This is Steven Cohen, performance artist.
Not just your usual gender-bending monster-mime drag queen clown.
No. Nor your ordinary homo-probe, eros-busting, crazy-assed Jewish shaman-priest. With a prosthetic leg. Or horn feet even.
No. This is Steven Cohen, performance artist, out of South Africa.
Didn't expect that, huh? I didn't either which says something about my own assumptions about what comes out of Africa. The fiercely bent alphabet and ferociously queer vocabulary that might peg him as Californian, say, still makes perfectly good sense for a white gay Jewish South African artist with drama queen pretensions. This is the ground he dances on; this the culturally complicated, politically implicated land he grew out of and belongs to. Denying history and denying the present to say his too isn't the face, a face of South Africa.
So. I went to see Test Patterns: Recent Video from South Africa at SF Camerawork. Steven Cohen's video, Chandelier, stood out—got me by the balls as it were—and not just because I like men in hose. No, this film, this performance, goes beyond the personal into the politically powerful and ricochets.
Seems to me, performance art is made with a certain amount—or a lot—of personal courage. Especially if the artist is doing particularly intimate material. And more so if the material is outrageous, which by definition is contrary and provocative and inspires outrage—then you never know what's going to happen. That's where Cohen likes to go. Ratcheting it up a notch, he goes off-stage, outside the gallery, into "art-unlikely" spaces, as he calls them.
In his list of past performances there are these which speak for themselves.
Jew at the Mall - Rosebank Mall and Mutual Square, Johannesburg
Ugly Girl at Rugby - SA vs Wales, Loftus Versveld, Pretoria
Crawling to register - Independent Electoral Commission, Johannesburg
Limping into the African Renaissance - public road, Sigangeni, Swaziland
And then in 2001 he did Chandelier - intervention at demolition of squatter camp, Newtown.
About these interventions into everyday surroundings Cohen says, "People of the outside step right into the work. They can change the choreography (deny access or 'come this way') and they can change the plot (yell and shout, hit, call the police)." This is in South Africa, mind you, where everyday surroundings include areas of abject poverty—just outside your studio door.
The story goes, Cohen had been working for some time on refashioning a wrought iron chandelier into a wearable tutu. When the piece was compete he decided to premier it in the neighborhood of his studio. So costumed in chandelier and hose, made up and twinkling with lights, he walked out on stacked platform heels down the underpass squatter lanes, camera trailing. As chance would have it, his inaugural presentation coincided with a government action—crews had been sent out to evict the residents and demolish their board and tarp homes.
Chandelier documents this most extraordinary collision, a synchronistic convergence of histories and meanings. The humble people of the squatter camp seem bemused and befuddled by the pale stranger, a statuesque apparition for sure, come turning, teetering, and gingerly stepping through the mud and debris. A woman steps up and curtsies; another holds back an agitated angry man wielding a fighting club. In his re-constituted emblem of higher living—the crystal chandelier—and his very skin, white, which together speak of colonialism and rank he towers over the field of residents, and yet he walks on fetish platforms in near nakedness, completely upending his gender position. One man, tweaked by this specific aspect, pushes forward. He's got Hustler magazine in hand. He gestures animatedly, "Same, same!" Cohen wearily sits down. The man flips excitedly through the pages, he opens the centerfold, waves it around, shows the camera, smiling. It's got to be one of the weirdest, most uncomfortable art-meets-real life encounters I've seen. Little black man grinning, he's got the white pussy shot and the girl-boy right there in the flesh, right there in the mud and mess of a sanitation-less encampment of apartheid refugees.
When the orange-clad workers enter the scene demolishing the ramshackle dwellings with crowbars, the performance turns from bizarre to deeply disturbing. Even as Cohen raises his arms in some fashion of supplication, there is nothing really but dull dejection in the act. People sit in the rubble waiting out the destruction. Ruination is everywhere. The chandelier is a light in the descending dusk. But there's one more thing. I haven't mentioned the Star of David painted on his head. There's plenty of time, as Cohen steps and stumbles through the wreckage, to consider the implications, to allow the host of associations to come to mind—the pillage and devastation the star has seen. History repeats itself.
It is difficult for me to dare to speak but even harder to keep quiet. And making these secrets public is to enter in a very dangerous relationship of confidence. Dancing up to our own limits, in the heart of contradictory forces, memory and imagination, the personal and the public mingle. I evoke our pride and shame about who we are, genocide and hope, fascination and reality, the macabre and the everyday. I am a Jew and an anti-Zionist. My works deals with the pain of being human and the joy of living and, as our lives are, this work is a complete and incomplete experimentation.
Powerful work. I love it. Steven Cohen does the dance and takes the cake.
Chandelier photos by John Hogg from Paris Autumn Festival and NYTimes.
