I went to MoMA PS1 two days before Vaginal Davis’s “Magnificent Product” opened and had the sublime pleasure of meeting Ms. Davis herself, at work at a table in one of the galleries. She is one of those people who draws you into her world, even just with conversation—during ours, we learned we were both born in 1961. “So were Kembra Pfahler and Ron Athey,” she noted, naming two legendary peers and collaborators. “So was President Barack Obama,” Davis added. “Oh, she’s holding up well,” I said, and we fell about laughing.
I mention this to frame my contention that Davis is one of the leading artists of her generation. And I mean that without qualification: not the leading queer artist or trans artist or Black artist or punk artist or performing artist, though she may be all of those too. Davis is the artist who for me seized upon and transformed the most relevant swath of cultural material of her era. And she still does.
“Magnificent Product” is not exactly a retrospective. Davis continually repurposes, revises, and expands on her own body of work, along with everything else her method ingests. It’s a method continually on the lookout for fragments of the shared culture that can be cut from their world with a view to making them part of a world of her own. Those fragments can be copied, reduced, reimagined, and reinstalled in a constellation with other fragments to suggest an alternate reality. In this other reality, all of these fragments, whether from classic Hollywood, pop music, gay porn, or rock ’n’ roll, come to belong to Davis. And yet it’s a world that wants to share. There’s a generosity to it. She takes from the world of straight life, makes a queer alternate world, and invites you into it.
It’s not queer as in rainbow-kitties-uwu. It’s queer as in fuck you. But not fuck you in the angry, confrontational style of punk. It’s fuck you as in just not caring what the haters might think about any of it. There’s something femme about it all. A low-femme confidence in the ability to appear in the world in such a way as to make the world appear in her image.
My favorite works are two parts of what make up the installation The Wicked Pavillion, individually titled Fantasia Library and Tween Bedroom (both 2021). The Fantasia Library includes a vitrine of source materials and walls of books Davis never quite got around to writing. Here are some choice titles of these nonexistent books: Sex Lizard, Can You Call, Employee Entrance, My Ginger’s Semen, A Subjective Turn, Look Who, and—my favorite—Your Pussy Killed My Husband.
At the center of Davis’s world are women of all kinds, often Black women. Starting with her name—the “Davis” part she chose a long time ago in honor of the writer, scholar, and political militant Angela Davis. What kind of things might a militant artist make? There’s an abundance of answers to that across the decades’ worth of Davis’s work spread across the galleries of this show. The core and periphery of the mediasphere are not just inverted but upended.
There are men too, if they’re hot. Male bodies are available as objects, for their beauty. It’s not just an inversion of the male gaze, the white gaze, the cis gaze—it’s a playful array of tactics, in and against media of all kinds, to create a joyful femme-centered alternate spectacle. It takes it as a given that you get it—you get the need for a critical distance from actually existing culture. It doesn’t just linger there. We dive pell-mell into this other world.
“Magnificent Product” is giving a lavish serving of Davis’s extensive body of work, going all the way back to her first show, in a local public library at age 8. The expansive installation work Naked on my Ozgoad: Fausthaus—Anal Deep Throat (2024–ongoing) is a collaboration with Jonathan Berger that revisits a precious moment when a young Davis reimagined the world of The Wizard of Oz, revised to her own specifications. The small cast-aluminum sculptures in this work are a delightful manifestation of Davis’s transformative alchemy.
Vaginal Davis: Middle Sex 2024.
Photo Steven Paneccasio. Courtesy MoMA PS1.
Tween Bedroom imagines what might have been a formative creative scene. A single bed with a giant cock splayed across it rotates in the center, under a clothesline hung with images and posters. In the corner, a makeup table. Together they are the elements of private desires, public fantasies, and makeup as a mediator.
Next door is a generous selection of Davis’s portraits of women, many executed primarily with makeup. There’s something almost sacred about them, or sacred in a way specific to Davis’s world—in the way makeup invokes the face rather than decorates it.
Davis has always been an artist whose method is curatorial: always selecting, framing, arranging, thematizing. HAG: small, contemporary, haggard (2012) is a nod toward a gallery she ran in Los Angeles from 1982 to 1989, which she later revisited in New York at Participant Inc. Among the components of the work are bread sculptures of Mariah Carey and Justin Timberlake.
Hofpfisterei (2024/2025) devotes space to Davis as a writer, with facsimiles of her famous zines, such as Fertile Latoya Jackson, which viewers can duplicate for themselves on a photocopier provided. I’d love to see an edited collection of Davis’s writing someday.
There’s hardly a medium that Davis hasn’t worked in—and worked over. Writing, publishing, music, video, sculpture, performing (drag and otherwise)—“Magnificent Product” pulls them all together as parts of one ongoing practice. MoMA PS1 has adapted the original Moderna Museet version of the show thoughtfully to the context of New York. The exhibition is more a prospective than a retrospective. It’s a show that gathers everything Vaginal in one giant handbag, for the most epic carry forward.
