HBO recently premiered its series House of the Dragon, a Game of Thrones prequel which continues that earlier show’s enthusiasm for sex scenes. Not long ago, such explicit sexual content was relegated to softcore porn on TV, and not long before that it was completely verboten. It’s now an accepted if not embraced element of prestigious and popular entertainment. Remember that viral tweet which states “a single shoegaze riff would turn a medieval peasant into a fine red mist”? Imagine what a Game of Thrones sex scene would do to a 1950s housewife worried about Elvis’s gyrations. This thought occurred to me while perusing the Museum of Sex‘s exhibition Porno Chic to Sex Positivity: Erotic Content & the Mainstream, 1960 till Today, which traces the normalization of sex and nudity in media over the last half-century.
One of the Museum of Sex’s more impressive attributes is how its exhibitions can pack a lot of material and information into relatively small spaces. Porno Chic to Sex Positivity wends its way through a single room, accommodating multiple installation screens and timeline-style arrangements of artifacts and info placards. The different sections reiterate the central conceit of increasing sexual permissiveness in popular culture, each focusing on a different facet of that culture. Experimental films are projected in one area, while a little screening room shows selections of mainstream cinema. Within a well-designed row of booths, viewers can look at the evolution of sex in popular music, from the controversy over girl groups on variety shows in the 1960s through infamous Jay-Z and Brittany Spears music videos in more recent decades.
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One of the more fascinating (and mordantly humorous) sections concerns the evolving use of sex in advertising. Items are presented alongside their ads. The mundanity of the objects contrasts with their provocative sales tactics. In one case an empty beer bottle sits alongside a placard describing the brand’s salacious ads highlighting the absurdity of shilling a drink with lust. The obvious question of whether the adage “sex sells” is even true is directly raised in the exhibition text, but more implicitly questioned by this presentation.
As what was once considered pornographic has transitioned into the mainstream, the selected media materials also demonstrate how artists have toyed with this fusion. This is particularly evident on display in the program of avant-garde films. Polish feminist filmmaker Natalia LL’s 1975 short Consumer Art riffs on female objectification by posing models with phallic foods, but in a way that mocks and defies any “sexy” gaze. (One pushes toothpicks through a sausage with a mischievous grin.) Iimura Takahiko’s 1962 film poem AI (featuring music by Yoko Ono) critiques and subverts Japanese censorship law by featuring extreme close-ups of a couple in coitus. That these images of sex are not legally pornographic because certain body parts are not legible lays bare how nonsense such standards are.
Porno Chic to Sex Positivity examines how the lascivious has become nearly banal. What, then, is left for artists to explore, and what about sex remains transgressive? What do we consider risqué now that will be seen as mild in the future? The exhibition invites such speculation without steering visitors toward any particular conclusion, and its well-curated mix of materials makes for an edifying experience, often because they’ve become more curious as historical objects than the titillations they were meant to be.
Porno Chic to Sex Positivity: Erotic Content & the Mainstream, 1960 till Today is on view at the Museum of Sex (233 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan) on an ongoing basis. The exhibition was curated by Emily Shoyer and Eve Arballo.
Source: Hyperallergic.com