen something written on the wall?”
There’s been a few articles and some entertaining books on the practice, but it seems unique to catalogue, study and discuss it. “After almost every show, at least one person comes up and shows me a picture they took, or tells me a story about something that they saw which moved them. It's very cool. It's a connective thing.”
That response keys into her Art History background. She admits an admiration for the confrontational work of Duchamp and Dada, along with people like John Cage, who broke forms to construct something entirely new. “I love a collective found art piece. Songwriting is my favourite thing to do. But most of the time, lyrics are either from my perspective or an imagined perspective of someone else. It's very cool to create a show about a collective thing, turning these pieces of graffiti into the lyrics of every song.”
Unless scientists can develop a robot which has a moment of inspiration while sat in a toilet, it’s an artform unlikely to be replaced by artificial intelligence. AI is a fascinating and scary tool, particularly from perspective of the creative industry, but it’s robustly terrible at creating art. Whether that’s down to its inability to truly experience something, or that it can only blandly generate anything based on what has come before, is still up for debate.
“I think we're all really searching for ways to connect. That's why my fascination with bathroom graffiti has continued on for over a decade now. It’s something that's expanded from our earliest human form. Robots don’t have that need to put a mark on something or confess like that.”
Cook says there’s numerous reasons why someone would write something on a wall. Clearly, they have a pen, or something to scratch out a message. Maybe they’re bored or perhaps they’re taking advantage of the anonymity. “It's a way of releasing something silly, small or sad inside them and leaving it for others to see. That it that is just so human.”
She wrote some early dissertations about the subject in her academic life. It’s also been suggested she create a coffee table book. “I prefer to live in a world of humour. I would want to incorporate that kind of style in any writing. But I like the idea of using the photos that I've taken for over a decade now, and some of the stories I've heard and created through doing the shows, and maybe interweaving that with the history of graffiti. It would be a really fun project.”
As anyone who has spent even the briefest amount of time in a gentleman’s bathroom, it will be little surprise to learn this environment displays a significantly higher number of crudely-scrawled genitalia.
“There’s a whole song about it in the show. I have a huge archive of it, and was thinking: ‘How do I categorise these?’ I also showcase the juxtaposition between wonderful, positive things that women write on stalls to cheer each other up, and the very intricately-illustrated images of phalluses that men like to draw in their stalls.”
“I know they're lying…”
Alongside this, there’s a composition about strangers responding to each other through a conversation conducted in graffiti, as well as a parade of beautiful, sad, vulnerable and poetic things that people have left on walls. “Sometimes people claim that they wrote certain pieces of graffiti that are in my songs, and I know they're lying, because I wrote them!”
Due to the Observer Effect, she can’t say for certain, but there are very different behaviours in each gender’s toilets. “Women talk to each other in the bathroom. We complement each other's outfits, give each other tampons or toilet paper. If someone's crying, we’ll cheer them up. It's a safe space and a communal space, and it's usually like a very positive space. My fiancé says, for the most part, men are just quiet. Or joking. Or someone's getting into a fight.”
Amongst all the intensive research and collection of data, there is one mini-artwork which particularly resonates with Cook. “I end the show with it. But it has really stuck with me. It's just: ‘Good luck out there human.’ That's just so touching. It's like we're all these like little aliens wandering around Earth trying to get by…”
Caitlin Cook brings The Writing On The Stall to Brighton’s Komedia on Sat 31 May - Sun 1 June and London’s Soho Theatre Weds 4 – Sun 7 June 2025.
Main image by Stefano Giovannini
Stuart Rolt
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