This Wunder Kammer
The modern museum is a direct descendant of the Victorian ‘cabinet of curiosities.’ In that era, the worldly, the wealthy and the wise make an art of collecting and ordering tchotchkes and artifacts from all across the heathen kingdoms of botany, biology, and colony. Within the wunderkammers, the perverse, the shocking, and the odd were for once not despised; they were honored.
Like most evolutionary lineages, the museum branched and differentiated to fill disparate niches as it evolved. Today we have museums in this city showcasing the arcana of nearly every imaginable field– from natural history to national tragedies, from sacred Himalayan art to worshipfully adored celebrity figures cast in wax. In our age of reason, museums function in a way perhaps analogous to the cathedrals of gothic Europe: breathtaking offerings to the potency of the human mind to imitate, order, and improve upon the natural world from which we emerged. As science has specialized and subdivided again and again, our encounter with the information it uncovered is coded through many different systems. Sure, there might be photographs at the Rubin, and pictures of young monks at the International Center of Photography, but they are classed and coded according to very different parameters. As we have seen, sexuality is a theme that thoroughly permeates American culture from the most high and austere academic enclave to the muckiest, worldliest work-a-day world. At the Museum of Sexuality (MoSex) it all comes to roost.
The progression one makes through the museum is quite telling, offering a psycho-spatial model for the different levels of scientia sexualis in the delirious space of our contemporary culture. These are the drawers of our cabinet, to be opened one after another. On the ground floor, requiring no check-in, is the shop. Full of novelties, art pieces, personal advertisements (i.e. shirts reading “F CK ART” or “Let me service you”), and eroticized machines meant to aid in the fulfillment of sexual pleasure, this represents the surface encounter with sexuality in mass culture: as a product that can be bought and sold, collected and enhanced. Only by officially checking in, and thereby announcing a commitment to learn and encounter deeper levels of truth can one access what lies beyond sexual capital.
We are treated next to an exhibition of data that lays bare the popular preferences and perversities that we reveal when searching for satisfaction online. The pornographic data is sometimes surprising, but more compelling to me is its presentation, juxtaposing the hypertext of digital sex—which has no real linearity—with the spatial progression through the hall. Behind the wall of the top hundred ‘sex’ searches hang various artists’ takes on sex sans physicality, using picture, text, and audio to showcase the contradictions of a sex life removed from the body.
Upon exiting from the present shock of all that information, viewers proceed to an exhibition of the myriad historical sexualities, from pre-photographic pornography and pre-modern birth control to the evolution of bondage and homosexual art. Present again are themes of alienation of the act itself, with machines, photographs, rubber dolls, and countless other media serving to complexify the process, and make it increasing visible, legible, and exciting.
On the top level, we see the science of sex scoping out from culture and into nature. Astounding facts and practices from the animal world cover the walls, and in them we can see the full diversity and importance of sex across all species. At the highest floor, those levels below are given their trumping scientific justification: sex is life, loving itself. Though new and old taboos still shroud a cogent viewing of sex in our culture, the Museum of Sex opens this cabinet of curiosities and grants them new worth as realities that can be celebrated, not shunned.
