Fakewhale continues to bring exclusive, in-depth content to its audience. A rare conversation between two defining voices in contemporary art, Banks Violette and Jesse Draxler, is now available on our YouTube channel.
Art is often framed as a means of communication, but what happens when there is no audience, no shared discourse, no agreed-upon terms? Banks Violette operates in this space, where destruction, subculture, and erasure aren’t just themes but materials.
“Any sort of gatekeeping or policing or saying that there is only one correct kind of vocabulary to use to describe how you interact in, digest, and create work. Like, that’s horrible. F#ck that.”
- Banks Violette
Banks Violette, Not yet titled/(broken screen), 2008, exhibition view, BPS22, Charleroi, Belgium, 2024. Ph: Leslie Artamonow
Banks Violette is an American artist whose work interrogates violence, erasure, and the aesthetics of subcultural extremity. Drawing from black metal, punk, and the collapse of established structures, his large-scale sculptures and installations impose a physical weight on ideas of destruction and absence.
Jesse Draxler is a cult-status creative whose influence has shaped digital arts since the advent of Tumblr. A singular and innovative artist, he has threaded his brand of fractured stoicism through fashion, music, and editorial illustration while maintaining a staggering studio practice.
Fakewhale hosted this exclusive conversation between Violette and Draxler, an unfiltered exchange on the mechanics of fabrication, the weight of physical presence, and the tension between aesthetic form and raw impact.
Banks Violette, THE BEES MADE HONEY IN THE LION'S SKULL (2005-2023), BPS22, Charleroi, Belgium
Together, they dissect:
▪️The failure of digital tools: why Violette rejects weightless mediums in favor of real mass and gravity.
▪️Complicity in destruction: how spectatorship turns the viewer into a participant.
▪️Burned churches, shattered chandeliers, and decayed luxury: where black metal, Romanticism, and high fashion intersect.
▪️ Steven Parrino and the paradox of negation: the impossibility of erasing history without invoking it.
▪️Stepping away from the art world: why Violette disappeared for a decade and what brought him back.
Explore the key insights from the conversation in our full interview summary ↓
Banks Violette, installation view, Throne (and over and over again), 2009-10
