Interviewing Marty Jankus: Sexuality, The Body, and The Grotesque.

“My work is going to be Queer regardless of if I want it to be or not because I’m Queer.”

June 05, 2024

By Ellis Dowle

‘It’s pure, I don’t smoke tobacco.’

Unnamed. 2018

Marty opens a cigarette case with crocodile tan leather on the front; inside are two pre-rolled joints. After grabbing coffee, we sat on a ledge under Bank in the City of London. Overlooking a steep drop onto the Thames, this is Marty's secret spot of meditation.

‘I have two sides either a complete fucking whore or this.’

Marty is wearing what he describes as ‘nothing special’: a khaki trench coat, an Italian cashmere knit V-neck jumper, and classic old-school houndstooth trousers—reminiscent of an old-money YSL look. Marty describes the other side of his dress as “a complete fucking whore”: and it is impossible to wear this look daily. The platform heels he loves are a massive inconvenience, as they make him too tall for the tube and don’t keep up with their on-the-go lifestyle.

Marty Jankus is a multi-media artist who works in sculpture, photography, and performance. Originally from Lithuania, Marty moved to Brighton to study Fine Art Painting at university. At first glance, their work is raw, bloody, erotic, and grotesque. The use of the body is very prominent throughout their work. This is because of the importance of the physical act of painting. The body's involvement is crucial to using the space, “drawing is not quite loose and fast enough, with painting, I like painting quite big… it’s a lot quicker, it moves differently, you can smudge it in, you can do multiple different things, with the gesture of the mark”. The physical movement of the paint is crucial in Jankus's creative process and contributes to the sensory experience. ‘Personally, I'm a bit weird with food, like someone butter toast loudly. Paint makes those sounds, but I don’t find them repulsive’. This physical sensation of repulsiveness can be expressed the imagery of their work.

Biohybrid. 2023.

Visually, the body is depicted in a proactively grotesque way. Jankus's work contains various images of the nude body, contorted and disfigured. People may find Marty's work repulsive or violent, but he would rather invite us to marvel at the collections of a subverted body than something bland. “You can get that grotesqueness with the motion itself. It’s straightforward. You see a red splatter of paint, and you automatically think about homicide, a crime scene, or something like that”. The pinnacle of this idea can be seen in a scene in The Spider series, where Marty contorts the body into red, flesh-like sculptures with metal legs. The dozens of attached eyes make the viewer the spectacle as the creature crawls around. They are subverting the voyeuristic dynamic of art and viewer. Art is often seen to be the pursuit of beauty, the perfect image – Why are bloody insides and bones, what remains beneath the skin, not as beautiful?

“It was okay for me to be an artist rather than to be gay.”

Underlying the work is a charged sexual energy. Jankus first started drawing at age 16 to explore his sexuality. Growing up in Lithuania, Marty states that he grew up in a very homophobic environment, which became “violent and torturous”. He knew he would have to leave, and his art was a platform for him to express his repressed sexuality. This expression of his sexuality is evident through the phallic and BDSM imagery.

“After university, I started noticing the pattern there: if I’m not having sex, I have a much more productive creatively. For example, in all of my most prolific periods, where I was not entirely isolated, but I was only having Platonic relations with people, but nothing sexual, all of my sexual energy would go into my work itself.”

MeatSpace, 2022

After graduating, some of his most “prolific” work stemmed from a lack of sexual relationships in his life. An example of this is his MeatSpace exhibition, a farewell to Brighton before his move to London, which took place in 2022. This exhibition explored fetish themes within his work and life, encapsulating all he had learned over the years. The exhibition featured elements such as people dressed as horses running on all fours, fetish wear, and the subversion of femininity.

“It's not power because it doesn’t come from a place of power; it’s the opposite. It comes from a place of vulnerability”.

When delving deeper into his queerness, he finds the same way people utilise femininity as a source of power: you can with queerness within your work. Although he does admit to trying to forcefully present this queerness previously in his work, he has come to the conclusion that his art is now queer even if he doesn’t want it to be. Marty is clear about he feels it shouldn’t even be a thing in any aspect of life, but many people, especially political individuals, weaponised a fear of queerness as a distraction: “It's just stupid; it shouldn’t even be a thing”. Marty doesn’t even want to be considered a queer artist anymore; he is just an artist.

But does he weaponize queerness in other aspects of his life? “Absolutely I do.” Why? “Because it's possible”. In London, much more than in Lithuania and even Brighton, you can utilise the existing patriarchy to fit you. Still, he is clear that this power comes from a place of systemic oppression and often comes from negative stereotypes, but it is a tool you can use to your advantage, especially within the closed-off and exclusive nature of the art world. Many people want to help, and “I am in no position to say no to help if it comes my way”. Simply put, Marty states that If it weren’t a vulnerable position that has been created through systematic oppression, they wouldn’t need help.

Surveillance. 2023

Jankus’ work embodies a rare sense of authentic confrontation. His genuineness is unmistakable within his work and their personhood. Some may find his work frightening, but his work comforts the disturbed, which isn’t that the point of art? Jankus's work should be looked to be a source of inspiration; No matter how fucked up of a bloody mess you are, no matter the gore and distortion that lies inside, you should face who you are and embrace it.