Performance artist Steven Cohen has just returned from Video Ground Zero — a Canada-based international collaboration of video artists — where he presented his performance and video works Living Art (1998), Limping into the African Renaissance (2000) and his latest Chandelier (2002) in Toronto and Ottawa.
Canada and South Africa have “different publics”, he says, referring to the responses to his hardcore performance interventions. “Theirs is polite, tranquillised, passive. Ours is confrontational, agitated and open, desperate and alive.”
Cohen’s description of his South African audiences is shown in graphic detail in Chandelier, an ongoing project he has performed twice so far, both in Newtown.
In Chandelier he wears a working antique French chandelier he has reconstructed into a wearable tutu. With tinkling glass baubles and 42 photon micro-lights visible from a mile away, he literally wears a mobile piece of European extravagance tripping about on high heels amid the increasing poverty that defines his chosen sites.
Cohen will show worked video documentation of his first public intervention with Chandelier at Museum Africa. He will also provide a support performance at the opening of the Playtime festival on Wednesday.
In this video, we see Chandelier in the now-demolished shack town under the M1 highway in Newtown — the site set aside for the new Mandela Bridge. Coincidentally, arriving at the same time as the Red Ants — the notoriously militant city council employees — Cohen witnesses their crowbars at work, demolishing the illegal homes.
In the midst of this chaotic destruction, Cohen and his chandelier have conversations with residents. Some want to attack him, thinking he’s brought the Red Ants. Some want to hold his hand, calling him “Angel”. Depending on perspective, Cohen’s Chandelier could be a force of evil or a symbol of salvation.
One man presents a Hustler magazine to Cohen, apparently aroused by the reality of Cohen — scantily clad, alluringly transsexual — providing relief from the debris and destruction around him. For Cohen, the work is constructed by “the unpredictable and diverse responses that people bring, as well as the intimacy of those interactions”.
The soundtrack to the video is macabre. The light, mystical tinkling of the glass baubles interact with the smashing of metal crowbars against tin and the cardboard shelters, sounding disquietingly like a hammer against a skull.
And Cohen is there as witness, providing a sounding board for emotions in chaos. This work shows clearly the vital role of performance art in public spaces; a vessel for commentary; another voice of analysis; an agent of change in a fucked-up social system where make-shift homes are as expendable as the people themselves; in a place and time where western opulence and extravagance co-exist side-by-side with homeless desperation.
In May, Cohen and his partner Elu take their performances to Rencontres Choregraphiques Internationale de Seine – St Denis in Paris, Danses du Loin in La Rochelle and In Transit in Berlin. Thereafter they settle in La Rochelle for a six month choreographic research residency with Ballet Atlantique, followed by a one-month residency at Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie.
Like Cohen, performance artist Robin Rhode, actively seeks out his audience, finding people in public spaces who are unlikely to see the inside of a gallery. The public nature of his art, says Rhode, “calls for immediate reaction from the audience. You become part of the process.”
His spontaneous, fresh, urban approach to public art, dealing as it does with societies in flux, has rapidly established itself on the international art scene. He interacts with South Africa using the streets and walls as his canvas, and chalk, spraypaint and piss as his media. His The Matriks — a work first shown at the Johannesburg Art Gallery during the Joubert Park Public Art Project — is currently on show at Dis/Locations at Sale Rekalde, Bilboa. In June this year, Rhode starts his residency in critical theory at the Malmo Art Academy, Stockholm.
But back to the present, Rhode is evasive about the work he will present for Playtime. He says it will be “something fresh, something funky, something to get you hooked, like a crack-head junkie”. What does this mean? We can expect his funky, cool approach to addressing issues of intangible latitudes, extending space, territorial marks that disappear as they’re made, taking the piss out of watercolour, colonialism, artificial space boundaries, identity, cultural ignorance, the art world, and institutionalised everything.
One possibility for Playtime is Rhode’s current project with children from Bosmont, his West Rand home, where playground equipment has missing parts and kids gather on street corners. In one work, a child swings on a chalk seat drawn on a street corner, into the road ahead and head-over-heels back again: a full revolution. Rhode is reworking this documentation with digital animation and drawings, adding colour and transforming a street corner into another space, another world.
Programme
The Playtime Autumn Festival runs from May 1 to 5.