Oral pleasure and pain in art

Despite the government-mandated lockdown across Germany starting on November 2, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg held on to the opening of its newest exhibition titled In aller Munde — Von Pieter Bruegel bis Cindy Sherman on October 31, and opened its doors to visitors, if only for a few days. 

The name of the exhibition translates roughly as The Talk of Town — from Pieter Bruegel to Cindy Sherman, with the "talk" part referring to how mouths are portrayed in art.

The director of the Kunstmuseum, Andreas Beitin, is among the co-signatories of a statement criticizing the renewed nationwide closure of cultural institutions and museums in Germany. The lockdown is particularly tragicfor his museum because as it had to close again two days after its opening.

It all begins with the mouth

The idea for this unusual art show came from the literary scholar Hartmut Böhme and Berlin dentist Beate Slominski. Both have been dealing with the oral dimension of the human condition for a long time.

They say that the exploration of the oral cavity from antiquity to the present has always involved natural sciences and medicine in addition to art and cultural history.

The exploration of the world itself begins with the mouth. A newborn baby tastes, smells and gets to know the world via its mouth, having its first sensory impressions this way. 

The mouth remains central to our lives, not just in terms of verbal communication and language but also as part of our facial expressions.

"What is unique about this exhibition is simply the fact that the audience has to visualize what role the mouth actually plays when you bring together all the functions it has," says curator Uta Ruhkamp, adding that the fullness of the organs that make up the mouth involve the lips, teeth, tongue, mucous membranes, uvula and throat.

The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is the first of its kind exploring the complexities of the mouth in Germany in such an ambitious and comprehensive manner.

Forget the pandemic

Curator Uta Ruhkamp meticulously categorized and structured the extensive wealth of material shown at the exhibition — including works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Albrecht Dürer as well as Pablo Picasso, Marina Abramović and Andy Warhol. In her method, she decided to divvy up the various cultural and historical aspects of the topic into segments.

When the research for the exhibition started, the novel coronavirus did not even exist yet. But in the months since, the mouth and throat area have become almost synonymous with the highly infectious disease that has spread around the globe. The mucus membranes of the mouth provide the ideal breeding ground for the survival and spread of the coronavirus.

The oral cavity has thus moved very much into the focus of social and political debates around the globe. However, the pandemic was not included in the concept of the show.

Go to hell

The exhibition features around 250 works from antiquity to the present. Paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, drawings, and video art meet exhibits from ethnological and scientific collections, in addition to film, advertising, music and literature.

The Old Testament already deals with the oral cavity in the books of Job and Isaiah, starting by describing it as the place where wickedness hides under the tongue, and later portraying the entrance to the underworld as the "hell mouth." Ruhkamp explains that in the biblical tradition, the "mouth of hell eventually becomes a human mouth."

A similar notion is reflected at the Bocca della verità — the mouth of truth — a well-knowntourist sight in Rome. It is considered to be a polygraph of sorts from Roman antiquity. Whoever puts his or her hand into the mouth of the marble face and speaks a lie, will have it bitten off — or so the legend goes.

Seal it with a kiss

Following this metaphysical introduction to the mouth, the show continues into the Middle Ages and Renaissance, highlighting works by Hieronymus Bosch, Jan Steen, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Albrecht Dürer — all still inspired by biblical references and religious interpretations of what loose lips can do.

The next part of the exhibition focuses specifically on the lips, with works by Salvador Dalí, turning the lips of American actress Mae West into a sofa, or Man Ray, who immortalized the lips of Lee Miller. And there’s also Andy Warhol who turned the puckered lips of Marilyn Monroe into pop-art icons.

Indeed, the first thing you see when you look at a mouth are the lips — and where there are lips, there are kisses. The next chapter of the show highlights works like Pablo Picasso's drawing Le Baiser in which two tongues are intertwined. 

Another variant of a passionate kiss is shown in Edvard Munch's The Bite, which portrays a vampire giving the kiss of death.

Artist Mona Hatoum goes even further than the tongue — her work goes as far down as the esophagus, while artists like Man Ray or Anselmo Fox lock their breath in glass, soap or chewing gum bubbles.

Reality bites

Another chapter of the exhibition is all about teeth. From toothaches to grinning and bearing pain, this part of the show may well be the most uncomfortable, at least for those who hate going to the dentist. The portrait The Tooth Puller by Jan Steen shows a painful dental treatment, dating back to 1651.

Other denture misadventures shown at the exhibition include dental art and depictions of Apollonia, the patron saint of dentists. It’s not all oral pleasure when it comes to mouth after all.

Curator Uta Ruhkamp says that teeth ultimately bookend the theme of pain throughout our entire lives as humans: "We are born into the world, and have to suffer pain as we start teething, the we lose our milk teeth under pain a number of years later, and then there is more pain as our permanent teeth follow, and then we finally have dedicate our entire lives to proper dental care until we are down to the last tooth."

The exhibition "In aller Munde. From Pieter Bruegel to Cindy Sherman" runs until April 5, 2021 at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. It is expected to remain closed from November 2 to 30 due to coronavirus measures.
 

This article was translated from German by Sertan Sanderson.