museums invented pornography

“The birth of Museo Travesti was a deliberate attempt to undermine the museum dispositif- which is also a sexual dispositif”1

Despite the emergence of Porn Studies, pornography and sexuality are not yet considered worthy subjects for either museological, philosophical or curatorial practices. There has been-reportedly-little attention paid by museum professionals to the ways in which museological theory and practices have constructed sexual norms, or to the role each of us, as pratictioners, plays in the maintenance of heteronormativity2.

As Paul B. Preciado puts it: the art market wants porn! but it doesn ’ t want it when it comes from feminism (and i would add even less if it comes from transfeminism)

THE ART WORLD LIKES THE ODD SPLASH OF OLD PORNOGRAPHIC CODES, PROVIDED THEY ARE KEPT WELL AWAY FROM THEIR FUNCTION OF SOCIAL CRITIQUE3

In History of Sexuality, the French philosopher Michel Foucault argues that modern sexuality with its gender binaries, public shame and heteronormativity are the result of “specific configurations of power-knowledge” and “scientific techniques (visual, legal, medical etc…) destined to produce what Foucault calls the truth of sex”4

Pornography in the West has, in fact, emerged as part of a wider “regime of production of subjectivity” (as Foucault would define it), namely capitalistic, exclusionary and rich of dichotomies (centre-periphery, men-women, westest). Thus, pornography has worked, close to other bio-political mechanisms, on the control and exclusion of “non-normative” bodies from society and the public space as well as on the construction of the modern city as a white, male-dominated, middle-class space.

“In The Secret Museum (1987), historian Walter Kendrick examined the different discourses in which the notion of pornography emerged in the modern age from a genealogical and linguistic position. Kendrick’s conclusions provide us with new coordinates for the debate.

The notion of pornography emerged in modern European vernacular languages between 1755 and 1857 as part of a museum rhetoric, arising directly out of the controversy caused by the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii and a series of images, frescos, mosaicos and sculptures depicting bodily practices with the consequent debate as to whether these could be displayed publicly. Archaeological digs beneath Mount Vesuvius had revealed pictures and sculptures of intertwined naked animal and human bodies and oversized penises. Contrary to the initial impression, these images were not restricted to brothels and nuptial chambers, but were found throughout the city. The ruins, reviving repressed elements, revealed another model for the knowledge and organization of bodies and pleasures in the pre-modern city and brutally highlighted a visual topology of sexuality that was radically different from that which dominated European culture in the eighteenth century.

It called for a whole new taxonomy that would distinguish between objects that were accessible to view and those which would only be seen under state supervision. The public authorities (the government of Charles III of Bourbon) decided to confine certain images, sculptures and objects to a “secret collection” in the Bourbon Museum of Naples, also known as the Secret Museum. Construction of the Secret Museum involved physically building a wall, creating a closed space and regulating the gaze through devices of surveillance and supervision.

By royal decree, only upper-class men- no women, children or members of the lower orders- were allowed into the area. The Secret Museum therefore operated a political segregation of the gaze based on gender, class and age. The wall of the museum was a material representation of the hierarchy of gender, age and social class, building political-visual differences through architecture and its regulation of the gaze.

It was in this museum context that the German art historian C.O. Muller first used the word “Pornography” (from the Greek root pornografei: painting of prostitutes, writings on the life of prostitutes) to refer to the contents of the Secret Museum. The 1864 edition of Webster’s Dictionary defined “pornography” as “licentious paintings employed to decorate the walls of rooms sacred to bacchanalian orgies, examples of which exist in Pompeii”.

For Kendrick, the Secret Museum and the regulation of this space is a funding moment and topos of what pornography was to signify in the visual, sexual and urban rationality of the modern age in the West. In this rhetoric and in the one to which I shall refer below, pornography emerges as a technique for managing the public space and more particularly for controlling the gaze, for keeping the exited or excitable body under control in the public space.

In other words, the notion of pornography that art history invents is above all a strategy for tracing the limits of the visible and the public. The Secret Museum also invented the new categories of “childhood”, “womanhood” and “lower orders”. In contrast, the upper-class male body emerges as a new politico-visual (we might even say politico-orgasmic) hegemony: the body that has access to sexual excitement in public, as opposed to those bodies whose gaze must be protected and whose pleasure must be controlled”5

Museo Travesti poses the potentialities of Post-Pornography (or as Campuzano’s would define it Marian Post-Porn), namely reactionary strategies of critique and intervention on the current forms of body representation and sexuality implemented by the three pornographic regimes of our century: the museum, the public space and cinematography or media in general. The Travesti archive, in this context, is part of what Preciado (following the definition of micropolitics given by Deleuze and Guattari6) would define as post-pornographic micro-politics, since it cannibalizes the above-mentioned pornographic regimes (museum and public space) by displaying those bodies secularly excluded from the public gaze and segregated in the realm of hidden pornographic imaginary: transgender, cross-dressed, disabled, sex-working, fake, siliconed.

1. Edited by M. Scotini, Utopian Display. Geopolitical Curating, QUODLIBET NABA Insights, Milano 2019. Text: M. A. López, The Transvestite Museum, pp. 206

2. N. Sullivan, C. Middleton, Queering the Museum, 2019, Routledge Publishing.

3. P. B. Preciado, Museum, Urban Detritus and Pornography , [https://monoskop.org/images/5/54/ Preciado_Beatriz_2008_Museum_Urban_Detritus_and_Pornography.pdf], accessed 04/01/21

4. ibid.

5. ibid.

6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari first mention the concept of micro-politics in G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Come farsi un corpo senza organi, 1 Marzo 1997, Castelvecchi. Micro-politics, here, are defined as an earthquake, of which we know the epicentre but can’t predict the space and time of its effects. We can call micro-politics all those strategies that help us produce what Deleuze and Guattari call “ ligne de fuite” (line of flight), that is an act capable of subtraction from the prescriptive codes of our society.