Can a museum dedicated to all things phallic serve as a center of learning? As Julie Beck finds, the answer is … sort of:
By the time Siggi’s private collection became a museum, in 1997, he had 62 specimens. The museum now boasts 283 biological specimens, including at least one from every species of mammal found in Iceland.
And I mean every mammal. The documentary The Final Member, which comes out on DVD June 17, profiles Siggi and his museum’s quest to complete his collection by acquiring—you guessed it—a human penis. The film portrays an apparent race against time between a 95-year-old Icelandic adventurer (and, seemingly, notorious womanizer) named Pall Arason, who has promised his organ to the collection when he dies, and an American named Tom Mitchell, who so desperately wants his penis, which he calls Elmo, to be famous, that he considers cutting it off while he’s still alive, so his can be the first on display. “I’ve always thought it’d be really cool for my penis to be the first true penis celebrity,” Mitchell says in the movie. …
[T]here is a strange tension [in the museum] between the spectacle and the scientific.
The spectacle gets people in the door, but the museum’s purpose seems to be more sincere. The “About” section of its website states: “Now, thanks to The Icelandic Phallological Museum, it is finally possible for individuals to undertake serious study into the field of phallology in an organized, scientific fashion.” It’s certainly not pornographic. …
“It is very very important for me to inform people or educate people,” Hjartarson says in the film. “I think this serves and helps decrease taboos about the human body. Especially about this organ, I’m presenting here… I was a professional teacher for 37 years. I like telling people, I like informing people.”
“My father is a teacher, not only by learning, but by heart, in his soul,” Sigurdsson agrees. “There’s nothing lewd or pornographic about [what he’s doing]. It’s an educational and funny sort of way to display something that isn’t seen every day. If you take something like the penis and just treat it like any other thing, it becomes more ordinary.”
Previous Dish on the museum here.
(Photo by Flickr user JasonParis)
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