Vaginal Davis Creates Spaces for Queer Kinship and Experimentation

I first encountered Vaginal Davis’s work in 2008, while interning at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. I had been assigned the job of facilitating Davis’s performance Colonize Me (2008), a series of private one-on-one encounters with the artist that took place inside a dressing room. Among my tasks were informing participants of the terms of their meeting with Davis – the Black, intersex and genderqueer doyenne of Los Angeles’s homocore scene – and obtaining proof of consent (as I recall participants had to disrobe). I never got to experience the work myself, but I’ll never forget how gobsmacked everyone looked afterward.

I observed similar reactions in visitors to ‘Magnificent Product’ at Moderna Museet, the centrepiece of Davis’s sprawling retrospective currently on view at four different venues in Stockholm. (The other exhibitions are at Accelerator, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation and the National Museum, with Moderna Dansteatern and Tensta konsthall joining in the autumn.) Seated on a pew inside the installation The Carla DuPlantier Cinerama Dome (2024), I watched viewers enter then hastily exit a screening of the documentary The Last Club Sucker (1999), which follows Davis as she charms the crowd gathered for the final instalment of Club Sucker, her Sunday afternoon punk rock and performance art club in LA’s Silver Lake neighbourhood. In the video, Davis periodically stops to fondle and tenderly suck the cocks of various attendees. It’s enough to make even the most seasoned contemporary-art enthusiast squirm.

This is just one of several early films shown inside the three-part cinema installation, which also features the video The White to Be Angry (1999), a visual album for one of Davis’s many parody bands, Pedro, Muriel and Esther. Comprising vignettes with titles like ‘Riche Jewish Husband’ and ‘Homosexual Is Criminal’, it is a sonic and visual assault on white supremacist culture. Although she has lived in Berlin since 2006, the dynamics of race, class, sex and gender in the United States are fundamental for Davis, who claims Creole, Choctaw, Jewish and Latinx ancestry, and whose name pays homage to Marxist-feminist philosopher, activist and former Black Panther Angela Davis. Without adequate contextualization of those dynamics, however, a Scandinavian audience is bound to have difficulties fully grasping the radicalness and complexity of the artist’s critique. Still, there’s plenty to get off on here.

‘Magnificent Product’ is Davis’s first major institutional solo presentation and features a myriad of expressions befitting an artist whose ‘medium is the indefinite nature of my own whimsy’, as she quips in the exhibition catalogue. Expressionistic portraits of feminist foremothers painted in cosmetics on found paper make up part of the installation The Wicked Pavilion (2021/24), which also houses Fantasia Library – a display of fictional tomes with titles ranging from Your Pussy Killed My Husband to Discussing Uganda – the life-sized diorama Tween Bedroom and several vitrines containing archival and research material. Another installation reconstructs Davis’s fabled 1980s Hollywood apartment gallery, HAG, in the form of an Ames room suggestively bathed in red light.

Perhaps more than any single work, however, it is Davis’s attitude that carries this exhibition; she has an extraordinary gift for creating structures of feeling where queer kinship and experimentation can flourish. Immersing viewers in a mise en abyme of outrageous personae and critical fabulation where anything goes, curator Hendrik Folkerts’s adoring presentation renders palpable the artist’s persistent and joyful effort to make a liveable life for herself and for others like her: self-proclaimed sexual repulsives, freaks and threats to a culture that is hostile to their very existence (and much else). Call me gobsmacked.

Vaginal Davis’s ‘Magnificent Product’ is on view at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, until 13 October

_{Main image: Vaginal Davis, The Wicked Pavilion (detail), 2024, installation view. Courtesy: © Vaginal Davis 2024 and Moderna Museet; photograph: My Matson/Moderna Museet}