A still from Louisa Achille's documentary The Naked Feminist, part of the exhibit The Porn Identity: Expeditions into the Dark Zone, on display at the Kunsthall Gallery in Vienna. (die Knstlerin/Louisa Achille)

The first thing I learned about the exhibit The Porn Identity: Expeditions into the Dark Zone, is that it is not intended to arouse.

I’m standing in Vienna’s Kunsthalle gallery, a space that once served as the royal stables for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and which is now part of the city’s hugely popular Museumsquartier, an urban village of art galleries, cafes, theatres and work spaces for artists. Guiding me through the show is the young and fresh-faced Angela Stief, one of the curators, and two slightly bemused, middle-aged Austrians tagging along for the tour.

We get off to an awkward start. Stief begins her talk by stating that porn is everywhere, something everyone is consuming but no one is talking about. But before she can finish the spiel, the Austrian woman interjects.

The exhibit is less an expedition into the dark zone than a well-lit stroll past a lot of images of exposed genitalia in action.

“That’s not true. Porn is not taboo anymore.”

“No?” Stief says. As proof, she talks about how embarrassed she felt reading the material for The Porn Identity on the subway in Vienna.

“Well, that’s you,” the woman says. “Speak for yourself.”

Stief drops the taboo argument and moves on to tell us that The Porn Identity did not want to use sex to attract visitors. Pleasure is great, Stief says, but the show is about investigating porn on a cultural, theoretical level. “So, it’s a fine line.”

Indeed, it is. Mounting an art exhibit that is meant to prompt reflection on “pornetration” but that is not supposed to turn anyone on poses a few challenges. That’s why the curators took special care to render viewing uncomfortable and in the open, with no dark booths or comfortable chairs.

Despite all the wholesome intentions, a little mojo did manage to make it into the exhibit on opening night, Stief tells us. It was the fault of Austrian performance artist Marlene Haring, who opened a mirrored booth with the challenge, “Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine” written in bold across the doors. The idea was for Haring to expose society’s prudishness by inviting the public to step into the booth with her and drop their pants.

“We thought no one would take her up on her offer,” Stief admits with a giggle, “but it was just incredible. Everyone wanted to go into the booth with her. The door kept opening and closing all night.” (The fun didn’t stop there. Later in the evening, a couple of libidinally charged gallery-goers managed to sneak into the booth where they proceeded to shag – more proof that people can get turned on by pretty much anything.)

The exhibit is less an expedition into the dark zone than a well-lit stroll past a lot of images of exposed genitalia in action. Most of the pieces aren’t pure porn but rather what the exhibit calls “post-porn” – that is, artistic attempts to turn pornographic clichés on their head. The results range from raunchy to funny to repetitive and inane.

A white replica statue from Stanley Kubrick's controversial 1971 film A Clockwork Orange. (Bob Goedewaagen and Witte de With)

The exhibit makes a few connections to iconic objects, like Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913), which is a stool with a wheel attached to it, apparently a reference to something to do with male masturbation; there’s also a later remake of Duchamp’s wheel in the form of a workout bike with a phallus jutting out of the seat. There’s a white statue of a naked woman kneeling over a dildo from Stanley Kubrick's 1971 violent classic A Clockwork Orange. There’s also a vintage box of Ivory Snow detergent, which features the face of (recently deceased) porn star Marilyn Chambers, before she began her adult-movie career.

Given that porn is still overwhelmingly produced and consumed by men with women employed and/or exploited in the process, the curators make a fairly successful effort to infuse female views and voices throughout.

Angela Bulloch's 1992 installation Baby Doll Saloon lists the rules for women performing at the New York strip club, which include management reserving “the right to fire you without notice or reason" while telling women that “if you take drugs, try not to bring them to work with you.” Katrina Daschner’s six-part video installation Dolores rewrites Nabokov’s Lolita as a Mexican lesbian coming-of-age tale told from the perspective of Lolita. It’s fresh and poignant.

One of the most affecting works is William E. Jones’s Mansfield 1962, a re-cut of police footage from a men’s public washroom in Mansfield, Ohio. It shows an undercover police operation from 1962, in which an officer, hidden behind a mirror, filmed men engaged in quickies, before another cop waiting outside arrested them for sodomy. Grainy, black-and-white images of furtive sex between men of various ages and races flick across the screen. At the end, mug shots of the men appear, post-arrest, one by one. Of all the works on display in The Porn Identity, this is the most disturbingly voyeuristic. The cruelty of the hidden camera, the humiliation of the men and the cold, documentary-like approach trigger the same prurient fascination as footage from Nazi concentration camps or Abu Ghraib. What repels you draws you in.

Nearby, two film works by Canadians are shown: the campy comedy The Raspberry Reich by gay filmmaker Bruce LaBruce; and a video installation by artist Terence Koh (a.k.a. asianpunkboy), in which he wears masks and struts around naked in thigh-high boots.

Not surprisingly, erect penises abound in the films. More specifically, images of men playing with their erect penises. As if there were any chance of missing it, the sheer repetitiveness of the act drives home the point that the raison d’etre of pornography is still primarily male masturbation. A case in point is the video of someone named Brent Corrigan, apparently a gay internet star, doing what I assume he does on his site, to his and others’ onanistic satisfaction. If there weren’t thousands of other similar solo acts on the net, Corrigan’s shtick might come across as something more than empty, compulsive narcissism.

Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce (Bruce LaBruce)

Reprieve from all the manhandled male parts comes with Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy by Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Martin Arnold. He takes a popular film series from the 1950s starring Mickey Rooney, and by straining the soundtrack and pausing or shaking the frames, Arnold injects banal, wholesome exchanges with lascivious subtext. A quick lick of the lips or a widening of the eyes is transformed into something lewd and loaded. Judy Garland, who co-starred with Rooney in some of the films, never looked so deliciously naughty.

The show ends with a work called Rainbow Wall. This curatorial addition, our guide Stief tells us, is an allusion to a line spoken in Kubrick’s last film,Eyes Wide Shut, by a model who offers to take Tom Cruise’s character “to the end of the rainbow,” i.e., off to have sex. This is a rainbow of the likes you’ve never seen before – a wall of TV screens flashing bright, colour-saturated scenes from “landmark” porn movies.

I think I’ve had my fill.

As we wrap up, I ask Stief what she’s learned from co-curating the exhibit.

“That our society is over-sexed and under-f---ed,” she says, for a second time.

I glance at the Austrian woman and detect another “speak-for-yourself” smirk, but this time, she remains tactfully quiet.

I thank our guide and head out. I need some fresh air and a cup of coffee. No cream, thanks.

Megan Williams is a Canadian writer based in Rome.