It’s not often that an exhibition vernissage births a drag persona. Mine (Imona Budgét) had no pearls to clasp, nor a decent-fitting wig – but did have a mustache. The occasion: a smörgåsbord of exhibitions and performances spanning the Swedish capital that present a retrospective of Vaginal “Crème” Davis (*1969). For a city of Stockholm’s size, involving six institutions represents a grand takeover of the culture scene. The organizers reasoned that the artist’s oeuvre is too expansive to be contained in just one place – tongue-in-cheek myth-making, presented with all the seriousness of an Oscar Wilde aphorism.
The possibility of experiencing so much of the artist in one episode suggests that Davis has propagated an uncontainable body of work. Encompassing photography, film, collage, zines, installation, painting, and drawing, it covers a persona-cum-practice that began to ooze sometime in the 1980s and continues as I write. It is vast, charmingly megalomaniacal, and spectacularly queer. Although the pedagogical aspect of these exhibitions purports to unravel the “icon,” a single revelatory moment remains forthcoming, as though any inquiry into who she has been, is, or might be, were doomed to defeat. The screens a series of videos, including The White To Be Angry (1999). Arranged as a “visual album” of songs interspersed by TV ad clips, it is a darkly humorous, turn-of-the-millennium portrait replete with a skinhead, a serial killer, and a critical breakdown of white supremacy in American society that, over two decades later, remains disconcertingly resonant. An earlier film, That Fertile Feeling (1983), presents a blonde-wigged Ms. Davis bringing forth an eleven-strong litter from her screaming muse, Fertile La Toyah Jackson. Lighter and more obviously satirical, it nonetheless offers a pointed view on the limited access to healthcare across the US. The video ends with Fertile skateboarding away from the scene of her deliverance.
Ann Summa, ¡Cholita!, ca. 1990; left to right: Melanie Sparks, Greg “Jailbait” Velasquez, Fertile LaToyah Jackson, Vaginal Davis, Alice Bag. © Ann Summa
Vaginal Davis, The Wicked Pavilion (detail), 2021. Installation view, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2024. © Vaginal Davis, 2024. Courtesy: Moderna Museet. Photo: My Matson
Beside the Cinerama is a large wall of photo prints, correspondences, and promotional material suggesting a life of making a scene. Behind a green gossamer curtain – a gloriously simple spatial gesture by the Swedish art, design, and architecture collective MYCKET – this archive is laid bare (sometimes literally), with handwritten captions. Scanning the display, a younger queer is reminded that these objects recall a world in which LGBTQIA+ rights were a far-flung dream. A community saturated by love and tension – a crowd of ass and dick, orbited by Davis in glorious Y2K splendor, AOL email address included.
The Wicked Pavilion, a reincarnation of a 2021 installation at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, named for a post-war novel by Dawn Powell, centers a shag-pile-carpeted tween bedroom. The novel in question, which hinges around a Manhattan heiress devoted to bohemian truculence, her love-fueled dalliances, and the allure of glamour, echoes throughout the galleries. Here, on a rotating bed, lies a huge, erect, inanimate cock, surrounded by washing lines hung with pin-ups and posters of activists and boys, to be admired only from beyond a barrier. For an exhibition of such immediacy, this distance presents the installation as a sanctuary – something akin to those charmingly naïve, hyper-queer annals of lust and longing that exist somewhere within every queer body.
Still from Vaginal Davis, The White to be Angry, 1999, 18 min. © Vaginal Davis. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
“The Fantasia Library” stands out as an ordered insight into Davis’s mind. It is a collection of imaginary books, whose pastel-pink titles range from the odd (The Chanterelles Are Waning) to the delightful (My Deliberative Body) and up to a crescendo (The Fiscal Clit), interspersed by titles from groundbreaking Black, queer, and anarchist writers like Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, and Sonia Sanchez. Along the walls, a sequence of portraits of “women trapped in women’s bodies,” painted with makeup, medication, and fixed with “Aqua Net Extra Strength hair-spray,” reveal how abrupt are her methods. All told, this coexistence of truth and fancy – the “real” books and “fantasies” – claims desire as imagination. Much like gossip, Davis’s delicate distortions may be best consumed in a state of post-orgasmic bliss.
Walking between the other venues, a visitor may wonder why Davis’s largest retrospective to date is in Stockholm. The city is, after all, a far cry from the likes of Los Angeles or Berlin – the places where Davis cut her teeth and operates, respectively. On the contrary, it’s an unusually sanitized and comparatively frictionless sort of place that wants for debased sex clubs and debauched kink nights – public ones, at least. What is it, then, that the artist can rub up against? As a mise-en-scène, the exhibition succeeds in revealing the richness and mystery of the artist’s interior world, lubricated by intelligent curatorial gestures. Where “Magnificent Product” suffers is from where it is – in milky museum spaces that tend to pasteurize. This is an exhibition that deserves to ferment.
Vaginal Davis, Wanda Coleman (recto), 2021, mixed media. © Vaginal Davis. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
Vaginal Davis, Wanda Coleman (verso), 2021, mixed media. © Vaginal Davis. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
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“Magnificent Product”
Moderna Museet and other venues, Stockholm
18 May – 13 Oct 2024