SUPERFUNLAND: JOURNEY INTO THE EROTIC CARNIVAL
2019-11-18Super Funland: Journey into the Erotic Carnival examines the sexual history of the carnival, inviting visitors to explore its bacchanalian origins in ancient Greece and Rome and its evolution in pre-industrial Europe and the “midway” of the great World’s Fairs of the 20th century. An historical exploration of carnival’s roots is accompanied by an interactive exhibition of thirteen erotically-charged games and amusements that allows visitors to lose themselves in the carnality, decadence, and joy of a reimagined carnival.
Fairs and festivals have served as outlets for hedonism throughout history, allowing revelers to experience decadent pleasures and, quite often, vice. Following the Industrial Revolution, fairs and festivals began to be carried out at larger scales in the form of traveling carnivals and expositions. Millions of visitors would make pilgrimages to the World’s Fair, where exhibitions on the midway ranged from famed designer Norman Bel Geddes’ topless “Crystal Lassies” to a primitive version of a sex robot. In 1939, Salvador Dali designed the “Dream of Venus” pavilion to promote Surrealist art, featuring bare-breasted performers who posed in bizarre tableaus and dove into large water tanks in an aquatic fantasy of subconscious reveries.
Museum of Sex
233 Fifth Avenue
New York
NY 10016