“Taboo”

Whether sacred or profane, taboos often focus their proscriptions against perfomativity and the bodies that enact them. “Taboo,” a provocative exhibition of contemporary Australian and international artists, whose works are presented alongside various archival ephemera––newspaper clippings, postcards, and photographs––attempts to lay bare the moral impositions wrought by collective institutional bodies upon individual ones. Of Wiradjuri aboriginal descent, the show’s curator, Melbourne-based artist Brook Andrew, knows firsthand the insidious nature of cultural and moral repression.

South African artist Anton Kannemeyer contributes several cartoonish works, including Yo Dumbfucks! Which of You Miserable Cunts Will Suck My Holy Cock Today?, 2012, in which the cloud-enshrouded white hand of God points down upon a group of blacks whose golliwog features recall bygone racial stereotypes. Far from trivializing his subjects, Kannemeyer’s incongruous narratives and comical style pointedly highlight the underlying absurdity of their offensive caricature. Tracy Moffat’s video installation Lip, 1999, made in collaboration with Australian artist Gary Hillberg, offers a mordant meditation on the mainstreaming of racial stereotypes in cinema, while Leah Gordon’s video installation Bounda pa Bounda: A Drag Zaka, 2008, conflates the regalia of drag with the rituals of Haitian voodoo. Meanwhile, Micky Allan’s all too prescient monochromatic screenprint Avoid Rape, 1975, depicts a cyclist in a head-to-toe burqa with the caption AVOID RAPE: DRESS SENSIBLY.

Taboos—in the age of reason, typically the purview of mystical and theological decree—have found in science the appellative powers of pathology. The sanguine collection of bloodstained pages, copper plates, and vials that make up Judy Watson’s installation a preponderance of aboriginal blood, 2005, evokes somber thoughts of eugenics and ethnic cleansing. Elsewhere, among the show’s anthropological and ethnographic artifacts, a framed slide from circa 1870 houses tissue sampled from a virgin’s vagina––the vestal mythos confirmed within the cellular matrix. An unflinching glimpse of destructive acts, Andrew’s formidable exhibition recalls Henry Miller’s quip that taboos are “after all only hangovers”––the painful but necessary remainder and reminder of past transgressions.