Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display

ISBN-13: 9780226315249

Media Type: Paperback(New Edition)

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Publication Date: 01-11-2016

Pages: 296

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

Jennifer Tyburczy is assistant professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Sex Museums

The Politics and Performance of Display

The University of Chicago Press

Hard-Core Collecting and Erotic Exhibitionism

Display, like choreography, is often composed of a sequence of bodily movements and a planned design of motion, form, and affect. In turn, how performers in a scene are made to encounter, engage, or interface with an environment and the objects displayed therein produces certain kinds of institutionally specific moving behaviors capable of reiterating or circumventing normative relationships between bodies and objects in space. Rigid choreographies for museum spectatorship, as Lawrence Levine has pointed out, synchronically developed alongside the cultivation of late nineteenth-century rules of decorum for theatergoing. At the root of such embodied restrictions is the disciplining of consuming audiences into canonical class divisions (elite/mass) and passive bodies capable of sublimating the emotional charge emanating from the stage or, in the case of museums, the exhibition with minimal, if any, interaction or reaction aside from bourgeois appreciation (e.g., applause, chin scratching).

Following the dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster, but with reference to museums, I use choreography to mean the "structuring of movement, not necessarily the movement of human beings." As Foster, Randy Martin, and André Lepecki have argued, the term choreography extends to the disciplining of all kinds of social behaviors. I seek to reemploy this scholarship on the historical connection between choreography and colonization to propose that display choreographies in museums similarly structure movement in ways that inform the critical consciousness and emotional habitus of museumgoing as a phenomenological experience of gendered and sexual as well as raced and classed norms. I call this display choreography erotic exhibitionism, a consistent and crucial component of patriarchal perspectivalism marked by white privileged access, the slow reveal or striptease of the object itself, and the highly managed spectatorship of bodies and desires that Michael Fried has referred to as absorption. As Randy Martin has suggested, however, choreography also refers toperformances of movement and politics as sites of resistance to rigid Eurocentric models of colonial and postcolonial identity through rechoreographed performances of reflection. Inspired by Martin, I mine histories of museum movements in search of queer choreographies, or assemblages of desiring movements, gestures, and actions that disrupt normative modes of sexual display and spectatorship.

This chapter tracks the material conditions of display choreography through two texts/encounters/instances: the first, the history of the collection and display of Gustave Courbet's 1866 painting (fig. 1.1) L'origine du monde (The origin of the world) and its role in establishing Lacanian theories of the (heterosexual) gaze; the second, the history of the reception of Andrea Fraser's 2003 film Untitled, a work that implicitly critiques the representational economies circulated through Courbet's example. The story of the performances that occurred around these sex objects offers a unique chain of events where one can examine the profound impact of display on art historical meaning, the history of sexuality, and the cultivation of sexual consumption practices that converge and diverge at the sites where the objects became visually accessible.

Viewing these practices collectively through the lens of performance can tell us more about the relationship between visuality, sexual spectatorship, and the emergence of an elite masculine heterosexual identity in the late nineteenth century. It is my contention that this privileged stance of erotic exhibitionism continues to structure how we see and display the female body and that this mode of seeing/displaying has become so expected in spaces of exhibition that it has come to constitute a dominant but often unremarked on visual framework of commodity capitalism. This framework becomes apparent through an analysis of display as a performative materialization of certain theories (e.g., patriarchal perspectivalism and its attendant economic politics as they relate to the collection and transnational circulation of sex objects) and through the use of a queer curatorial method to conduct an analysis of these displays so as to illuminate the patriarchal heteronormativity of traditional display choreographies. Here, I use queer praxis to unpack the reiterative and citational theatricality of display as a practice in motion that socializes certain normative relationships between the objects on display and the bodies that are conditioned to move around and toward those objects in specific ways. Furthermore, the application of queer praxis to my examples in this chapter suggests the need to expand the concept of patriarchal perspectivalism beyond visuality to include repeated movements in spaces of display. I refer to this expansion as erotic exhibitionism so as to focus my analysis not on the maker of theimage but on the maker of the image's scene of spectatorship. Much like Kendrick's view of the Secret Museum (discussed in the introduction), erotic exhibitionism is also a theory in motion that describes a strategic negotiation to allow for the public display of the white, naked and female body, an acceptable and even tasteful form of sexual consumption perhaps best personified through the idealized conglomerate of otherwise fragmented female body parts known as the nude. When reappropriated by unlikely agents in the history of display, erotic exhibitionism also makes room for the queer potential of even the most traditional display choreographies.

In discussing the display of sexualized art and not just art as representational object, I aim to theorize the multiple embodied experiences of sexual display. I am inspired by Amelia Jones's interest in applying the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to analyze the role of the viewer or, in her words, the interpreter. I hope to add to Jones's analysis by focusing on sexual display as a choreographic engagement that manages movement and affect and to suggest that the composition of this regulated experience with an object is just as important as, if not more important than, the composition of the sex object itself. My aim here is to move beyond identity and to focus on the often slippery nature of spectatorship that does not necessarily line up with a discursive relationship to desire based in binary gender roles or sexual orientation. At the same time, I analyze erotic exhibitionism as a pivotal choreography used by the possessor and the shower of the object in the making of white masculine heterosexuality as a discrete and dominant sexual identity. This procedural move is aimed at shifting art historical attention from interpretation of the object to focus instead on the unpredictability of performance, affect, and desire and to argue for a method of deriving meaning in the space of display. When looked at through the lens of display, the meaning of the sex object becomes unhinged from the artist's or the interpreter's identity, and thus from subjective experience, and is instead produced experientially and contestedly in the details of the spatial encounter crafted through the curatorial labor of (erotic) exhibition(ism).

Whether an object falls to the side of high art or low art, the place it takes up in the rigidly managed and market-related divide, and its standing in the debates over the distinction between the base genre of pornography and the enlightened vision of erotic artists: the answers to these questions are wholly dependent on the context of how bodies are made to relate to a sex object. Walter Kendrick famously argued: "Pornography is an argument, and not a thing." Linda Williams goes further to show how the lowbrow status of pornography is dependent on the anxiety or expectation of having or witnessing an embodied response. The contextuality of erotic exhibitionism as a performance determines the status of a work of art as erotic, and therefore admissible to display in the public realm, or pornographic, and therefore obscene (asin "off stage"). These distinctions, as Pierre Bourdieu has pointed out, reproduce class hierarchies, but they also reproduce gendered and raced hierarchies as they assign economic value to certain objects that can remain in the category of high art through a designation of the object as erotic. This designation depends on the display of the white female body as nude, a theatrical mode of dress, as John Berger has reminded us, that engenders a specific display choreography where the white, masculine heterosexual subject can physically approach the object, sustain the gaze, and remain intact without threat to the heteronormative viewing posture.

The queer potential of the display enters when feminine-gendered subjects reconfigure that relationship as spectators or, in the instance of Andrea Fraser, as artist/author. In the case of L'origine du monde, the sex object was used as a prosthetic extension of heterosexual masculinity. In this way my reading of the painting confronts many other tellings of the tale, especially those of Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan, in which the represented cunt is identified in the painting as a symbol of masculine absence and thus a sign of castration. Instead, I position L'origine du monde as a necessary tool for constructing the phallus of Lacanian psychoanalysis and, of equal importance to my focus on the performance of display in institutional settings in museums, for normalizing certain forms of sexual consumption.

The first half of the chapter examines L'origine du monde as the quintessential example of collecting and displaying sex in the public sphere in the West. The second half comparatively analyzes a more recent scene of performance between an art object and a solitary male collector, the 2003 film Untitled by the performance artist Andrea Fraser. Much of Fraser's work critiques institutions involved in selling and displaying art. She often uses her own body as the author and the art object, an art tactic that feminist performance artists consolidated in the 1970s (as in Carolee Schneeman's Interior Scroll) and that Rebecca Schneider has labeled binary terror. Binary terror describes a performance approach whereby a female or feminine artist uses her body to make apparent the link between ways of seeing "woman" and the ways of structuring desire according to the logic of commodity capitalism. In Untitled, Fraser showed herself having sex with an unidentified American collector who paid an undisclosed amount to participate in the sixty-minute filmic comment on the relationship between art, heterosexual sex, gender, collecting, and capitalism.

When juxtaposed to L'origine du monde, Untitled offers another version of the history of sex and collecting from the perspective of the female artist as a way of exploring the gendered history of looking, touching, and possessing sex objects both within and outside the frame. I use Untitled as a methodological tool for examining the interstices of capitalism and heterosexuality with the collection and display of the naked female body precisely because its riskiness threatens to expand or even undo the second wave feminist stance that drives Schneider's theory of binary terror. While many feminist performance artists stare down a history of patriarchal perspectivalism, Fraser takes up the reigns of erotic exhibitionism and reappropriates the genre of pornography to perform an uneasy sort of binary terror that throws into confusion what a spectator is supposed to do and feel when consuming explicit sex.

Lacan's Cunt

I always tell the truth, but not the whole truth. — Jacques Lacan, Écrits (1972)

Lacan's unveiling L'origine du monde went something like this:

The year is 1957. Imagine you are an elite, white gentleman or an emerging artist visiting the country home of the famed psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. This is La Prévôté (the provost's house), situated in Guitrancourt, near Mantes-la-Jolie, and purchased by Lacan and his wife, Sylvia Bataille, after World War II. It is Sunday, a day when Lacan comes to Guitrancourt to work and receive patients, but you know from hearsay that the house serves other functions as well. It is also the site for lush parties where Lacan dons disguises, dresses fancily, dances, and generally flaunts his extravagance. But, as you can see, it has also become a veritable museum, a stage where Lacan exhibits his passion for collecting objets d'art and rare books. As he leads you around this simple yet spacious home, he stops in front of some of his most prized possessions to ruminate on how he "owes" so many of his "revelations" to "their powers of suggestion and the reactions they allowed him to trigger off." Some of them, he explains after this ejaculatory phrase, are valuable because of their links to family and friends; others, he says, contain "stimulating mysteries and enigmas."

After a meal, Lacan leads you through an ample garden to a separate outbuilding that serves as his studio. While the house is primarily a museum to his massive library (bigger than the one in the Rue de Lille), the walls and shelves of his studio teem with his art collection. Painted vases, Nasca pottery, Pueblo Indian kachina dolls, Greco-Roman and Alexandrian statuettes, ivory sculptures and erotic terra-cottas mix with paintings by Renoir, Balthus, and Derain. Several paintings by the surrealist artist André Masson, Sylvia's brother-in-law, are also hung there. You also notice a small drawing of a skull by Giocometti and a large, rather unimpressive Monet painting of a willow tree. To the right of the door sits an ornately gilded frame. It appears quite heavy. Inside the frame is an abstract sketch on a brown background, a woodcut in the style of the surrealists. Lacan heads toward this object, and, as he slides the woodcut to the left of the frame, he tells you that, like many of the works in his studio, this thin-paneled sketch is by Masson (fig. 1.2). He tells you that it was his wife who requested that her brother-in-law make this wooden cover, an abstract reproduction of the erotic elements of the original. "The neighbors and the cleaning lady wouldn't understand," he says, attributing those words to Sylvia. You listen and watch intently as he fingers some sort of hidden mechanism to slowly reveal an intricately painted and close-up study of a woman's genitalia and torso, her breasts partially flattened under the weight of gravity as she reclines on what appears to be a crumpled bed sheet. Her head and legs fall open and outside the frame. The angle of the painting places the viewer as slightly below and directly between the fleshy thighs. Lacan studies you carefully as you view the painting. He waits for a response.

To tell the story of L'origine du monde is to summon a tale of seduction that fleshes out the life of a painting in ways usually reserved for human bodies. Throughout the mysterious history of its collection, circulation, and display, the painting's social life, as Arjun Appadurai would say, consisted of various owners who always revealed the object through a carefully stylized choreography reminiscent of striptease. Each and every one of its famous owners, all of whom were men, displayed L'origine du monde in ways that constructed and dramatized erotic encounters with the representation of white naked femaleness and, more specifically, the cunt. These encounters provided carefully choreographed scenes of consumption ripe for analyzing the relationship of display, as a sexualized technique, to what John Berger labeled ways of seeing. In many ways, L'origine du monde is the quintessential example of showing sex in the West in the post-Enlightenment period. But, while the modern visuality phenomenon that we have come to know as the male patriarchal gaze or masculinist perspectivalism is crucial to my unpacking of the collection and display of the painting, even more important to my analysis is the performative impact of this way of seeing on the consolidation of heterosexuality as a dominant sexual identity in the age of commodity capitalism.

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Excerpted from Sex Museums by Jennifer Tyburczy. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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