Let’s Talk About Sex:
MASP’s 2017 show Histories of Sexuality Undercuts Contemporary Gender & sexuality Debate
The 2017 MASP exhibition Histories of Sexuality supplements evolving scholarship within the art world developing a rigorous notion of the Global South. Drawing from 126 artists, Histories of Sexuality consists of over 300 non-chronological pieces transcending space and time in what the PIPA Institute describes as a “broad and inclusive panorama of works.” According to ArtNexus, the exhibition proposes counter-hegemonic alternative viewpoints by “challenging hierarchies and boundaries between the types and categories of objects of a more conventional Art History: from pre-Columbian to Modern art; from folk to contemporary art; from sacred to conceptual art; featuring art from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas (Simões, 2017).” In confronting eurocentrism, the curators address the flawed idea of universalism by situating seminal works alongside current works. The show’s curatorial aim is to spark debate by objecting to conservative and biased assumptions concerning the artistic treatments of art and gender. The timely revisionist perspective of this exhibition is contextualized further by its juxtaposition to contemporary debates involving sex and gender. Histories of Sexuality serves as a global stage for marginalized and mainstream artists who challenged patriarchal, colonial, and eurocentric archetypes of gender and sex well before the contemporary art world had adopted this theme. In expanding upon the canon’s narrow perspective, Histories of Sexuality is reminiscent of other curatorial pursuits in building an accurate record of art history.
Gerardo Mosquera best articulates the consequences of eurocentrism and colonialism on art when he wrote, “the myth of universal value in art, and the establishment of a hierarchy of works based in their ‘universality,’ is one of the heritages of Eurocentrism that continues to survive, despite our becoming less naive with respect to the ‘universal,’ which has so frequently been a disguise for the ‘Western’ (2016).” Histories of Sexuality is situated within the political context of today. One review by Terremoto Magazine describes the situation unfolding in the backdrop of the exhibition–Brazil–where “conservative groups with evangelical roots are gaining power, the value and relevance of showing this work is immense and represents a call to action for bodies outside of the limits imposed by censorship (Harum, 2018).” Dominant and persistent eurocentric and western perspectives falsely depict sex and gender as a monolith. Our social and political realities are policed by patriarchal and colonial notions of sex. This is despite the extensive evidence illustrating countless constructions of gender and sex in many different cultures throughout time. Pulling from contemporary and historical examples, “Histórias da sexualidade highlighted, above all, the fact that there are no absolute or definitive truths when it comes to sexuality (Simões, 2017).”
Hegemonic viewpoints stemming from the universalism brought by eurocentrism tend to condense complex and dynamic topics into one faulty. The curatorial aims of Histories of Sexuality in challenging narrow art history convictions mirror those of other revisionist curatorial efforts in expanding upon the notion of the Global South. In providing global examples, Histories of Sexuality successfully demonstrates that sex and gender are, in truth, not a monolith. This perspective posits a counter-hegemonic viewpoint on gender politics that Simões argues:
“The exhibition Histórias da sexualidade struck a note of respect for others, difference, and artistic freedom. It broke through naturalized ways of seeing and discourses about Western art to make it possible for taboo topics, sex among them, to be understood beyond any moral stigma. It asserted, in the end, a different gaze (2017).”
In 2012, a collaboration of several New York City-based museums held the exhibition Caribbean Art at the Crossroads of the World. This seminal exhibition is described by Dr. Celilia Fajardo-Hill as involving, “more than 500 works of art spanning four centuries illuminate changing aesthetics and ideologies and provoke meaningful conversations about topics ranging from commerce and cultural hybridity to politics and pop culture (2022).” The curators of Caribbean: Crossroads strived to argue that the Caribbean; artistically, geographically, and culturally, transcends the obtuse stereotypes infiltrating media that derive from Colonialism. Similarly, the curators at MASP constructed Histories of Sexuality to argue that sexuality and gender are not confined by conventional western standards.
While Radical Women: Latin American Art served to cement the contributions of women artists from the Global South, Histories of Sexuality serves to apply a similar revisionist framework in order to highlight the thematic contributions relating to sex and gender of marginalized artists. The canon of art history has long portrayed women, represented by male artists, “as objects of desire or whatever” for the male gaze (Fajardo-Hill 2022). Furthermore, the artistic and thematic contributions by female artists have been erased from the canon historically, and continue to be in contemporary art markets. The curators behind Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–85 sought to challenge the male-dominated canon and propel female artists of the Global South into the mainstream. Authored by the show’s curators, the exhibition’s catalog essay reveals, “one of our hypotheses is that the reformulation proposed by these artists in their works made it possible to grasp other dimensions of sensibility and sexuality, dimensions that helped to divorce biology from sexuality and to redefine closed notions of gender (Fajardo-Hill and Guinta 2017).”
Works Cited
(2017). The many histories of sexuality are told in group show at MASP. Pipa Prize. https://www.pipaprize.com/2017/10/many-histories-sexuality-told-group-show-masp/
Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia. Giunta, Andrea. (2017). Introduction. Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, University of California, and Munich, London and New York: Delmonico Books — Prestel. https://hammer.ucla.edu/radical-women/essays/introduction
Marcio, Harum. (2018). Histórias da sexualidade, at museu de arte de São Paulo, Brazil. Terremoto. https://terremoto.mx/en/online/historias-da-sexualidade-at-museu-de-arte-de-sao-paulo-brazil/
Mosquera, Gerardo. (2018). The marco polo syndrome: Some problems around art and eurocentrism. &&&;;;!!!. https://kakaji.tumblr.com/post/153705130194/the-marco-polo-syndrome-some-problems-around-art
Simões, Alessandra. (2018). Histories of sexuality. ArtNexus, 109. https://www.artnexus.com/en/magazines/article-magazine-artnexus/6074f93dc883936413edd189/109/histories-of-sexuality
