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Editor's introduction to Taboo
by Megan Hicks

During its long history that worthy publication the National Geographic has often been used as a masturbation aid for adolescents with no other access to pictures of naked women. Museums can sometimes serve similar purposes. In the exhibition Taking precautions: the story of contraception at my museum, the Powerhouse in Sydney, there was a letterbox where visitors could post their comments. Its intended purpose was twofold: to allow visitors to tell us stories about their own contraceptive experiences, and to give those who objected to the exhibition an opportunity to express their disapproval. Indeed we received a steady trickle of comments and criticisms, but mostly each weekday the letterbox was stuffed with examples of adolescent 'wit', ranging from anatomical sketches in the toilet graffiti style to descriptions of unbelievable sexual exploits.

Presumably the writers of these notes meant to shock us, whilst exciting themselves and their onlooking peers. We were gratified that at least they had noticed what the exhibition was about. No evaluation was ever undertaken to find out whether they and their fellow school students actually learnt anything about 'birth control as a normal human activity through time and across cultures' or about 'the contraceptive choices that are available today', these being the exhibition's specific themes.

Teenagers manage to find titillation during enforced school excursions, while some adult museum visitors actively seek it. There are few other places where ordinary conservative people can experience the excitement of fainting in public while watching a (videoed) body piercing session, thrill with righteous indignation at the sight of a bracelet of plastic penises, perv at the congress of anus and bullwhip whilst ostensibly appreciating a photographer's artistry, or stare in disgust at somebody's tattoos without risking getting their block knocked off.

In an intensely thorough paper in this issue of Open Museum Journal, Caleb Williams examines the current fashion for transgressing taboos in Australian museum exhibitions. In Beyond good and evil? he characterizes the new museology as challenging 'the nineteenth century notion of the museum as receptacle for received traditions, typologies, culturally sanctioned knowledges and hegemonic meta-narratives'. He goes on to propose six models for explaining the circumstances that can result in a museum broaching a challenging or taboo subject. Williams's own museum, the Justice and Police Museum in Sydney, broached the subject of tattoos and their history in an exhibition that he believes 'reflected and responded to the concerns of a contemporary audience'.

In her short piece Trish McDonald provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of another exhibition featuring tattoos, Body art at the Australian Museum. Unashamedly targeting the youth market, this exhibition created dissention within the museum and a brief flurry of controversy outside it.

Deviating from fleshly concerns in his paper, When 'risk' is taboo, Patrick Hughes examines the representation of science as 'family fun' in science centres. What is 'taboo' in these centres, he maintains, is a critical appraisal of the enterprise of science. The result is that these centres are failing in their self-imposed mission to improve the scientific literacy of their visitors.

Heleanor Feltham has contributed a short piece chronicling the background to the destruction of the Great Buddha of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. In another stretch of the idea of taboo, Feltham asks, 'What happens when a community decides that a whole past culture and its arts are taboo?' Not the least disturbing of her observations is that if any of Afghanistan's rich material culture remains after the last decade's turmoil, it will be those pieces that have been stolen and swallowed up by the voracious international antiquities market.

Feltham's article was written many months ago, long before the events of September 11 made the term 'Taliban' familiar to even the most reluctant of newspaper readers. Those events, coupled with the collapse of several prominent companies, have created a heightened sense of insecurity amongst Australian people. Yet, while writing this Introduction, I have learnt that a museum in western Sydney is preparing an exhibition that revisits the horrific Anita Cobby murder of 1986. Perhaps that museum's motivations are in accord with those of Ross Gibson, the curator of the NSW Historic Houses Trust's exhibition, Crime scene. Gibson believes that grief, violence, suffering and fatality can be addressed by museums in ways that can be beneficial to both individuals and communities.

Certainly in these anxious times, museums appear to be recognising a niche for themselves in a crowded leisure market, and are latching ever more firmly onto USA museum guru Elaine Gurian's mantra that 'museums are safe places for the exploration of unsafe ideas'. The challenge for exhibition developers will be to recognise that, as Patrick Hughes has indicated, the compass of unsafe ideas is wider than corporeal 'taboos' like sex, murder and self-mutilation; that 'hegemonic meta-narratives' can be so pervasive as to be invisible; and that the imperatives of sponsorship and funding mean that exhibitions are often self-censored out of existence at the stage when they are only ideas.

Megan Hicks
Curator of health and medicine
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
November 2001