Artist Take: "20th Century Porn" with Jill Westwood
Artist Take / 22 July 2026 / By: Timothée Chalamet
When he’s tired of being told to sit down and be a Good Fucking Boy by Kylie, Timothée Chalamet enjoys being cucked by dominartist Jill Westwood. So much so, in fact, that he asked her to add him to her roster. She declined, because she’s retired now and making art about desiring eschatology in a way Luca Guadagnino won't know shit about. Grow up Twinky!
Jill’s videos, photographs and archive installs are about fucking insofar as Jaws is about a shark. Early work began with liquid latex “second skin” garments she’d sell under pseudonyms – Fetisch or Die and Fetisch World Domination – and performances in her industrial female duo Fistfuck, but now, an art-psychotherapist (people have always wanted her help I guess), she works backwards, restructuring past performances, power relationships, examining ecstasy and violence, the body and the self. Showing at :)) Glasgow’s :)) David Dale Gallery, :// Marseille’s :// Giselle Books* – even :{ :{ east london’s :{ :{ Neven Gallery.
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TC Do you like art?
JW In 1983 when I was 23 years old I wrote this artist statement:
To portray the metaphysical side of human nature.
To establish a subconscious link between myself / others.
In the confused time in which we live. I am aware of the kind of despair I portray and it’s not without remorse that I decided to do so. There is no mistake, it is something on which I have staked everything. I believe in all the threats of the invisible. I am fighting the invisible itself. Applying myself to unearthing some secrets. What I want to expose is this mass of desires, dreams, illusions and beliefs, which has resulted in this lie, no one believes any longer. I would aim to revive some images, obvious images, that are not tainted with continued disillusionment. To succeed in showing the mind’s obscure, hidden, unrevealed secrets and aspects by a sort of real projection. Not aiming to create an illusion of things which do not exist. Aiming to make scenarios indestructible, irrefutable. No single gesture must be void of the fatality of life. I grope blindly towards an ideal. I partly know what I want and how to accomplish it. But I believe a chance, a miracle will occur and reveal to us all, that which we still do not know.
TC Does your own art hurt or heal you?
JW I’m interested in the parts of ourselves we’d rather disown: our capacity for cruelty, selfishness, envy or dominance, alongside tenderness, generosity and care. If my work heals, it’s not because it offers comfort. If it hurts, it’s not because it seeks to wound. I hope it creates enough space for people to encounter something true about themselves, however uncomfortable that might be. That’s where empathy begins.
TC When you think about your tombstone, what do you think it looks like?
JW My first thought was Damien Hirst’s ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ along with Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’. Last year my dear friend and long-standing collaborator Antal Nemeth died. Standing by the grave of his ashes in Berlin as the church bell tolled just for him, I unexpectedly found profound beauty in this ritual. I thought, how funerals belong to the living. The finality of death itself remains unimaginable.
TC Is sex like death, or is death akin to sex? Which do you think about more?
JW Both deserve reverence, tenderness and respect; both require surrender, vulnerability and trust. But I think about sex more than death. Not simply as an act, but as a force. For me, eros isn’t simply about sex. It’s about the erotics of knowing and loving life.
TC What do you think about the kink scene in London, and is there any hope?
JW I don’t think I know what “kink” means. I lived through an exploratory phase where fetish practices were underground, socially hidden and unaccepted (1980s). The music, fashion, art and night club scenes crossed over giving rise to a new wave of intersecting contexts, an experimental space. Labels often obscure lived experience. It’s possible that exploring frightening experiences within a context of trust stretches our humanity in ways that expand human consciousness and its mattering in the world.
TC What are you listening to? I wish I could have seen your industrial noise performances Fistfuck (1981-81)
JW Recently I’ve been immersed in listening to Zos Kia preparing a film reel for their performance at VOD. Those Fistfuck performances have taken on something of a mythic quality. From the inside they felt very raw and dangerously precarious. We wanted to discover what performance could do in those contexts, pushing things over edges to find out what happened when sound, body and audience were pushed into unfamiliar territory. I'm intrigued that the energy of Fistfuck has such an afterlife, I’m interested in what those performances were asking more than in the mythology that's grown around them. Although I’m happy to milk their dubious glory now. Hahaha!
TC Favourite worst nightmare?
JW My motto with my long-standing collaborator Antal Nemeth has always been: Love is the Law, Fear is the Key.
TC Do you like ContraPoints?
JW I had to look this up, and yes, I do. I’m drawn to brave people willing to explore beneath appearances. She seems interested in complexity, contradiction and in the instability of certainty.
Dream artistic orgy/sex marathon/ smoke circle.
JW My first thought was a tantric liaison with Bowie. Then I thought what about a fantasy mix of all these ways to be intimate with my favourite people? A gathering of those who have enchanted, influenced or transformed me. Something dreamlike, a beautifully, sensitive exchange of bodies, minds and spirits, so I am imagining an uncensored unfolding, such as you get in dream states, that is timeless and melts from inspiring conversations into sensuous touch that flow into mass-orgasmic splendour. WOW! Seismic Sex Magic. That’s a great fantasy, that could change the world. An erotics of friendship, imagination and aliveness. Thanks for unleashing that thought.
Timmy Tam Juliette, or Justine? And if the latter, do you think Justine ever experienced pleasure, and is therefore an unreliable narrator?
JW This was printed in ID magazine in 1984 to accompany a photograph of me dressed in black latex, leather and stiletto shoes: Dominatrix Vixen “She’s a libertine… “in pursuit of pleasure totally” her alter ego is Juliette a Marquis de Sade character. “My outfit is sexual – involving every aspect of sexuality.” Reading this now makes me smile.
When I made this statement, I was very clear in my desire to find and claim my power. As a young, working-class woman in the 1980s, I felt this was necessary. This was an era of extreme everyday sexism and misogyny, when the Yorkshire Ripper was still haunting public consciousness and Benny Hill embodied what passed for mainstream entertainment. These days I admire my daring boldness and punk spirit; in exploring the sphere and language of De Sade, fetish and transgression, it was a way of stepping into territory usually reserved for men. It was also a way of exploring the frightening capacities in all of us, and of trying to understand the extremes of human experience. De Sade interested me because transgression can expose how power is constructed and maintained. Fetishism can exaggerate social roles until they begin to fracture. My thinking has evolved to understand power as agency rather than domination.
I am not sure how Justine experienced her plight. I can’t imagine she experienced pleasure in the conventional sense. But trauma has a complicated relationship with desire, and fetishism can sometimes become a way of transforming suffering into a strategy for survival.
Marty Supreme Are you happy? Are you single? Can you read me a poem?
JW I recently wrote this poem in Marseille around the opening of an exhibition titled ‘Everything is NOW’ at Giselle’s Books (4 July-16 Aug 2026). This might answer these few queries.
Everything is NOW
Everything vibrates
Skin remembers
Blood feels
Spit
Piss
Sweat
Tears
Shit
Spunk
Menstrual blood
Everything is sacred matter
Every act is ritual
Language is a body
A vast cosmic landscape
Touch it
Feel it
It feels you
Love is a potent magic
Love is a political act
It is how we become one another
We leap
Strapped together
Scared and ecstatic
Already falling
Our saints are among us
They are within us
We are they
They are us
Every touch
Every wound
Every dance
Every intimate moment
Every BODY that refused to disappear
WE CONSECRATE EACH OTHER
Through presence
Through friendship
Impossible LOVE
We leave ourselves in one another
Like sacred relics
Still warm
Still breathing
This is how power returns
NOT AS DOMINATION - AS DEVOTION
NOT MINE - OURS
Everything is sacred
Everything is breathing
Everything is NOW
We are already falling…
TIMMY TTTTTTT Has god ever answered your prayers?
JW Making work is an act of sustained attention. Like sex-magic, I hold an image, a feeling or a desire as clearly as I can. I invest myself in it completely, then in an act of transmission into the unknown, I let it go. Sometimes, much later, something unexpected returns from the world and it feels as though your prayer has been answered and that can feel miraculous.