Jenkin van Zyl in Madame Tussauds: “That was a lot, I need a vape”

If you arrived at the gates of hell tripping your balls off, it would probably look like a Jenkin van Zyl film. His first Frieze presentation ‘Sweat Exchange’ took place this year with Edel Assanti. Shot in the abandoned swimming pools of Victoria Baths in Manchester, the film depicts freakishly pink human/dog/alien hybrids with voluptuous bottoms and cunty kitten heels. His work is at once fantastical, haunting and acutely playful. Through generous doses of queer deviance, Jenkin provides anarchic meditations on neoliberal power structures and a world that feels increasingly delirious. 

I’m pretty flustered at the best of times, a disposition intensified by a lethal combination of abnormal October heat and the duty of meeting, photographing, filming and interviewing Jenkin in one sitting. Of course, this is Plaster, so this ain’t no coffee shop interview-job. In classic school trip fashion, we’re going on a grand day out to Madame Tussauds. It’s my first time, but I guess I should’ve anticipated the absolute sensory overload that is Tussauds. Nervous, overwhelmed and breaking a sweat, I spot Jenkin walking toward me. It’s not difficult to miss him; he’s impeccably suited and booted – like if a devilish pirate went to Berghain. For someone so otherworldly, he is incredibly down to earth. We quickly gel and my nerves subside. “I have lots of micro-collections,” he says, as I point to his lapel, where a badge with a pube stamped inside is pinned. “I’m a maximalist, maybe I’m a bit of a hoarder.” Tussauds is surprisingly quiet for a half term. Slightly bereft that we didn’t get to flaunt our Fast Track queue-skipping passes, we head inside to get freaky…

We walk around the complex as fascinated school kids eye up Jenkin. It feels like a bit of a fever dream. “They’re quite uncanny,” he says, pointing to an awkwardly posed array of Bond actors. He’s as hilarious as I expected, with a bawdy irreverence that I love. Jenkin limply points to a moody-looking Winston Churchill as we pass through to the next room, “Let’s leave him on the stairwell”, he laughs… Jenkin has a brain-rot-ish sense of humour, an affinity with a ‘chronically online’ state of mind. “I’m not very good at finding quiet in my brain; I’m often in a state of overstimulation”, he says. So he must feel right at home in Madame Tussauds. There’s a delirium in Jenkin’s work that nods to the carnivalesque. 

When a younger Jenkin was ‘calcifying’ his basenotes of influence, he was transfixed by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive; Pedro Almodóvar films were his “faggotry awakening.” We bond over our shared love Nighty Night – Julia Davis’ unhinged 00s show that birthed the gay icon Jill Tyrell (if you know, you know). “Gay son or thot daughter?” I ask him. “Oh, I won’t be breeding, but for the sake of the question, fraternal twins with a gay son and a thot daughter, I know plenty of those.”  

Admiring his outfit as I head behind him into the Chamber of Horrors, I wonder if anyone in Madame Tussauds has ever slayed so hard – and then I remember that there’s a waxwork of Jack the Ripper in the basement…

“He’s a bit ick,” Jenkin chimes as we spot Ed Sheeran, who is from Ipswich (where I grew up), and Jenkin tells me about his own formative years. Raised in Surrey, the final boss of the Home Counties, he’s no stranger to the peculiarities of suburbia. “It’s this idea of middle-of-the-road Britishness, which is defined by what it lacks. I’m curious about Englishness and a distinct lack of possibility.” Jenkin uses hedonism as armour against the stale beigeness of middle England. In a city still reeling from the devastation of austerity and Covid, the queer dance communities he is immersed in provide medicative spaces. “Club culture is about a yearning for togetherness,” Jenkin says. “I’m interested in dance as a means of escape, and how we yearn for escape – but often that can often lead us back to what we’re escaping from.” 

Five words that no one wants to hear: “the ride has broken down.” We are GUTTED to learn that the black cab simulator experience is out of operation. “I won’t be able to sleep tonight .” Jenkin laughs. So we head back onto the streets of Marylebone, squinting as if we’ve just emerged from a dark cave (near enough). “That was a lot, I need a vape,” he exclaims, so we head down to a corner shop. Coca Cola flavour is his weapon of choice, the Lost Mary a pink and brownish ombre, which he describes as a “prolapsing hole”. We head down the road, exchanging vape puffs, and ‘accidentally’ stumble into a boozer. 

“Sometimes I find that the way I dress is to distance myself from people, it achieves a state of intensity, and other times it’s a way of showing off.” With the interview taking place just a few weeks after his first presentation at Frieze, it seems incomprehensible that someone as unfiltered and fun as Jenkin could survive a minute in an art fair that is the ultimate melting pot of the mega-rich art world. “That’s where invisibility and visibility of disguise helps, you become a total waxwork.”

Jenkin isn’t fooled by the pantomime that is often the reality of the corporate art world. “You’re a robot air kissing and taking selfies, and they aren’t interacting with you like a real person. The art world is a clouded industry; it’s a Russian doll of confusing sources of money, confusing labour structures, confusing class politics and confusing ideas of what it is to be a reputable artist and what is professionally viable and how you should behave.” 

Hours pass and I suddenly realise that we’ve been nattering for so long that my phone has died. We go outside the pub and finish our encounter crouched in a side alley smoking a cig. 

We hug goodbye, and in a flash he disappears in a cloud of (vape) smoke. As I rawdog the walk home (phone dead), I wonder if I’m going to have a ‘and then she woke up and it was all a dream’ moment. But, Jenkin van Zyl is all real. Turns out, he’s the realest.