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Jennifer Tyburczy: The idea for the exhibition really grows out of my new book, Sex Museum: The Politics and Performance of Display. The book looks at the history of the museum as a site that has helped to forge categories of sexual normalcy and sexual perversity, from the secret museum in Pompeii, Italy, in the 18th century up until present day.
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It's been a bit of a treasure hunt, not only to find the artists, but to get the works and learn the stories. Tracking down these stories proved the MO of the show itself: That these histories have been intentionally erased. One of the major messages I hope that folks take away from the exhibition is how sex has been used as a political tool to silence all kinds of minority voices, across the spectrums of race, gender, immigration issues, religious issues, and critiques of capitalism.I really wanted to put especially women and artists of color at the center of this show, because they are the publics that are most often targeted, because of systemic racism and misogyny written into systems.Do you have suggestions for curators who want to show work that might be described as challenging, or even obscene, by the standards of the communities where they live? Art should push boundaries, so how do we prepare our audience to receive that kind of provocation?
I think that comes down to the wall text. Of course you can't control what people read or how much they read, but I think if someone is viewing the work, then you can refer them to the context. When you walk into an art space, the ideal is the bourgeoisie eye that is trained to look at art and "get it." You really only encounter a main presentational wall text, and then you're on your own. So if you don't understand, you're in the wrong place.I think art museums and art galleries should think more about the stories of the pieces themselves. What if we rethought of the art museum as a space, not only about aesthetics and "beauty" or "ugliness" or whatever, but about contextualizing the piece within its historical moment?Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.