Vaginal Davis

PP

I was happy to be greeted by Oz when I entered “Magnificent Product.” You’ve talked before about how important the L. Frank Baum stories are to you. You’ve already shown this work in versions of the retrospective in Stockholm and Berlin, but does it take on a different dimension for you to show it in the US, specifically?

VD

Naked on my Ozgoad: Fausthaus—Anal Deep Throat, my collaboration with Jonathan Berger, is very special in that it’s the only site-specific aspect to the seven installations in “Magnificent Product.” It’s configured to each institutional space, and I paint directly on the walls with my arsenal of make-up supplies. The tiny sculptures I fashion in wax, and they were cast in aluminum at a foundry outside of Berlin that only makes industrial products like pipes. It’s a foundry that doesn’t work with artists, so the pieces have a raw quality to them that is not precious. I used eye shadow and medicine to color the sculptures so they have this odd, subtle quality to them. I’ve been working with Jonathan Berger since he was 19 years old and my student at the California Institute of the Arts is pure joy in that we are both very detail oriented but in different ways that complement each other aesthetically. Sometimes we don’t even need to talk. We know exactly what the other person is thinking.

I’m a morning person and function better early in the day. I wake up at 5 am and I’m usually in my atelier in Berlin by 6 or 6:30 am. By 3 pm, I’m usually dead tired or my diabetes brain fog kicks in. It’s difficult for me to pull an all-nighter, but working on the first iteration of “Magnificent Product” for Sweden, I was at my studio from 6 am till midnight creating the sculptures and the zine Middle Sex cut and paste style by hand, like we did zines in the 1980s.

Showing Ozgoad in the US doesn’t hold any particular weight to me. I haven’t been in New York since 2017. I’ve never liked aeroplane travel. The hideous carbon foot print. The great thing about the pandemic years was that everything grounded to a halt and we all were forced to do some serious reflection. I decided that I’m only doing things that really excite me and that I was going to be saying “no” a lot more. I’m a firm believer in the Diana Vreeland adage, “There is elegance in refusal.”

PP

I recently picked up the fourth book in the Oz series. I’ve found Oz to be an apt way of thinking through the present and, being from Kansas myself, I've often resonated with and projected onto Dorothy's character. What was it about Oz that first drew you in, and what about that world continues to arrest your attention? Do you think of our times as Ozian?

VD

I was thinking about how my disdain for the wealthy was so intense when I was young, but I softened after getting a scholarship to a fancy East Coast prep school for a school year and meeting rich kids who were so discarded, unloved, and forlorn. Also being in the Upward Bound Program in high school, where I was able to take coursework at both USC and UCLA before being accepted to UCLA. I was the first one in my family to go to university. It’s all about perspective and being thankful for what you do have and not being envious of others.

What brought me to Oz was the yearly TV viewing of the MGM classic starring Judy Garland. That was the gateway drug to the Oz books and classic Hollywood, especially musicals from the MGM Arthur Freed unit that would be broadcasted on TV in the 1960s and 1970s. I had a cheap Radio Shack tape recorder and would tape all the songs from our Emerson floor model black-and-white TV.

The Oz books were written in a formalist turn-of-the-last-century language, which I related to because of having an older mother and the concentration of plucky female-centric characters. The fantasy aspects were also grounded in the real world somewhat. The second book of the series, The Marvelous Land of Oz, was irresistible, and so were characters like the boy Tip, who transforms into Princess Ozma, and General Jinjur, a 14-year-old girl who stages a coup of the ruling class. So subversive and detail-oriented.

Yes, we are living in Ozian times, and L. Frank Baum was certainly a prophet of doom. He saw the limitations of the so-called civilized world, so he wrote about the fairyland of Oz as a cautionary tale mixed in with tilted parables.

PP

The title of your series with Berger makes me think that your interest in Oz and fairytales, generally, transcends individual cultures, contexts, and languages. How have some of your formative interests and influences transformed over the two decades that you’ve lived in Berlin? Have any new ones specifically emerged while living in Europe?

VD

One thing about me is that I’m very consistent. Not much has really changed over the decades with my art practice. I still use the 1950s colors pink and chartreuse, as this was the color palette I grew up with a lot. I also use diaphanous fabrics and curtains to conceal, but in reality using a curtain forces the viewer to commit in a very pure fashion, in that they don’t realize what is happening. Nothing really changes with me. It’s just that now more people know about my visual work, where before they knew me mostly as a writer and performer. Being based in Los Angeles was also limiting me to being seen as this oddball character. I’ve been piddling about in the same fashion for decades under the radar.

I’ve lived in my own feral cosmos since childhood, and I’ve bent and reshaped others to my will in a very quiet and unassuming manner. I guess it’s all about being part of a long line of Black Creole and Choctaw Indian witchy poos. All the women in my family have a strange effect upon people they come in contact with. My therapist also says I have a strange power over people that he feels and that those in the analyst office comment on, which goes beyond my being very tall and striking looking.

In the mid-1980s I met this very patrician, handsome Boston Brahman blondine man who was an architect who had just moved to Los Angeles. He came across my zine Fertile La Toyah Jackson at the Melrose Avenue punk rock boutique Retail Slut. This man was very WASPY and conservative and I found myself attracted to him. In those days I had a fetish for bland white men. Of course, those crushes never went anywhere romantically. But this particular man, who was living in the Hollywood Hills and was hanging with a crew of A-list party gays who came from good families and possessed great looks, muscular bodies, and generational wealth, would always tell me that he couldn’t understand why he liked hanging out with me. I was the only Black person he had ever gone out of his way to get to know, and he felt like I had somehow enchanted him by casting a weird spell.

His haughty friends thought he was insane for spending so much time with a Black feminine person. In those days, with a certain type of gay man, if someone wasn’t sexually desirable they served no real purpose. Yet slowly this man found himself drifting closer and closer into my world. He sold the house in the Hollywood Hills and bought a house in Silver Lake overlooking the reservoir. He stopped going to circuit parties, shaved his golden boy locks, stopped dressing preppy, and started sporting a more Eastside style. He got involved in the art scene surrounding Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. His gorgeous best friend from university, who was straight and married and worked in the film industry, also started hanging out with me, which horrified his extremely proper wife who was an academic and most likely considered herself a well-meaning liberal. I could tell the wife didn’t like me, though she tried her best not to show it. Within six months she promptly made her husband sell their house in Larchmont Village and move to Colorado, away from my bad influence.

Do you get the point I’m trying to make or am I being too convoluted here?

PP

I understand exactly what you're saying. Is this subtle power to bend people to your will particularly effective amongst certain groups or milieus?

VD

I’ve certainly inherited my mother’s Creole Hoodoo abilities and Choctaw shaman qualities.

As long as I don’t use my powers for personal gain, it’s amazing what impenetrable doors seem to glide right open. Of course I never expect anything from anyone. Don’t complain, never explain. When seeing me, no one expects to be moved or mystified by an elderly Black lady, so I maneuver completely under the radar. When I lived in Los Angeles, I was completely taken for granted, and that’s ok. It is what it is.

PP

One of the main continuities across this show and your work, generally, is this interest in iconic imagery and language, both in terms of pop culture and the networks through which certain names, images, and texts become popular, be it in mainstream or localized scenes. Your name comes from Angela Davis. Your gallery HAG in LA showed the work of John Drew Barrymore. You once said in an interview that you used terms like “world famous” and “internationally acclaimed Blacktress” in the past to “negate the typical showbiz lexicon.” How would you describe your relationship to celebrity?

VD

You’re not the first person to mention my take on celebrity. Being that I am a Los Angeles native—which is rare, as most people come to Los Angeles from elsewhere to become famous or be a part of the entertainment industrial complex. Those of us born in Los Angeles have a different relationship to celebrity, and the nature of growing up in an industry town, we see through it. So when I reference celebrity, it’s through a critical eye. But I don’t like being dogmatic about it, so I use humor in a way that makes it seem like I’m fawning over celebrity culture.

I’m a student of the golden era of Hollywood from the 1920s to the early 1960s, and the Hollywood independent movement from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. I actually don’t follow modern day films or stars for the most part. But I do have soft spots for people like Zack Galligan of the Gremlins franchise or hunky Steve Guttenberg who I went to UCLA with. And I adore the former starlet Phoebe Cates, who gave up her Hollywood career when she had children with Kevin Kline.

Celebrity is so unavoidable in Los Angeles. I used the format of gossip magazines like Rona Barrett’s Hollywood or Photoplay when creating my independent periodical publication Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine, but I was also influenced by magazines like After Dark, Dance Magazine, Viva—publications that could get away with showing full frontal nudity because they weren’t considered porn magazines but “Entertainment/Arts” publications and were quite visible even at the supermarket checkout lines.

I’m 64 years old, so I came of age in a different time and place that is so far removed from the reality of today with social media and its youth culture myopia, which I find as dull as Melba toast, and all this online excrement which I tend to avoid myself—though I have young people in my camp that manage a MyFace account, Pentagram, and my webpage Vaginaldavis.com. I am a luddite when it comes to technology. I grew up in a time in Los Angeles before the Meese Commission, where sex on the streets was rampant. Both gays and straights roamed the highways and byways with hardly any clothes on in Hollywood. At 64, almost 65 years old, I’m the last of the baby boomers, and my Los Angeles was really wild from the mid-1970s until the Olympics in 1984 and the advent of the AIDS pandemic.

All this shaped me. Plus growing up poor and being the first one in my family to go to university at UCLA with all these immaculate children of WASP wealth, whose parents were movie stars, movie moguls, and captains of industry. When I would tell people about my poor background, they would look at me with blank stares as if I was talking about a fairytale. This is where I’m coming from. There is a disdain for the wealthy and privileged, but it’s boring to scream this on deaf ears so I’ve camouflaged it through what seems like an obsession with celebrity.

Even the Germans who adore Los Angeles and the constant sunshine think I was crazy to leave Hollywood to live in bleak Berlin with its cold winters and endless grey skies.

PP

You’ve been given multiple monikers over the years, which is a testament to the novelty of your work. José Esteban Muñoz described your work as “terrorist drag” and you’re often identified as a leader of “queercore.” What is your relationship with labels and categories, generally? Do you find them to be useful to play with, in the same way you play with “showbiz lexicon”?

VD

I’ve always been known for my special way of using language. I guess the fault with that lies in having an older mother from the Deep South. My mother Mary Magdalene DuPlantier was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and gave birth to me in her forties. I was the baby in the family. In Black Creole families the youngest child holds a special position in the family dynamic. I inherited, by osmosis, my mother’s use of language, being that she used a lot of depression-era phrases and slang, the type of talk used in Hollywood movies of the classic era. Having access to this patois, so to speak, isolated me from my peers and set me apart.

I always gravitated to older people and had this intellectual curiosity way ahead of my years. I also developed literary pretensions at an early age. I was always writing little storiettas and obsessively combining them with painting and drawing as a child, and I was so nosy listening in on others’ conversations and transcribing the dialogue.

One of my mother’s lesbian lovers was a woman who called herself Uncle Trash, who was a relative of Barbara Hutton, the richest woman in the world at that time. Uncle Trash introduced me to first edition books and antiquarian bookstores. Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a haven for specialty bookstores and I was obsessed with books and libraries—another recurring motif in the work I do. As a dorky bookworm I spent a lot of time in libraries grilling librarians who were so knowledgeable and kind-hearted. I loved how when you bought books in these old shops, they wrapped the books in butcher paper and tied it with twine

PP

You come from a Jehovah’s Witness background and were even in theocratic ministry school when you were first entering the LA punk scene. Did you see any parallels between the two worlds?

VD

My mother, who grew up a Roman Catholic, always questioned the wealth of the church, and that led her to experiment with faith matters in the early 1950s. She became enamored with the fundamentalist sect of Jehovah’s Witnesses because they didn’t pass a collection plate during their services, didn’t celebrate Christmas, birthdays, or holidays, and didn’t seem as consumer-driven as Catholicism. With the spirit of 1968, my mother returned to her Catholic roots with Liberation Theology, which radicalized her. Jehovah’s Witnesses weren’t tacky when it came to money. They had unobtrusive contribution boxes in the back of their Kingdom Halls, and my mother was impressed by this attitude towards donations and mulla in general.

As a child I enjoyed my time with the Witnesses. I was enrolled in their theocratic ministry school, which was like a form of graduate school. I was always a good student, so I applied the Bible teachings within the context of history. I loved proselytizing—going door-to-door on the weekends talking to people, being invited into homes. It was street theater. I was nosy and loved peering into the lives of others. Having grown up in apartments all my life, getting invited into single-family homes was granada. I also loved the discussions and showing concern for one’s neighbor.

Of course my mother couldn’t follow all the tenets of the religion. She was very inconsistent. We didn’t ever celebrate Christmas, never had a Christmas tree or exchanged presents, but my mother did love Christmas music. I never went trick or treating for Halloween, as my mother thought that was dangerous. I never had a birthday party or birthday cake. My first birthday cake wasn’t until I was way into my adulthood in the 1990s. I never felt like I missed out on anything. Being a Jehovah’s Witness was a great preparation for living a life outside society’s norms.

I drifted away from religion before my involvement with the punk scene, but my late cousin Carla DuPlantier, the lesbian drummer of the early Los Angeles punk band The Controllers, also grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness. My big sister, who still lives in Los Angeles in the same flat since 1976, has remained a member in good standing with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Religion filtered into some of the performance personas I created, like The Right Reverend Most High Holy self-proclaimed Saint Salicia Tate, who is an itinerant preacher who speaks in tongues, becomes overwhelmed with the Holy Spirit, and is a mystical being. Also, my persona of the Whoracle at Delphi, who is a soothsayer and prophet. When I become these characters I am not taking the piss, I really inhabit these personas to the extreme, and have performed with my dear colleague and frequent collaborator Ron Athey in this guise. Ron comes from a Pentecostal religious background and was groomed from an early age to be an evangelist preacher. Ron grew up in an African American and Chicano inner-city neighborhood, as his white family was too poor for white flight to the suburbs of Orange County or the San Fernando Valley.

PP

In “Magnificent Product,” you keep your past incredibly close to the present. The room next to Ozgoad is full of personal ephemera, archival photographs, and video documentation of your performances. Do you always keep the archive close when making new work?

VD

As far as the Ozgoad room being next to the Sucking Her Unborn Cock archival room, that was just the logistics of the MoMA PS1 space. I wasn’t making a grand statement with this placement. In the archival room I did physically install the photos and used a lot of pictures I took that were New York City-centric, as I never lived in New York but I had a lot of New York mentors and spent a great deal of time in the city, especially in the 1990s. For the Berlin incarnation at the Gropius Bau museum, I made things very Berlin- and Europa-centered.

When the originating curator [Hendrik Folkerts] at Moderna Museet first approached me, I was very skeptical as I don’t really trust institutions. It took a lot to convince me to partake. The curator wanted to do a survey, and I nixed that idea for something a bit smaller in scope that takes the form of what I call a retrospectacle. I wasn’t so sure about spreading myself throughout Stockholm’s institutions. After all, Sweden, like most of Europe, has become quite right wing. When I met the leadership of the Swedish institutions, I clicked with them immediately and they were far from being stuffy and staid Nordic arts people, which surprised and shocked me. You always have to deal with people as individuals and not go into something with preconceived notions.

I’m not so into what Kembra Pfahler of Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black calls yesterbation. I’m not really that sentimental or nostalgic. I just tend to move on to the next project, and rarely look back lest I turn into a pillar of salt. That is why I didn’t save copies of a lot of ephemera. Luckily others saw the value of my past work and saved items like zines and what not.

I’m very thankful to Frank Rodriguez, my Club Sucker at the Garage partner, who archived religiously, and Hector Martinez, who has photographed me since the early 1980s and provided photos that I collaged on my paper handbags. Hector also had saved the giant phallus in his attic for decades. So indebted also to Jeffrey Hilbert, who came from the zine and club world of the 1980s and 1990s in Los Angeles and designed the “Magnificent Product” catalog, and Jeff Briggs, who is now a Warner Brothers Studio archivist, who saved a lot of things I produced when he was a teenager in the 1980s.

PP

It’s wonderful to see how you still work with all these artists that you worked with decades ago. Ron Athey staged a performance as part of the show in Sweden last year, and the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black recently performed as part of the programming at PS1. How do you approach collaboration? At times, it’s like you’re a dramaturge!

VD

Yes, working with other artists and former students has been a mainstay. I’ve known Ron Athey since fifth grade. We reconnected during the post-punk period in Hollywood, and he was part of the public program in Sweden at Tensta Konsthall. The same with Kembra, who has been part of the same music, so was the perfect person to represent at the MoMA PS1 public performance. Ron, Kembra, and designer Rick Owens were all born in the year 1961 and have collaborated together many times over the years since the early 1980s.

Kembra is originally a Southern California girl who came from a famous surfer family, though she has lived in New York City in the same flat since 1979, when she came to the city for art school. Kembra is such a genius and the ultimate consummate artiste. Rick Owens has made countless sculptural outfits for Kembra, Ron, and I. Rick designed gowns for our endurance art festival Platinum Oasis in 2002, which Ron and I curated for the experimental section of the Outfest Film Festival, where each guest received a free toga-like gown designed by Rick Owens and made to fit in Rick’s couture sweatshop installation.

Oh, I don’t consider the way I work to have a dramaturgic component at all. That’s something I purposely resist. That’s why I was never able to be a part of traditional theater or work in mainstream film. People who work in the mainstream film industry are more like accountants, and are actually quite resentful of people who are creative.

I was talking about this with the Los Angeles-based artist Dynasty Handbag when she was last in Berlin. She was approached by the mainstream comedy film star Jack Black, who wanted to work with her because he recognized she was the real deal. Mainstream people want that kind of authenticity and edge, but then get scared and refuse to put their penis where their mouth is. When they can’t co-opt that quality about you that they become obsessed with, it falls apart and they run for Them Thar Hills. Dynasty Handbag and I experienced the same situations with these certain kinds of industry types on the hunt. These culture vultures tend to be cut from the same exploitative cloth.

PP

You mentioned earlier that you don't really trust institutions, either. In showing your work in more institutional art settings in recent years, have you found there to be demonstrable changes in the art world between today and when you first entered it?

VD

As far as the art world, I don’t really recognize or see myself as a part of it. I’ll always be an outsider to everything. One museum exhibition that has traveled does not guarantee a place in the institutional art world, nor should it. I’m just an oddity like I’ve always been.

PP

I'm wondering in what ways you feel that your practice is most outside of traditional, mainstream, or institutional understandings of art? Your performances immediately come to mind, as does your visual sensibility, including the images you curate. Do you have any historical role models or guiding lights when it comes to image-making, specifically?

VD

I’ve always felt kindred with that super freak of freakazoids, William Blake. Both as a poet and visual artist he sets the bar high for us of the über weirdo contingent.

One of my creative writing professors at university was Robert H. Deutsch, who was in charge of the Wallace Stevens Society and Wallace Stevens Journal back in the late 1970s. Professor Deutsch was an early mentor who would single out my writing in class to the horror and chagrin of the other students. Professor Deutsch was also perverse and a true freakazoid. He would smoke cigars in class, curse like a salty sailor, and would make a big fuss over me and a lesbian student named Katy Adelman. He was really titillated by our queerness and was always saying things like he wanted to join our club. Deutsch would attend events with an entourage of students, as he was a very cool professor.

He very much wanted Katy and I as part of his little litter, and to take part in his salon, but Katy and I had our own lives within the punk scene and we both commuted to campus—she from Ventura and I was from South Central Los Angeles, and later Hollywood by bus, as I never learned how to drive a car. Katy and I didn’t have the time or inclination to hang out with Prof. Deutsch outside of class. Luckily he didn’t hold it against us.

PP

You’re a teacher, too. What’s your own approach in the classroom?

VD

Whenever I teach at art schools, colleges, or universities, it’s not about theory but praxis. I have stolen the approach of the late great performance artist Rachel Rosenthal and her Doing by Doing technique. It’s simple but very effective in getting students out of their comfort zone and, as Jack Smith would say, “Pasty, Uncle Fishhook middleclassism.”

Why be a tepid, conformist company gal like Yvonne DeCarlo when you can radiate like volatile Maria Montez? The Rosenthal principles pop whether it’s a short-term workshop or full professorship seminar, like when I taught at the Work.Master Program at HEAD in Geneva from 2018–2021.

PP

You have so many ideas and practices—many of which are on display throughout “Magnificent Product”—that are left intentionally open-ended or unfinished to the point that I want to call you a conceptual artist. Is that a term you resonate with at all?

VD

Oh I don’t think of myself as a conceptual artist at all. I find that kind of work a little cold fishy. It’s not generous enough for me. Too masculine and not very giving or gracious.