Abstract

The fraught and implicitly problematic taboo exhibition - the term is imperfect and to some extent contradictory - is worth pursuing. If possible museum treatments of taboo subjects should arise out of existing collections, or from issues, relationships and histories that the museum has always thematically overarched. With the broad-scale reassessment of what a museum does and for whom it speaks when it does it, there has been an opening up of new possibilities in terms of subject matter and a number of local museum explorations of death, transgressiveness and the body are briefly surveyed.

Six theoretical models are offered to account for the emergence of the taboo within the museum at this point in time. Among them the arguments that the taboo has entered the museum as a result of a postmodern 'crisis in meaning' and that we now inhabit a 'panoptic schema' of society wherein all varieties of exposure are increasingly conceded as a basic right. It is argued that the museum fulfils a fundamental requirement of its existence by providing a neutral philosophical space for contemplation and educative encounter and that the capacity for rationality, tolerant investigation and 'unfearful looking' is essential to the curatorial profession.

The museum can create artificial, magical, laboratory-like conditions for viewing the taboo offering a space for forms of ritualised demystification in which inspection can occur without the psychic contamination or other ill-effects that may otherwise result in normal conditions. Using an exhibition on the history of the tattoo for a case study it is concluded that forbidden subject matter interpreted carefully, can produce positive outcomes for both museum and its audience. Areas proscribed in earlier times are now available to be used as triggers for profound meditations and provocative spatial journeys.

Date published: November 2001