"Weird isn't good or bad, it's just different," is how I once inscribed a children's book to my goddaughter. But Vaginal Davis proves that it can be great with "Magnificent Product," a retrospective of her impossible-to-categorize body of radically mixed media works at MoMA PS1.
Take, for example, these disparate elements from a mind-fuck work she created in collaboration with Jonathan Berger called "Naked on my Ozgoad: Fausthaus - Anal Deep Throat." It fills a white-walled gallery with scrawled characters like the "Candyman of Merry Land," tiny sculptures on cushions and recordings that, in combination, suggest a knowledge of L. Frank Baum's fantasy literature that goes way deeper than The Wizard of Oz.
I LOVED Baum's books as a kid but was perfectly content with the contemporary illustrations of W.W. Henslow even though they were 50 years old by the time I saw them. Davis has re-imagined and perhaps adultified them for the 21st century.
I knew nothing of Davis before seeing the exhibit, although I probably should have been as a Butt subscriber and a fan Bruce Labruce. Born intersex, she keeps her birth name and age secret. But Davis remembers the services the Black Panthers provided in the South Central Los Angeles schools she attended as a child, and she took her artistic name from Angela Davis. She admired the Berkeley philosophy professor almost as much as her mother, an unfulfilled artist in her own right. Davis got her start fronting a number of punk bands, including ¡Cholita! Afro Sisters, her first group, opened up for the Smiths, another indication of her age.
She also published and collected queercore zines, pages from which are exhibited behind a gossamer curtain. A non-conformist from birth of the first order, she likely would find the Pines an anathema. She once described herself as "too queer for punk and too punk for the gay world."
Before relocating to Berlin in 2000, Davis turned her Los Angeles living room into an art gallery called "Hag--small, contemporary, haggard," recreated in the exhibit.
Her smudgy portraits of inspirational women include some you might expect for a Baby Boomer--like Zora Neale Thurston and Pearl Bailey--as well as others like Juliet Prowse, which may reflect her own mixed parentage (both in terms of race and religion). Davis claims her grandfather was the "black sheep" of the House of Hohenzollern!
I couldn't tell if the first half of "The Wicked Pavilion," a reputed facsimile of her bedroom as a tween, was another Wizard of Oz allusion, although the enormous phallus, which she has used for her performance art, suggests probably not. It definitely made me giggle like a school girl.
More than 500 hilariously titled books that she intended to write but never completed, including The Fiscal Clit. line the shelves of "The Fantasia Library," Part II of the "Wicked Pavilion."
Using cosmetics and found materials including postcards, hotel stationery and cereal boxes she paints portraits of her cultural heroines. That they're unrecognizable without labels makes no difference; you exit the room feeling as if you've engaged with the fiercest of feminists who herself represents a lifelong work-in-progress.
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| "Janice Ian, Society's Child" |
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| Joan Didion |
It's probably safe to say that few artists have museum goers engage with their works using overhead projectors; it's all part of the same DIY aesthetic that relies less on formal training and tools than an inexpensive, undisciplined expression of a childlike sensibility.
She secretly photocopied much her zine work--which perhaps most memorably includes the Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine (1982-91), at UCLA, where she had a day job.
Her playfulness knows no boundaries--other than a refusal to acknowledge heterosexual men as anything more than beefcake--and seems to have found a more receptive audience for her antics in the intellectual salons of Germany than America.
An academic credits Davis, who eschews both glamor and campiness, with inventing "terrorist drag." After watching her performance in "That Fertile Feeling," in which she co-stars with a pregnant LaToyah Jackson who is about to give birth to eleventuplets before taking off on a skateboard, I would describe her as the love child of Andy Warhol and Flip Wilson. Who grew up to be six and half feet tall and mentored by John Waters.
