Interview: Blinky the Friendly Hen 40th Anniversary

This is a drawing of Bahuchara Mata.

If you don't already know about Blinky the Friendly Hen, let me tell you the story.

Jeffrey Vallance bought Blinky, a Foster Farms fryer chicken, at Ralph's supermarket in Canoga Park in 1978 and paid to have the complete burial and memorial service at the Los Angeles Pet Cemetery. His act of treating one chicken's life and death with dignity proved to resonate with a whole bunch of people and still does today. If you want to know a lot more about Blinky, you can look her up on google or read the book Mr. Vallance wrote about her or listen to him talk about it on Youtube.
 
And so it's the 40th anniversary of Blinky's burial, and California State University, Northridge is celebrating with a big Blinky show that has a lot of chicken art in it. And when I say "a lot", I mean a lot.

I had the chance to Interview the artist, and so I did. What you read next is the interview.


PEPIAJW: How do you feel about chickens?

JV: I love chickens.

PEPIAJW: After 40 years, why are we still talking about Blinky?

JV:  Blinky made a crossover into popular culture, so it got out of the art ghetto and into the minds of regular folks. Blinky is out there in the culture as an archetype. It keeps showing up in all these kinds of venues and forums, in punk rock songs or cartoons or little jokes on TV shows, so I think it keeps going by popular culture.

PEPIAJW: If you could be any kind of chicken, what kind of chicken would you be?

JV:  I think I would be a guinea fowl. That was the wild bird that became the domesticated chicken. It's a chicken but it's wild, lives in the forest and has a natural life. I'd want to be a guinea fowl because domesticated chickens live pretty horrible lives on corporate farms and don't have much space and they're crammed in cages stacked on each other, and sometimes they cut their beaks off, and it's not a very good life for chickens now.

PEPIAJW: Do you feel that being a male artist has limited the reach of the phenomenon of Blinky?

JV:  Very much so because Blinky is a hen, a female and I'm a male, and I think Jesus had the same problem because in the bible he says he would like to be a mother hen and would like to embrace all people like a hen embraces her chicks. That's the ultimate conception of god, a mother hen, instead of god being like a stern father. Mostly we have the stern father in the sky image.

PEPIAJW: Have you ever met Bahuchara Mata?

JV:  Yes, actually in my bedroom, I have a shrine to her.  She was a woman in India, and she was walking along and then these criminals came and they were going to rape her, and she didn't want to be defiled, and she had a big knife and cut off her breasts and that turned off the marauders, she became a goddess, and she rode a chicken and that image of her riding a chicken became a symbol. She's worshiped by the transgender community in India. They have festivals and shrines for her in India. People dress up, wear make-up and have great rituals in her honor.

PEPIAJW: How did Blinky evolve in your mind after the initial acts of burial and the memorial?

JV:  The first idea was more like a prank, to see what I could get away with... if a pet cemetary would go through the ritual with the animal.

Very early on, I started to see Blinky as a symbol for all of the trillions of chickens that are slaughtered every year. Blinky started to take on a more serious role, and then a funny thing started to happen.

Later, as I looked back, I saw that all the things I did were symbols for Christ: burial, resurrection, sacrifice. Unknowingly, I went through all these rituals, and it was only later that I saw that Christ saw himself as a mother hen. That opened me up to how the different world religions see chickens as sacred. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and tribal religions, voodoo and Wicca, and it goes over the scope of religion. That's where the current show is going. My personal take on all this is that I see heaven as a big fluffy chicken. It's a warm and fuzzy place. You're embraced by this giant chicken, and you're safe under the wings.


Opening Reception: Saturday, February 2, 4-6pm
Artist Talk: Monday, February 4,10am
Artist Walkthrough: Saturday, February 16, 1pm