FINE ART: Dennis Mair
THE crammed space of the Hnel Gallery somewhat resembles the inside of Lorena Bobbitt’s handbag at present, as images of penises teem the walls amid a diverse selection of coffins, cabinets and intricates.
Steven Cohen’s Camp Concentration opened on Sunday February 2, to a performance piece by the artist dressed in scarlet platforms with gas mask, matching leopard print tights and fox stoles. Smearing the walls with goo, he was overshadowed only by his cult followers, attentively clad in gender non-specific materials to dye for. Lips were whet with tomato cocktails as the odd woman dressed as a man in drag, roamed the space commenting on who’s who and hoping to be seen.
The somewhat eclectic assortment of flagrant images, woven together like an upholstered strain of fabric, kept few sufficiently distracted as they pathed towards the punch bowl out back. A flurry of gay iconography and religious representations, interspersed with porn, bombarded spectators with a discontinuity of semblances ranging from the actively political to the socially extreme. One work came complete with a severed foetus head, fit for homo consumption. Another consisted entirely of a soiled serviette sex-proposal mounted in a gilded frame. Both were reasonably priced for a bourgeois bank balance.
Images of the artist splayed themselves within the confines of the exhibition space until he later surfaced in hot-pants with cell-phone and feather hat.
Like his dress sense, his furniture constructions comprised an intricate assemblage of the unconventional and not-quite-kitsch couture. Cohen uses the acrid blend of his fixation with male genitalia and ardent reaction against the norm to transform societal abuse into an aesthetic. His foot stools and lamp shades tread the fine line between sweetly sarcastic and blatantly perverse, intentional for sure. Complete with cocks, crests and flowers, he manages to maintain the elegant lines of antique form while expressing disgust at a deteriorating climate.
The juxtaposition of conflicting imagery is the signature of Cohen’s art. A ”nigger-loving” porn paper, enlarged and laminated, hangs near a personalised rendition of the new South African flag.
Cohen’s work screams out, loud and queer, that his identity moves beyond cultural heritage into a realm where being odd is no longer extreme. From a distance, a seemingly innocent aesthetic catches the onlookers’ eyes. But, on closer inspection, the intricate meanderings shock conservative heteros and like-mindeds into the reality of an alternative norm. It then becomes apparent that more than just the Fifties ideals are resident in the Rainbow Land.
Camp Concentration is on at the Hnel Gallery in Cape Town until the end of February