'Red Shoe for Susana.'
I love the show. Can you tell me how it came together?
I personally think it’s one of those times when you can say: it’s perfect. Everything in it I wouldn’t change. They’re like little crystalline jewels, and it’s presented just the right way. I don’t know if you saw it when the photograph was up? But that really finishes it, completes it. There’s a photograph of myself and Lady Jaye prior to any surgeries of androgyny, but both looking very androgynous, naked, entwined. When you look it from behind all the shoes, it turns it into a shrine. It’s much more clearly a shrine at that point.
That’s interesting. I love androgyny.
That’s the basic theme, of course—the end of either/or, not just the fluidity of becoming one or another. We had a way of explaining it: some people feel they’re a man trapped in a woman’s body, some people feel they’re a woman trapped in a man’s body, but a pandrogyne feels they’re just trapped in a body. So, that’s why it’s about the end of biological perception—it’s time to totally forget about the package, the ‘cheap suitcase,’ as Jaye would call it, and recognize the self you identify when you say ‘I'—that’s consciousness. It’s not in any way to belittle the progress that’s been made in terms of identity and people like to create their own narrative—it’s that there are no limitations at all except one’s own imagination. Flesh isn’t it. It’s consciousness—that’s who we are, and it’s time to stop being distracted by stereotypes, no matter how radical the stereotype may seem. That’s something we’d been thinking about for a very long time. You said you liked it—what did you feel? I’m curious about how people respond.
I don’t even know. It’s kind of monstrous—it’s fashion meets macabre—but then it’s also playful.
That’s good, you see. It’s nonverbal—it’s bypassing explanations and ways that we perceive things and explain things. When they’re being made it’s very intuitive, it’s almost like a trance state. I don’t know if you saw what they’re made of, the materials, but all those squares of wood that have patents in them—they’re all antique blocks for printing fabric that we collected in Katmandu over the last 30 years. All the shoes have, at some time, belonged to sex workers—transexual dominatrixes, biological female dominatrixes, go-go dancers, strippers, hookers, you name it. All of them have been connected to the interplay between the sexuality, the body and desire.
Then you have all the pieces of iron, the little wiggly ones that actually represent pythons, and the ones that look a bit like umbrellas—they’re all from West Africa, from the voodoo ceremonies that I was initiated in about three years ago when we were making the documentary, where we were investigating. There’s a huge twin cult in voodoo in West Africa, so we were fascinated by what that was about and what it might be, what it might explain, because we felt that we were two parts of one. The minute we got there, the first night we were in the little tiny town square drinking beer, and I was facing a different direction than everyone else and I saw this very tall figure in blue robes and in the shadows that just seemed to float, and as we were looking we said out loud, ‘I think that’s a priest,’ and everyone turned round, but they’d gone, vanished. Then the next day our guide said, ‘Would you like to come and meet our family for dinner?’ so we said, ‘Yeah, of course,’ and we went to their house on that side of the compound behind a wall in the town square—so it wasn’t magic, the father was very tall, he was the high priest of all the voodoo there, as it turned out, and he’d just gone in the gate, but we couldn’t see that in the shadows. So, it wasn’t so mysterious. Then he looked at me and he went, ‘You had a twin, but she died and you’re wearing her gold earrings.’ My hair was down so you couldn’t see my ears, and I was wearing Lady Jaye’s gold earrings. And we always saw each other as the other’s half, as twins, and that’s when they started to initiate me into the twin cult and the python cult. So, all those bits of metal are from that trip, and that investigation. That was three or four years ago, it was over a whole year, the documentary premiered at the Rubin.
I don’t know if you noticed all the little fish, but they were from our fish tank. We’d put feeder fish in for the other fish, and when they died we’d dry them out and keep them. So, everything is little fragments of ritualizing daily life, which made total sense when we were in Africa, or in Kathmandu, with the different tribes of that part of Africa, that’s how they view life—there’s no separation between mystery and mundanity. It’s all interlinked. You can be walking to the office in your office clothes, and literally we saw a woman stop and sacrifice a goat, then carry on to work, and no one looked at her because it’s a part of daily life—this mystery and nonverbal communication and devotion are all absolutely integrated into everything that happens. Domestic or banal objects can actually have great significance if you know more about them, and that’s kind of the root of what we were doing with the show. And shoes are just such a wonderful thing to work with, because they’re already a fetish.
Lady Jaye was your partner?
She was my other half, yeah. She left her body in 2007. She was a professional dominatrix and a registered nurse, so her whole life was about the human body and the tensions of fixing it, and attacking it in a way—that strange combination that people have.