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Nicholas Jenkins is a New York-based filmmaker and video artist.
I am a filmmaker and former underground warehouse party promoter based in New York. I am the founder of Sterile Cowboys & Co., the entity that produced PRODUCT, a monthly cable access show in New York, which aired between 2000 and 2004. This subcultural magazine not only showcased pop culture excess, but it also solicited and aired short contributions by non-commercial/ experimental video artists and filmmakers that were not getting the recognition or airplay they merited. Conceived as an anthropological urban study, PRODUCT became a public outlet for how fringe culture is produced and redistributed to the masses. I’ve always been fascinated with fringe culture and its uneasy relationship with the mainstream. It has always prided itself as being an “outsider.” Yet, in reality, it is an inherent part of the mainstream capitalist system. As history has repeatedly proven, the avant-garde always ended up being devoured by the system and becoming co-modified and sold back to the masses in a more palatable form.
My most recent project, one that I have been working on for the last two years, is a collaboration with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, the performance artist, and co-founder of the video art and experimental music group, Psychic TV (PTV3.) Exploring the malleability of physical and behavioral identity, P-Orridge and his/her life partner, Lady Jaye (who died in October 2007,) garnered attention by undergoing medical procedures to eliminate their physical differences. Merging their identities to create a new gender—the pandrogyne, a hermaphroditic entity—they documented every aspect of their body modification process (before, during, and after surgery.) During this time period, I discovered their extremely graphic, and sometimes shocking footage, which I later worked into other videos that I made for them. I decided to gloss over the harsh realities of body modification—of the bruised, swollen, and bloody bodies—with a contrasting video depicting the process as much more glamorous and stylized. This kind of fetishization of plastic surgery and body modification—procedures considered extremist and radical just a few years ago—is not so dissimilar to the approach of current mainstream media. My film, New York Story is a fictional recreation of their life and art practice.
