The constellation of beauty and pain, of virtuosic creativity and risk, is central to how fabulousness operates: society wants nothing more than for us to play by its rules, and we're punished for it when we don't. The fact that beautiful eccentrics put themselves on the line every day despite the odds shows how important they are not only as aesthetic geniuses but as political activists too.
-madison moore, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric
"Nothing special" is a uniform: it is the uniform of the unnoticed...in fact, it may be the uniform of whiteness because there is no textile without social and cultural significance. Unnoticeability is the uniform of Americanized and Europeanized social environments because it assumes a racially non-discriminatory, informal class structure, and gender-relaxed society. The experience of complete unnoticeability , of total freedom on a sidewalk or path, is mostly a white experience.
-Ernesto Pujol, Walking Art Practice
Jessica Blinkhorn on the spectacle of the gaze and her iconographic, Leigh Bowery and Queen of the Damned- inspired looks
Jessica Blinkhorn is a visual and performing artist and activist. She graduated from Georgia State University in 2010. In 2008, she began to investigate how the disabled body functions in space by creating performance art works centered around her own body . In 2020, she found that she hit a stride in thinking about her work. The conversation around civil and human rights injustices during the pandemic still largely marginalized the voices of people with disabilities and aging populations. Blinkhorn often chooses locations that highlight the inaccessibility of public spaces. For her 2021-2022 BeltLine Flow performances, Reverent Warrior she migrated along the East and Westside trails for 3 hours, as a reverent warrior spirit, embodying the attributes, attitudes, and energies of people who have fought and continue to for justice and equity. She embraced the spectacle of the gaze in this work, and made eye contact and connection with other people along the trail she felt needed empowering. The BeltLine is a path of accessibility to Jessica, but prior to this work, Jessica performed an iteration called Reverence in areas that have failed to maintain accessibility based on ADA standards. Three (a number Jessica is deeply connected to) wheelchairs were set up in those spaces and audiences placed flowers around them creating “a mosaic of color” as a reminder what it means and what it could look like to live in an inclusive and equitable world. (1)
The interview was edited for clarity and length.
AA
The spectacle of the gaze. Some of the work that you've done before has been inside of a gallery or you've done work in a restaurant [note: it turned into a restaurant after the performance]. But the last two works before Reverence were Graze and Gaze [which happened outdoors] and those two were kind of from the perspective of everyday actions as performance, like eating, doing your makeup. I'm wondering what your thoughts are about creating public performance out of everyday actions. And what that's serving for you and the work?
JB
Well, it falls in the line of education. I'm a strict believer in: in order for there to be change, we must first acknowledge. Once we acknowledge it, we begin to learn. Once we learn, we accept. Once we accept, real changes can be made because there's an area where we can have an actual conversation without feeling offended or offending others. So, by taking something as mundane as doing my eyebrows, what you don't see or probably didn't notice in some of the photos is that I'm actually putting my eyebrows on in front of an eyebrow salon in New York that's inaccessible. There are three stairs getting into that salon. I'm dressed in this very chic long black dress with my corset and my moon brace on. I'm engaged in the spectacle of being a large, tattooed, Southern, smart mouth, vulgar, sassy little bitch that I can be. And I'm doing my makeup to club music because I love club kid culture. And I'm just taking something like putting my eyebrows on and I'm showing people how I do it, and I'm doing it in front of a place that's inaccessible, where I could easily go and have someone do it for me. But I can't because there are stairs preventing that.
I'm also taking these mundane activities and I'm using them as a way to educate people because I've literally been asked anything and everything a person could be asked. From: how do you go to the bathroom? How do you lay down? How do you brush your teeth? So why not do these things in public? To allow people to see the actions happening, to allow people to engage with the actions. I've done a performance called Assistance where people actually came up and they got to wear the gloves of a caregiver. They put the latex gloves on, they brushed my teeth, they washed my face, they combed my hair, they took my clothes off, they put my night clothes on. All in a public arena. With Graze, I find eating in public a point of insecurity for me, one: because I'm a big girl and people always assume you're going to eat a lot of food. Two: I'm a big disabled girl and my hands shake and my hands get cold, my hands get weak, I can't hold a fork, I drop food. And it makes me feel like I'm being a spectacle.
People are, like, looking at me as an object to just gaze on and laugh at and judge silently. So, I created this. I had a local artist, former student named Nika King, create me an outfit. And the outfit actually exposes my breasts. And the dress is covered with words that I've been called like "fat," "fat ass," "retard," "gimp," "cripple," all this stuff. The words are spray painted on the dress and my breasts are out and I'm wearing cow makeup. I like to call it my "Leigh Bowery-Meets Bovine Orthopedic Chic" look. And I'm sitting there and I'm eating, so I'm embracing this awkward action of something that people take for granted every day. Knowing I could drop something and ruin my dress, knowing that people are looking at how much I'm eating, knowing that my breasts are out and I'm dressed like a cow because they look at me like I'm a cow grazing in a field. But I'm using it as a way...I'm allowing them to look, I'm allowing them to look. And there is this empowerment in allowing somebody to do something. It's my way of saying, I don't fucking care what you think. I'm going to eat my meal and I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to drink my wine and I'm going to enjoy it. And if I drop this shit, I drop it. And guess what? You can either come and help me, you can clean it up or you can walk by but you will not deny my existence, because my existence matters just as much as yours. And if I can look at you without judgment, who are you to look at me with?
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AA
Can you talk about where the imagery and costuming for Reverence came from?
JB
Well, it's definitely influenced by, I would say, Renaissance, Byzantine, neoclassical works, the icon, the Madonna, things like that. It definitely pulls from that indirectly because I do have a working knowledge of art history that feeds into the visual a lot of times. I like for my performances to look like they could be paintings. That's what I like. I like to create this beautiful scene that if you were to come by and take a picture of it, it would be a beautiful picture. I try to outsource all of the things that I can't do for performances through local artists or artisans. For instance, my headdresses made by Aileen Lloyd, who is a costume maker and designer in Atlanta and has been for many years. It's inspired by Akasha, from Queen of the Damned. I always liked that very kind of Serpentine snake when she comes out in Queen of the Damned and she has that headdress. It's also inspired a little bit by Madonna's hairstyle in the Bedtime Stories music video, which has got the whirling dervishes in it and it's very dreamy and lackadaisical and surreal.
The mirrors, actually though...because when you look at my headdress there are mirrors...everything is a reference to art history. There are circular and square mirrors, and then the points are triangles. Those are the three main shapes found in all classical art and architecture. The mirrors are also a way to reflect who I am on to another person. Rather than looking at my body, look at yourself and know that at any moment you could be this person. So, people are looking at themselves indirectly through these mirrors. They're windows into what's possible and how we need to empathize. Always empathize, always face humanity with a sense of empathy.
1. All background information on Blinkhorn came from our conversation.
Witness
Spectator
Observer
voyeur
consumer
onlooker
viewer
"Much Western theatre evokes desire based upon and stimulated by the inequality between performer and spectator - and by the (potential) domination of the silent spectator. That this model of desire is apparently so compatible with (traditional accounts of) "male" desire is no accident. But more centrally this account of desire between speaker/ performer and listener/spectator reveals how dependent these positions are upon visibility and a coherent point of view. A visible and easily located point of view provides the spectator with a stable point upon which to turn on the machinery of projection, identification, and (inevitable) objectification. Performers and their critics must begin to redesign this stable set of assumptions about the positions of the theatrical exchange."
-Peggy Phelan, The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction, 1993