Vivid Sydney 2024: The Huxley’s bring shock value to light festival
Their risque performances have not been without consequences. Now the Huxleys are bringing their controversial non-binary art to a new testing ground: Sydney’s festival of light.
It was a risque video installation detailing the sex lives of plants that got the Huxleys cancelled. Melbourne’s best-known – and always best dressed – performance art duo had their work Sex in the Garden of Heronswood, an uncensored exploration of pollination, controversially scrapped from the opening night of Gallery Heronswood in 2017. Set among the sleepy bayside suburb of Dromana on the Mornington Peninsula, Heronswood Gardens had never seen anything like Will and Garrett Huxley.
“They wanted artists to respond to the idea of plant genealogy,” says Will, 42. “I honestly think they got the wrong artists but it was too late to say no.”
Speaking with Review over Zoom from their Clifton Hill studio, the pair, who have been together for 18 years, laugh as they reflect on the “outrageous” short film, a Monty Python-inspired montage of characters in bee and plant costumes they say has become a cult classic.
“It got banned by the gallery for being too obscene, but it wasn’t. It was just super gay and ridiculous,” Will says. “My Mum thinks the film is brilliant because dad was a biologist. She says she’s in the process of sending it to David Attenborough but I have no idea how she plans to communicate with him.”
The Huxleys, partners in life and art, have been a mainstay of the Australian cultural scene for 10 years. Having studied photography, Garrett, 51, at the Queensland College of Art and Will at Edith Cowan University, both were working independently to make art a living prior to their collaboration.
The self-described “creators of a queer wonderland” use filmmaking, photography, music and costume design to put on boundary-transgressing exhibitions and live performances. The Huxleys gained a cult following from their frequent performances at Hobart’s annual winter ritual Dark Mofo and Melbourne’s Fringe Festival.More recently, the pair took a road trip across rural Victoria dressed as retro-futuristic alien Elvises for their 2023 Disgraceland exhibition, which ran at The Abbottsford Convent.
This week, the Huxleys are leaving their home in Melbourne to bring to Sydney their characteristic shock value at Vivid Festival. Their self-described disco-enthused exorcism dance party, Personality Crisis, will close the event onJune 15 at the newly repurposed Machine Hall Precinct, a former electrical substation on Clarence St.
The initial shock value of the Huxleys’ art, which encompasses photography, costuming and performance, is part of their long game with audiences; particularly so for those who are more agnostic to the duo’s androgynous spectacles of sparkle and surrealism. “We don’t set out to shock our audience because we do have a deep respect for them.” says Garrett. “But to those people who are scared of wigs or make up ...”
Will jumps in: “Those are the people who are shocked. And they probably need to be.”
Strongly influenced by the likes of cult filmmaker John Waters and the otherworldly surrealism of British-Mexican painter Leonora Carrington, the Huxleys’s work is tinged with black humour and overtly frivolous spectacles.
They work hard to look ridiculous and they’re well aware of it.
Says Garrett: “When we’re performing, we’re often genderless or playing an object. People will be enjoying themselves and then we see it click in their heads, ‘What gender are they? What’s going on?’
“But at that point we’ve already made this connection with them because we’ve made them laugh, we’ve made them smile.”
Will describes it as the classic “razzle dazzle” spoonful of sugar – a kind of bait-and-switch designed to confuse even the most conservative viewers into having a good time.
“You can’t care too much about what people think,” he says, “You just have to keep making it and soon they’ll catch on.”
And people have. The Huxleys are riding the queer cultural Zeitgeist that’s piquing mainstream interest, with much owed to drag performance.
“I love drag artists,” says Will. “But we would never call ourselves drag artists. We’re stepping out of binaries by taking gender away. I like the freedom of surreal fantasy. It’s amazing to see how much (Ru Paul’s) Drag Race has propelled queer performance art over the last 10 years.
“People’s mothers are watching it!” Garrett adds.
Indeed, the duo joke their own mothers are as much fans of Drag Race as they are of their sons’ art, often coming to see their performances.
“I think my mum loves what we do but I’m not sure whether she fully understands it,” says Will. “She still sends me jobs to apply for because she comes from a generation where being an artist isn’t necessarily something you can make a living from.”
So how did it come to pass that performing as Bauhaus worms and glitter bombed aliens became their full time work?
Garrett laughs. “I was always creating art on the side, but I eventually got rid of hospitality!”
Internationally, the pair have exhibited at Berlin Film Festival (2016) and have performed at Hong Kong Design Week (2018), while they have presented commissions at Melbourne International Arts Festival, the Art Gallery of NSW, and the National Gallery of Victoria. They are regulars at MONA’s summer and winter festivals Mona Foma and Dark Mofo, and their work – mostly photographs – is held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and State Library of Victoria, among others.
They have enthusiastic admirers in multiple Oscar-winning costume designer Catherine Martin, and four-times Archibald finalist Sally Ross, who immortalised the couple as the subjects of her 2018 submission after seeing them lead a prawn-worshipping cult in their live performance, Discordia (2017).
Their current success would have been unfathomable to their younger selves. Both Will and Garrett had similar experiences of growing up in 80s and 90s suburbia, where they were tormented about their sexuality.
Garrett, who grew up on Queensland’s Gold Coast, considers himself as far from the surfing stereotype as is possible. Instead, he turned to pop music and magazines to escape reality.
“Artists like David Bowie and Prince from these larger cities, like New York and London, were lifelines for us growing up,” he says. “I could finally see glimpses of myself in a way I’d never seen before. Homosexuality just wasn’t accepted.”
Comparably, Will describes his own experiences in suburban Perth, after emigrating from Britain, as incredibly dark and terrifying.
“I hardly had any friends growing up in Perth. I would try to dress like everyone else and would still get beaten up,” he says. “So I decided to be however I wanted … really express myself.”
While a difficult relationship with his mother has mended, the situation with his father remained complicated up until his death 12 years ago.
“When I came out, he didn’t speak to me for a long time,” says Will. “When he got sick I think he realised it was wasted energy being ashamed of me. In the last year of his life, I would even hold his hand and sing him songs. He was vulnerable and this was my chance to get close to him.
“It was healing for both of us.
“I really hoped that, with time, he would come to terms with this world we had created. And when thinking about the upcoming show, I have this fantasy that he would be there.”
Garrett played an instrumental role in supporting Will to heal from the trauma of coming out. They met in Melbourne when Will was perusing the art house section of the Video Busters store where Garrett worked. Will remembers Garrett as a dramatic Heathcliff type, who took himself a bit too seriously.
“It was my first relationship with a man so it was a really big moment in my life. I couldn’t believe I’d found someone who loved Kate Bush, Leigh Bowery and Cindy Sherman as much as I did,” says Will.
It took another six years until they finally collaborated on a glam-rock fantasy mural at Melbourne’s Bakehouse Studios and their first runway at Melbourne Fashion Week soon followed.
Says Garrett: “From there, people started calling us the Huxleys. We never decided on that name. It just happened.”
‘It’s such a shame to see the joy for art disappear.’
Garrett had taken on Will’s surname because, as he explains, his own surname, Hughes, was his stepfather’s and “hadn’t meant anything to him”. It was, more importantly to the couple, a show of solidarity prior to the legalisation of same-sex marriage.
When Review asks if they have since married, the pair brush off the idea as “too stressful” and not an institution they believe in.
Garrett, however, excitedly remarks, “We got cosmically married in LA!”
Will explains that their recent US trip in April included a stop at Luna Luna, a retro-themed art amusement park with the likes of Salvador Dali and Keith Haring on display. Under the neon-lit archway of André Heller’s cubist Wedding Chapel, visitors are invited to marry whomever (or whatever – be it iPhone or pet) they love. “We had a whole audience of strangers cheering us,” says Will. “I was wearing a top hat and veil, and then you recite these beautiful vows. What’s really special is that you’re honouring art and creativity above all.”
The trip wasn’t purely personal though. The Huxleys added a three week long residency at the Bessie and Obie-award winning Chocolate Factory Theatre in New York to their repertoire. The theatre, which is known for its critically lauded off-Broadway productions, partnered with Melbourne’s Abbotsford Convent for their first ever collaborative global artist exchange. This residency program saw the pair immerse themselves in the New York City art scene (there were 14-hour days spent at galleries) and perform at the long-running Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas, an event that has generated its own cult status.
The opportunity arose following their critically acclaimed Bloodlines exhibition which debuted ahead of Sydney World Pride last year. Through photo, video and music, the couple paid tribute to influential voices in the queer community, such as Leigh Bowery and Derek Jarman, lost to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 90s. “When we were researching for (the show), we always wondered why these artists of the 70s and 80s were so intense, so punk. They exploded with creativity and outrage because their voices had been silenced for hundreds of years. Then we lost a lot of them to HIV/AIDS so there was a lot of silence again throughout the 90s,” says Garrett.
This residency finally brought a sense of closure to that body of work. Says Will: “(In New York) We visited the exact areas the artists in Bloodlines had been to. The original hallway from Paris is Burning, a Keith Haring in a queer centre, the original drag ballrooms.
“Often in Australia there’s a sense of tall poppy syndrome but the Americans were really barracking for you to be bigger and better. There didn’t seem to be any snobbery, maybe it’s too big a city for anyone to really care but I felt really alive.”
With the election in November, it was inevitable that conversation would turn from the liberal art scene to the divided political climate in the US.
Following Trump’s election in 2016, the couple created one of their all-time favourite performance pieces, Born to be Alive, for the 2017 Sydney Contemporary Art Fair. In skin-tight, gold sequined suits, the pair pop out of an enormous inflatable vulva and proceed to worship it.
“At that point we were so angry with Trump’s sexist and misogynistic rhetoric, but we wanted to respond in a way that was still joyful,” Will explains. “For some reason,” says Garrett, laughing, “of all our works, people were really revolted by this one.”
The duo agrees there’s an emotional weight among artists who feel creatively paralysed by mounting political and cultural crises.
“It’s such a shame to see the joy for art disappear,” says Will.
“I read this response by Marlene Dietrich (in her memoir) when she was asked why she continued to act throughout the war. She said it was all she could offer to the world in a time that was so unbearable.”
On home soil, Garrett speaks of how disheartened he felt before a performance in Brisbane scheduled on the night the news broke the Indigenous voice referendum had resulted in a “no” vote.
“Being a Yorta Yorta and Gumbaynggirr man, it meant a lot to me,” he says. “I just thought, ‘How are we going to go out on stage in these big, inflatable fairy like crab costumes?’ ”
Will continues: “We felt really stupid in the dressing room. This horrible thing has happened and we’re in these silly costumes.”
The pair took strength from the crowd’s response.
“It was really beautiful because a lot of people told us it was what they needed at that moment.”
Now, Personality Crisis sees the duo take their own trauma and turn it into an escapist fantasy. Inspired by Discordianism, a 1960s new age anti-religion which embraces chaos, the Huxleys’ new work involves curating a dance party with acts from local artists.
“It’s going to be a combination of dancing, live music and performance art. We feel that because the world is in crisis, the only way to push through is with a sense of radical joy,” says Will.
“We’ve asked these artists to do acts they’ve never done before,” adds Garrett, “This is their time to do it.”
Once The Huxleys’ disco fever dream wraps they move straight into their next big performance work. The next target? That uniquely Australian mania for all things sport.
The Huxleys’ Personality Crisis will be presented at the Machine Hall for the closing night of Vivid Festival on Saturday, June 15.
