Coco Fusco, a now-canonical performance artist and feminist theorist, is coming to Duke to deliver a keynote address at this weekend’s Feminist Theory Workshop. Recess’ Claire Finch interviewed Fusco through a series of e-mails about her recent work, the elite maintenance of the fine art world and performance art’s burgeoning commercialization.
What issues particularly interest you in terms of your current artistic practice?
In terms of current work, I am developing some new projects at present—one for the Liverpool Biennial, which will be a performative lecture about contemporary responses and non-responses to social injustice. Another is a performance I will do in Brazil in the summer that revisits W.E.B. DuBois’ transcription of the Black Codes of Georgia for the 1900 Paris Exposition. Finally, I will soon undertake research on the experience of incarceration by teaching inside a women’s correctional facility.
In terms of your upcoming work on W.E.B. DuBois’s transcription of the Black Codes: what is the role of the American South in a global context?
The American South is an abstraction—so is “the international audience.” Audiences vary from place to place, from institution to institution, trying to classify them as national or international just leads to false generalizations. My historical references to Georgia’s Black Codes are very specific and relate to what DuBois did in 1900 for the Paris Exposition where he was very specifically creating a sociological exhibition using photographs and material culture to represent the conditions of Black Americans at the turn of the century.
It seems to me that performance art is still widely misunderstood and is often still viewed as illegitimate. As a sometimes-performance artist, what do you think are the particular strengths of the medium?
Regarding public misperceptions of performance—I think you are right that there is not a great deal of understanding. However, I would say the general public has very little familiarity with any kind of contemporary art because American public education pays little attention to art and a very small percentage of people in this country visit any kind of art exhibition with any regularity. The general public relies on cliches about the fine arts and on marketing efforts by major museums for deriving a very basic understanding of what a masterpiece is. In the worst sense, the populist values of entertainment culture are applied to fine art in the mass media—thus what the general public learns about are artworks that are famous masterpieces (“the classics”) and ones that sell for millions of dollars.
The economics of the fine arts contribute to the public’s lack of familiarity as well. The fine arts constitute the least populist area of culture. Fine art relies on investment by a tiny elite class that buys art and runs museums and major exhibitions. While film, television and popular fiction can be sustained by market success without critical approval, the fine arts’ place in history and its institutionalization rely on critical approval from yet another tiny elite—the art press and powerful art historians in a handful of universities around the world.
At present there are many museums of modern and contemporary art that are trying to figure out what to do with performance and this may bring about a shift in public perception of the art form. There are no more masterpieces to sell at auction—the vast majority of valuable modernist works are also settled in museum and private collections. Thus, there is a move to acquire more contemporary work. Accompanying that move is a new wave of academic research on contemporary art practices, including performances. When I was in college, it was virtually impossible to write a dissertation in art history on a living artist—now it is quite common.
What this new focus on contemporary practice yields is an institutional effort to make performance palatable. This is done for the general public through “user-friendly” press (see all the articles about Tino Seghal’s performances at the Guggenheim recently, or all the press around Marina Abramovic’s MoMA retrospective). A parallel effort is made to educate museum acquisition boards so that they consider acquiring performance works (by buying documentation or buying the work itself).
Coco Fusco will speak at 10 a.m. in the Sanford School of Public Policy’s lobby. Her lecture is titled “Invasion of Space by a Female: Sex as a Weapon in the War on Terror.” For more on the Feminist Theory Conference, click here.
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