LOS ANGELES — Scientia Sexualis at the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles takes its name from Michel Foucault’s term for the 19th-century study of sexuality, and uses the colonizing and pathologizing of the non-White and non-male body in this exploitative “science” as its jumping off point. Part of the Getty Foundation’s initiative PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the exhibition includes 27 artists who approach bodily autonomy or lack thereof from various perspectives. Works range from painted elegies for gay men lost to AIDS (Joey Terrill) to drawings made of menstrual blood (Xandra Ibarra) to a video offering new age-y comic relief (Nao Bustamante), and much more. What the artists share is a subject position that has been marginalized or worse by White patriarchal government-medical systems. From there, it splinters into, in its own words, “Black, feminist, trans and decolonial approaches” to the subjects of gender, sexuality, and representation in relation to the clinical gaze.
That’s a lot for one show to take on, and those are broad terms that can read as academic keywords. This all lends to a slightly dry and disjointed feel and, unsurprisingly, some artworks succeed better in this context than others. Part of the issue is spatial — the ICA’s large, open galleries aren’t really conducive to group shows with disparate works; they can appear orphaned amid the sparse layout. The show is also balancing so many conceits — and much of it is grounded in critical theory that requires explication.
Joseph Liatela’s “On Being an Idea (the right to live without permission)” (2020) consists of textbooks related to the DSM-IV-TR, a manual created by the American Psychiatric Association to classify mental disorders, bound by shibari rope and set on a floating platform with LED lights underneath. It’s a smart idea, but its layered symbolism felt a little abstruse and didactic, similar to a scholarly text. “Arch of Hysteria” (1993), a nearby bronze Louise Bourgeois sculpture of a slender, ambiguously gendered body hanging from the ceiling in a supine arc, may be the most visually arresting work on view. Headless, it announces its abuse, but its specifics remain a mystery. Meanwhile, its glistening beauty threatens to eclipse the horrors it suggests.
Body horror is a subtle thread throughout, slipping and sliding into themes of womanhood and motherhood in ways that can border on instrumentalizing, particularly because the concept is generally feminine-coded and concomitant with abjection. An abundance of body horror imagery in popular culture and art that aims to reclaim the unruliness of the femme and maternal body risks reinforcing that body as sociopolitically abject — woman as marginalized other, as hysterical, as an excess to be contained by patriarchal law. Celebrating the unruly body is one thing; refusing its second-class social status in an actionable way is trickier. Body horror’s power lies in its ability to unravel subjects and systems that seem to be coherent entities. Candice Lin’s understated scent work, “The Smell of Abortion” (2024), hints at that potential by infusing the air with an invisible, disquieting presence. “Night Moon” (2024) — a ceramic sculpture with an enwombed video, also by Lin — is beautifully, seductively visceral even as it unsettles.
The show’s most successful works speak with a clear, resonant voice, but some viewers may not even see one of the strongest pieces. P. Staff’s 16mm film “Depollute” (2018) is played on request because of its strobing effect. In its two-minute run, the film embodies at least one of the show’s ambitions — to subvert the perpetrators of pseudoscientific study who have claimed ownership over other people’s bodies. In it, a rapid-fire text montage offers instructions on how to perform a self-orchiectomy. The cold scientific tone and flickering light seem to redouble the procedure’s violence. The violence is twofold — it’s medical, of course, invoking experiments performed by Nazis and others on people they considered “lesser,” and it’s internalized as self-abuse, the result of hate continually inflicted on an individual by peers and society.
The film ends with the title word, ostensibly referring to cleaning the wound, but it encompasses a multiplicity of meanings. To “depollute” can also refer to flushing toxic matter out of a system or body. What one person sees as self-abuse, another may view as self-empowerment or cleansing. And likewise, a self-performed surgery can be another way of purging one’s body and being of someone else’s intervention.
Scientia Sexualis continues at the ICA LA (1717 East 7th Street, Downtown, Los Angeles) through March 2. The exhibition was curated by Jennifer Doyle and Jeanne Vaccaro.
