Synth-Pop Singer Peaches’s First Solo Museum Show Is Brash, Provocative, and Definitely NSFW

When you hear the name Peaches, you probably think of the
brash, 52-year-old
Berlin-based musician who became a Y2K sensation with her
album Teaches of
Peaches, which featured
the shocking and deeply catchy song, “Fuck the Pain
Away.”

But the singer, who has an appropriately provocative solo
exhibition at the Kunstverein
Hamburg, is an artist as well.

Her new show, titled “Whose
Jizz It This?” (through October 20), imagines a near-future where
sex toys wake up from their inanimate circumstances and dedicate
themselves to leading lives of sexual fulfillment rather than of
subservience.

“Something I talk about a lot in
my music is squirting,” Peaches says between sips of herbal
tea. “I
thought, you know, this is something the fleshies would want to
experience after being jizzed into for so long.” (Fleshies
are masturbation devices with a mouth and
genitals.)

Though not as widely known for
making visual art, Peaches is an international cult hero when it
comes to music and her fearlessly queer, feminist oeuvre,
which trudges through provocative themes. 

She’s toured with musicians like
Marilyn Manson and Iggy Pop and has collaborated with the likes of
Christina Aguilera and Pink. But her focus these days is squarely
on her artwork.

Bold As Ever

Drawn to the idea of a project that, unlike her stage shows,
didn’t center on her own physical presence, Peaches’s initial idea
for the exhibition came to her when she stumbled upon an YouTube
review of a sex toy last year.

“When I looked at the object, it reminded me of chickens that
are bred for mass consumption and no longer have beaks, or have
extra wings because they’ve been mutated for whatever purpose
humans want them to have,” she says. “I was thinking about
Animal Farm—what would happen if the chickens rose up and
wanted their beaks back?”

The Hamburg show
features over 50 new artworks, from
titillating videos and
photography to animatronic sculptures and futuristic
textiles. It’s all brought together into one mood-lit
installation that’s more like a stage setup than an art show, with
carefully choreographed music and lights. 

The show was originally intended
as a retrospective to mark the 20th anniversary of her stage debut,
but she decided to push herself in a different
direction.

“I didn’t understand why I would
be making a retrospective of myself,” she says. “It would be nice
if someone wants to go into my archive and do it, but I thought,
no, I’d like to make new work. And that was it.”

Peaches says that she “cried for
two months” during the
initial phases of the project.

“I knew that it wouldn’t be
easy,” says the institution’s director and curator, Bettina
Steinbrügge. “When two
different fields of cultural practice merge, the problem of
translating each system and structure to the other side is a bumpy
road. But I believed in the project from the beginning, and I
knew it would create a fresh look at the format of an
exhibition.”

An Unconventional Show

Peaches’s career-long commitment
to doing things differently in music has translated across all
elements of the exhibition, even the skeleton of it.

“I don’t relate to podiums or
pictures in a frame. It’s the architecture of the art world,” she
says.

Instead, she turned to a
language that she is fluent in: the language of performance. Stage
risers and theater curtains are used in place of the museum’s more
traditional moveable walls. Using this setup and her strange, fleshie-like
objects allowed her to open up a wider dialogue about consent, she
says.

“The point was: how can the
fleshies become emancipated? I asked myself, what has my own way of
becoming emancipated been? And a lot of it has been using the stage
as a way of expressing myself and inspiring others. I wanted to
give the fleshies that same platform.”

Peaches has dedicated eight
months to creating the exhibition and the ambitious corresponding
live show, titled “There is Only One Hole With a Piece in the
Middle.” (The 40-person stage happening, which had its world
premiere earlier this month in Hamburg, opens today at the
Southbank Center in London.)

The Berlin-based performer says
she’s delighted with the reaction so far.

“At the opening, it was exciting
seeing people not just coming in, looking around, and leaving, but
actually staying and experiencing [the work],” she says. “It was
funny because I realized that it became a communal space, which is
what I always try to do in my music.”

Part of this was realized
through literally giving the fleshies a voice. Within the darkened
hall of the Kunstverein, objects are arranged into 14 different
“scenes” that at intervals are activated by lights, movement, and
sound.

At one point during my time in
the exhibition, the spotlights turned onto an altar featuring two
entwined fleshies that began to sing. At another moment, an outsize
mechanical fleshie began noisily to give itself a fellatio. It is
inspired, Peaches says, by sex educator and artist Annie Sprinkle’s
masturbation experiments.

Peaches also cites Paul
McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yoko Ono as influences. From the
younger generation of artists, she name checks Kris Lemsalu, who
represents Estonia in this year’s Venice Biennale, and
Berlin-based, Swedish artist Anna Uddenberg, who is best known for
her darkly humorous sculptures of the female form.

“I don’t think [Kris and I] are
similar, but I just like the way she looks at the relationship
between humans and animals,” Peaches says. “With Anna Uddenberg,
[I’m attracted to the] the sheer creepiness of her
sculptures.”

While she won’t discuss
specifics yet, Peaches says she is planning more visual art
projects in the near future. “It is easy for me to do a stage show
and know that people will love it. The biggest risk comes from
knowing you might fail.”

“Whose Jizz Is This?” is at
Kunstverein, Hamburg, until October 20.

“There’s Only One Peach with
the Hole in the Middle” will be on view at Royal Festival Hall at
Southbank Center in London on August 28.

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Is Brash, Provocative, and Definitely NSFW appeared first on
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