Performance Still (Clifford Owens Seminar at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY)
2013
Gender
queer artist KRIS GREY/JUSTIN CREDIBLE’s interdisciplinary practice
includes video and ceramics, as well as a variety of performance modes:
storytelling, drag, educational lectures, social interaction in public
space and endurance. They explore the intersection of gendered
embodiment, authority, intimacy and social justice. Kris received their
BFA in Ceramics from Maryland Institute College of Art (2003) and their
MFA in Fine Arts from Ohio University (2012). They perform and lecture
internationally, most recently at Performatorium: Making It, Difficult at Neutral Ground Contemporary Art Forum at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada and Performing Franklin Furnace, curated by Clifford Owens at Participant Inc. in New York. Gender/Power, a collaboration with Maya Ciarrocchi, will begin a series of 2015 residencies at Baryshnikov Arts Center in March, Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn in the summer and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Process Space in the fall. From March 25 - 28, 2015, you can see Gender/Power performances at Gibney Dance Center
in New York City. Kris will be the 2015 Perry Lecturer at Whitman
College in Walla Walla, Washington. Kris’s home base is Brooklyn.
OtherPeoplesPixels: Both your BFA and MFA are in Ceramics, but it seems that you are now focused on performance, video and social activism. What led to the shift from object-making to performance? Do you still find time for the studio? Do you ever miss object-making as a practice?
Kris Grey: I’ve been making objects and performances in parallel for as long as I can remember. I developed a performance persona named Justin Credible
as a parallel to my studio practice in the early 2000s. That character
allowed me to perform an array of alternative masculinities through drag
performance. As Justin, I organized and performed with the Charm City
Kitty Club from 2005-2009. I also performed in bars and on stages all
over Baltimore and the Washington DC metro area. It wasn’t until grad
school that I started producing performance and live art under the
banner of visual art—in essence combining my creative identities.
I come to my work through craft. The way I use my body is closely tied to the way I use clay or other sculptural materials. With clay I work through form and build objects that exhibit, subvert or superseded gendered expectations. Ceramics is magical alchemy! You combine materials, manipulate forms and then place them under extreme duress to produce beauty. The material qualities of the body are similar. Bodies are always marked by socialization. Much in the way that clay records its own history, the body reveals its own stories. Flesh is pliable and plastic. It can be formed and reformed just like clay.
I have taken that methodology on as a life project. My body is my main raw material. I use hormones and surgeries as a way to craft a queer form outside the binary of male and female. The material may change, but the core interests are constant—namely gender, authority and social justice.
OPP: “Ask A Tranny is an ongoing, interactive, public performance, social action and online project" which has been performed in Newark, London, Baltimore and Kuopio, Finland. How do you pick where to perform this piece? Has one place been more challenging than another? Where did you receive the most welcoming, enthusiastic response?
KG: The first time I performed Ask A Tranny (AAT) I was in London on a study abroad trip. I didn’t even have a passport before that summer. I was 30 years old, and travel was something I thought to be beyond my class status. Getting a passport probably seems simple to most people, although costly. However, for me there was a major consideration about what “sex” I should list myself as. I am gender-queer identified with a transgender history. I don’t self-identify as either male or female exclusively. When I applied for my passport, I had begun to take testosterone and my appearance was somewhere on the masculine spectrum though I didn’t have facial hair. I’ve never had the intention of changing my ID sex markers since I feel the M/F binary is arbitrary and insufficient. I am listed as “F” on all of my IDs including my license and my passport. I like to think of that F as standing for feminism. I saw my new passport as a conversation piece that made passing through security checkpoints particularly contentious. Whether I’m holding a passport or a sign, I’m enacting the same “performance”—performing myself as gender-queer for an audience of strangers and with differing stakes. At a border I risk detainment. In the public there are different risks. The passport and the cardboard sign both function as prompts for conversations around gender, embodiment and self-actualization.
Since travel provoked this work, it seemed appropriate to perform it in many different geographical locations. I made a sign that fits into my suitcase and I take it along wherever I go. I usually perform in places of public gathering. Some sites have a particular resonance their history, for example Speakers Corner. I’ve run AAT in public parks, shopping centers and on college campuses. Sometimes there is resistance from police or authority figures who think, at first, that I am soliciting money. It helps to know and understand local laws for public use, which can vary greatly across cultures. In general, it is not illegal to hold a sign and conduct conversations in public spaces. That is what happens in AAT. The result, when I appear in public and make myself vulnerable, is that strangers meet me there with their own care and vulnerability. We exchange stories and create empathetic connections. Gender and my transness is the place we start but the conversations are as varied as the participants. Every single time I’ve performed AAT, I have had genuine, interesting and transcendent experiences with people I’ve never met before and will likely never see again.
OPP: Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that tranny
is generally considered a derogatory term these days. I can definitely
see that you are reclaiming the term and therefore controlling it's
perception with your performance, but I wonder if you ever get push back
within the trans community for using the term tranny?
KG: I use the term tranny to identify myself. It’s personal to me. You are correct. Tranny is a trigger word that makes some folks feel unsafe. Though I’m very intentional in my use, I know that this particular word can be difficult and potentially harmful for those people. I would never say I’m “reclaiming” the word tranny. As someone on the trans masculine spectrum, it is not mine to reclaim. There is a great wide debate about who may use the term and who should not. I am certainly not advocating any position by my use of the word to identify myself.
I make my work with sincerity and I am always open to being challenged or critiqued. When people attend the public performances or see video footage I think that sincerity is communicated.
Performance Still (The Ice Palace at Cherry Grove, NY)
2012
OPP: While looking at all your work online, I was reminded of Bob Flanagan nailing his penis to a board, Stelarc's suspension and body modification and Marina Abramovic's 1974 performance Rhythm 0. Suspicious Packages (2010 and 2012) also reminds me at times of Martha Rossler's seminal feminist video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975). How does your work relate to the art historical trajectory of endurance work?
KG:
I’ve certainly been influenced by all the artists you list. I hope that
my work continues in a legacy built of live art/body work, AIDS
activism and feminism. I could make a list a mile long of writers,
artists and activists I admire and seek to emulate. Trans* and gender
queer artists like Kate Bornstein, Del LaGrace Volcano, Vaginal Davis, Leon Mostovoy, Heather Cassils and Tobaron Waxman come to mind. Body/live art artists including Linda Montano, Annie Sprinkle, Elizabeth Stephens, Barbara Hammer, Martha Wilson, Julie Tolentino, Rocio Boliver, Franko B, Dominic Johnson and Ron Athey,
inspire me. I owe a great deal to the leadership and guidance of my
teachers and mentors from high school to the present. While I look to
other artists for inspiration, I am also indebted to the body workers
and healers, trans* people, queers, crafters, sex workers and outcasts
who have made their lives and work outside the frame of visual art.
Intergenerational dialog has been the key to my development in performance. I’ve had the great pleasure of performing for and working with amazing artists. Ron Athey’s work and writing have deeply influenced me and I’m so humbled to have built a relationship with him over the past two years. The first time I performed Homage, in 2013, Ron installed my chest piercings. In January 2015, we both performed in Regina, Saskatchewan, at Performatorium. We had the chance to participate in each other’s work again. This time, Ron worked together with another artist, Jon John, to help prepare my body for my performance. It’s an incredibly intimate thing to bring other people into your work through your body. And it’s such a gift when the people you admire invite you to perform in their work, as Ron did at Performatorium. That’s the best kind of mentorship for a live artist!
OPP: Whether in casual conversations in public spaces, in videos like How To Perform Trans Visibility in Three Easy Steps (2012) or in storytelling performances like Body Dialectic
(2012), you project a warm, down-to-earth presence. You put people at
ease and make it comfortable for them to ask questions. Is this just
your personality or something you to cultivate and maintain?
KG: It may just be my personality. I was always coming home with report cards from school with teacher comments that read “too social in class.” I’ve always been interested in people; I just want to tell stories and hear stories. In a way I’ve built my practice around that desire. But being welcoming is a practice I’ve cultivated over time. I grew up in hospitality. My parents owned a small, seasonal motel in Upstate New York. I worked there from the time that I was in diapers until I left for college in Baltimore. While other kids were on summer vacations with their family, I was working. The motel was very formative. It brought strangers from all over into my life. I learned how to entertain.
OPP: Do you generally feel drained or jazzed after a public performance?
KG: Some of the content of my work is challenging. The core of my identity is an agitation to the very structure of binary socialization. I work through the lens of gender, but I’m ultimately interested in disrupting systems of power and dominance. I find it most effective to lead with vulnerability. I get nervous before I perform, sometimes for weeks before I appear on stage or in public. I’m an extrovert and something of an exhibitionist, but when the content of the work is so raw and personal I find it necessary to recharge after. During and immediately following a performance I feel elated. Some works, like Homage and (sub)Merge, take me through my body and out. Homage is really a meditative transcendence. Afterwards, I feel very vulnerable and fragile. I try to treat myself tenderly and with extra care. Sometimes that means that I need to be alone in a space that feels safe.
Performance Still (Athens, OH)
2011
OPP: I love what you say about leading with
vulnerability. Personally, I believe that social and political change
can be best brought about through activism based in storytelling, as
opposed to protest, although they can certainly work in tandem. I’m
thinking specifically about the changes in representations of LGBTQ
characters in TV and movies over the last decade.
KG: I
agree. Storytelling is an incredibly effective tool for social change. I
cannot say if it's more or less effective than protest or if there is a
clear delineation between the two. ACT UP and Gran Fury
created an incredible amount of social change through protest. There is
a vast difference between mainstream media storytelling and
street-level activism, but it's hard to totally dismiss television
programs because they have an incredibly wide reach. I think it's
dangerous to judge work based on political efficacy alone.
We
may also be thinking about storytelling in different ways. In my
practice, direct community engagement through storytelling—and by
storytelling, I mean people saying their truths of their lives in their words out loud to others for witness—can create revolution.
Performance Still (Athens, OH)
2012
OPP: What are your thoughts on recent media representations of trans characters, specifically Sophia Burset from Orange is the New Black and Maura Pfefferman from Transparent?
KG: The radical potential of trans* narratives is that they could disrupt a
central power structure which touches every part of our lives: binary
gender. I will say that we’ve never had a champion like Lavern Cox. She is such an incredible force, and I’m proud of the conversations she’s creating off screen. I admire her tremendously.
I
am wary of mainstream media. Some of my earliest memories of trans*
people come from daytime talk shows I saw as a kid. Someone would come
out and be introduced to the audience who would be waiting with placards
to guess if the guest was a man or a woman. From that kind of
sensationalism, which still happens today, we have newer exploitations
where after a lengthy introduction, the trans* guests break down and
thank the host for letting them tell their story. . . except they hadn't
just told their story! The host had interpreted and mediated it for the
audience.
Consistently, in movies, on television and in the
news, trans* people are portrayed as pathological. The dominant
narrative produced is of being trapped in the wrong body. The wrong body
narrative, so closely tied to the definition of transexualism
from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, centers
heteronormativity and distracts from any variation on the male/female
binary. This dominant narrative reaffirms trans* folks as a strange
apparition in need of medical and psychological intervention rather than
a part of human diversity and who need access to life chances in
health, housing, education and employment. Further, it skirts the real
societal ills— sexism, misogyny, patriarchy and racism—that produce
violence.
I suppose what I want to say here is that it depends
on who's doing the telling. Trans* characters are increasingly complex;
this is a good thing. The media machines that produce them are starting
to cast actual trans* people, though not all the time and certainly not
enough. I think trans* roles can be played by trans* people but I also
think trans* actors can play non-trans roles. We often hear backlash
when a cisgender person gets cast as a trans* character, but I'd like to
see more diverse casting across all media, on TV, on stage, in movies,
etc. Instead of casting for the lead “female” role, why not just cast
for the role? Don’t immediately limit the possibilities of who could
play that person. I want to see new representations of gender-queer and
non-binary folks. It’s totally fine for people to feel like they’ve been
“trapped in the wrong body,” but I don’t feel that way. I’d like to see
more visibility for other non-binary people who feel differently.
Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an instructor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Recent exhibitions include solo shows I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (2013) at Klemm Gallery, Siena Heights University (Adrian, Michigan) and Everything You Need is Already Here (2014) at Heaven Gallery in Chicago, as well as Here|Now, a two-person exhibition curated by MK Meador and also featuring the work of Jason Uriah White, at Design Cloud in Chicago (2014). Most recently, Stacia created When Things Fall Apart, a durational, collage installation in the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center. Closing reception guests were invited to help break down the piece by pulling pins out of the wall.