Juliana Huxtable: “I try to make work that, if I were on acid, I’d be lost in”

Do you remember when Tumblr banned porn? Juliana Huxtable does; her entire Tumblr got taken down, and a trace of herself was lost. Starting in 2009, Huxtable started browsing Tumblr and finding “cool pornography” that she could see herself in without being reduced to a stereotype. Inside her new London exhibition at Project Native Informant, the artist, writer, musician, and performer is talking to me about the masterpieces of DeviantArt, anti-porn feminism, DJ-ing at Furry conferences and her boredom at critics trying to fit her work within an art historical canon. For Huxtable, this exhibition is about her disobedient selfhood.

“People can say that internet art is passè,” says Huxtable, who resents the simplified terminology of “digital to IRL.” “Some internet art is just replicating what’s on screen in a different context, but I’m interested in the insane, powerful and highly mechanical process involved.” Her show, ‘Heads and Tails In The Struggle for Iconicity’ highlights the specificity of forms created through digital processes: the textures, the skill required, and, ultimately, the error and change that comes with the transference from iPad (the artist’s preferred method) to canvas. Looking closely at the tail of the large Iguana-human hybrid in IGGY ANARCHY, Huxable points out that some of the animal’s markings are raised, laser-cut, vectorised vinyl stickers. It’s nearly impossible to see what is digital cursive and what was painted in situ: “I try to make work that, if I were on acid, I’d be lost in.”

“The button press for these was gigantic.” Huxtable is talking about two oversized buttons on Iggy Anarchy and SKINKISM which replace the heads of hybrid creatures. Leftist Punk aesthetics was something she explored back in 2019 in a show at Reena Spaulings. ‘Infertility Industrial Complex: Snatch the Calf Back’ reckoned with the non-art function of sub-cultures and their fetishistic power through buttons, stickers and posters. “It’s very DIY; it is a little more unhinged.” Buttons are not aloof and immovable symbols of high art, which is why Huxtable uses them. “I love the history of band graphics, Punk aesthetics, rave flyers and how information is translated.” As Jeff Nuttall wrote on Punk buttons in Bomb Culture (1969) “They’re symmetrical, ritualistic, with a bizarre metallic brilliance and a high fetishistic power.” Punk subculture, a movement generally associated with chaos, is ultimately cohered as a meaningful whole in the uniformity of its graphics and typography. Huxtable favours these subcultural communication systems over traditional art historical references; “The regularity with which people mention Picasso or Matisse… I can’t believe they’re still meant to be the most relevant entry point into fine art.”

I look closely at the car bumper (Untitled, 2024) taken from a Bethnal Green MOT shop and covered with custom-made vinyl stickers that read things like “I brake 4 Tails” and “Potrusion – Orientated”. Huxtable describes her interest in over-signifying: “I love the bathroom stalls of nightclubs; they’re covered in stickers, places where people feel safe to express anything.” Destruction of aesthetic codes through layering underpins Huxtable’s practice: “I find comfort in the density, I have a fetish for it.” In these semi-public spaces, an individual is free to express anything – political messages, longing, meditations on nothing. Huxtable has an affection for both the aesthetic appearance of these spaces and their role as communal forums, as she writes in the forward for the show:

“I have my distentions
am realer than real
unmovable writing on the wall of a bathroom stall.”

Furries, or Therians, a community of people who adopt animal personas, played a big part in ‘Heads and Tails’. Huxtable explains that her relationship with Furry culture is not exploitative: “There is a fully self-aware art community coming from the Furry context.” Pointing at the arachnid body in ATHRO ANARCHY from which a self-portrait emerges, she tells me how important it was to render the spider’s textured body correctly, not wanting to neglect the standards of anatomical zoomorphic accuracy found in the work of Furry illustrators on DeviantArt.

As a community, Furries are interested in the intersection between animism, identity and play. “There is this Twitter thread where a Furry news and culture aggregate discovered my Reena show and started discussing whether this was appropriation,” says Huxtable, who has her own fursona (a name and series of characteristics with distinctive body markings; artists will typically be commissioned to produce renditions of fursonas) but is not yet attending Furry conferences, although she has been asked to perform at one. Her interest in non-human eroticism is rooted in play, seeing a fursona as a more honest way of creating sexual images of herself compared to the standards of mainstream pornography. “I think the feminists were onto something in terms of their critiques of pornographic representation.” In recent work, she’s depicted arachnid and reptilian creatures like skinks and iguanas in sexual poses, telling me, “I want to get to single-cell organisms eventually.”

Anime aesthetics, and cartoons in general, have previously been adopted in contemporary art trends. They’re a subsect of what Clement Greenberg would term “kitsch”. For Huxtable, they tend to be used as a motif rather than something that is critically unpacked. “People are kind of incurious, but there’s so much to unpack in anime: cinematography, animation, orientalism, questions of psychoanalysis and cartoon representation.” Little critical theory exists on Furry culture, even in left-field academic communities. But, Huxtable explains, fursonas could be considered a portal into more subversive thinking about identity. “Trans studies are now moving into inter-species discussions.”

I’m not surprised when Huxtable tells me she participated in an intense form of debating in high school. It’s the kind of debate Ben Lerner speaks about in his book The Topeka School, in which high school kids are required to read college-level essays and then parrot the arguments in debate with their peers.

This gives an insight into how Huxtable expertly layers her works with an abundance of cultural symbolism and signifiers – her points of reference are unexpected and not fixed within the canon. Viewers are asked to look very closely, then look again, to uncover her meaning.