Steven Cohen
Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, South Africa
Steven Cohen, Untitled (c.1988), hand-coloured silkscreen on cloth
There was much that was strange about South Africa’s interregnum, that waiting period between Nelson Mandela’s prison release in February 1990 and his subsequent inauguration as president four years later. An aspect of this strangeness manifested itself at the ‘Limits of Liberty’ festival, a multi-format conference on censorship held in Johannesburg in 1993. Set against the backdrop of apartheid’s conflation of race, religion and morality, and the new period’s desire to disassemble this tight weave, the conference included screenings of previously banned films alongside the display of artworks in dialogue with the event’s theme.
Please Help (1993)
While Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) induced walkouts, and feminists heckled the speaker appearing after the schlock porno epic Caligula (1979), it was a local short film about sex around a pioneer campfire that prompted the biggest fuss, a hoard of outraged white right-wingers storming the host venue. I’m unsure if they ever stopped to look at Steven Cohen’s work, a side plate decorated with a recurring motif of a suppurating foot. It was instructive: the plate depicted a medical condition associated with the wearing of army boots. Displayed in close proximity to Robert Mapplethorpe’s seductively brash Man in Polyester Suit (1980), Cohen produced the plate as a commemorative piece for the 1992 Mayoral Arts Ball.
Golgotha – Portrait #1 (2007)
I was reminded of this plate while viewing ‘Life is Shot, Art is Long’, curator Sophie Perryer’s synoptic overview of Cohen’s remarkable career. (The exhibition’s title intentionally misquotes Hippocrates’ aphorism and is based on a small tapestry bought at the roadside by the artist.) While Perryer passed on the footplate, she did include four others from the series, three decorated with a doll-figure clutching an engorged penis, the fourth adorned with a large brown eye. The works are vintage Cohen: rude, kitsch and wonderfully applied.
Commemorative plate for Mayoral Arts Ball (1992)
Currently based in Paris, where he works principally as a performance artist, Cohen first came to prominence in Johannesburg with his atypical fabric designs which were displayed either as wall-hung canvases or used to reupholster furniture. These early works are not entirely out of character with the period, Cohen’s hand-coloured silkscreen fabrics emerging at a time when DIY printmaking was a cheap resource for anti-apartheid activists. While many of the works representative of this phase have a period quality, a bricolage style if you will, Cohen was never an orthodox graphic artist or activist. While his early prints draw on a variety of stock anti-apartheid motifs – dubious politicians, boys playing war, Nazi iconography – he muddled the plot by including shirtless beefcakes, girls in bathing costumes, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, flowers. The outcome was a sort of baroque tableaux where the pretty and profane coexisted.
Chandelier (2001)
As Cohen graduated from flea market trader to art world fixture, his screen prints also began to articulate what are now pronounced artistic concerns: his Jewish heritage and radical queer identity. ‘Life is Shot, Art is Long’ offers an abundant selection of works illustrating both these vectors, though ‘illustrate’ is probably the wrong word; while Cohen’s applied works, which also manifested on embroidered serviettes, speak of the period out of which they emerged, they do not claim to be photographic records of that time. At best, they offer partial views. A peephole. The lurid connotation of this metaphor is probably apt.
During the course of his transformation from politely political graphic artist into performance provocateur, the penis (often Cohen’s) came to play a central role in his work. Demurely at first, as is evidenced in his hand-coloured silkscreen, And Then Eve Ate of the Fruit (1995), but latterly as a tool of provocation and experimental encounter. This is especially true of his late-1990s situation-based performance pieces, which generally involved Cohen arriving at a rugby match, dog show or horse race in radical drag with little plan beyond documenting the response. While Cohen’s blatant sexuality is an unavoidable part of his performance repertoire, like Leigh Bowery, whom Cohen first encountered in a book presented him by a critic in 1998, it does not fully explain him.
Expiation and ritual are a hallmark of his performance work. In 1999, Cohen dragged himself into a voter polling station wearing a feathered headdress, corset and patent leather ballet shoes with antelope horns affixed to them to make his mark. Three years later, dressed in heals and a chandelier dress, he awkwardly trampled through a shack settlement in central Johannesburg. As in all his performance records, audience reactions (incredulity, shock, the desire to participate) are integral.
In his most recent work, Golgotha (2007–9), Cohen staged a performance in New York. Ambulatory concerns persist. Filmed at various locations in lower Manhattan, the projection shows Cohen struggling, contorting – in a word, performing in shoes made of human skulls that he found in a junk shop in Soho. That Cohen’s performances are exaggerated costume plays is self-evident. That they sometimes lapse into stagey, high kitsch affairs, however earnest their thematic concerns, also needs to be conceded. Such are the contradictions defining this pervy colourist. ‘Life is Shot, Art is Long’ amply charts Cohen’s journey from Dada-like practitioner of the applied arts to his current position as an artist empirically researching the limits of South Africa’s newfound, unevenly defined liberties.
Sean O’Toole
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