Jibz Cameron, the performance artist and poet of female panic who goes by the moniker Dynasty Handbag, is trying to make more user-friendly work. Cameron has made her name by staging wild and incandescent actions that make you feel excitedly deranged. In her 2015 show Come On at the RADAR Queerfail Festival, she imagined trying to seduce a prospective lover by sticking out her butt and singing encouragements like “come on my face!” “come on my tooth!” in a high-pitched Phyllis Diller squeal. In Live Birth! she appeared before her audience in a black cowboy hat and Spanx, and proceeded to pantomime herself bitchily expelling a fetus while screaming out insults to an invisible wife in a combo baby voice/Exorcist demon growl. And in a 2016 video titled Oh, Hummingbird she appeared in a naked suit with drawn-on droopy breasts and a big bush to sing merry Anthropocene warnings like “Oh hummingbird/just a word/do be careful when munching that flower/because it may have been rained on by/toxic clouds of polluted gas.”
Cameron’s antics earned her the praise of the late critic José Esteban Muñoz, who singled her out in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity as an artist who imagined possible futures apart from capitalist and heteronormative models. Muñoz praised Cameron’s performance of “failure”—her displays of her botched efforts to gain love, look like a natural mother, and deal with environmental devastation: “Dynasty Handbag’s queer failure is not an aesthetic failure but, instead, a political refusal. It is going off script, and the script in this instance is the mandate that makes queer and other minoritarian cultural performers work not for themselves for but distorted cultural hierarchy,” he wrote.
One may hypothesize, rightly, that a lesbian feminist performance artist who dedicates her career to limning failure via political refusal may perhaps not earn a ton of cash while so engaged. The entire point of staging actions that require audiences to travel from comfort to bemusement to disgust and finally to radical re-imagining requires that the artist liberate herself from an entertainment market trapped in an eternal return to reassuring remakes and a patriarchy of superheroes.
Even if the artist wants to go on-script for a while so as to make a couple of ducats, that’s pretty hard to accomplish, too: In a 2015 issue of Jacobin Magazine, Canadian academic Miranda Campbell observed that “despite the supposed glamor of being an artist, most earn an income that falls near or below the poverty line.” In May 2016, the Atlantic Monthly rightfully lambasted Minneapolis’ artist-supportive housing for serving mostly white tenants, who earned a still-not-princely average income of $29,890. One of the best essays on this topic is poet Morgan Parker’s 2015 My Dreams of Being a Feminist Housewife, where she confesses: “I have approximately six jobs. My friends and my mom say I am ‘overextended’ and wonder about the psychology around my impulse to ‘do too much.’ It is very simple. It is the psychology of the poor.”
Thus it came with little surprise that Cameron tried to style last Sunday afternoon’s performance, I, An Moron, at the Hammer Museum, as more of a peppy variety act than as a master class in white female abjection. She announced as much at the beginning of her set in the Hammer’s packed, dark Annex, when she relayed that she was in television development talks (rumors have it with Jack Black’s outfit Electric Dynamite), and currently cherished a goal of trying to “make more accessible work for the masses.” She hoped to avoid a future filled with museum acts like this one, with its miserable pittances that were the equivalent of the Hammer, that “baking soda capital of the world,” “tak[ing] a shit in [her] mouth.”
As such asides might indicate, Dynasty Handbag’s dreams of financial security couldn’t completely kill her nihilist streak, thank God! She started family friendly enough, dressed in a dapper white pantsuit and talking about lesbians who BYO hemp water to cultural events, because they are so environmentally conscious that they won’t use corporately wasteful and probably racist Dixie cups for soy milk beverages that are responsible for destroying the rain forest. “We lesbians always have a large hairy foot in the responsible hole,” she noted.
Cameron started to bring back the freak soon enough, though—oh, here’s Dynasty Handbag stripping to her flesh-colored Spanx and giving birth with groans and Beelzebub screams to an invisible tot—oh, here’s Dynasty Handbag now talking about how she got pregnant with her wife’s eggs and her dog’s, stepfather’s, and brother’s sperm. Next came a super weird bit where Dynasty Handbag enacted “being in a woman’s body” and her joy of “being in my golden globe” by pretending to pick muffin crumbs out of her sweats for several minutes, and then pantomiming washing her feet for several more. Next, she sang Led Zeppelin’s “Over the Hills and Far Away” (Hey lady—you got the love I need/Maybe more than enough) in a frantic shriek and then shouted “This is going to get me into the Whitney MacArthur Guggenheim gift card, but if not, I don’t care because I’ve got Hollywood!”
Successful comedy can be art. Louis C.K., Sarah Silverman and Chris Rock, among others, have touched that ephemeral intersection. But performance this filled with unmediated vaginitis does not typically rake in the dollars, because it makes you look at where you’ve placed your own large hairy foot in the distorted cultural hierarchy. Maybe the near future will see a fully naked Dynasty Handbag teaching us acerbic yet soothing life lessons on a mid-budget HBO property. But for now, Dynasty’s still here with her full-blown crazy, and we can always dream of an equitable state that offers generous stipends for the nuttiest and most brilliant artists working today.
Photographs by Yxta Maya Murray
So thrilled that you wrote this up — & dismayed that I missed it. I LOVE Dynasty Handbag!