Juliana Huxtable

EO

In a 2020 profile of you published in The New York Times, Aisha Harris wrote, “[Huxtable] believes that her interests in writing and internet subculture have given her an alternate space and shielded her from the powerful systems many artists have to work within—first ‘the art-school industrial complex,’ she said, and then the art world itself.” I’m curious about the phrase “art-school industrial complex.” Can you define it? What does it mean to you?

JH

To me, the art-school industrial complex is a system endemic to MFAs and certain undergraduate institutions, like Bard, in which the failures of society to appreciate, understand, disseminate, ingest art, or literacy in general, are presented as solved by instilling the hope in artists that going to school will produce stability in their career. More often than not, art school produces discourse to supplement what are the irreparable inadequacies, shortcomings, and failures of art as an economy or cultural enterprise that would, could, or should engage pertinent questions or speak directly to society outside of art’s niche market.

This isn’t an indictment of the idea of going to school for art. I just don’t think that going to school for art serves the majority of people who do so in any real substantive way, aside from delaying whatever skills they naturally possess in the face of absolute precarity. I also think that the discourse around art is increasingly self-parody. At its best, the art-school industrial complex inflates what’s already a threadbare discourse. It damages the immediacy, the efficacy, and the reach of art as something that is alive and culturally relevant.

EO

How have you encountered that kind of flat discourse? Where does art seem to be working as a system of interrogation and exploration and discovery?

JH

What’s presented as a complex and diverse marketplace of ideas does nothing in the face of what are really crass market demands that align themselves pretty spot on with curatorial presentations. Those trends have resulted in a really long uphill battle against people just being like, “Oh, you make this because you’re Black. Oh, you’re a trans woman. Life must be hard for you.” I’m like, “How could something that is purportedly so complex, and so literary, and so concerned with pertinent questions of the time, and historicizing itself, and trying to understand the role of technology, and mediating an insanely complex world of ideas that’s fragmenting the political—that something being curatorial decisions—produce the most crass, reductive, uninteresting relationship to art?” And particularly when the art at hand is being produced by people that are living wildly insane and interesting lives and coming from interesting contexts! Our situation has meant that I am constantly disputing a lot of claims made about my own work and what I might think about art in general. And, despite being someone who produces literature, writing, and poetry, I constantly have to fight for the basic decency of not being squeezed into some horrible template of what my art should or shouldn’t be. Which usually just comes down to a question of identity, because most people like the idea of filling houses and museums with images that make themselves feel better about what are really late ideas of internalized prejudice. If your whole relationship to art production is: our immigrants are excluded, produce images of them and put them in a museum. Black people have difficult lives. Produce images of them, put them in a museum—you’re really missing the point. I don’t think you should be in any position of determining what lives in a museum or what’s considered interesting if you think like that.

I’m interested in complexity and how insanely bizarre of a time that we live in is. So much of what I do is thinking about technology and the way that it mediates our reality. Medical technology, gender technology, whatever. But to constantly have to fight against the way that my work has been written about is an example of the failure of the art school industrial complex, the curatorial industrial complex, art babble, etc.

EO

The way that we think about these problems, the way that they’re confronted in a museological and curatorial context, is through material. But I feel like nothing is ever able to exist—itself—as material.

JH

I think that’s because museological and curatorial  encounters serve representations, like politics as representation. I think it’s also related to other things, like the pornographic gaze, for instance. Specifically with trans people, it’s related to a kind of pornographic gaze that affords no nuance or complexity, or even eroticism, to trans people. In whatever you do, your transness is always being sniffed out by someone as the revelatory truth of whatever form of cultural production you’re engaging. There’s so much work that I’ve made that would be completely unhinged to look at and think, “Oh, this is about trans people.” To the degree that it’s about trans people, it could be about how I’m also a New Yorker. Or how I’m from the South. Or how I’m Black. Or how I’m a completely itinerant person who has lived all over the world. I’ve made artwork and lived in Beirut and Lebanon. People don’t write about that. That doesn’t interest people because it doesn’t serve their specific representational end.

At this point, I think there’s a subconscious sadism at work. People are giving into an accelerationist impulse to shove whatever the most crass form of identity politics is down people’s throats so as to incite an uprising against it. People just want me to be a Black trans woman who overcame death every day and now gets to assert the validity of her identity in the public sphere. “Redemption is possible. Everything is great.” It’s like, “You want to believe that because that makes me—in a time when the overwhelming sentiment amongst most people, regardless of their intersectional location, is exhaustion, exasperation, disenfranchisement, jadedness, and indignance—a fool.” It’s like a magical Negro narrative. Where is this coming from? What is the motivation? That’s why I mention the sadistic, accelerationist impulse. It seems like people really want to push the stupid identity narrative because it pisses people off.

People are tired of that. People are exhausted. Even people that aren’t from those backgrounds are exhausted by that. That sphere of political representation—twinks for Trump, Blacks for Trump, whatever—is reactionary. It’s been interesting to be someone who, for years, even since the Triennial, was so vocally like, “Please stop.” The Triennial was when it first started happening, and I was like, “This is not it. I am not a poster child for trans rights. I’m really not a producer.” Sometimes I’m like, “Have you read anything that I’ve written?” People that claim to really love and engage my work are redemptive. Have you read any of my writing? Redemption is not the angle that it’s coming from.

EO

I think that has a lot to do with how your literal body was implicated in Frank Benson’s Juliana (2015), the sculpture shown at the Triennial. Because it wasn’t an abstraction—but a physical representation, a direct encounter with your actual body—it gave people permission to engage you in these presumptive, even invasive ways. It was a dangerous display, stripped of context, and it displaced your autonomy in the process.

JH

I wish I had understood the vast difference between having financial capital and having cultural capital and influence. At the time of the Triennial, I was already doing so much and had made such an impact on so many people. I couldn’t see that, though, because I was struggling financially. It was within that context that I was able to be exploited thusly.

EO

We get invited into these institutions to do a certain kind of work, but there’s always this underlying condition: “Yes, you can do the work—but we’re only going to pay you in cultural currency.” And that doesn’t work. It doesn’t guarantee anything. It just sets you up to be exploited again, because you’re expected to survive—and keep transmuting that currency—in order to survive.

JH

And is it even actual cultural currency? It doesn’t protect you against right-wing backlash. I saw that coming. I’m from super conservative, right-wing evangelical Texas—raw America. The whole Trump thing wasn’t that surprising or scary to me. I mean, yeah, it’s scary that someone unhinged is in power—I’m not trying to be dismissive. But we’re out here. I could already see where the whole representational politics and visibility thing was headed. And it wasn’t a good place.

EO

I was thinking about the Trap Door panel you did in 2018 at the New Museum—with Che Gossett, Reina Gossett, and Miss Major. It felt like such a heightened moment for transness, trans visibility, and trans politics, especially in New York. The panel had a real cultural impact and became a kind of anchor in that era. I’m curious how you feel about it now, looking back. What did that conversation make possible for you—or clarify?

JH

That conversation was one of the more meaningful things to come out of that era. I was really happy to be able to have that conversation with Che. That’s always been my thing. I’m like, “What is happening on the ground? What material transformations? What are the means of production? Who is buying and how is capital being moved, or being shifted in ways that benefit the people in the images?” It’s just not happening. It is simply not happening. Luckily, I had elders who, even though they weren’t necessarily working in the visual arts, had experienced moments of cultural fascination where they’re like, “Don’t let these people get you fucked up. This moment can disappear so fast.” Even just on a basic level, it’s almost at this point a New York parable, of the star who burns too bright, flies too close to the sun, and then dies of a drug overdose or ends up unhoused in Buffalo, New York and dies alone. So many figures that were consumed for a moment, or were considered luminary for a moment, pass in that way.

I’m really glad that I have older people in my life who could give me that kind of advice. Also, I’m from the South. I’m from people. My mom is the first person to go to college in my family. I don’t trust white people. I don’t trust rich people. I’ve never trusted that moment, I knew that it was too fast and too intense for me to think that I’d somehow made it. And I’m glad that I didn’t. My mom always encouraged me to take whatever I was interested in or doing and translate that into a digital sphere.

EO

Where do you think that inherent distrust of rich people and white people came from?

JH

Our family social circle was mostly Black people. My mom was struggling for a few years. It’s not like we were in some crazy marginal place, but my mom was really struggling and it was tough growing up in my hometown. We didn’t live in the bougie area of town, and we didn’t live in the poorest, but we had cockroaches all up in our house. You feel the weight of that socially, even as a child. So a lot of my friends growing up were working class, poor-ass white people who would otherwise be called trailer trash. Even with them, I saw how easily race could destroy those relationships and could warp those relationships as we got older. As I got more comfortable with myself, and as my gender and sex evolved and morphed over time, I got to see better how those relationships worked.

I also went to Bard. I went to school with really wealthy white kids. When I first got there, I thought it was a utopia. But then the class shit and race shit started to come into play and these people suddenly were not my friends. I was intense and I was complaining a lot or I was doing too much racially and politically. I remember I thought I was balling because I had $2200 in graduation gifts. That was more money than I could have ever possibly imagined having at one time growing up. I thought that would last me for so long. If I had gone to school in Texas, yeah, that would have lasted me, that would have been fine. Obviously, I had a job, but that money disappeared. I think I spent all of that in like three weeks carrying in New York with my friends. Two or three weeks.

EO

Did that encounter with material constraints—and the frustration of navigating those dynamics—radicalize you in any way?

JH

I had to work 40 hours a week for most of college. I was at a school that was so built around wealth and wealthy people that they were unable to see I was working so hard. I was the president of two clubs. I was in debate and got to nationals my freshman year. I was doing well in all of my classes and basically never slept. I worked at the cafeteria, I worked at the café, I worked at catering, I worked at the library, and I worked at the computer lab. I did anything I could to try and survive at that school. I took like $80,000 in loans. No one gave me a break ever. People did not understand labor. I would come back to the dorms after doing sometimes literally a 12-hour catering shift—I was a kid—and find everyone just playing video games. Bless their hearts. They didn’t mean to be malicious, but I already knew at that time that they’d never be able to fully empathize with what I was going through. In my hometown, I was middle class. I thought we were cute. And then I got to Bard and I was like, “Oh, lol!”

EO

How did scholarship present itself to you?

JH

Thankfully, Bard has a really good literature program and human rights program. The humanities there are grounded in reading and writing. I distanced myself from the art stuff. I just couldn’t afford to do the arts, even just the paints and the studio fees. But also I was in the anxiety of, “I’m so out here, and I like being at this school, and I have good friends, but this is really hard for me.” I wanted something that, at the very least, I could sell as meritocratic. So I was drawn toward literature and classes that were really grounded in reading and writing. The human rights program was amazing because you had teachers that were actually really brilliant. And there are people that go to Bard, rich or not, who are very serious about their studies. I threw myself into those classes, especially literature ones, because I was so thankful for an environment where what I can do was recognized, and where I didn’t have to just live in this weird projection of wealth—where it was presented as an accomplishment in and of itself.

So many of the students were living in that kind of bubble. “Oh, we’re so esoteric. Oh, I went to the Quaker school. I read Nietzsche when I was 11, you know, and I knew about the Velvet Underground when I was 12.” You just had parents that were wealthy Bohemians. You have accomplished nothing, but you live in a world in which your ego is so inflated. Coming in from College Station, Texas, you’re looking at me like an idiot because I’m wearing Target shoes. I needed something concrete. This world—this smoke and mirrors of wealth as an accomplishment in and of itself—was a chop for me. I needed to figure out something concrete. I loved the literature program because it was a space in which, at the very least, if you did the reading and could  really enter into the world of ideas and manipulate them, you were supported. It was a world in which I could then look at them and be like, “You're full of shit. Fuck you.” I loved that.

EO

How did studying literature affect your relationship to art?

JH

I basically gave up on the idea of the pursuit of art—at least visual art—and shifted to studying literature. I do believe that literary studies is, at its best, an art form. The rich history of literary criticism speaks to that. The roles of the thinker and/or scholar and artist collapse within literary theory. I was drawn to that. And because I wanted something that at least seemed more meritocratic than the vagaries of my social context, I was just drawn to literature. Literary studies is such a charge. You really have to work in a way that’s different from visual art. This isn’t to say you don’t have to work when studying visual art, but anyone can just look at a painting. Not everyone can get into a certain type of literature—which has its own problems. But I loved that, and I loved when I would experience what I felt was the literary sublime.

I was able to sublimate the self-consciousness that I developed around my own art practice—from my experiences at Bard, surrounded by all these rich kids and teachers who were basically just resentful of their own failed careers—into something productive and interesting and fruitful through literary studies.

EO

Did you recognize that feeling in anyone else at the time? Were your friends at other schools going through similar things?

JH

At Bard, you’re really socially isolated, which is what made the whole experience so much more intense. I had friends from the town—what the campus would call townies. But really, you’re so isolated at Bard that your whole world revolves around the school. I had friends on LiveJournal in high school who were from all across the country, and I vaguely kept up with them in college. But Bard is its own world. I had debate friends because we traveled to other schools and stuff. Still, my social life was on campus.

EO

When did you start on Tumblr?

JH

I started on Tumblr at the very end of my senior year, the very end of 2010, but I wasn’t really active. I just logged on. Anytime there was a new social media platform that I was even vaguely interested in, I’d make an account just to make sure no one took my username. I actually don’t remember who I heard about it from. I was into blogging before anyone else was, so I was always very social media savvy. Even in high school and college, people thought of me as super online. I don’t even remember how I found out about Tumblr, but it didn’t really start until I moved to New York. I was working at the ACLU as a legal assistant. I became obsessed with Tumblr because it was a way for me to explore and get into just ideas.

I think I was able to elaborate the curiosity and interdisciplinary research methodologies that my education provided into my own logic and aesthetic lines of inquiry through Tumblr. I was attracted to Tumblr for the same reason I was attracted to literature. While the latter confuses the distinction between criticism and art—because so much of it is writing about other art, which is itself a form of writing—Tumblr collapsed the distinction between cultural production and cultural consumption. You could build a whole following just from writing funny captions and reblogging things other people made. I naturally took to that because, in a certain way, that logic mimics the logic of literary criticism. And so I built a following. Then, at a certain point, the things I was writing in response to other people started being recognized as a form of art in and of themselves. I eventually was just like, “I guess I’m doing this.”

EO

How did that feel? What were you engaging with?

JH

Everything that I was interested in. I would do politics, I would do fashion, I would write about music a lot. I would write about visual art. I never stuck to a genre—it was always about the ideas. That’s why I said I was able to develop my own logic, my own aesthetic, my own lines of inquiry. The format didn’t have to be specific to a media type or a medium. I could put a video, I could link to a mix, I could post a poem, I could post a video of myself that I made. Anything, really.

EO

What are you negotiating now? What are your desires now?

JH

Right now, I’m trying to find a synthesis of my fascination with the world of ideas—different lines of inquiry and conceptual logics—and making art in a more conventional sense. I realized just how precarious everything was during lockdown. I had no money. There were no art shows. There was no DJing. There was nothing. I was just wiped out completely. I really had to build myself back up after that. I was also in a relationship where I was engaged, and that went totally left. I lost my home in New York when an ex-friend of mine fell into really extreme drug use. I had to come home from Berlin and abandon that city. In a very short period of time, everything I thought provided meaning and stability in my life just came crashing down.

EO

How old were you?

JH

I was 32. I spent time in Berlin before, which allowed me to escape the visibility spiral of New York after the New Museum show. I was working in fashion, I was so overwhelmed and so over it.

EO

What were the genetic and social makeups of these places for you—in terms of artistic production? What kinds of energies or structures shaped what you were able to make?

JH

The first city I ever moved to was Johannesburg. I did a study abroad there, and their semester starts in our summer—so essentially, you begin the term in South Africa right after the school year ends here. It was great for me because it meant I got to stay for the time period of two full semesters. In total, I think I was there for almost eight months. I stayed as long as I possibly could. It was the first city where I was a fully functioning adult—because there’s no 21-year-old cutoff in Johannesburg. I could go out. It’s also very dense. It’s perfect for someone like me because it’s so complex. There are so many racial, ethnic, and linguistic factions in that country. The cultural landscape is so dense and so interesting. There’s not a kind of reticence or eye roll when it comes to talking about politics. I loved being in Johannesburg—and it was also the first time I ever lived in a Black-majority city as an adult.

It was wonderful because it’s not like here, where there’s a set idea of what Black people are. Like, “Oh, Black people do this, Black people do that.” Even in an idealized sense, here there’s still this projection of a fairly homogeneous idea of what Black American identity is. In Johannesburg, Black people are the majority, and there are so many different ethnicities within that. And Johannesburg is also a financial, trade, and industry capital in Africa, so you have little Morocco, little Algeria. I had friends from everywhere—Ghanaians, Nigerians, people from Mozambique, Uganda, Kenya, Lesotho. It was a really complex version of Blackness—or not even Blackness. The Blackness was coincidental to the complexity of the society as a whole. But as someone who is Black, for me, that meant for the first time I actually just got to be a person. There were so many different types of Black people. I wasn’t weird—I was just a person. And there were full-on times where I would forget… I mean, sometimes people would think I generally read as Black, but in some contexts people were like, “Oh, are you Coloured? Are you just like Black, heavy, mixed-Coloured?” But either way, I was just a person moving through society.

EO

How did that change how you engage with your material?

JH

I really, really, really immersed myself in anything that I could artistically. Most of my friends were artists or musicians or people studying there. I was like, “Art can be so interesting. Art can be so multifaceted. Art can respond to politics. You can be misanthropic and indignant and also have a sense of political immediacy.” All of those things can coexist. There are so many different ways to approach art. I love Johannesburg. What I got out of Johannesburg really expanded and opened me up to what was possible artistically.

When I first moved to New York, it was so exciting. I had always wanted to live there. I made a pact with my best friend, Amy Chen, when we were eleven, that we were going to move to New York. I always knew that was going to be a thing. When I got there, it was great. Especially right when I moved to New York, I knew at a certain point I needed to leave the ACLU, which was scary—to go from having this very elitist cushion job to then just freestyle New York. But I figured it out, and I didn’t leave the city for about three years.

EO

When you finally left New York after those first few years, what drew you to Berlin at that point, and what did it give you that New York couldn’t?

JH

The first place I really left New York to go to for any substantial amount of time was Berlin. After I quit my job at the ACLU, I went to Berlin for six weeks. In Berlin, time and space are liquid and bountiful. People work less so that there’s more free time. There are parks everywhere. It’s not bound by water. In New York, it’s like, if you want to sit down somewhere, you have to buy something. In Berlin, you can just go to a park. You can sleep in a park, if you want. No one’s going to say anything. I had never experienced that before. And that, for me—coming from New York—was a very liberating experience.

Most artists in New York are not really living any free or bohemian lifestyle. They’re just small corporations. There’s absolutely nothing bohemian, nothing radical, about the way that the majority of artists in New York are living. Being in Berlin was affirming in that I could actually live an unconventional, eccentric, and esoteric life. I loved doing that and just experimenting—experimenting with music, experimenting with sound. Music was really what I ended up working on the most in Berlin. I didn’t work so much on visual art when I was there. During my last year I worked on a lot of art, but at first I was writing and working on music.

I think the art itself suffers in New York. Most artists have been pushed into the corner of being commercially viable or just being rich kids. That’s a horrible kind of groundwork for a culturally rich society. That’s why I’m so thankful for nightlife—because nightlife is a true alternative economy where people are supporting themselves and making it work, not living conventional lives and not just being little capitalists. Jaded contrarianism seems to be the only way people can see themselves responding to the despotic conditions of art production. I can’t give that. I can’t do that. So I’m very thankful that I lived in Berlin.

EO

How did being in Beirut reshape the way you thought about what art can do?

JH

I lived in Beirut for a year. It's another place where the U.S. government is basically undermining any attempt at sovereignty. Then you have Israel on your neck constantly. So the idea that, “Oh my God, another artist talking about politics,” is just silly. Not that your art has to serve a political end, but the political nature of reality is so self-evident. It’s silly and almost dumb to performatively lament about politics entering art or something. Ironically enough, particularly when it comes to music and sound art, Beirut is one of the most interesting and experimental places I’ve ever been. There’s really something unique happening there. There’s a unique history in terms of the sound that’s tied to war and all sorts of things. But the way artists have responded to that is not didactic. That was also really inspiring to me.

I don’t care about rich people. Like I said earlier, I don’t give a fuck about what some rich person who is only in a room because they paid to be. I could not care less. I loved being in Beirut. People there didn’t reduce me to the most crass version of an identity sales pitch. People actually got me. When I got to Beirut, people were like, “Who’s this weird-ass bitch? What’s going on? What’s going on in her art?” And I’m like, “What’s going on with y’all?” It was an earnest exchange between true freaks. I felt like I was in a community of freaks. For my last show in London, two of the portraits were shot in Beirut. I’ve also recorded music there. It’s so fruitful because it’s just freaks getting together. That’s great for me, because no one’s like, “Oh, the Black trans woman is coming in to do something.” I’m so tired of that. I’m just uninterested in that conversation. It was so refreshing to be in a place where it’s like, “What are you actually making?” People were engaging me on the terms of what I was contributing to the scene.

EO

Do you think criticism is a generative structure for producing new conditions or standards for work or art to exist?

JH

I’m excited by the idea of art criticism. I am not an art critic in that sense, and I don’t do criticism about visual art for the most part—some, here and there. But I feel like criticism is stuck in the diagnostic trap. Everyone can point out the failures of what’s happening now. Yes, I look to criticism to elucidate and parse shortcomings, underthought biases, and failures of trends. That’s important. But I also turn to criticism to elucidate possibility. That’s what I’m most frustrated by.

There are people whose criticism I like, but I often get to a point in the essay where I’m like, “Okay, we’re here, we’re here, we’re here…” and then it just ends with a vague assertion that we need to return to some era of the past or some crass traditionalism. That, to me, is the current trap of criticism.

I read criticism because it ignites thought and interest. It gives me something to respond to, an apparatus to understand myself—or to see how maybe I was actually operating inside the very thing being articulated as a failure or shortcoming in art. Maybe I can body that in ways I couldn’t or didn’t see before I read the article. But I really haven’t been feeling that so much lately. Honestly, I just read literature. Literature itself gets me lit right now.