Nothing is quite as engaging as successfully blending erudition and pleasure, although unfortunately, it is also quite rare. Petit bourgeois thinking prefers to pit presumably dry theory against the flowing presumable indeterminacy of the senses, while Vaginal Davis shows us—and not for the first time—how, that, and how differently flows and signs are dependent on one another. Paintings, rare books, and invented books, not yet written (without exception in pink), perhaps what the reader would answer to the authors, to everything—all of this not only fills one gallery (Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi) but there is even more for the second one (Eden Eden), transforming them into special rooms that lead the beauty of knowledge back to the knowledge of beauty: rooms to leave rooms behind and to track down feminist, communist, and other undesirable joys in indeterminate openness; that is, neither a safe space for pipe-smoking academics nor pure immersion into assiduous erudition. Although: Nerds are welcome.
Everything I learn here when turning to the women honored here in literature and music, film and theater, fashion and politics, is not just what I learn when working through a syllabus for Black Queer Feminist Aesthetic Theory, keenly selected and full of surprises (and that’s already quite a lot), but it is the kick of the living example. The life stories of Sonia Sanchez, Laura Nyro, Gabrielle Wittkop, Iris Owen, Nikki Giovanni that I’m drawn into here (along with four dozen equally exhilarating goddesses), are not just full of references, points, and answers to questions that we couldn’t have had a premonition of even asking, they lead into the heart of Hollywood and radical struggle and the love stories that bring the two together.
We have long known Vaginal Davis as a performer, working in all media, a musician, a director, but for some time she, as a curator and hostess, has also moderated and initiated evenings and other adult education events that not only single out forgotten and neglected treasures from film art, trash, and (anti) popular music, but bring them to a potential audience with a disarming way of speaking in turn—and she has been teaching at selected art schools. What appears in The Wicked Pavilion, alongside her performative and didactic-academic- rabble-rousing gifts, is another talent, still too little known, but recently appearing more and more distinctly: the visual artist, the painter Vaginal Davis. We recognize this in paintings that appear both as homages to this group of selected female artists (some of them are in the book and the pictures, others only in one of the two series), but also in the love of a very personal idea of installation art lived out in the spaces of the gallery. She creates spaces for a knowledge that is not trying to compare itself to the knowledge that normally needs to have spaces built for it. Some bookshops and public libraries have also managed this—and Vaginal can say a lot about growing up in the public libraries of Los Angeles and even more about the help she got digging up some of the rare books for this exhibition from the pros who worked at the Strand in New York—but as we see here, it takes a genuinely artistic program to construct such cathedrals of artificial paradises and liberation movements—no, not from sand, but from glaciers of sugar. Following the endless narratives and their interrelations, the artist asks what “The Wizard of Oz” might have to do with the suffragette movement! How Eve Babitz got one over on Duchamp, you know that anyway.
— Diedrich Diederichsen (Translated by Daniel Hendrickson)
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