Author | Sophie Sotsky
Featured image by Adrian Buckmaster Photography
Brett Kreutzer is a graphic designer, performance artist, nightlife personality, mixed media artist, and wearable art fashionista. Or — should I say — Muffinhead is.
“Muffinhead is the person I assign to present my work,” says Brett. A performed character, an illustrated one, a pseudonym as much as a topic sentence, “Muffinhead” is also very much Brett Kreutzer himself. “A lot of the ideas I have you can’t present as someone named Brett,” he told me. “It’s a matter of packaging.”
The separation between Brett and Muffinhead, or rather, the lack thereof, is a blurry line that Brett smears playfully. “My friends just call me Muffin,” he told me.
The Muffinhead aesthetic is strikingly consistent across an impressive panoply of disciplines. Paintings, costumes, art objects and live performances all stem unmistakably from the same fantasy land.
The cross-disciplinary consistency, I learned, is not due to the obsessive adherence to some rigidly pre-fabricated topography.
If a graphic design and a performance art piece are remarkably synonymous it is only because they each come so directly from Muffin — from his inner landscape. Indeed when he invited me into his home it became immediately clear that Muffinhead is not entirely fictional. Yes, Muffinhead definitely lives here, I thought.
Even from a young age he’s always had a colorful, insatiable imagination. “I had pictures in my head all day long,” he comments. Near obsessive in his pursuit of realizing this inner life, he started off drawing and grew his process from there. By age 19, he had his own line of silk screen T-shirts, and a trademark aesthetic that had coagulated.
Each project now, be it a headpiece or a performance, begins with an image in his mind. In fact, it matters little to M in which particular medium the idea materializes. For him they’re all essentially one and the same.
If he has tended more recently towards performance it is only because here in New York, says the L.A. native, “we’re so performance oriented that that’s what’s called for.”
M explains that he is very much inspired by fashion illustration. That at times he feels almost let down by the realization of these preliminary designs as, in the face of such stark inspirational images, “the actual thing is almost muted.” Fittingly, his live performances read almost like fashion illustrations brought to life.
His canvas vacillates wildly. Past performance venues have included the Social Media Awards in Singapore, the Life Ball in Vienna, The Standard Hotel (where his installation piece saw him sporting a massive balloon dress which covered the length of the pool), and recently, (amusingly) a mall opening at the Springfield Town Center in Virginia.
But in any context his aesthetic is unwavering. It’s cartoony, clownish, and super-hero-y. It’s Tim Burton. It’s almost goth. It’s psychedelia. It’s playful. It’s daffy.
In his chunky monochrome and bold lines, in his Kinkos color scheme and elvish femininity, and in the mischievous Cheshire Cat grin that pervades so much of his work, M seems to have leapt directly off the board of some trippy chromatic Hasbro children’s board game.
Don’t let his childish guise fool you though — It’s dark in Candy Land.
Muffinhead frequently performs amidst the NYC nightclub scene, and his persona and his installation art are forebodingly shaped by its character. “A nightclub has a rather large dark side attached to it,” he told me impishly, “so in a way you have to talk to it.”
“It’s sex and drugs and loud music… but if done correctly there’s a painful beauty about it… That’s something that I like to try to underline.”
In one characteristically dark installation piece, a performer named Anais Delsol laid flat down, as if she had jumped off the balcony at Marquee, a popular NYC nightclub. She lay splayed on a big spiral print out as M painted blood around her. She was meant to appear like a suicide victim.
“I appreciate the dramatic,” M confessed.
A gory but strikingly beautiful still image called “The Curse” (pictured below) features a model gouged with bloody zebra stripes. It is simultaneously gory and pop. It is both sinister and neat.
What is perhaps the most fascinating thing to me about Brett/M/Muffinhead is that it is impossible to separate the alter ego from the man himself.
I believe this to be a pivotal wavelet of the gradual incorporation of the drag canon into mainstream performance: the prevalent and playful deconstruction of persona. Equally on stage and in everyday life.
“I think drag is, in a way, our modern Kabuki,” notes M. ” You can say so much with it. It’s such a strong visual representation. It’s also a mask. And a good one.”
