Pasadena "Piss bandit" has been operating for 6 years.
Every few days, a mysterious figure in a mask and latex gloves carries bottles of urine to an affluent neighborhood, carefully arranges them on a utility box, and then vanishes into the night.
Known as the “Piss Bandit,” for the past six years he’s left his mark on Pasadena with soda bottles, juice cartons, and even gallon jugs full to the brim with yellow liquid.
Nobody knows his identity and he taunts the locals with notes and drawings scrawled on his bottles: “human urine,” crude smiley faces, or sometimes “HIV positive.”
https://nypost.com/2024/10/02/us-news/piss-bandit-who-taunts-locals-with-urine-bottles-is-californias-number-one-menace/
PASADENA, Calif. (KABC) -- Pasadena officials hope they've finally thwarted the so-called Pee Bandit, a man known in the city for his years-long campaign of leaving several bottles of urine on a local utility box.
People who live around the utility box near the intersection of Colorado Boulevard and San Rafael Avenue say someone has been consistently stacking bottles of urine there for the past six years.
The strange displays caught the eye of Derek Milton and his friend Grant Yansura. They have spent the last two years trying to figure out who the Pee Bandit is and why he places the urine bottles on the box - and there are quite a few of them.
"Stacks of them, you know, nine, 10, 11 bottles," Yansura said. "All different colors, shades - from like an amber hue to more of a healthy, golden, lighter yellow. But some are really dark and concerning."
https://abc7.com/post/pee-bandit-mystery-is-leaving-bottles-urine-pasadena-neighborhood/15386094/
Someone is leaving bottles of urine by a street in Pasadena. Two filmmakers are watching
On the south side of the 134 Freeway in Pasadena, amid the brush and the dirt and detritus, there is an empty tub of Dreyer’s vanilla ice cream and an empty drink cup from Subway.
They appear to be litter, perhaps cast out of fast-moving cars by careless freeway drivers.
In fact, they hide strategically placed security cameras aimed at capturing the man some in Pasadena have named the “Piss Bandit.”
The mystery man has a penchant for placing full bottles of human urine on a specific Pasadena Water & Power electrical box on Colorado Boulevard. For years, he has deposited full bottles of pee (unscientific but newspaper-safe term) atop a seemingly random electrical box.
That behavior is odd enough. But what about the two self-appointed documentarians who have devoted themselves to identifying the urine bottler and understanding his ways? The story is a confluence of classic California weirdness and the Hollywood show business hustlers always there to track it.
--------------
Milton and Yansura say they believe it is one person, a man. The city of Pasadena also said it is investigating a man, whom officials did not identify.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-02/pasadena-urine-bottles-tiktok-filmmakers
= new reply since forum marked as read
Piss Christ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ
!Large.jpeg
Immersion (Piss Christ) is a 1987 photograph by the American artist and photographer Andres Serrano. It depicts a small plastic crucifix submerged in a small glass tank of the artist's urine. The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's "Awards in the Visual Arts" competition,[1] which was sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a United States Government agency that offers support and funding for artistic projects.
The work generated much controversy based on assertions that it was blasphemous. Serrano said of the controversy: "I had no idea Piss Christ would get the attention it did, since I meant neither blasphemy nor offense by it. I've been a Catholic all my life, so I am a follower of Christ."[2]
Description
The photograph is of a small plastic crucifix submerged in what appears to be an orange liquid. The artist described the substance as his own urine in a glass.[3][4] The photograph was one of a series of photographs that Serrano had made that involved classical statuettes submerged in various fluids—milk, blood, and urine.[5] It followed two years after Serrano's 1985 work, Blood Cross. The full title of the work is Immersion (Piss Christ).[6][7] The photograph is a 60-by-40-inch (150 by 100 cm) Cibachrome print. It is glossy, and its colors are deeply saturated. The presentation is that of a golden, rosy medium, including a constellation of tiny bubbles. Without Serrano specifying the substance to be urine and without the artwork title referring to urine by another name, the viewer would not necessarily be able to differentiate between the stated medium of urine and a medium of similar appearances, such as amber or polyurethane.[8]
Serrano has not ascribed overtly political content to Piss Christ and related artworks, stressing their ambiguity. He has also said that while this work is not intended to denounce religion, it alludes to the recent trend of commercializing or cheapening Christian icons in contemporary culture.[9] Subsequently, he has explicitly rejected the assertion that he was motivated by blasphemy, saying instead that it was intended as a serious work of Christian art. He said, "What it symbolizes is the way Christ died: the blood came out of him but so did the piss and the shit. Maybe if Piss Christ upsets you, it's because it gives some sense of what the crucifixion actually was like...I was born and raised a Catholic and I've been a Christian all my life."[10]
The art critic Lucy R. Lippard has presented a constructive case for the formal value of Serrano's Piss Christ, which she characterizes as mysterious and beautiful.[8] She writes that the work is "a darkly beautiful photographic image… the small wood and plastic crucifix becomes virtually monumental as it floats, photographically enlarged, in a deep rosy glow that is both ominous and glorious."[11] Lippard suggests that the formal values of the image can be regarded separately from other meanings.[12]
Reception
In 1987, Serrano's Piss Christ was exhibited at the Stux Gallery in New York and was favorably received.[13] The piece later caused a scandal when it was exhibited in 1989, with detractors, including United States Senators Al D'Amato and Jesse Helms, outraged that Serrano received $15,000 for the work, and $5,000 in 1986[14] from the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts. Serrano received death threats and hate mail, and he lost grants due to the controversy.[15] Others alleged that the government funding of Piss Christ violated the separation of church and state.[16][17] The NEA's budget was cut.[18]
Sister Wendy Beckett, an art historian and Catholic nun, stated in a television interview with Bill Moyers that she regarded the work as not blasphemous but a statement on "what we are doing to Christ."[19] Beckett said that she was tempted to say that Piss Christ might be "comforting art" which she defined as art that was easy to have an opinion and react to.[20] She said, " ... they're not challenged in the slightest. Ninety percent of them think it's blasphemous, and few like me think, well, it might not be. It might be a rather ham-fisted attempt, to preach about the need to reverence the Crucifix. Not a very gifted young man but he's trying his best."[20] "Real art," she continued, "makes demands."[20]
During a retrospective of Serrano's work at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 1997, the then Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, George Pell, sought an injunction from the Supreme Court of Victoria to restrain the National Gallery of Victoria from publicly displaying Piss Christ, which was not granted. Some days later, one patron attempted to remove the work from the gallery wall, and two teenagers later attacked it with a hammer.[16] Gallery officials reported receiving death threats in response to Piss Christ.[21] NGV Director Timothy Potts cancelled the show, allegedly out of concern for a Rembrandt exhibition that was also on display at the time.[16] Supporters argued that the controversy over Piss Christ is an issue of artistic freedom and freedom of speech.[21]
Piss Christ was included in "Down by Law", a "show within a show" on identity politics and disobedience that formed part of the 2006 Whitney Biennial. The British TV documentary Damned in the U.S.A., first shown by Channel 4 in its Without Walls arts series in 1991, explored the controversy surrounding Piss Christ, and interviewed Serrano about the work.
On April 17, 2011, a print of Piss Christ was vandalized "beyond repair" by Christian protesters while on display during the Je crois aux miracles (I believe in miracles) exhibition at the Collection Lambert, a contemporary art museum in Avignon, France.[22][23] Serrano's photo The Church was similarly vandalized in the attack.
Beginning September 27, 2012, Piss Christ was on display at the Edward Tyler Nahem gallery in New York, at the Serrano show Body and Spirit.[24] Religious groups and some lawmakers called for President Barack Obama to denounce the artwork, comparing it to the anti-Islamic film Innocence of Muslims that the White House had condemned earlier that month.[25]
On October 14, 2022, Piss Christ was sold at a Sotheby's auction in London, UK for £130,000 (USD $145,162).
On June 23, 2023, Andres Serrano was included among a group of artists invited to meet with Pope Francis in the Sistine Chapel as part of an effort to "broaden out the engagement of the church with artists" and to proclaim the church's commitment to supporting art that serves "to waken us up, call us to a new alertness and a new consciousness" about issues of social justice.[26] During this meeting, the pope blessed Serrano and gave him a thumbs up gesture of approval. Serrano remarked, "I was very happy that the church understands that I am a Christian artist and I am not a blasphemous artist. I’m just an artist."
