Through her music and performances the rock star Peaches uses highly sexual lyrics and camp stage shows that reside on the edge of the absurd and uncomfortably point to the persistence of societal prejudices. Her overt representations of base sexual drives humorously sully the conventions of the typical love song, which tend to subjugate physical desire under a gilded romance. Her refusal to pander to the airbrushed flawlessness of this pop style by creating perverse caricatures of our sexual urges, builds complex stories of difference and opens the possibility for a multi-dimensional pan sexual existence.

The Or Gallery Berlin presents Lonesome Schoolboy, an exhibition of several of Peaches’s recent performance outfits. The costumes were designed for Peaches Does Herself a stage play and soon to be released feature film that uses her songs to create a story of profound love and devastating rejection. The dramatic narrative of the life of an intersexual being searching for love, which comes in the form of an even more perfect reflection of herself, unfolds. In true operatic form this fulfillment is rescinded as her lover falls for a woman posed as transgendered, luring her away with trickery and magic.

The centerpieces of the exhibition illustrate the transformation from the sweet completion of one who is loved into the monstrous and destructive force of an exploding spurned lover. This transmuted creature raged with the shattering consequences of death. Lonesome Schoolboy focuses on this moment not to render it static – a story that always ends the same, but in order to keep the possibility of turning back. In the gallery the costumes become unresolved artifacts with no order of time or sequential placement and in their stillness have the possibility to reverse. The small-mindedness and limited vision, partly caused by intolerance toward her, has the potential to be resolved. To further animate the costumes a newly recorded soundtrack of the Rolling Stones’ infamous Cocksucker Blues by Peaches activates the still outfits and again inverts gender.

Jenifer Papararo

Photo credit: Lynn Lauterbach