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Christine Flok: What is it about the art of drag that enticed you to use it to compose much of your work? |
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A Slave to the Rhythm – Christine Flok speaks with artist Derek Jackson
Christine Flok: What is it about the art of drag that enticed you to use it to compose much of your work?
Derek Jackson: I have never met someone who didn’t like to play dress up. Fashion is—from child warriors in the Congo to Madison Avenue—it’s a basic human impulse to express yourself through clothing and accessories, whether aesthetic, functional or ceremonial. It’s a huge industry and simultaneously personal and subjective. Fashion is a language that I use to create possibility, an opportunity to take a safe risk, to deconstruct, subvert or empower our strategies for representation. By mostly absenting clothing from my current work, I am still referencing an idea about fashion and how it can serve as a cultural location device. The focus on emotion and gesture rather than clothing or character is an invitation to the viewer to dress the subject with his or her own ideas of love and hate, pride and humility, solace and solitude.
CF: Your photographs tend to appear as movie stills. How do you go about photographing your subjects? Are your subjects normally people who are familiar and comfortable with drag?
DJ: One of the ways I learned photography was by doing model testing for modeling and talent agencies. As a performer, I knew how to direct the models and used the opportunity to learn photographic technique. It was sort of like water-skiing. At a certain point I learned how to kick off one ski. That’s like making the leap from working with a subject who is aspiring to be a model to working with a civilian. I am still required to direct, and regardless of the person’s experience level, my directorial approach begins with a mutual willingness and trust. The added layer of photographic control is like the water in my ski analogy, infinitely variable and constantly changing.
CF: It is disappointing to see many queer artists only represented in larger cities. Coming from Chelsea, Massachusetts do you think your work would be accepted as easily there as in NYC? Or even a smaller town somewhere in "middle America?"
DJ: My day job from 1999-2004 was as an artist representative for contemporary dance companies. I worked with regional presenters on booking a roster of about 12 companies ranging from large international groups to young solo performers. One of my greatest challenges was convincing a presenter from a rural or "off center" organization to take a chance on an unknown entity. I understand the onerous task of introducing challenging material, but I also feel that presenters have a responsibility to educate their audiences. This difficulty is compounded by a situation in which a presenter has no local constituency–—no press affiliates that will help frame a critical context, no higher educational alliances that will partner on programming and no local commercial or social service interests that relate to the work of a particular artist.
As for my own work and the efficacy of queer culture outside of major metropolitan areas, one of the primary ways my work functions is the direct involvement of individuals from many different cultural communities. When a person sits for me, a relationship is formed that is based on exchange. I learn about their lives and re-present their stories on some level to a broader audience and they in turn are exposed to and share in the process of a working artist. I also give all of my subjects documentation—whether it is a video project, photograph or painting. Sometimes this work, which they have helped to create, is the first art they have "acquired.”
CF: Your most recent project is a series of portraits in homage to Peter Hujar, a photographer who died of AIDS. What is the concept of this project and how is it different from your previous ones?
DJ: The series began in 2004 with black and white portraits of friends, lovers and fellow artists. I imagine that if Hujar were still alive he would have been a friend, maybe even a lover, or possibly a mentor. So I began this new work with the hope of addressing a kind of genealogical or artistic gap created by the pandemic… At first, I tried to mimic Hujar’s style—minimal natural light portraits that involved very little direction for the sitter. I thought that the shoot was successful when the subject was uncomfortable because they didn’t know what to do, that it meant that I was subverting my artistic ego. I’ve since found the balance between directing and letting the subject’s personality come through. I have made almost 200 portraits since 2004, processing the film and paper by hand, and sending work prints and contact sheets to the subjects. I am now in the final stage of editing that incorporates my earlier methods of combining photographs to create diptychs, triptychs and larger compilations.
I began working with the Bakery Photographic Collective in Portland, Maine in 2004 when the series began. In exchange for helping maintain this artist-run collective darkroom, I am allowed 24-hour access to a full service print facility. The experience of time spent perfecting individual prints has dramatically altered my approach to the photograph as a formal object. Back in the day, I was shooting all of the time but never really making prints. I would get the film, mostly 35mm color, developed at a lab and have 4×6 prints made that I would scan onto a computer. I would lay out the images in groups and, in that way, deal with conceptual threads. I started to run into problems when invited to do exhibitions because I hadn’t been making exhibition size or quality prints and thus hadn’t really been dealing with issues of editing or format. The homage to Hujar is a return to photographic essentials; a back to the basics. A step I admittedly skipped as a self-taught photographer who honed my skills by assisting mostly commercial photographers working digitally or with large budgets. My current process is much more hands-on and satisfies my early artistic impulses with painting and drawing. I am even more literally "painting with light.” I also have a background in performance having studied theater for many years and getting my undergraduate degree in experimental theater. As with my earlier photography-based projects, I consider portraiture to be the culmination of both visual and performing arts, rendering the body’s image and understanding the body from the inside out. The conversation with Hujar’s legacy remains an exercise in intimacy, the pleasure of seeing and being seen, and the articulation through light and shadow of the body’s inherent narrative.
CF: Social change and awareness is a subject as well as a goal of many artists. On that note, VisualAIDS is a project that you have contributed to. Can you explain the organization as well as your role in it?
DJ: I was a raver during the early nineties. Tethered to NYU, a multi-national educational conglomerate as a student by day, I would work as a go-go dancer in gay clubs then meet up and go to raves or after hour parties with my skater, punk, young artist and the one or two obscenely underage poster girl (raver) friends. It was less Kids meets Party Monster and much more an exploration in identity construction. In the club, it doesn’t matter who you are and you can be anything for a night. The flip side of this freedom is its dependency on drugs and alcohol, numerous and fleeting sexual encounters and an insular momentum that rarely intersects with the main stream save for a couple of independent films and a talk show appearance. Eventually the make-up comes off. I saw people go down and more than once woke up with too many questions.
You never quite stop raving. The beat goes on. I quit the nightlife by the mid-nineties when I started grad school. I was suddenly in the world of daytime, with blue hair and platforms I went out in search of internships and the chance to floss what I learned in the clubs. The world of arts administration is sort of like seeing the Wizard of Oz, the unassuming creature behind some fabulous illusion. I think it was 1996 when I first went and visited the Visual AIDS office. They had been listed by my school as an intern host and so I got an interview. It was a one-man show and the office filled with stacks of paper and artwork just looked like an uphill battle. I was asked by the director if I would be willing to help connect Visual AIDS with African American and Latino communities. I responded by telling him that if he wanted to connect to those communities he should do it himself.
It’s now ten years later. I have been a member of the Visual AIDS Archive since I was diagnosed HIV positive in 2000. I sometimes think about that man and wonder. I haven’t really asked Amy or Nelson who run the office now about him. And I don’t remember his name. Sometimes I like to think that maybe he was actually the guy who invented the Red Ribbon and A Day Without Art…or that the question he asked me was finally answered by someone who was willing to undertake his request and because of that, I myself, an African American artist is a part of the organization today.
I didn’t do the Visual AIDS internship. I was phasing out of my Liquid Sky Design nightlife uniform and moving into academic ethno-chic. Figuring I had survived the rave days and could go on to a life of middle-management in large regional arts organizations I moved to Brooklyn and threw away my platform shoes. I started thinking a lot about race and misaligned the details of my identity as a queer black male artist with blue hair and Otherness. I finally landed an internship at “In the Life,” a nationally aired GLBT television show, where I did data entry and took long lunches. I knew enough by that point not to wear my club clothes or attitude in the daytime. One day, while I was still adjusting to the sunlight, I had to go with the production crew on a site visit. It was for a story about GMHC, which I only knew had something to do with AIDS. I don’t think I had ever been tested for HIV but wasn’t paranoid about it. I had never really seen anyone with AIDS and the photographs I had seen were so dramatic as to fall into the genre of special effects or Anime. In the club, everyone is beautiful. And potentially lethal. This "not knowing" was just as intoxicating as drugs or alcohol. On the day of the site visit, I was probably hung-over. I didn’t really know much about the organization GMHC and just hoped that it would be a quick location scout then back to the office and some Indian Food. I followed the crew to the roof of the building where they made a few notes while I wistfully pondered the sparse architecture and monolithic lighting. Five minutes and we were on the way out. Thankful that my exposure to the advanced effects of HIV and AIDS remained with my choice to pick up a People Magazine, I made for the door. The sunlight from the roof had been so bright that I hadn’t seen under the bit of shadow, a tall emaciated queen wearing a baby doll Tee, baggy jeans, and eight inch stacks. I tried not to look in his eyes as I passed lest I come face to face with the intimation of my future.
My diagnosis was something like a final straw. A new way that I could either consider myself different or the same as other people. Visual AIDS and the organization’s message that AIDS IS NOT OVER works on the singular and multiplicitous tip by including artists with HIV and AIDS in a public slide archive and hosting guest-curated web galleries, video screenings, broadside campaigns, material grants and exhibitions. My most significant long-term working relationships have resulted from Visual AIDS. Connections to people like me who may have and may still be slaves to the rhythm.
