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Vaginal Creme Davis<\/a> has long been a star. \u201cI\u2019ve always thought of myself as a success,\u201d she said during a recent Zoom call, \u201ca messy success.\u201d<\/p>\n A statuesque femme, way over 6 feet tall, Davis was, for decades, a ubiquitous, commanding figure across much of Los Angeles\u2019 artistic landscape. From the early 1980s until the mid 2000s, one could find her performing at underground venues from Alcohol Salad to the Lhasa to Largo (or as internet legend has it, perhaps opening for the Smiths at the Hollywood Palladium) in an eclectic variety of bands and personas. There was her Blaxploitation a cappella group, the Afro Sisters, for which she donned a bleached blond wig, flanked by a revolving host of backup singers with names like Clitoris Turner, Urethra Franklin and Pussi Washington. There was the time she was Graciela in the band \u00a1Cholita! The Female Menudo, where she sang alongside Sad Girl, the punk icon Alice Bag, who described Davis to me as \u201cthe most exciting and audacious performer I\u2019ve ever worked with.\u201d Alongside Warhol actor Bibbe Hansen, Davis was also behind Black Fag, a send-up of the seminal L.A. band, and she collaborated with Glen Meadmore on the queercore outfit Pedro, Muriel & Esther, whose 1995 album \u201cThe White to Be Angry,\u201d was recorded by rock legend Steve Albini.<\/p>\n If, unfortunately, only a smattering of documentation of these groups exists online, their performances are likely still vivid in the imaginations of anyone who attended them. The musician Kathleen Hanna praised Davis as an inspiration for starting her band Le Tigre in the late 1990s, and the comedian Margaret Cho chose Davis as the opening act for her U.S. tour in 2001. Part of what makes Davis such an intrepid performer is, as Bag said, that she \u201cwill not tolerate a passive audience.\u201d Davis\u2019 version of engaging an audience \u201cmight be pointing a light-up dildo ray gun\u201d at them, \u201cdry humping or shrimping an enthusiastic fan on the dance floor\u201d or giving \u201ca Spanish lesson, using only the nastiest profanity.\u201d In a 2012 piece she wrote<\/a> for Artforum, Davis remembers that, one night, when performing at the famed venue Jabberjaw, she singled out the actor Drew Barrymore and her then-boyfriend, Eric Erlandson, of the band Hole, and \u201cattacked both of them\u201d using her tongue \u201cas a power drill to bore into their mouths.\u201d<\/p>\n The move embodies the confrontational ethos of punk rock. But in Davis\u2019 case, a formative grounding in punk and social consciousness is melded with the stinging dish of a professional gossip, a historian\u2019s eye for names and places, a poet\u2019s linguistic virtuosity, and the exuberant, subtle viciousness and delightfully naive curiosity of a teenage girl.<\/p>\n Davis wears a Prabal Gurung jacket and BODE shoes and pants.<\/p>\n These many facets of Davis\u2019 persona and more are being celebrated in \u201cMagnificent Product\u201d at MoMA PS1<\/a> in New York, her biggest and most comprehensive show in the U.S. to date (the retrospective originated in Stockholm before traveling to Berlin over the summer). Over a video call, Connie Butler, the director of the PS1 iteration, called Davis a \u201ctrailblazer.\u201d \u201cI think she is a pivotal figure that brings together a number of generations, and the show will really make the case for her historical importance,\u201d she said, noting that she hoped it would also honor the \u201ctheatricality and playfulness\u201d of Davis\u2019 performance persona through its range of presentation and vintage equipment. \u201cWe painted many of the walls pink,\u201d Butler added, \u201cwe did some things like that that are not typical of our usual exhibitions.\u201d<\/p>\n Now in her 60s (Davis gives her birth year as 1961, but the internet abounds with alternative dates), Davis has become something of an art world darling, lecturing and teaching across Europe, working the biennial circuit, and increasingly being included in museum exhibitions. It wasn\u2019t until she moved to Berlin in 2006 that she began to experience these more conventional markers of artistic success, showing her work in commercial galleries and achieving wider attention.<\/p>\n \u201cOne day you\u2019re being shown in a museum, and then the next day you\u2019re back in the gutter,\u201d Davis said from Berlin, wearing a casual black hoodie and speaking from a light-filled room with posters and photographs tacked to every surface of the wall. \u201cI\u2019ve been doing what I\u2019ve been doing for people who\u2019ve known of it for the last 40 years. They know that not much has really changed.\u201d<\/p>\n Vaginal Davis. Memorabilia and ephemera as part of \u201cThe Wicked Pavilion.\u201d 2021. Installation view, \u201cVaginal Davis: The Wicked Pavilion,\u201d Eden Eden, Berlin, 2021.<\/p>\n (From the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin. \u00a9 Vaginal Davis. Photo by GRAYSC)<\/p>\n Vaginal Davis. Hofpfisterei (detail). 2024\/2025.<\/p>\n (Photo by Steven Paneccasio\/MoMa PS1.)<\/p>\n Vaginal Davis. \u201cMiddle Sex,\u201d 2024. Installation view of \u201cVaginal Davis: Magnificent Product,\u201d on view at MoMA PS1.<\/p>\n (Photo by Steven Paneccasio\/MoMa PS1.)<\/p>\n Vaginal Davis. \u201cThe White to be Angry,\u201d 1999, film still.<\/p>\n (From the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.)<\/p>\n Vaginal Davis. \u201cThe Wicked Pavilion: The Fantasia Library,\u201d 2021.<\/p>\n (Photo by Steven Paneccasio\/MoMa PS1.)<\/p>\n Though leaving her hometown of Los Angeles wasn\u2019t exactly her choice \u2014 she departed after being forced out of a $500-a month, three-bedroom apartment in Koreatown with original tile and peg and groove hardwood floors that she still rhapsodizes about, when her landlord died \u2014 Davis recognizes that the move helped to build her reputation. Even before leaving L.A., she had been collaborating with the Berlin-based art collective Cheap, and once she was in Europe, American institutions suddenly began to take her more seriously.<\/p>\n \u201cYou get taken for granted when you live in the same city that you were born in,\u201d Davis said. \u201cPeople just think, \u2018Oh, she\u2019s always going to be here, she just does her little thing.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The writer Lisa Teasley, who has known Davis since the late 1980s through their mutual close friend, the artist Ron Athey, agreed that relocating to Berlin has made much of Davis\u2019 later career possible. \u201cMost countries in Europe have been way ahead of the U.S. in terms of supporting the arts,\u201d she said. There is also the legacy of Black artists like Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Miles Davis and James Baldwin taking refuge outside of the country, as well as more basic necessities being provided for. \u201cI mean, there she has healthcare,\u201d Teasley said, \u201cwhich is something that so many of us artists here don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n While Davis can\u2019t really see herself living back in the States again, she was also quick to interject: \u201cBerlin is no panacea, sweetie. There\u2019s no safe spaces anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n Davis wears BODE pants and a Gogo Graham dress and headpiece.<\/p>\n Earlier in our conversation, Davis had apologized for her brain fog, a result, she said, of being more of a morning person who usually wakes at 5 a.m. to work in her \u201catelier,\u201d and the Type 1 diabetes she got diagnosed with only a few years ago during the pandemic. But she was energized talking about the Los Angeles of her youth \u2014 a time when the city was still among the cheapest international places in the world, underdeveloped, with remnants of its Old West roots like horses and hitching posts visible alongside glamorous 1920s architecture. When I asked the designer Rick Owens, a longtime friend of Davis\u2019, for comment on their formative years in Los Angeles, he sent a document he and Davis had worked on together that ended up in his first book and that paints the city as an endless stream of \u201cwelfare watering holes\u201d where \u201camazing fights \u2026 would break out between rough trade concubines with names like Animal or Spider or Eyeball\u201d; \u201cdank apartments\u201d had \u201cwalls covered in molding peacock feather fabric\u201d; and Little Richard parked in a limo outside of the Spotlight Pub, handing out Bibles from the window.<\/p>\n Recalling the era, Davis seemed nostalgic, but her memory also turned out to be crystal clear. It extended back much further to the names of the underage discos she used to attend as a teen, and the middle school teachers who \u201cencouraged my sort of whimsical nature and my sort of use of humor in everything that I did.\u201d She credits her local library branch, Pio Pico, on Oxford Street in what is now Koreatown, for facilitating her love of reading and language. Davis, a gifted writer, regularly wrote about music and culture for the LA Weekly, and ran an infamous fanzine, Fertile LA Toya Jackson, which she started off printing on a Xerox machine during her day job at UCLA in the mid-\u201980s.<\/p>\n Davis also readily cites her mother, Mary Magdalene Duplantier, as one of her main inspirations. \u201cMy mother made art objects too, but she would make something and then dispose of it because she didn\u2019t consider herself an artist.\u201d Davis describes much of the work that appears in \u201cMagnificent Product\u201d \u2014 from her delicate paintings of feminist icons composed with makeup and nail polish to her totemic bread sculptures of fertility goddesses \u2014 as appropriations of Duplantier\u2019s art. \u201cI\u2019m just copying her,\u201d she said. \u201cMy whole career has just been copying my mother.\u201d<\/p>\n Davis wears a Telfar suit. <\/p>\n Davis\u2019 mother is also the subject of an autobiographical novel, long in process, that is excerpted in the \u201cMagnificent Product\u201d catalog. Titled \u201cMary Magdalene,\u201d it mixes fact and fiction, as in general seems to be Davis\u2019 wont as a natural-born storyteller, always refining her tale through fabulation and embellishment. The excerpt shares how Davis\u2019 mother came west from Louisiana during the Great Migration, a Black Creole who arrived in Los Angeles in 1945. She gave birth to four daughters, three of whom were the result of her first marriage, before having Davis in her mid-40s. (Davis said her father was 19 when her mother met him, the Jewish-Mexican relative of owners of a grocery store in East L.A., where her mother worked briefly.) In the novel, Mary Magdalene is portrayed as tough and no-nonsense, violently attacking a doctor who touched Davis inappropriately as a child, and sending a man who insulted her with a racist slur on the street flying through the glass window of a May Company department store.<\/p>\n When we spoke, Davis described her mother as being intellectually curious, someone who, like Davis, was a voracious reader, subscribing to five newspapers; a practicing Jehovah\u2019s Witness, but also involved in political activism. She moved the family from the Ramona Gardens housing project in Boyle Heights to the apartment where Davis grew up around Pico and Western when Davis was just a few years old. Davis remembered that around this time, during the 1965 Watts uprising in L.A., while visiting her older sister nearby their apartment, she and her mother saw tanks in the street. \u201cMy mother was holding my hands and she told me, \u2018Look at this, see these tanks, always remember this.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n Of course, race has played an equally important role in Davis\u2019 work as gender, if christening herself after the activist Angela Davis when she was a teenager wasn\u2019t enough of a clue. (The conversion was distinct enough that Davis does not refer to her birth name and notably, the information is not included in any of the literature for the PS1 show.) When the beloved queer theorist Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz called Davis\u2019 style of performing \u201cterroristic drag,\u201d he was commenting primarily on the politicized manner of her performance and the ways in which it became a form of cultural critique, rather than the way she dressed. <\/p>\n Davis has acknowledged racial antagonism and the randomness of racial categorization in ways both transparent and ambiguous: leading, for instance, a mostly white crowd in a chant of \u201cI hate your whole family,\u201d during a \u00a1Cholita! performance with the American flag prominently displayed. In one of Davis\u2019 videos, the character of Fertile, played by a friend of hers in a giant afro-wig, points a gun at the camera and admonishes the viewer to admit their racism. \u201cIf you\u2019re white, you\u2019re racist \u2026 we\u2019re all racists,\u201d she hollers. For Pedro, Muriel & Esther, Davis sometimes performed as a bearded, camo-ragged white supremacist named Clarence, and the band\u2019s album cover bears a Confederate battle flag.<\/p>\n Davis wears a Dolce & Gabbana jacket and her own pants.<\/p>\n While it was planned in a different political climate, there is perhaps some poetic justice that \u201cMagnificent Product,\u201d Davis\u2019 highest profile exhibition to date, has arrived at a time when prejudice and transphobia have become nearly state-sanctioned, a development Davis might have easily anticipated. Far from feel-good drag queen story hours and gay weddings covered by the New York Times, Davis\u2019 version of queerness<\/a> was never meant to be assimilated, which makes it even more up to the challenges of the present day. As she said in an interview with Athey<\/a> a few years ago, reflecting on the emergence of mainstream gay culture: \u201c[T]here was a big difference between queerness and gayness.\u201d To which Athey answered that their version of queerness was \u201cqueer, as in \u2018f\u2014 you,\u2019 not queer as in unicorn stuffed animals and the cult of tenderness. We weren\u2019t tender.\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, Davis, both in conversation and in her work, is nothing if not charming, playful, seductive and extremely reverent of both the forebearers she often paints, references and writes about \u2014 a whole cosmos of actors, writers, singers and teachers \u2014 as well as the artists who have risen in her wake. She is also unbelievably funny. Recently, I watched her in the 1993 inaugural edition of the \u201cFertile La Toya Jackson Video Magazine,\u201d<\/a> directed by the photographer Rick Castro (a second issue followed in 1994). Davis gallivants around L.A., interviewing drag queens and trans sex workers on Santa Monica Boulevard about where they buy their clothes (inevitably the answer is either Playmates or Frederick\u2019s of Hollywood). She converses earnestly with a restaurant valet attendant, and giggles and gags with a girlfriend at another friend\u2019s house, standing in front of an open refrigerator at one point and pulling out a jar of mustard as if it were a kind of magical object<\/a> that Davis had never before seen. (\u201cIt\u2019s light!\u201d she keeps exclaiming of the mustard, \u201cit\u2019s light!\u201d).<\/p>\n Watching the video, I found myself enchanted, identifying with its sense of delirium and fun, which reminded me of the best parts of being young. I yearned to have Davis as a friend, and most of all, I laughed harder than I had at anything in a long time. The quietly revolutionary aspect of Davis choosing to address \u201call the girls in their natural habitat, but treating them like the human beings that they are,\u201d as she said of the sex workers she talked to on Santa Monica Boulevard (\u201cworking ladies because sex work is work\u201d), didn\u2019t strike me until after the fact. \u201cTo me, her work corrects assumptions that anyone can fit into any kind of box really,\u201d Teasley said, \u201cunless they want to, unless they want to be some kind of cookie cutter, and even then, it\u2019s impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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