– Vaginal Davis
Vaginal Davis is an icon. Spanning over five decades, her multifaceted practice defies categorisation: as a writer, visual artist, self-proclaimed Blacktress, drag terrorist, filmmaker, gossip columnist, influential socialite, performance artist and educator, she is a trailblazer for Black and queer counterculture. She was inspired by the militancy of the Black Panthers’ pursuit of social justice in the United States and in the mid-1970s, she named herself after communist, feminist and Black Power activist Angela Davis.
Vaginal Davis makes scenes for a living. She is a founding mother of the queer punk underground of Los Angeles in the 1980s, the city she was born and raised in. In 2005, following frequent collaborations with Berlin-based art collective CHEAP, Ms. Davis packed her bags and relocated to the German capital. Here, she continues to be a vital contributor and organiser across cultural fields. Marking 20 years of living and working in Berlin, Fabelhaftes Produkt manifests in seven major installations, folding in histories that took place on the stage, in nightclubs and in apartment galleries, spread far and wide through the xeroxed pages of her zines and extensive correspondence. Indeed, Ms. Davis’ installations metabolise her archive and stage it anew.
Naked on my Ozgoad: Fausthaus – Anal Deep Throat is inspired by Vaginal Davis’ first visual art exhibition at the Pio Pico Library in Los Angeles, created when she was eight years old. Both exhibitions are interpretations of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books – situated in the land of Oz, imagined as a place on Earth, yet full of magic. The first book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), became a canonical children’s book in the United States and was adapted to a movie starring Judy Garland in 1939. Another 13 volumes followed, featuring a myriad of radically progressive characters and plot lines. Because of its political undertones and revolutionary storytelling, Baum’s books have long been an inspiration to queer readers. Early on, Ms. Davis became fascinated with Baum’s commitment to firstwave feminism, which developed through proximity to his wife and motherinlaw, who were suffragettes advocating for women’s political equality.
A soundscape of internal monologues, written by Ms. Davis and voiced by a host of guest contributors, allows the identities and personalities of the Oz characters to unfold as her own creative invention. For her largest painting to date, Ms. Davis applies makeup directly to the walls of this room, exploding the world of Oz into a nonlinear narrative space. The sculptures embellished with makeup depict key Oz protagonists, cast in aluminum at an industrial foundry that normally produces pipes and machine parts. Copies of Ms. Davis’ newly published zine Middle Sex, fashioned in the size of a pocket bible, are displayed by the windows.
With contributions from Shadi Farid, Richard Gabriel Gersch, Salome Gersch, Hands On Press, Kathleen Hanna, Daniel Hendrickson, Adam Horovitz, Ricardo Montez, Miss Joan Marie Moossy, Maria Norman, Uzi Parnes, Susanne Sachsse, José Segebre, Angela Seo, Carmelita Tropicana, Ela Troyano.
– Vaginal Davis
This installation takes up the iconic 1960s architecture of the Cinerama Dome on Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard and hosts several of Vaginal Davis’ early films that portray her role in the LA queer underground scene. It is dedicated to her cousin, Carla “Maddog” DuPlantier, the drummer of the band The Controllers, who introduced Ms. Davis to the Los Angeles punk scene.
In the late 1970s, Ms. Davis started a band called Afro Sisters, followed by other bands including ¡Cholita! The Female Menudo, Pedro, Muriel & Esther (PME) and black fag. She became integral to the scene referred to as “homocore”, which parodied and challenged the white heterosexual bias of punk and refused the normative gay mainstream. Amid the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Ms. Davis built spaces for anti-normative, anti-capitalist punk and queer politics. In her own words, Ms. Davis was “too gay for the punk scene and too punk for the gays.” Playing on the stages of nightclubs and punk pits, she created her own mythology and aesthetics through the live performances of her bands.
The Carla DuPlantier Cinerama Dome is designed by MYCKET: Mariana Alves Silva, Katarina Bonnevier, Thérèse Kristiansson
From 1982 to 1989, Vaginal Davis ran an art gallery in her apartment on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Using the title HAG Gallery, Ms. Davis would exhibit the work of people who did not necessarily consider themselves artists nor had attended art school.
For a solo exhibition at Participant Inc., New York, in 2012, Ms. Davis revisited HAG Gallery, but now as a space for her own work on the “hag”, a derogatory term for an older woman. It manifests as an illusory room, the window of which provides a view into Ms. Davis’ mind, a space where conventional perspective and experience is skewed. The room itself is full of “hags”, complemented by two sculptures made of bread, titled Dirty Mariah and Justin T.
The Fantasia Library is part of Vaginal Davis’ installation The Wicked Pavilion, named after Dawn Powell’s 1954 eponymous novel on the thrills of New York high and low society. The library holds a collection of over 500 pastel-pink imaginary books, a manifestation of Ms. Davis’ literary imagination and ability to transcribe her world. Writer Dodie Bellamy recently noted: “[Vaginal] Davis has repeatedly stated that she doesn’t fit in anywhere... Language is one site where she reinscribes an unwelcoming cosmos, creating an alternate one in which she makes sense.”
The shelves hold titles such as My Deliberative Body, The Fiscal Clit, Hollywood Speaks and The Hottentotten. In the adjacent vitrines, paraphernalia from Ms. Davis’ (in)famous performances is presented, as well as a selection of letters and collages. Here you will also encounter books authored by quintessential queer, Black and punk writers that have been foundational to Vaginal Davis’ literary universe. The artist’s portraits of iconic literary and cultural figures such as Wanda Coleman, Joan Didion, Audre Lorde and Minnie Riperton complete the display.
In this room, a humongous plaster dildo – a prop from previous performances simultaneously celebrating sexuality and ridiculing masculinity – is tucked into a rotating bed. The tiny boudoir in the corner speaks volumes. Placed next to a mask-shaped diary are the materials fundamental to the shaping of Ms. Davis and her art: nail polish of various shades that she uses for beautification and as paint for her portraits. Posters of Vaginal Davis’ art-punk band Afro Sisters bear the tagline “Young, free and famous, the envy of all others.” The clothesline completes the room, with images hung like laundry. Tabloid journalist Elsa Maxwell meets actor Michael Pitt, side by side with author Christiane F. and Motown singer Gloria Williams. Further on, actress Isabella Rossellini hangs shoulder to shoulder with a gay threesome, a flyer for the CHEAP collective and the cover model for S.T.H. Straight To Hell magazine.
All of this is set against the soundtrack of an audio piece: an extract from the song A Love Like Ours, sung by Gloria DeHaven and June Allyson for the 1944 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film Two Girls and a Sailor, a voice message from Ms. Davis’ secret admirer and two interviews that Ms. Davis and Ron Athey conducted for the LA Weekly in 1996.
Through this room, we finally come to know who inhabits The Wicked Pavilion: the fantastical imagination of Ms. Davis as a curious young tween – a radical thinker and performer, who is obsessed with gay porn, loves to gossip and has an encyclopedic knowledge of literary and cinema history.
The installation Hofpfisterei highlights Vaginal Davis as a writer, offering a rich collection of text material produced from the 1980s to the present. Featuring a wide range of genres – from poetry to long-format journalism to fabricated confessional literature and tabloid rag gossip columns – the presentation mirrors Ms. Davis’ dynamic leaps between downtown nightlife, academic lectures and gallery settings.
The diverse formats on display point to the various avenues of dissemination and circulation Ms. Davis has employed over the decades: pamphlets handed out at club nights, fanzines distributed by mail and community circulars, all of which paved the way for countless digital iterations of self-publishing. Speaking from the Diaphragm, Ms. Davis’ long-running online blog, was conceived in the early days of the internet, before the existence of blogging on pre-coded platforms. Visitors are invited to browse through decades of gossip, tell-alls and sharp culture reviews in their original forms.
The title of the installation hints at one of Ms. Davis’ key methodologies. Attracted to the word and its sound after encountering it on a number of shops in Germany – “Hofpfisterei” is the name of a Bavarian bakery chain – Ms. Davis appropriates it for a new context and purpose.
– Vaginal Davis
The video in the installation Choose Mutation combines found and original footage in a dystopian collage about paranoia and the effects of social and political control on language and the body. Its title is inspired by writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s 2020 article, Learning from the Virus, in which he reflects on the political dimensions of illnesses and immunity. The sound and objects in the room are accompanied by nine larger-than-life black-and-white photographs by Annette Frick, featuring portraits of CHEAP from some of their earliest projects, including CHEAP Klub.
The art collective CHEAP was founded in Berlin in 2001 by translator Daniel Hendrickson, actor and artist Susanne Sachsse and film and queer studies scholar Marc Siegel. CHEAP’s work includes performances, videos, festivals, concerts, installations and radio shows. In any format, their practice combines theory and pleasure, politics and whimsy, aesthetics and sex. The collective frequently collaborates with artists of different disciplines such as Jonathan Berger, Bruce LaBruce, Pola Sieverding and Xiu Xiu. Ms. Davis has worked with the group from its early days, first as a guest, then as a crucial collective member.