My Snake is Bigger Than Your Snake

A Quirky Magical Kink-Comedy: Rebecca Goyette’s My Snake Is Bigger Than Your Snake

– Jane Ursula Harris Interviews Rebecca Goyette 

Art as a form of healing, of processing and transmuting pain into fantasy, has been at the heart of Rebecca Goyette’s multimedia practice for decades. The elaborate psychosexual dramas she creates in her films, however outlandish and absurd, are always rooted in the personal and cathartic. Like the underground filmmaker Jack Smith whose kooky B-movie inspired fantasmagorias were too bizarre for mainstream success, her work has been relegated to a cult-like status. This the source of its power, I believe, along with the artist’s uncompromising eccentricity.

As director, producer, costume and prop designer, actor, and maker of the related marginalia (ceramic and soft sculptures, drawings, etc.) that appears in her installations, Goyette also shares Smith’s D.I.Y. aesthetic and penchant for imbuing her campy surrealist worlds with the hyperbolic antics of drag. Goyette’s eccentric feminist vision is inimitably her own, however, marked by a ribald sense of humor that subverts easy mollifying laughs with a dark disturbing hilarity.  Forcing us to simultaneously consider the depths of our own repressed desires and fears, and relinquish them, the artist offers up the unhinged potency of confronting our own self-imposed taboos.  The following interview explores some of these themes on the occasion of her latest exhibition, My Snake Is Bigger Than Your Snake, elucidating the motivations and process behind this fierce and singular practice. 

JUH: Your work has always entwined sexuality and politics, using BDSM and porn aesthetics to combat misogyny. Sex-positivity for you seems to be both an antidote to, and a weapon against the former; a means to address systemic violence against women, and to triumph over it. Would you agree? And can you share how this theme has evolved from early work to the present? 

RG: Yes, totally, your assessment is spot on. As to the evolution of this, even before I started making videos, I was exploring persona-play in my work, weaving personal and sexual narratives into sculptures, paintings and performance art. In 2007, I started a series of Dysfunctional Brides and Grooms, for example, that played on the interactive, functional nature of ceramics, and humorously skewered heteronormative gender roles. Many dealt with sexuality; a Bun-in-the-Oven Bride with a baby on a swing; a Junk Food Bride with a lush orgy; a Hidden Pleasures Bride that contained a usable dildo, etc. So these themes were there early on. 

JUH: When did they make their way into your films?

RG: I created my first film, Anything for Max (2009), with the burlesque dancer Amber Ray.  In it, I played an “I Love Lucy”- style girlfriend serving her boyfriend - a handsewn life-sized doll - a surf and turf dinner, from soup to nuts.  I even boiled a lobster for him at the table, lol. Then the burlesque dancer I hired (Ray) danced for him, twirling her tassels and peeling off her sequined layers. After getting really jealous, I got rid of her, and ripped all his clothes off, making out and grinding with this food- stained doll boyfriend. It was hilarious but there was an element of psychosexual violence to the scene, which came as a bit of a surprise to me. It was such a release, and I realized I was able to delve more deeply into sexual subject matter with film than prior mediums. So I’d say this film was the origin of my using BDSM aspects in my work for cathartic effect. 

JUH: And tell us why the symbolism of lobsters has kept your interest all these years? 

RG: Most people don’t realize the way lobsters have sex is completely sadomasochistic, and that’s what drew me to them.  It’s what I play out in my ongoing Lobsta Porn series, which originated in 2010, that I’ve filmed in locations around the world, from New York to Berlin. In Lobsta Rollin’ (2011), Lobsta Lady boxes the man down and squirts him with aphrodisiac drugs and pee that shoots out of her forehead. There’s a kind of ritual to it. She pushes her way into his lobsta cave and has to molt her shell in order to have sex. The male lobsta has double dicks and can impale her vulnerable flesh wherever he wants to. 

JUH: And this is based on how lobsters actually do have sex, right?

RG: Yeah! That’s why I discovered I had an affinity with female lobsters, as I genuinely feel I am a switch, loving to explore both my dominant and submissive sides. With each film, I create a set of prompts, a performance score for the untrained performers to role-play with me.  As a director of these psychosexual dramas, I have shared stories of my own sexuality including my traumas. In Masshole Love (2013), for example, I re-performed a brutal scene from my childhood when I was molested by a police officer. Films Lobstapus/Lobstapussy (2013) shot on a Greek Island and Crustacean Temptation (2019) shot in Berlin expressed a more sensual sex positivity, which has been its own personal journey.  Works like Touch My Hull (2011) and Fuck Platter (2012) explore sexual desire with elements of violent play.

JUH:  Lobsta Lady and Ghost Bitch not only transmute personal experience and biography into psychosexual dramas but take on mythical, if absurdist forms as well. I’m thinking about your recent interest in magic and ritual. Was this shift toward the spiritual inevitable in your work, or a result of the loss of your father, which I know this exhibition centers around? 

RG: The Lobsta Porn series allowed me to consider issues of codependency, sexual trauma and alienation through a kind of ritualistic community of performers.  It’s about collective experiences of sexuality, and how I can enjoy my own kinks in relation to others. But my interest in magic originated with the ongoing Ghost Bitch works I started in 2007. These interrelated multimedia artworks are based on my ancestor, Rebecca Nurse, a female landowner who was falsely accused and hanged as a Salem witch. I made Ghost Bitch: Arise from the Gallows (2015), my longest film to date (at 38-plus minutes) as a BDSM scenario where Ghost Bitch performed the historic hanging scene for tourists by day, and worked as a dominatrix by night. As I was preparing to shoot my first Ghost Bitch film in Salem, Massachusetts, I joined Moon Church in Bushwick, wanting to learn about witchcraft, through direct experience.  

JUH: For the sake of authenticity?

RG: Well, I knew that Salem had always attracted a thriving witchcraft community even today, one that continued to teach visitors about the false accusations against Puritan-era women that led to their violent deaths. When I got to Salem, I met a group of male witches. It was an unexpected twist. The most powerful was Demetrius LaCroix, a Vodou Priest, Haitian and Scottish in origin, who performed a protection spell on both my character, and me in Ghost Bitch: Arise from the Gallows (2015).  It became a turning point in my own personal involvement with Wiccan traditions. I began to go to initiations, rituals, and coven meetings, etc. 

When I found out my dad was dying, I had recently discovered Sigil drawing through the creation of pictorial symbols. While I was inspired by Austin Osman Spare’s hyper sigils, I also incorporated a style related to chaos magic.  

JUH: For those who don’t know what Sigils are can you explain?

RG:  A sigil is a symbolic graphic that is imbued with the creator’s intention, which are used to manifest desires. To create one from a chaos magic perspective, the creator writes a sentence of something they want to manifest in the present tense, cross out all the vowels and repeated consonants and form drawings that are a mashup of the remaining letters.  

JUH: Interesting. So what’s their relationship to your dad’s death? 

RG: In the weeks leading up to death I made two of these drawings about my family (I am an only child, so it was me, my dad and my mom).  I found them all sketched out in my pad a month after he died and didn’t even remember making them. That kind of blew my mind. I started to color in the elaborate sigiled borders, a type of marginalia framing erotic figurative imagery that had emerged through this deeply subconscious process. And then I found myself making an entire series of them about my father, my childhood home, and my quirky magical kink-comedy - a mourning process - evolved out of them. 

JUH: That’s quite a mouthful, lol. And yet “quirky magical kink-comedy” does sort of sum up your recent project. Walk us through how that work was conceived. 

RG: Lolz! I had a lot to work out in my head. My dad was a classical musician, a Shakespeare-buff, a wildly eccentric, severely alcoholic, loud comedian confined to a small, conservative town in Massachusetts.  And he was my muse; the good, the bad and the ugly.

After he died, I was tasked with emptying my childhood home and putting it up for sale. As I went through the long process of putting the house on the market, I created a large-scale ceramic replica of my childhood home. I approached creating the clay house as a way to transmute my feelings of loss as a kind of good luck ritual. 

JUH: How so?

RG: My father had made a dollhouse replica of our house as a Christmas present for me when I was 5 years old.  Every night, after my bedtime, he snuck down to the basement to build it, and I snuck to the top of the stairs to watch him.  It was magical.

So the house sold right before Christmas to a man who wore a t-shirt that said “My Snake Is Bigger Than Your Snake” to the closing - hence, where the show’s title derives from.  I, in turn, had a lobsta purse strapped to my body like a protection charm (I was nervous about bringing the big check home on a Greyhound Bus).  And the whole encounter felt mythical and absurdist to use your words. Suddenly I was in a Lobsta Queen-Snake Man face-off, lol. But there was a menacing side to it. This guy made it clear he was not happy doing business with a woman, he was a Trumper and a misogynist. It made me think of my Salem witch roots, and my ancestor Rebecca Nurse, accused of witchcraft just because she was a female landowner.  When I got back to New York City, I ran to the clay studio straightaway. I made Lobsta Queen and Snake Man figures and designed my idea for a ceramic tableau about the whole story of my dad and selling the house. I then went on to draw, create costumes, and produce an art film with live action and hand-painted animation that all comes together in this exhibition, My Snake is Bigger Than Your Snake.

JUH: I’m curious to know more about your collaborative process. In the notes you gave to the actors in your film, you advised: “rather than acting we are experiencing something real in this non-penetrative sensual improv.” What’s the significance of that for you?

RG: I see my film-making process as a form of self-reflection and healing for both myself and my performers.  From my first Lobsta Porn, Lobsta Rollin’ (2011), I saw that non-penetrative sensual improv was teaching me as much about my sexuality as any sexual experience could. The interactions we had in our psychodynamic costumed role-play was not only fun, but alerted me to aspects of sexuality that are often hidden or subconscious.  

JUH: Such as?

RG: Sometimes being on camera can allow unexpected truths and desires to emerge, because it almost insists on the dissolution of boundaries designed to protect our inhibitions.  As I gained this awareness through the collaborative process, I started to understand how important issues of consent and the role communication played in establishing healthy and safe interactions. I had to figure out how to open up while also confronting my issues with boundaries. Like a lot of children of alcoholics, I have always had trouble with boundaries, over-empathizing at times, oversharing at others.  My films force my hand to create a safe, creative space for me and my performers, but of course given the content occasionally dramas did pop up. So that “note” was a way to address them, to foster more dialogue between myself and performers before the film shoots began, and enable the trust necessary to push past individual comfort zones. 

JUH: So how did this idea of creating something “real” versus just acting manifest?

RG: By connecting to who each performer was in real life. In My Snake is Bigger Than Your Snake, I worked very closely with my cast, my chosen family of sorts, building their characters to drive my narrative, while simultaneously touching on each performer’s own specific kinks.  For instance, my Dad was played by Johnny Sagan, a bisexual Bear who can sometimes be a Daddy, while also loving to submit in service of others. Based on jokes that my Dad was a little too intimate with his dog, I cast Olive Hui as Dad’s Dog.  She embodied a frisky young pup, locked and loaded with her hot pink strap on, ready to push her Dad’s face square into a cherry pie, lol! Of course, he laps it up obediently, like a faithful dog himself.  Their relationship as performers was very sweet, they were committed to being vulnerable and open to exploring power dynamics because they also connected on a personal level. As I worked with them, practicing, things felt familial, and they became believable surrogates for my dad and his dog.  They in turn found their own stories within that roleplay, and I think grew as individuals.  

JUH: You got such a great performance from your Fortuna character. She was so funny and beguiling yet with a gleeful, menacing edge.

RG:  Oh, yes!  Lena Chen, who played Fortuna, is a feminist artist, writer and activist.  She has been making provocative work about revenge porn, sex worker’s rights, and BDSM power dynamics for years. She also leads a group that has met internationally, called “Heal Her,” which focuses on using artistic rituals to help femme-identifying folks heal from sexual trauma. I chose Lena to play Fortuna, the ancient Roman Goddess, original FinDom and controller of the fates. Lena shared with me her beliefs in the healing nature of sex work that should be respected.  She also has a great sense of play and easily stepped into the role of dominance, with confidence and humor.  I egged her on to go hard on Snake Man played by Brian Andrew Whiteley. She really used him for her own pleasure, we bound him in packing plastic, and she sat on his face and pleasured herself with wicked laughter, looking at the camera in cam girl fashion. That was one of my favorite moments of the film.

JUH: It was really good! Maybe you can outline for us the various characters in this film and their function -- I don’t think most of us know Fortuna as a dominatrix for example, lol!

RG: The Snake Man of course represents the man who bought my childhood home. In the film he operates as a smarmy snake oil salesman, set to buy my house for a low price while I, the Lobsta Queen, am mired in my own grief.  Lobsta Queen is transformed by the physical and psychic connection to The Dad Character, played by Johnny Sagan, who was really able to inhabit my father’s eccentricities.  When my father died from liver cirrhosis, it was a very visceral bodily experience.  Johnny allowed himself to be manhandled by me and his dog in the film.  I cast Olive Hui as Dad’s Dog because of her playful, enthusiastic nature, she basically wakes him up from the dead to play with her.

I included the Virgin Mary (played by Joanne Leah), in the film based on a magical experience.  I had gotten a psychic reading based on the Akashic Records (our encoded mental plane), and as my reader was channeling, the Virgin Mary came through as a spirit guide, letting me know that she wanted me to make humorous art about her, not to disparage her, but rather to show her in her fullness of character.  I immediately imagined her having sex with God in the abstract, no male form needed.  

JUH: I love that!

RG: What is more erotic than that, really, right? So in the film, she has a squirting orgasm, looking up towards the heavens at her lover, and a little later she gives birth to Baby Jesus in my living room, with the cast gathered together as her  eager-to-please doulas. For me she’s a goddess.

JUH: Well, in fact, she represents the Virgin aspect of European pagan goddesses, her Maiden and Crone aspects having been stripped away by early Christian propagandists trying to convert/gain cohorts. I taught a whole class on this. But anyway, going back to your notes, you also alluded to “Jodorowsky’s Psychomagic immersive experiences” in those notes. How has this played into your process?

RG: Jodorowsky with his form of Psychomagic uses visceral scenarios to create catharsis and psychological insight for participants. I do that as well, while maintaining my role as a feminist director, aware of my own agency, sexuality and my own specific story to tell. 

When we bring each other into a heightened state of psychodynamic play, our armor dissolves.  For “My Snake,” as the crew set up the lighting, I chatted with performers about my father.  I revealed to them my father’s words of wisdom, “Drink Vodka Bex! It’s the least caloric of all the alcohols.” We giggled our asses off.  When we shot the first scene where I was in bed holding my dad’s hand as he was dying, Brian Andrew Whiteley, aka “Snake Man” - who I have worked with for years, suggested I add my father’s oddball wisdom as his parting words, somehow taking it seriously.  I needed that encouragement, as I had always been so used to feeling a knee-jerk sense of shame around my dad’s alcoholism, which leads to keeping secrets.  

JUH: Humor is such an essential part of your sensibility, the absurdist and outlandish nature of your films adding a kind of levity to them, but simultaneously a devious edge that can be unsettling. You seem to play with this line between making us laugh, but also uncomfortable. Is this tension something you cultivate, and if so to what ends?

RG: My father was very funny. He had a loud laugh and was always pulling pranks on his friends.  I was his partner-in-crime.  When I was young, I thought he was hilarious.  As I hit my teen years, I realized that a lot of his jokes were misogynist, a lot of dumb blond jokes, and a lot of nagging wife wisecracks.  He literally would give me kitschy joke cards with naked cartoon blond women with enormous breasts, wishing me Happy Birthday! I would call him out on it, but also realized he was always in trouble with my mom, the straight (wo)man to our comedy. She was always trying to keep some order in our small-town wild ride of a life, where there was always a watermelon being blown up by a quarter stick of dynamite, snowmobiling accidents and beer bongs on the backyard picnic table. The sense of discomfort I create in the films is deliberate and comes from a desire to convey experiences that can feel unhinged, precarious, painful, and even tragic through the lens of humor.  I also grew up watching reruns of The Three Stooges with my dad, and derive my sense of physical comedy and even sploshing from that.  In the realm of The Three Stooges, there was always someone getting a pie thrown at their face.  I rather like my audience to be on edge, even questioning whether they should laugh or not in the face of the uncomfortable psychological and visceral moments I create.  The frenetic pace of my films, for example, helps create this duality between excitement and danger.

JUH: There’s definitely a feeling of being caught between wanting to laugh and yet feeling disturbed simultaneously. I guess that’s what I was getting at - the purpose of that, the questions it brings up.

RG:  I continue to recreate this kind of queasy feeling in my work that is at once funny and disturbing because I grew up with these dualities. A day of joking and pranks could end in yelling and door slamming. A friendly fireworks battle with the neighbors launching M-80s back and forth over the hedge, could end in trees and lawns ablaze, and firemen friends coming over to hose it down, joking about it over a beer.  At 18, on break from my first year at RISD, my father got me to perform a fake stick-up at a neighbor’s house on Halloween, exclaiming “Your Reese’s Or Your Life,” and stole all the man’s favorite candy. When I create visceral imagery now, especially in the films, I am reflecting on this sort of chaos within me that comes from that early proximity to performative masculinity.  Who has power? And where is the line between a joke being funny or cruel? 

JUH: You end up making so many of the props and costumes for your films, and then this sort of franchise of objects - ceramic and soft sculptures, drawings, etc. - that make up the immersive, fantastical installations you present them in. How does this extended practice manifest materially and symbolically in the exhibition, My Snake is Bigger Than Your Snake?  

RG: This exhibition started with me making a magic-infused ceramic replica of my childhood home, while my dad was dying and I had the house on the market.  As the story unfolded, I created characters out of clay, the Snake Man, the Lobsta Queen with her lobsta purse having a face off came next.  I almost sold the house to a veterinarian who wanted to turn the house into an animal hospital. She became a “Doggy Dominatrix” in the scene.  The ceramic installation kept expanding.  The characters felt cinematic.  As it happens often in my work, the ceramic pieces were urging me to expand my ideas into the realm of film.  I began to cast for the film, and create handsewn costumes and make drawings and props for the set. In each exhibition where I share my film, I bring some of the costumes and props back into the exhibition, so here I am including a soft sculpture of Snake Man wearing his original costume.  I also have elements of an altar that appeared in the film including an urn with Dad as Lobsta Chef wearing a “Never Trust a Skinny Chef” apron.  Drawings of each character that appeared on set also reappear here in the exhibition.

JUH: What, if any, is the message of this film, and how does it carry forward similar themes from previous works (or do you see it as entirely separate?

RG: The message of My Snake Is Bigger Than Your Snake, is that mourning can be a creative process. Dealing with the death of a loved one puts us in touch with our own mortality. Facing a death can be a time to release anger, shame and resentments, it can be a place to honor where we came from and a chance to forge a new path. Our approach can be ritualistic, quirky, at times humorous. I sought to document and honor my own mourning process in this film, which was a new and deeply personal addition to my work.  My Snake is Bigger Than Your Snake expanded on psychosexual themes from my larger body of work as well.  It is my passion to create elaborately costumed improvisation scenarios where the performers reach a fever-pitched sensual release.  Whether it be a cast of lobsta porn stars eating sticky desserts out of (my) Lobsta labia on a Berlin paddleboat  in Crustacean Temptation to a queer cast of witches peeing and smearing mustard and Cheetos on a Donald Trump in a Bushwick sex hotel in Golden Showers: A Sex Hex, to the shrink-wrap mummification domination of the Snake Man in My Snake, we find freedom. Lightness. It’s a simulated “La petite mort” (little death) that I am after, a post-orgasmic state of transcendence.

Jane Ursula Harris is a Brooklyn-based writer who has contributed to Art in America, The Believer, Bookforum, BOMB, Cultured Magazine, Flash Art, Frieze,  GARAGE, and The Paris Review, among other publications. Her essays have appeared in catalogues including the forthcoming Carnegie Mellon’s Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth; Kunstahlle Hamburg’s Werner Büttner: The Last Lecture Show; Participant Inc.’s NegroGothic: M. Lamar; Hatje Cantz’s Examples to Follow: Expeditions in Aesthetics and Sustainability; Kerber Verlag’s Marc Lüders: The East Side Gallery; Phaidon’s Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing, Phaidon’s Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting; Universe-Rizzoli’s Curve: The Female Nude Now; and Twin Palms’ Anthony Goicolea.  Harris curates on a freelance basis, and is an art history faculty member at the School of Visual Arts. She was a 2020 recipient of the inaugural Cultured Magazine/Parker Pen Writers Grant.