In ‘Scientia Sexualis’, The Scientific is Political

Bodily autonomy is a fragile affair. This present reality finds historical context in ‘Scientia Sexualis’ at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which offers a window onto the ways in which scientific discourses of sex, gender and sexuality have violent (racist, colonial) histories or are put to violent ends. Curated by Jeanne Vaccaro and Jennifer Doyle, the exhibition sees 27 artists using menstrual blood, hormones, pills, latex gloves and toilets to turn the ‘science of sex’ into a communal art project instead of a diagnostic tool. The works on view range from grimly realistic to radically utopic, from bubblegum-pink paintings to disorienting, abstract films. It’s a powerful array of erotic possibilities. Colourful banners (all 2022) by Cauleen Smith herald the world we’ve made and the one we have yet to build. ‘YOUR PAST MADE MY FUTURE,’ one declares. ‘WELCOME TO THE AFTERMATH,’ says another.

‘Scientia Sexualis’ underscores that science, like the personal, is political. The show is urgent in our current moment: a time when hormone replacement therapy is being banned on both sides of the Atlantic and, in the US, Roe v. Wade has been overturned, removing the constitutional right to abortion; ‘Your Body My Choice’ has become a far-right rallying cry; and drag bans and book bans abound. Even the words ‘gender’ and ‘pronouns’ have become metonyms for trans people, as if those who are cis are immune. The tendency to pathologize genders and sexualities that don’t hew to the straight and narrow has historically been reified by medical diagnosis, as addressed by Joseph Liatela’s On Being an Idea (the right to live without permission) (2020). The artist used shibari rope to tie together dozens of copies of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (2000) – the last version of the book to include ‘gender identity disorder’. The material dimensions of resistance are starkly apparent in the exhibition. For example, Jes Fan utilizes Depo-Testosterone, urine and melanin in the beguiling Form Begets Function (2020), a sleek sculpture made with materials including aqua resin, wood and fibreglass. Instead of retreating into the shadows, Fan puts on display the accoutrements of transness – and the biomolecule associated with race – in glass globes. Including such highly regulated substances as testosterone in the show is a reminder of the mundane bureaucracy steering trans life today.

‘The artwork in this exhibition is a form of medicine, an attempt to address and cure sites of injury,’ the curators write in the exhibition catalogue. The fate of Magnus Hirschfeld, the sexologist and gay and trans rights advocate beaten and suppressed by the Nazis in Germany, looms heavy over the show in light of the fascist tendencies of our moment. Books in Hirschfeld’s library that the Nazis burned are re-created in dean erdmann’s kiln-cast sculpture 38 (2022–ongoing), which transforms the tomes into cloudy white glass. There’s a spectral quality to the work, a sunken grief imbued in 3D models. Many of Hirschfeld’s patients – the kinds of people we now label queer and trans – were then called freaks. The work dismays as it comforts, gesturing towards possible liberatory policies even as it confronts the grim reality of history.

Artists like erdmann, Liatela and KING COBRA (Doreen Lynette Garner) use the imagery and devices of the medical-industrial complex to comment on the punitive treatment of Black and queer patients. KING COBRA’s sculptures Fuck Baloney (2023) and Vesico Vaginal Fistula (2016) explore the stickiness of white flesh. Both works reference surgeries performed by J. Marion Sims, the racist ‘father’ of gynaecology, who invented the speculum. (Fuck Baloney is ersatz meat that incorporates dirt from Sims’s gravesite.) KING COBRA subverts the othering nature of the medical field through S&M iconography, eroticizing the pain of surgery and drawing on what the scholar Hortense Spillers, quoted in the catalogue, dubs ‘pornotroping’: the circulation of Black people ‘whose primary use was to be of service, whether manually, sexually or reproductively, to others’. Perverting the course of medicine has never been so deviously sexy. By working with flesh and the body as a primary medium, KING COBRA’s work considers how Blackness has been de-gendered by the development of modern gynaecology. Curators Vaccaro and Doyle drew heavily on the work of scholars like Spillers and C. Riley Snorton to address the complex racialized legacy of the medical industry in the US and abroad, including its relationship to the Atlantic slave trade. KING COBRA highlights the unethical experimentation on Black women’s bodies for fistula research in Vesico Vaginal Fistula, a visceral sculpture, made with silicone and a hair weave, that confronts white audience members, especially, with these violences. History overtakes the body, staring back at the viewer.

Legacies of imperialism and colonialism in relation to scientia sexualis come to a head in a massive work by Demian DinéYazhi'. The artist, fresh off another word-art piece at the Whitney Biennial (we must stop imagining apocalypse/genocide + we must imagine liberation, 2024), revives a work originally made in 2016 for Day With(out) Art, an action coordinated by Visual AIDS. The work’s title, POZ Since 1492 (2016/24), is superimposed on a blue, distorted version of Jean Leon Gerome Ferris’s The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1621 (1912). As it underscores that Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by HIV, the installation also characterizes ‘first contact’ as an originary infection. Sunshine on a Cannibal (2015) by Ojibwe artist Andrea Carlson is one of the best paintings in the show. This apocalyptic fun-land sees cartoonish mountains and acidic rivers share space with the Tower of Babel, figures inspired by Yves Klein’s ‘Anthropométries’ (c.1960s) and phrases such as ‘INSERT TRIGGER WARNING’ – referencing the heart attack Klein experienced shortly after seeing the characterization of his blue-painted women in the shockumentary Mondo Cane (1962).

Other works in ‘Scientia Sexualis’ are more explicitly inviting. On a pink wall, the words ‘Lie down’ appear in white text as part of Nao Bustamante’s video installation Vagnasium (2021), which explores what she terms the ‘vaginal imaginary’. Inviting exhibition-goers to relax, the artist leads them through pelvic floor exercises, a gentle counterpoint to the often-difficult pelvic exam. Viewers can practise Bustamante’s carefully considered exercises atop a plastic-covered couch placed by the monitor and a labium-coloured wall. Vagnasium considers what a care-oriented approach to gynaecology would look like, asking how a professional might guide a patient to feel more in their body despite such a long history of invasive and painful procedures. It offers an antidote to the prurient nature of works like Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés (Given, 1946–66), which features a peephole through which viewers can spy a naked woman with splayed legs. Multiple pieces in the exhibition refashion Duchamp’s work to poke fun at renderings of the female nude in art history.

Challenging or subverting clinical and colonial readings of art and gender, the reclamatory works in ‘Scientia Sexualis’ provide vital context for the continuous battles over bodily autonomy. Not all the works offer a cheery tonic, but the clarion call for insurgency is clear. Our turbulent time, as Smith’s banners seem to say, requires a reckoning with the painful losses we’ve endured – and the difficult moments yet to come.

‘Scientia Sexualis’ is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles until 2 March

^{Main image: ‘Scientia Sexualis’, 2024–5, exhibition view. Courtesy: Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; photograph: Jeff McLane}