Steven Cohen
TAXI-009, David Krut Publishing)
It’s tempting to try and understand Steven Cohen, that “queer Jewish freak”, as standing in the tradition of a Bob Flanagan, an artist obsessed with the body and the multitudinous ways in which it can be abused, manipulated, mortified and modified in the name of art. Unlike Flanagan, however (and I only use him as the most obvious example of his genre), Cohen’s art is not about an extreme dialogic response to a homogeneous mainstream that is defined by clear-cut taboos and traditions. It’s about engaging with the (specifically) South African culture in which the artist finds himself, and about being a part of that culture. Cohen’s bound and bloodied cock is not an “up yours” to the establishment, a trite gesture of counterculture rebellion. It’s about us — it’s about the cock of the nation.
This is made clear in Surgery without Anaesthetic: The Art of Steven Cohen, Shaun de Waal and Robyn Sassen’s excellent introductory essay to this latest in the Taxi series on contemporary South African artists. Often, the challenge facing writers of an essay like this is blending biographical information with analysis, so as to enlighten and inform readers who are not familiar with the artist, and at the same time challenge those who are already aficionados. The writers succeed admirably in this task, aided by some wonderfully chosen photographs.
We are taken on a tour of Cohen’s work, from his first exhibition in 1988, a collection of hand-coloured silk-screens entitled Alice in Pretoria, to his most recent performance in 2003, the dance piece I Wouldn’t Be Seen Dead in That! It’s an extraordinary journey. The 1988 work is built on an alternative aesthetic that is almost naive, showing elongated Alices juxtaposed with the Voortrekker Monument and army vehicles.
The 2003 dance piece is a vastly more complicated and complex work, one that — like the best of Cohen’s art — doesn’t allow easy ingress, and is calculated to make any audience struggle to come to grips with the stresses it places on their understanding of how their own psyches work. One passage features a naked dancer, made sightless by a leather headdress, being led around the stage by a remote-controlled car attached to his genitalia by a leash.
In between these two works, there is a process of profound artistic growth that De Waal and Sassen document with precision. Crudely put, we could term it a realisation on the part of Cohen that the penis as symbol is hugely uninteresting, whereas the penis as medium is extremely interesting. And the uses to which the artist has put his penis are extreme — such as violently binding it, or attaching a Star of David to it.
But Cohen lays his entire body on the line with his performance pieces. As the writers put it, “his own actual body, in both its physical frailty and strength, becomes the substance of the work.
The result is an artistic practice with immense power to challenge and disturb, especially when Cohen’s body-as-artwork invades public spaces.”
The invasion of public spaces is what really makes apparent the power of Cohen’s art. It also makes it obvious how incredibly courageous the artist is.
In 1998’s Patriotic Drag Cohen attended a right-wing rally at Fort Klapperkop, dressed in drag. For Chandelier (2001/02), dressed in high heels and a chandelier, he traipsed around for hours in a squatter camp that was being demolished.
In 1999 Crawling … Flying … Voting saw Cohen spend five hours painfully crawling in a voting queue, wearing drag and high heels made of metre-long gemsbok horns.
Many people are going to want to debate the value of this kind of art, or even whether it’s art at all. In Taste (1999), for example, Cohen strips, and slides from his anus a set of anal beads. He ejects from his rectum a black fluid, which he drinks from a glass, toasting the audience. There’s much more to this complex work than that, of course, but you can see how some audiences might react with a measure of disgust.
De Waal and Sassen explain what’s at work here: “These are, literally, works in progress that can only be ‘completed’ by the viewer, who cannot but see the works’ strenuous effortfulness and cannot but participate in the embarrassment they often generate.”
Ultimately, whether you’re a Cohen fan or not, you need to own this book. There is as much evidence here for his detractors as for his supporters, which is a testament both to the rigour of the editorial process and to the courage of the artist in laying bare the ways in which he works.
More than this, though, the work of Cohen gives us strange and remarkable ways of looking at what it means to be South Africans, the horrible and the wonderful. Cohen says of his work: “I would rather be the cause of wonder than of conclusion”, and this book is a fine illustration of that precept.