In his now-canonized four-volume study of sexuality in the Western world, The History of Sexuality (1976), Michel Foucault introduced the term scientia sexualis to disentangle sexuality from certain scientific “truths.” Critical of the rubric for normative sex and what could be considered deviations from that construction, Foucault’s model primarily considers how sex is taxonomized (normative/degenerate, hygienic/venereal, etc.), and how it has been used to justify forms of institutional, state, and medical violence targeting minoritarian communities. The exhibition “Scientia Sexualis” at the Institute of Contemporary Art offers a contemporary reconceptualization of Foucault’s theory, expanding on and amending it to account not only for the violent legacies of Western sexual pseudoscience but also for the complicated attachments many have with such practices. Curated by scholars Jennifer Doyle and Jeanne Vaccaro and featuring twenty-seven artists, the exhibition stages critical dialogues between historic and contemporary works and is accompanied by an eclectic array of programs that range from the scholarly to the practical.
“Scientia Sexualis” charts artistic responses to the often-vexed relationship between sexuality, gender, and science, frequently visualizing the violence that persists across myriad material, ideological, discursive, erotic, and institutionalized forums. Dottie Attie’s nine-panel oil painting Disturbing Rumors, 1994, for example, pairs a reimagined Courbet painting, L’Origine du monde, 1866, with a detail of the hand of Dr. Samuel D. Gross, drawn from Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic, 1875. In pairing two renderings of a depersonalized (white) body, Disturbing Rumors leverages a feminist critique of medical violence and its misogynist celebration of objectified, vulnerable bodies in art history. Located around the corner, Nicole Eisenman’s large oil painting The Session, 2008, expands on such legacies by looking toward the diagnostic relationship between practitioner and patient. The composition depicts a classic psychoanalytic scene—a figure (a representation of the artist) reclining worryingly on a couch, clutching a box of tissues as the clinician, a disaffected Sigmund Freud, sits with a notepad nearby. Eisenman’s explicit invocation of Freud alludes to the deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic histories of psychoanalytic thought while demonstrating the continued importance of the treatment in many people’s lives. Freud’s explicit pathologization of female sexuality, in particular, is complicated in a neighboring work by Millie Wilson, whose installation Wig/Cunt,1990, satirizes the diagrammatic taxonomy of lesbian vulvae. The installation features a white synthetic wig, stylistically reminiscent of an eighteenth-century European poof, encased in a mahogany-and-glass display. Two prints on either side feature a catalogue of vaginal labia, each vaguely resembling the wig itself, thereby satirizing the bourgeois theatricality of then-modern sexology.
Sculptural and multimedia artworks further examine classification regimes inured in colonial thought. Young Joon Kwak and Gala Porras-Kim’s collaborative diptych Objects of Pleasure, 2022, uses taxonomy to highlight the eclectic, invisible, or not-yet-created histories of sex objects, particularly those intended for queer and trans pleasure. Wangechi Mutu’s twelve-part collage series “Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors,” 2006, pairs anatomical charts with images culled from pornographic, fashion, and ethnographic sources to magnify the surveillant dissection of Black female bodies within and beyond the colonial medical apparatus—featured on a neighboring wall, the collages contrast the shapely precision of such devices with the surgical violence inflicted against Black women.