Provocative art exhibit showcases fraught relationship between sex and science

LAWRENCE — The connection between sex and science is nothing new. Yet there are still plenty of things to learn about this relationship.

“What we have been taught about our bodies isn’t the final word,” said Jeanne Vaccaro, an assistant professor of museum studies and women, gender & sexuality studies at the University of Kansas.

A new exhibit Vaccaro has guest curated titled “Scientia Sexualis” gathers an ambitious group of contemporary artists whose work confronts, dissolves and reimagines sex and gender within the scientific apparatus.

The exhibition is funded by the Getty Foundation and presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, an expansive collaboration across arts institutions throughout Southern California 

“Sex is kind of a shorthand for this project. It really centers around Black feminist histories, Indigenous practices, transgender experiences and disability – and sex is at the intersection and coalition of all those ideas,” said Vaccaro, who shares curating duties with Jennifer Doyle of the University of California, Riverside.

“Scientia Sexualis” takes its title from the work of French historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984). In his writing, he discusses the creation of the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality.

“Although those behaviors have existed across time, the labels we use to describe those behaviors and turn them into identities are relatively new to the modern project of humanity,” Vaccaro said.

“Our show looks at all these diagnostic categories and the so-called experts who invented them, from the anthropologist to the psychiatrist. The title is very much an academic term. It’s something mysterious, and it kind of draws you in. You must have a certain curiosity to unpack it.”

The works of 27 artists are featured. These include painting, sculpture, mixed media, film and video. The artists range from icons such as Louise Bourgeois to emerging creators who are in their 20s.

“There’s a real intergenerational conversation around artists who have been thinking in this register for some time,” she said. 

Among the highlights, Vaccaro cites a piece by Joseph Liatela which incorporates the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

“It’s considered the Bible of psychology, and it has over many iterations and for many decades offered different versions of gender identity disorder, or what you might call transgender or nonbinary,” Vaccaro said. “He took 126 pounds of these used textbooks — and he’s 126 pounds — and tied them into a shape that is almost like the human figure in repose. And he tied them with the Shibari Rope treatment as a nod to BDSM.”

This provides the sense of being weighed down by such textbooks. But underneath the platform is a red light peering out that’s a nod to the iconography of a queer nightclub. Vaccaro calls it “a push and pull of constraint and liberation.”

Another work titled “DCNB” by Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger employs an overlay of video and 16mm projection that focuses on the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

“Before the invention of the AZT (azidothymidine) cocktail, there was a somewhat underground, new-agey community of people who tried a chemical used by Kodak in film processing to treat their HIV,” she said. “The artists treated the film itself with this chemical and with turmeric and St John’s-wort, which were herbs used in this kind of movement. The audio gives the oral histories of people talking about this alternative medicine.”

Vaccaro came to KU three years ago after serving as the inaugural scholar-curator at ONE Archives in Los Angeles, which features one of the nation's largest collections of LGBTQ materials. A New York native, she previously lived in California while doing postdoc work at the University of Southern California. Her expertise is in transgender studies and art history, feminist art history and queer theory.

She considers the “Scientia Sexualis” project as the “perfect hybrid” of her museum studies and women, gender & sexuality studies departments.

“Anybody who has a body has probably been minoritized in some way and shares the experiential knowledge of that fraught-ness,” Vaccaro said.

“I live with chronic illness, so I’m used to the experience of being treated with skepticism from the medical establishment. Women often have that experience. People with disabilities often have that experience. This show is going back 500 years to think about the kind of frameworks laid down for what continues to shape our relationship to our bodies and medicine.”