Now on sale
Issue 106 Winter 2009
Watch BOMB’s music video exclusive of Kalup Linzy’s Asshole Remix.
DISCLAIMER: Intended for mature audiences only.
Kalup Linzy in his KK Queens Survey, video still, 2005, digital video, color, sound. Total running time: 7 minutes. All images courtesy of the artist and Taxter and Spengemann, New York.
On a freezing winter day early in 2006 I showed up for a sparsely attended event at the Studio Museum in Harlem showcasing a few performance artists from the museum’s Frequency exhibition. Between performances, an R&B song piped incongruously throughout the room, presumably signaling intermission. Instead, heads in the audience gradually swiveled around toward a grown man behind us, barefoot and in a black leotard, crooning a Toni Braxton song into a microphone. He crept down a staircase and commanded the stage. It was the first time I saw Kalup Linzy.
Kalup is best known for his bombshell narrative videos (soap operas, really) in which he and a cast of artist-friends act out melancholic melodramas, routinely dressed in drag, often lip-synching to Kalup’s wildly manipulated prerecorded vocal tracks. Most recently, he has just finished a full-length album, recording a music video for each song.
After curating Shades of Black and White, a solo exhibition of Kalup’s black-and-white videos at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, also in 2006, I asked Kalup and Shaun Leonardo (a recurring character in Kalup’s videos) to collaborate with me on a performance at NurtureArt in Brooklyn. Shortly after, Kalup asked me to host(ess) his birthday party performance, also at P.S. 1. This openness toward collaboration, toward other’s ideas and interpretations, is one of Kalup’s exceptional qualities. Another is how his work cuts through the murky terrain of stereotypes—of blackness, gayness, normalcy, and the art world—without being cynical. Like John Waters’s films, Kalup’s can be uncomfortable, raunchy, and outrageous. Also like Waters, he makes them with love.
(Interview)