The video and "perform-ish" artist discusses the language of chaos, humor beyond morality, and making drag transgressive again.

“Wiggle Witcha Weenah,” 2021, gif image. From Jake Brush: The Multiple Murders of Lady Gilgo at Duplex.

In early January, I interrupted Jake Brush painting faux-marble surfaces in his Red Hook studio. Given our conversation about affect that followed, this seemed fitting; but Brush insisted it was for side work as a scenic painter. Brush’s cyclonic videos—both as Jake Brush and as half of Pubic Access with fellow performer Candystore—twist the familiar into something cracked and cackling. They approach the world as punk rather than priest, with no life or landscape spared: reality television, snails, Chat Roulette, femininity, ferrets, cemeteries, shit in the Hudson. We talked on a couch in his studio, and Brush, animated, would open a hand to reveal a tattoo of a lightbulb, which when placed beside his head made him appear to have cartoonishly bright ideas.

Eric Dean Wilson I first encountered your work at Waif Hill, your summer 2021 residency show in the Bronx. I fell in love with STOP BEING POOR! (2021), which is a video piece that’s wildly irreverent in its approach to everything from plants to gender. But I thought of it in terms of performance. You improvise with other performers—Christeene, Candystore, David Moses—on the grounds of Wave Hill, sometimes mocking its opulence. This is a hell of a time to be a performance artist.

Jake Brush Isn’t it always? I mean we be always performing, but I only ever got involved in sculpture or painting or performance because I was producing video work. Video as a material allows for this huge spiderweb of other practices. I’d end up helping artists because they came and helped me with my project. That’s how I ended up doing “perform-ish” work.

EDW And that collaboration is clear. When you’re performing—whether for videos or Pubic Access Live!, your show with Candystore and Mike Feswick—is this some extension of yourself or a persona? A character? Fashion?

JB It’s definitely not fashion. It’s disgusting!

The Pubic Access girls, Jake Brush and Candystore. Photo by Brett Lindell.

JB When I’m doing the live shows it’s not a persona at all. I mean, I am doing a bit, but I don’t go by a different name just because I have a wig on. That’s why Candystore and I say that we’re “cross-dressers” and not “drag queens.” We’re not lip-synching or saying “boots.” But when I do the videos they are characters because I’m assuming the role of an actrice. I’m acting as another person—or the shell of another person that’s been archived online, like the hot dog hooker.

EDW What prompted you to create a whole show around the hot dog hooker and the Gilgo Beach murders [The Multiple Murders of Lady Gilgo (2021)]?

JB The actual source material was this woman on Long Island who was an associate of my father, very loosely. So I’d always heard of this lady. She’d turn tricks out of this hot dog truck on Merrick Road. I went back to see what I could find of her in the media. So much of how she was carrying herself was straight-up salacious. She didn’t present sex work in this patronizing or infantilizing way. She would leave prison and flash the cameras, sing “I’m Sexy and I Know It,” and be out on Merrick Road the next day in a two-piece bikini. You didn’t think “sex worker” and then immediately sympathize with her as “victim” or “savior.” Instead, I just thought, “This person is doing something,” and whatever it is, it’s chaotic. I included the Gilgo killer because she mentioned it offhand in one of her many local news appearances: “Why aren’t they looking for this guy, but the cops are obsessed with me?”

EDW The lowbrow reality media that your work nods to—tabloid murders, Jerry Springer, The Real World—are spaces where morality is removed. They’re beyond good and evil. It’s freeing when you take out “should” or “shouldn’t” and play it for entertainment.

JB Totally. I keep listening to this true crime podcast—so gay—because there’s something about these women that’s dishonest. They’re going through all the evidence and the facts to “raise awareness,” but no one’s listening to this shit to raise awareness. They’re listening to it for entertainment. Morality is everywhere. It’s littered in every political conversation, and it’s because people are denying themselves the truth that they enjoy seeing others suffer, that they enjoy seeing the fallout of situations. Why deny ourselves that? When the exhibition for Multiple Murders opened at Duplex, someone came up to me and asked, “Is this to raise awareness?” I said, “Not really. Of what? It’s to raise awareness of me!”

EDW The irony is that there’s something admirable about that honesty. As someone who experiences a lot of eco-media, I can tell you there’s a lot of moral posturing that ends up being unethical.

JB I’m sure. It’s all so phony. It’s like a joke no one can laugh at.

Excerpt from STOP BEING POOR!, 2021, video, sound, 58 minutes. With performances by Candystore, David Moses, Christeene, and Jake Brush. Shot by Mike Feswick. Edited by Jake Brush. Title Graphic in collaboration with Riley Hooker. Shot on location at Wave Hill as a part of their Van Lier Trust artist fellowship.

EDW Comedy is crucial to your work. I find it hilarious, a kind of chaos when the laws vanish. Do you feel like you cultivate chaos in your videos and performance?

JB I hope so. The funniest things are chaotic, tragic. There’s a reason why there are jokes about race and 9/11 and AIDS and things that are taboo; people find it funny, you know, and whether the jokes are “right” or “wrong” is beyond. There’s a paper trail of this kind of material because it’s cathartic to laugh about something that shouldn’t be laughed at. In my own work, I’m trying to speak from a more authentic place where the language of chaos is a means of accessing the truth. Being chaotic makes me feel closer to my spirit.

EDW Much of your work also plays with affect—camp, for instance. It made me think of Nicole Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism in which she points out that while sincerity works sometimes, it’s not the only affect. She writes: “Can we imagine a shallow, immature, bitchy, hedonistic LGBTQ persona that articulates a pro-environmental position?”

JB Yeah, that’s me. I mean, I don’t want the world to end, but I don’t know how pro-environmental I am. I’m definitely pro-authenticity. It’s this assumption that being sincere and being earnest is always being nice and pleasant. But you can’t have time for everybody. I don’t have the capacity to be totally agreeable all the time, you know?

EDW What has the response been to your live shows?

JB Amazing, actually. People had so much fun. I love being able to go up there unrehearsed and hold a microphone and crack a couple of jokes and talk shit. People either laugh and enjoy themselves or get pissed off and write something mean about me. It makes me feel like I’m doing something with my time on stage.

EDW Yeah, you’re gathering together a group of really interesting—

EDW And I’m proud to be a part of that.

JB We have a lot of conversations—me, Mike Feswick, and Candystore—about who we’re going to have on the show and what the show is going to be. We fight about it. It’s dysfunctional and stressful. But where we usually arrive at is that we want to have people on the show that you wouldn’t get to see down the street at a gay bar on a different night. That’s not to knock nightlife performers, but we’re not nightlife performers. We want it to have a closer tie to something less structured. Luckily, in New York City, people who love attention want it whether it’s positive or negative.

EDW The show was a riot. It was deeply uncomfortable when Candystore went up to someone in the audience and asked them about K8 Hardy, who was one of your guests that night and sitting a few feet away, and they said, “I don't know who that is.” I couldn’t stop laughing.

JB The greatest insult is to rise above and ignore, you know?

JB But I knew K8 didn’t give a fuck. I was looking over at her, like, yikes, but she didn’t care. That’s a good thing if no one knows who she is. No one knows who I am! It’s a good thing not to be a world-renowned “queer performer.” What does that look like? The guy from Schitt's Creek? One of the girls from Drag Race? Who gives a fuck?

EDW Pubic Access feels like it’s filling a need in a time when drag—because of RuPaul—has become mainstream and rigid in its rules.

JB Ugh, it’s so gay.

EDW I died in your video “I Too am Traumatized by Now More Than Ever” (2020) when you called it “RuPaul’s Frack Race.” That’s it.

JB I hate it. There’s one thing about RuPaul fracking. And then there’s another about the general cultural decay, that drag isn’t John Waters and Divine anymore. Now it’s make-up palettes, drag tots, and capitalizing on “self-love.”

EDW It’s not about subversion anymore.

JB Or transgression. At all, at all. And that’s why I’m not a fucking drag queen. Because it’s not transgressive in any way. I think the last season of Drag Race I watched, they had a girl on who was doing this weird sexual predator shit—probably the most interesting storyline they’ve ever had. But instead of diving into this character and the actions behind this person and what they did and the complexities behind that, they edited her out of the show! And she made it all the way to the end. Why edit her out? If there’s something unsavory in the room, we should look at it. Keep things interesting—as a treat.

"I Too am Traumatized Now More Than Ever," 2020, video, sound, 8 minutes. Courtesy of Visual AIDS on Vimeo.

EDW Besides the ongoing Pubic Access shows, what’s next for you?

JB I’m doing a new project about this pet store owner Marc Morrone who was on Martha Stewart in the ’90s to early aughts and had a public access TV show. He’d load a bunch of pets onto this two-by-four table—like, a monkey, a turtle, a fucking bird—and he’d try to do presentations on each animal, but then the monkey would bite the turtle or a ferret would fall off the table. He’s since said it’s because there was no heating in the building, but he was also filming all of it live, and so it was just this loaded gun pointed at him—perform, perform, perform—amid utter chaos, animals clawing each other to death. It resurfaced a couple of years ago as animal cruelty, and people were up in arms about it, but I knew of him from Long Island because I got a few of my ferrets from him.

EDW Interesting that you have this tangential connection to the eccentric characters in your work.

JB Yeah, I like that because I feel like I have more of a right to these people just because I know about them, and you don’t.

JB Also, I want to make a horror movie soon.

EDW Have you been watching a lot of horror movies?

JB My whole life. I’ve always loved horror movies because terrible things can happen, and how exciting is that? How exciting is it that your life and death isn’t going to be boring and unremarkable? The unassuming and the mundane are the worst. You’d almost rather be in this crazy thing. So the seeds for that are starting to plant.

JB Yeah, it is. I don’t know what it would look like. I’ll edit it, so it’ll become something that’s more “experimental.” I was watching Slumber Party Massacre last night, and I don’t want it to be that, just some low-budget shit that isn’t utilizing its limitations. I’m going to make a low-budget movie, but for me it’s about leaning into it and understanding my limitations instead of fighting against them. I’m not trying to be a Stanley Kubrick or a Wes Craven. I’m just going to be Jake Brush and see what happens. How’s that for self-love, RuPaul?!

Jake Brush and Candystore's next Pubic Access Live! show will take place on June 25.

Eric Dean Wilson's essays, poems, and criticism have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Tin House, among other publications. A former assistant editor at Archipelago Books and graduate of the New School’s MFA program, Wilson is currently a Teaching Fellow in the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research through the Center for Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY, through which he teaches climate-themed writing and environmental justice to undergraduates at Queens College. In addition to teaching, Wilson is also pursuing a PhD in the English Program at the Graduate Center where his work focuses on American studies, environmental humanities, activist writing, and the Black radical tradition. Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, he now lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn

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