The Original Sexy Beast

The visually arresting tribal objects in the show include scarred and scored hide shields, furred shields, hippo-toothed pendants and, in particular, some cloth-covered fetich statuettes from Senufo and Cameroon that throw off a scary force field any sculptor would die for. But Boulay is making no anachronistic attempt to forge links between Tarzan and early Modernism. This show is about a state of mind, a Western yearning for an Africa compounded of reality fragments and fantasy. It can, as such, be compared to the 19th-century Western school of “Orientalism” (which was bitterly attacked on these grounds by the late Edward Said). I was reminded of being given a tour of “Dracula castles” in Romania where some tourist traffic has been inspired by the vampire nobleman created by Bram Stoker from scraps of knowledge about the real-life monster, Vlad Drakul. And Stoker had no more visited Transylvania than Burroughs Africa.

Tarzan was soon pioneering a trail to be followed in later decades by the originators of Superman and Batman.

Boulay walked us around the show. We were surrounded by jungle noise, including insectoid rattles and scrapings, grunts, and birdcalls.

Where did the fictive Tarzan actually operate, I asked. “He moved a lot,” he said. “He was in East Africa. He went to the west. Gabon, the Congo.”

One small space has a movie playing on the far wall and on either side wall are publicity shots of the actors who portrayed the ape man, including Elmo Lincoln, Herman Brix, Ron Ely, Buster Crabbe, Dennis Miller, and the best-known of them, the Princeton dropout Lex Barker, who was the 12th Tarzan, and the sixth, Johnny Weissmuller, the winner of five Olympic golds for swimming in the 1920s, who made 12 movies (including The Adventures of Tarzan in New York, during which he noted acutely “Stone jungle!”).

Wall texts taken from comic books—TRAPPED IN A PIT OF IMMENSE PROPORTIONS, TARZAN PONDERED OVER THE SITUATION. WHAT MANNER OF BEAST WAS THIS HUGE TRAP INTENDED FOR?—have the potency Noel Coward attributed to cheap music. Disparate elements in the installation include first editions of Burroughs novels—“I got it on eBay” Boulay says of the German volume—a vitrine of Tarzanesque comic books with names like Kali and Zembla and umpteen plastic figurines.

“Voilà!” said Boulay, indicating an assemblage he had put together himself using pieces—Batman and Spiderman both figure—he had either acquired himself or borrowed from private collections. “When you are looking for popular culture, the big museums have nothing!” he said.

Stuffed fauna on view include a lion, a panther, a 20-foot crocodile, and a small dik-dik, a species of antelope, this being an allusion to the antelope upon which Tarzan escaped from the Empire of the Ants. “He is like Gulliver. He rides the little antelope like a horse,” Boulay rejoiced. Further graphics detail Tarzan’s adventures with dinosaurs, ball-breaking Amazons, and a proto-surrealist encounter with the Onononoes, huge-headed beings with alarming grins and upswept wings of hair, like talk-show hosts more than ready for prime-time.