Curious about sex? The Museum of Desire is for you

After 20 years managing The Cat Empire, Correne Wilkie decided it was time to leave the world of music and try something new. Three years on, she’s landed in a space that celebrates all things sex.

With partner Dave Strong, Wilkie has just launched the Museum of Desire, an immersive experience in a former industrial building in the backstreets of Collingwood.

Artist Sunni Palmieri in their installation Confessions of a Photocopy Machine at the Museum of Desire. Credit: Jason South

Though inspired by the sex museums she visited while on tour with the band (New York, London, Barcelona and Amsterdam each has one), Wilkie wanted to create something different.

“On the whole they’re pretty yuck and intimidating and not inviting spaces, but the idea is so amazing,” she says. “We thought, ‘What could it look like if you created one that was artistic and beautiful and curious and humorous instead?’”

As veterans of the entertainment industry, Wilkie and Strong (who met 22 years ago when he booked The Cat Empire to play St Kilda Festival, for a mere $600) wanted to create something for the post-COVID world.

“There’s a change in the way people want to socialise and spend time together,” Wilkie says. Alcohol has been “decentred” in the social life of young people, she claims, which has had an impact on pubs and the live music they supported.

A couple of visitors savour the experience of The Huxleys’ infinity room. Credit: Jason South

“The younger generation are much more about connection, they like doing things in smaller groups. They care about the cultural experience. We wanted to be responsive to that and create a new form of entertainment space.

“But also, there’s that curiosity around sex. We’ve got sexologists and people talking about sex on podcasts, and there’s this openness that’s come about, and we felt it was timely to showcase that in a way that could reach the masses with a really fun, dynamic and artistic conversation.”

The result of all this is a space that treads a fine line between titillation and something a little more lofty in ambition. There are interactive exhibits (some tame enough for Wilkie and Strong’s young kids to experience, but most not); a video installation from performance-art duo The Huxleys (a trippy mirrored infinity room); and a wall of plaster-cast penises from English artist Jamie McCartney (a piece that speaks directly to MONA’s vulva wall, by Australian artist Greg Taylor).

AI-generated ‘women’ at the Museum. Credit: Jason South

Three rooms created by local artist Sunni Palmieri perfectly capture the mix of education, liberation and Benny Hill-style humour at play here.

A Brief History of Pubic Hair includes a wall plaque that gets into the short and curlies of the short and curlies from ancient Egypt to the Victorian era to second-wave feminism in the 1960s and on to the porn-influenced present. Alongside it is a wall of bathroom tiles, including some cast in glass with actual pubic hairs inside (just try wiping those suckers off). Opposite is a wall of whimsical stylised merkins, the “wigs” sometimes worn as cover for the genital region.

In Confessions of a Photocopier, the walls and ceiling are plastered with blurry A3 bums and boobs and other bits, the soundtrack provided by a constantly running machine. The Masturbatorium of Past Encounters is a reliquary of mementos and sex toys, along with short slabs of text describing the act, and the time and date it occurred.

What you won’t find is a sense of shame.

“We wanted to create a space that was really inclusive, where everybody felt they were part of the conversation,” says Wilkie. “We’ve trod lots of fine lines in the delivery of this, in sex and art, and gender and identity, and sexual interest. It’s been an interesting and challenging process to go through to land it in a way that we hope will be broadly accepted by people.”

Wilkie and Strong make no bones about this being a commercial venture. They funded it themselves, and had to factor in the possibility that it could flop. “Dave and I shook hands on what we were prepared to lose as the worst-case scenario, and once we decided that we got the courage to just go for it.”

The museum is here for six months, but could become permanent. At any rate, Wilkie says, “we already have our sights set on doing another one overseas next year. You will see a second Museum of Desire pop-up somewhere else in the world, probably Europe.”

Early signs are positive, with 1000 tickets sold for last weekend’s debut and 1500 sold for this weekend by the time we visited on Thursday.

All of which suggests the Museum of Desire just might be an idea whose time has come.

The Museum of Desire is at 92 Rupert St, Collingwood. Details: museumofdesire.com