Review

Review of Scientia Sexualis

View of Scientia Sexualis from the Front Room. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Scientia Sexualis, exhibition 
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

5 October, 2024 – 2 March, 2025

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We came as strangers and left as collaborators, friends, a couple, a pair. Such is one of the many medicines offered by Scientia Sexualis, a recent exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, that not only grapples with the fraught histories of science, sex, and sexuality, but attempts to cure them as well. Wounds can be mended, the exhibit insists, and injuries repaired. For co-curators Jennifer Doyle and Jeanne Vaccaro and the 27 featured artists, healing is a creative practice, one that imagines otherwise. 

Figure 1. Candice Lin, Hunter’s Moon, 2024. Glazed ceramic, resin, acrylic paint, video hardware, digital video (Inside Out, color, sound, 2010, 2:40 min.). Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The exhibition title takes its cue from Michel Foucault who used the term to signal how modern Western histories of race, sex, and sexuality are imbricated with the development of science. According to Foucault, scientific discourse names, pathologizes, and enshrines systems of racial, sexual, and gendered differentiation as “truth.” Alternatively, Doyle and Vaccaro understand scientia sexualis in the exhibit as “nam[ing] an undoing that is also a remaking.”1 Crucial to their reworking of Foucault’s term is centering queer, trans, Black, Brown, decolonial, and transnational epistemologies.

Figure 2. King Cobra (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Vesico Vaginal Fistula, 2016. Silicone, wire, hair weave. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

As the exhibit emphasizes, the scientific (re)production of race, sex, and sexuality is realized through aesthetics. Works like King Cobra’s Vesico Vaginal Fistula (2016), Cauleen Smith’s Venus (2023), and Candice Lin’s Night Moon (2024) underscore the centrality of aesthetics in this history. King Cobra and Smith differently conjure the bodies and legacies of the enslaved women who Marion Sims—the so-called father of gynecology—operated on without anesthesia or consent. Similarly, Lin invokes the deceased pregnant women whose bodies were dismembered in the medical illustrations of eighteenth-century obstetrician William Hunter. In recuperating and redeploying the forgotten names and bodies of those rendered vulnerable to science, each artist confronts histories of how women—and in particular, women of color—have been violently objectified and reduced to their sex organs in the name of scientific knowledge. Scientia Sexualis thus takes up this medico-aesthetic regime as both integral to the medicalization of race, sex, and sexuality and a possible starting point for its undoing. 

Figure 3. Jes Fan, Form Begets Function, 2020. Aqua resin, pigment, wood, fiberglass, glass, urine, Depo-Testosterone, melanin. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Jes Fan’s Form Begets Function (2020) invites viewers to reckon with the overdetermined symbolic charge of estrogen, testosterone, and melanin. These substances are suspended in glass globules that hang on—almost ooze over—a rectilinear scaffold, highlighting their contrived social function. While present in all human bodies, medical discourses have enlisted these biological materials into a bioessentialist fantasy whereby testosterone is the marker of (strong) men, estrogen of (weak) women, and melanin of people of color. Isolating these substances and presenting them as decaying, fluid forms trapped within a rigid structure whose rectilinearity suggests scientificity’s supposed rationality and order, Fan playfully mocks the aesthetic logics of bioessentialism. The absurdity of metonymy rings clear: in approaching estrogen, testosterone, and melanin in Form Begets Function, one is no less confronting a “woman” or “man” than one is a “race.” Rather, Fan asks us to literally see what’s the matter of ideology. In doing so, Fan offers a new way to think about these substances. If form (substance mediated by medical discourse) begets function (racism and sexism), what new possible functions arise from rearranging form?

Figure 4. Jes Fan, Form Begets Function (detail), 2020. Aqua resin, pigment, wood, fiberglass, glass, urine, Depo-Testosterone, melanin. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Subverting how—and for whom—forms have typically been made to function, multiple artists throughout the exhibit use the grid as an aesthetic strategy. While art historian Rosalind Krauss identifies the explosion of the grid as a hallmark of Modernism, its deployment by Ojibwe artist Andrea Carlson reminds viewers of how scientific and aesthetic “modernity” is predicated on the disavowal of non-white cultures as “primitive.”2 Her grid’s intersecting lines point to how forces of racism, sexism, and coloniality structure the very system of scientific discourse. Questioning the dividing lines drawn by anthropologists and scientific racism that mischaracterize Indigenous peoples as cannibals to justify their colonization, Carlson’s gridded Sunshine on a Cannibal (2015) restages a colonial encounter. Who is the real cannibal, she asks: the victim of scientific racism or the insatiable force of scientific settler colonialism? 

Both of Dotty Attie’s contributions to Scientia Sexualis also take the form of a grid. Attie’s Resistance and Refusal Mean Consent (1999) and Disturbing Rumors (1994) present women’s bodies mediated by the male physician’s hand. Arranged in grids composed of six-inch by six-inch squares, each separated by one-inch margins, Attie’s works quite literally cut the female body into parts, testifying to histories of women’s fragmentation enacted under the guise of scientific progress and care. For instance, Disturbing Rumors makes explicit the connection between aesthetics and scientific processes by juxtaposing and rearranging two famous realist paintings: Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (1875) and Gustave Courbet’s L’Orgine du monde (The Origin of the World) (1866). The first is known for its gruesome depiction of surgery performed for medical students in an operating theater, and the second for its pornographic depiction of a woman’s genitals. Attie represents how the male gaze fragments women’s bodies by disassembling Courbet’s painting over nine squares. Inserted within the woman’s pudendum in the center square lies Dr. Gross’s bloodied surgical hand. Like Courbet’s hand, the surgeon’s hand and scalpel imposes itself into the painting, carving the woman’s sex both onto the canvas and onto her body. Reaching out of the painting, the hand beckons onlookers to witness the histories of violence that have been and continue to be masked by aesthetics and science. In Attie’s reconfiguration of these paintings, the grid of Disturbing Rumors separates the women’s body, synthesizing the aesthetic and the scientific gaze into the surgeon’s hand.

Figure 5. Dotty Attie, Disturbing Rumors, 1994. Oil on linen. Photo by Cecilia Azar.

If Attie makes clear the violence of the surgeon’s cut, P. Staff asks us to consider the lives within the ostensible blank space of the rupture. Though violent, when self-administered, the incision can also be life-affirming. In addition to selections from their 2022 series Knife, Scalpel, Blade, which makes portraits of cutting devices carried by their friends and queer kin, Staff’s 16mm video Depollute (2018) provides instructions for performing a self-orchiectomy, or the unassisted removal of one’s own testicles. Yes, “make an incision,” the artist’s two-minute instructional video teaches the viewer, but then “bridle the wound.” In Staff’s film, pain and suffering are acknowledged as prerequisites, but the insistence on mending prevails. “Depollute,” the video commands, not only questioning who or what is harmful and what qualifies as surgery, but also calling for direct action to heal.

Throughout the exhibit, pain and pleasure, suffering and recovering, are not naively linear. Good affect is not the predetermined destination of struggle. These binaries, rather, are dialectical, indissolubly bound up with one other. After all, the scalpel that violently mutilates the genitals of Attie’s Disturbing Rumors is the same tool that offers Staff rebirth in Depollute. One strategy of the undoing and remaking that Scientia Sexualis stages, then, is not the wholesale banishment of sexology’s so-called bad objects but their rearrangement and resignification.

Take the couch, for instance, which the artists and co-curators offer as another aesthetic and material site of potential repair. While it appears in its usual form as a site of recurring childhood trauma in the psychiatrist’s office of Nicole Eisenman’s 2008 painting The Session, the couch of Nao Bustamante is a space to reimagine the pelvic exam. In her Vagnasium (2021), Bustamante invites the gallery-goer to lie down on her couch. Less a psychoanalyst or gynecologist than a groin guru or doula, a recording of Bustamante appears to the reposed from a video screen angled overhead. Deep within the caves of what she calls the “Vaginal Imaginary,” Bustamante guides her audience through a series of pelvic floor activations that transforms the violent legacy of medical pelvic examinations. Bustamante’s playful intervention not only reimagines the therapist’s couch and the pelvic exam as sites of empowerment and encouragement but, importantly, provides material space for bodies to rest and (re)discover pleasure. 

Figure 6. Nao Bustamante, Vagnasium, 2021. Mixed-media video installation (color, sound, 8:11 min.). Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Not only are scenes of psychic and medical knowledge reimagined as caring sites of relational pleasure within Scientia Sexualis, but the museum space itself becomes eroticized too. Moving beyond the visual regime, which has been historically deployed to surveille and clock queer and gender non-conforming bodies, Scientia Sexualis appeals to the audience’s broader sensorium. Through this rearrangement, the exhibit asks us to challenge the authority of the medical gaze by thinking with and through our body’s other senses. Throughout the museum, sounds from installations like Geo Wyex’s Muck Study (2024) and El Palomar Colectivo’s Daniel Schreber is a Woman (2020) play on a loop, the latter reminding us to “excite [ourselves] sexually.” Commissioned for the exhibit, aromas of Candice Lin’s The Smell of Abortion (2024) waft throughout the museum, recalling histories of how women and their allies have cultivated the healing properties of plants for their purposes of reproductive health. 

Haptic knowledge is encouraged, too. In a guided tour, the curators implore the audience to reach out and feel the water trickling out of Nicki Green’s Three Fruitful Vines as a Fountain (2024), thereby participating in its cleansing ritual.3 Built into the museum’s walls, Green’s installation redirects the building’s plumbing so that water slowly drips out of its three ceramic spigots into a trough below for recirculation. Three Fruitful Vines as a Fountain intervenes as much into Jewish traditions of bodily and sexual purity as it does into the architectonics of bioessentialism that crudely equates the function of sex organs to plumbing. Through the relational aesthetics of touch, Green’s work calls us to cleanse ourselves of bigotry.

Figure 7. Nicki Green, Three Fruitful Vines as a Fountain, 2024. Site-specific installation (glazed ceramic, hardware, water). Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Perhaps the most playful rethinking of the erotics of space in Scientia Sexualis, however, is Chris E. Vargas’s Reading is Transcendetal (2024). Taking over the museum’s bathroom, Vargas lays claim to a space both public and private. Transforming a site overpoliced for gender difference and legally enforced transphobia, Vargas wallpapers the bathroom with the spines and covers of books about trans life. Placing sociologist Aaron Devor’s qualitative study FTM: Female to Male Transsexuals in Society next to McKenzie Wark’s autofictional Reverse Cowgirl, Vargas embraces scientific study without deferring to it de facto. The wisdom imparted by the butch lesbian, the drag queen, and the intersex and trans persons aren’t isolated by genre or ordered by categorical classification but rather come together to form a collection—a queer and trans collectivity of sorts. Here, without the limiting exclusivity of identity markers, it is the trans subject—not science—who is the arbiter of trans knowledge. In the bathroom of Scientia Sexualis, then, a trans person might not only be able to relieve themselves in peace but, perhaps, find relief there too, as they cruise the bodies of books for promiscuous knowledge.

Figure 8. Chris E. Vargas, Reading is Transcendental, 2024. Site-specific installation (vinyl wallpaper). Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Scientia Sexualis closed with a three-day symposium held from February 28 through March 2, 2025, bringing together artists, curators, and community members. As the convening’s title suggests, Reckoning and Repair references the work of the exhibit and invites a communal reckoning “with racist, sexist, and transphobic pseudoscience [as] a creative act… of living under the scrutiny of medicine”—an act that the curators suggest must continue beyond the exhibit.4 In a closing conversation with C. Riley Snorton, Vaccaro explained that what she and Doyle “are interested in is the museum as a classroom. What these programs are doing is creating a space of open conversation and dialogue.”

Repair, Scientia Sexualis suggests, is best approached together. Healing happens when we join forces to confront and rework the violences of history. In the wake of harm, one thing we can do is bear witness to one another and give each other pleasure. Indeed, as a co-curated endeavor, the exhibit itself models the solidarity needed to address the present wounds of the past. By pairing up to co-author this review, we aim to take part in and extend the call for repair that Scientia Sexualis articulates. Through this review, these pairs—authors and curators, scholars and cultural workers—offer a space to collaboratively suture the wound of difference offered by science. We hope this medicine becomes viral.

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The authors of this review are grateful to the exhibit’s co-curators, Jennifer Doyle and Jeanne Vaccaro, for their support in making this review possible and for modeling collaborative and reparative work. Special thanks to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, for their permission to use images of the exhibition.

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Endnotes

  1. Jennifer Doyle and Jeanne Vaccaro, eds. Scientia Sexualis (Inventory Press, 2024), 12.
  2. Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (1979): 51-64. https://doi.org/10.2307/778321.
  3. For additional recordings of the exhibit and its convenings, visit the ICA LA’s YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/@theicala.
  4. Jennifer Doyle and Jeanne Vaccaro, eds. Scientia Sexualis (Inventory Press, 2024), 12.