Vaginal Davis
Magnificent Product
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Curator: Hendrik Folkerts
May 18 - October 13 2024
Vaginal Davis at the Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Hector Martinez. Courtesy of Moderna Museet
For the past couple of months, I’ve seen words flying around surrounding this exhibition; riotous, joyful, irreverent, subversive. It was hilarious, frankly, to see a video segment on SVT (Swedish public service television network) describe her with an entirely matter-of-fact tone as “a temple prostitute, drag terrorist, author, documentarian, composer, and artist,” as though the first two terms were self-evident. (Is this success? Those words are “real” now, without a deep dive into theory.) The segment concludes with her cheerfully chanting – Black power! Black power! Destroy white boy.
A brief Google search suggests these are lyrics by the 90's American gothic/doom metal band Type O Negative, in a song mocking the Republican fear of the Black Power movement. But I’m no expert on doom metal and can’t say for sure that is what she was referencing. Another thing that’s hard to know for sure is how Vaginal Davis’s work has been received here in Stockholm more broadly, though we can see clearly that her work has inspired a bit of fun. Her energy is contagious. The description on Moderna Museet’s website begins with “Once upon a time,” and Dagens Nyheter celebrates how she’s filled Stockholm with a subversive energy. It seems all the major news outlets have written about her in one way or another.
It’s easy to sing her praises but harder to dive into the depths of her social critique. Amidst what feels like – and is, in some ways – unrestrained chaos, debauchery, and playfulness, is also a tremendous degree of craft and precision, a rich visual language and logic. She’s such a visionary thinker. But to what extent does the cut, and its precision, come through? This question of how the exhibition has been received, and received differently across its multiple audiences, stays with me as I work my way through. The first thing I notice upon entering is a fellow museumgoer clutching onto their companion’s Hawaiian print shirt.
Photo: Erika Råberg
Vaginal Davis makes a scene wherever she goes, and new seeds have been planted here in Stockholm under curator Hendrik Folkerts’s expert care. Magnificent Product is an exhibition in parts, putting forth Moderna Museet as one node in a network which also includes Accelerator, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, and the National Museum, with forthcoming programming at MDT and Tensta Konsthall in September. It would not have made sense to try to contain the uncontainable, and Folkerts knew this, creating instead a constellation across institutions that echoes both Davis’s and Folkerts’s ethos. The exhibition model is multifaceted because so is her practice.
Folkerts was certainly the right person to spearhead this magnificent network, having realized projects across institutions since arriving at Moderna Museet in 2021. We saw this with Every Ocean Hughes’ Alive Time last year, for example, with its bridge to MDT. I also see connections to the series of performance commissions that Folkerts brought to life at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019-21, which stand as testament to his commitment to performance, body politics, and feminist art histories.
With Vaginal Davis, the expansive exhibition model has served us all well, playing to the affordances of each institution involved. After taking in the Romantic at Nationalmuseum one could easily wander into The Old Library and encounter Davis’s drawings on the wall; at Index, we have the perfect container for exploring her written work and engaging with her methodologies, her spirit. I appreciate the multi-nodal here for the ways that it pushes back on the myth of singular achievement by emphasizing collaborative processes. It still amazes me how sticky this myth can be, of the solitary genius and his intellectual systems of support (male, of course, complemented by female systems of domestic support). For this reason I am always glad to see other ways of being modeled for us, to hear Davis praise the family that she grew up in, the house full of women with no need to separate the idea of the intellectual from that of the domestic.
Installation view, The Carla DuPlantier Cinerama Dome "Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product". Foto: My Matson/Moderna Museet. © Vaginal Davis 2024
Magnificent Product opens out into a room hosting a three-part cinema installation, The Carla DuPlantier Cinerama Dome (2024). The videos give me a full-body reaction. I was not alone in this, as I noticed several other museumgoers sit down beside me only to pop up again moments later and exit. The White to Be Angry (1999) remains a powerhouse decades later: chaotic, contradictory, and deeply unsettling in its engagements with white supremacist visual symbols and culture. Scenes from live music performances are spliced together with found television footage, creating an off-kilter visual album of sorts which also existed originally in the form of a performance. The handheld home video, low- and no-budget aesthetic gives the signal that anything could happen – the feeling that the kids are unsupervised.
The Last Club Sucker (1999) has an equally visceral effect. A few people poked their heads in but no one sat down beside me. In it, Davis stops to fondle and suck the cocks of various attendees, all on a Sunday afternoon. It is just so blatant, making me feel shy about bodies for the first time in a while. The last time I felt that particular flavor of productive discomfort was a decade ago when seeing Barbara DeGenevieve’s work in Chicago the year before she passed away. In The Panhandler Project (2006), DeGenevieve asked five unhoused people to model nude in exchange for financial compensation, food, and lodging. The subjects were all men of color, and she herself was white. Needless to say, she was another provocateur who understood the capacity of the camera as apparatus to frame questions about race, gender, power, and representation.
The feeling of the videos sticks with me as I duck behind a long row of gauzy turquoise fabric, encountering a collection of ephemera from decades past: photos, flyers, and handwritten notes, all of which give a sense of the energy of that time and together are a remarkable tribute to her many years of creating. There’s a unique pleasure in seeing a collection of things that weren’t initially intended to be collected; it feels so direct, somehow. The curtain engages the senses and gives a hint of the domestic. It is airy and light to the touch, but also serves as a physical barrier that must be adjusted as one moves along. I can’t help but feel like it’s trolling me somehow, as though I need a degree of privacy in order to take a long, close look at the images that I want to look at. I can almost hear Davis’s voice reassuring me, “It’s okay, sweetie – lean in and look as long as you’d like!” This feeling of privacy with each image makes for a viewing experience I haven’t had in a museum space like this before. I notice people spending quite a while behind the curtain, perhaps longer than they would have if they sensed they were being watched after all.
Installation view, The Carla DuPlantier Cinerama Dome, Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2024. Photo: Erika Råberg
The second installation reconstructs Davis’s apartment gallery, HAG, from her time in Los Angeles in the 80's. Here, in the quiet, air-conditioned space of the museum, I’m confronted with the strangeness of seeing the following in pristine wall text: “During the seven years of HAG, guests were often found fornicating among anti-paintings, decomposing sculptures, edible fashion, psychotic/psychotropic performance vomitorials, alpha bitch slaps, and feral mudslides.” (What is a vomitorial?) In her artist talk back in May, Davis described, with a laugh, how she didn’t know what Artforum was until they wrote about the gallery. So for me, the main tension of the exhibition here at Moderna Museet is this feeling of having shown up late to the party. The smells aren’t there. The chaos isn’t there. Where did everyone go? Then again, it would be a mistake to think that the exhibition is striving to reenact the original. What we have here is something different, something which lovingly maps out years of work and ensures an afterlife within the institution long after the show comes down.
Here, we have a tribute to the intelligence of FEELING something. Even if we aren’t feeling our way through one of her original gatherings, we can walk away with the sense that such a thing is possible. At the very least that is an important reminder, if not a revelation.
Installation view, The Fantasia Library "Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product". Foto: My Matson/Moderna Museet. © Vaginal Davis 2024.
The third installation, The Wicked Pavilion (2021/24), presents an archive of decades of work. Everything is bathed in pink light, with pink walls and pink curtains. It feels feminine and it feels smart. (Some people still can’t seem to wrap their heads around the two going hand in hand.) A row of display cases present a collection of books, collages, notebooks, photographs, records, and other objects. Each item is intriguing on its own and the collection as a whole, presented in this way, is a tribute to the importance of all of these as records of thought and of feeling. (Of thoughtfeelings? We need new language here.)
A series of small impressionistic portraits honoring iconic women forbears line the walls, such as the poet and writer Wanda Coleman, poet and essayist June Jordan, and screenwriter Gail Parent. One such portrait has escaped its place in line, and can be found on its own near the entrance, but is easily missed. The extent to which Davis worked with what she had on hand comes through here, and in this case meant makeup and other beauty products, including mascara, foundation, watercolor pencils, hydrogen peroxide, nail polish, and discontinued over-the-counter medicine, all on found paper. Maybe because of the materials here, I think of them more as objects, and because they are small I can imagine, if I had one, bringing it along with me.
Installation view, The Fantasia Library "Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product", Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2024, Photo: Erika Råberg
In a way, the institution is not the right container for her – she’s too big, her humor too American, her energy too rowdy. At the same time, I am glad that she is there. I take particular enjoyment in thinking about the afterlife of the show here at Moderna Museet: these works will be conserved, with records in writing and in databases, vomitorials and all. I heard Davis describe how she had snuck copies of her zines onto the shelves of her local bookstore, and was then shocked and delighted to see that people were actually trying to buy them. I like to think of her work entering Moderna Museet in a similar way, Trojan-horsing subversive ideas and causing unexpected ripples. If a museum collection is an offering to its public(s), then her work definitely belongs there.
I think of the Study Gallery downstairs, where visitors can request to view panels that showcase works from the museum which are not currently on view. The last time I was there I was standing amongst some chatty Americans visiting from New York, talking about their friend Linda’s divorce as a Rauschenberg painting came slowly creaking down from the storage racks above. Magnificent to think what might come floating down someday upon some curious viewer’s request. Maybe even the giant cock, who knows.
Erika Råberg
Erika Råberg is an artist and curator originally from the US. She is the founder of the forthcoming publication series Working Title, which publishes conversations between artists here in Stockholm, and also hosts projects in her apartment as Occasional Gallery.
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