12
Sep/22

SUPERFUNLAND: JOURNEY INTO THE EROTIC CARNIVAL

12
Sep/22

Visitors race for the crown in the “Love & Lust Deity Derby” at the Museum of Sex (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

SUPERFUNLAND: JOURNEY INTO THE EROTIC CARNIVAL
Museum of Sex
233 Fifth Ave. at 27th St.
Through October 23, $36-$39
212-689-6337
www.museumofsex.com
www.superfunland.com

In 2015, I had super fun at the Museum of Sex’s interactive “Funland: Pleasures & Perils of the Erotic Fairground,” a kinky collection of participatory installations that reimagined booths at county fairs, with devilishly delightful twists. That theme reaches new heights in the follow-up, “Super Funland: Journey into the Erotic Carnival,” which is, as its name promises, also super fun, even more so than its predecessor.

Continuing through October 23, the exhibition features more than a dozen sensual, risqué, whimsical, and ribald games, rides, and challenges to titillate the senses. But as with most shows at MoSex, it is well curated, with ample history to accompany the bacchanalian revelry. Miniatures from the collection of Al Stencell, former president of the Circus Historical Society and the author of Seeing Is Believing: America’s Sideshows and Girl Show: Into the Canvas World of Bump and Grind, and a fanciful 180-degree short film help put the eroticism of fairs and carnivals into cultural perspective, going back to ancient Rome and Greece and celebrating the carnal boom of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A two-floor slide ushers adventurous participants to more bawdy installations in “Super Funland: Journey into the Erotic Carnival” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Stardust Lane” is a dizzying erogenous kaleidoscope lined with small dioramas playing archival footage from world’s fairs and Coney Island’s heyday. “Tunnel of Love” is a 4D journey into human orifices. “Jump for Joy” is a bouncy castle of massive mammaries, while “Glory Stall” gives visitors the opportunity to, well, “burp the worm” and “yank that plank.” You can put an image of yourself in the middle of the action at the “Porn-a-Matic” screen-test booth, see how passionate you and your partner are at the very public “Lucky Lips Make Out Challenge,” compete for prizes in the “Love & Lust Deity Derby,” get married (complete with rings) at “AutoWed,” or capture your own reward in the “Claw, Pinch, and Grab” games.

The warmly lit, mirrored “Climbx” Ecstatic Climbing Challenge leads to a steamy slide that deposits you through hot lips and out a striped bottom to a lower floor where you can get your fortune told by a superstar in “RuPaul Speaks,” reveal your G-spot skill to win a CBD love elixir in “The Siren,” and grab some “licker” at the “Carnal Carnival Bar,” including such specialty cocktails as Mosex on the Beach, Penis Colada, and several with names that are too raunchy to print here. You can become a “Pole Star” by following the prompts as you dance on a stripper pole, then engage in various positions with a companion — clothes on, please — in “Kama Ultra.”`

Boasting contributions from Bompas and Parr, Droog, Bart Hess, Rebecca Purcell, Snøhetta, and more, “Super Funland” is indeed super fun, but MoSex also has other, more serious exhibitions that are definitely worth your time. The multimedia “Porno Chic to Sex Positivity: Erotic Content & the Mainstream, 1960 till Today” looks at how the use of erotic content in mainstream culture has developed over the last sixty years, divided into “A Pornographic Avant-Garde,” “Sexualized Marketing,” “Scandalous Scenes of Cinema,” and “Music: an Erotic Form.” MoSex has reached into its permanent collection of more than fifteen thousand objects for “Artifact (xxx): Selections from Secret Collections,” comprising a wide array of items, from a blow-up doll, a lotus shoe, and an intriguing sex chair to various toys, magazines, and even a Picasso etching (10 May 1968). And “F*CK ART: the body & its absence” consists of painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installation by eighteen artists, including Coyote Park, Alina Perez, Cherry Brice Jr., Justin Yoon, Erin M. Riley, and Pixy Liao. Finally, make sure you have plenty of time to browse in the store, which is an exhibition all its own.