Sex Museums by Jennifer Tyburczy;

Author:Jennifer Tyburczy; [Tyburczy, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226315386
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-01-06T06:00:00+00:00

At his home, she discovered that he worked in finance and was connected to major corporations and businesses in Paris. He was a wealthy man who had been collecting all his life; by comparison, Wilzig thought of herself as a newcomer who had been collecting for only six or seven years.

4.3 Erotic Japanese decorations. World Erotic Art Museum, Miami Beach. Photo by author; printed with permission of Naomi Wilzig.

Since her collection was originally intended as her home decor, Wilzig bought what appealed to her and developed a certain criteria for what she did and did not want: no “children,” no “hard” looks (“I wonder why anybody would want to look at a painting all day long of somebody that doesn’t look pleasant,” she explained), and objects that represented as many periods, styles, cultures, countries, and, of course, forms of eroticism as possible. She initially displayed them in her home, which became a monument to her sex-collecting travels. At first all she found were depictions of women and female nudes. “Anyone walking into my house would have thought I was a lesbian, right?” she joked with me. It was a harder quest to find male figures that she enjoyed seeing (another collection criteria was that the body in the image had to be attractive to her), and she was not only interested in male nudes. Finding those objects required more travel to different markets throughout Western Europe and to Israel (where she found a few items). She also discovered that she often needed to take a second look at an object: sometimes sex was hidden behind a mask, inside a cigarrette box, or tucked into a Japanese ivory strawberry from the 1930s that seemed simply decorative but contained a copulating couple within its delicate layers. In many ways, Wilzig’s interest in discovering how various cultures embed the erotic in the ordinary continues the legacy of the banal Roman erotic artifacts displayed at the Secret Museum. Her delight in acquiring artifacts that in some way mimicked the pursuit of hidden sex objects in general led to a collection that exemplifies how modern cultures install the erotic in everyday things, for moral purposes, at times, but mostly in humor and jest. Like Mary Weismantal’s study of Peruvian Moche sex pots, Wilzig’s collection traces how these sex objects contain within them multiple stories, values, and interpretations that are typically occluded by their literalness.41

Wilzig’s collection moves from paintings, sculptures, and these objects in miniature to the monumental: a large, wooden kama sutra bed with penises for posts; a red throne and ottoman, hand-carved and painted, upholstered in a red-striped silk, and reconstructed after a chair belonging to Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia; a room almost solely dedicated to Lady Godiva, who rode naked through the marketplace of Coventry after the Earl of Mercia promised to ease the tax burden if she did so. In addition to bronze statues and ivory and wooden plaques either depicting or dedicated to the naked aristocrat, the gallery also

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