Coco Fusco
Encyclopedia
Coco Fusco is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist
and writer who began her career in 1988. Fusco has performed and curated throughout America and internationally, and currently is full-time faculty in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design
. Her recent work combines electronic media and performance in several formats, including large scale projections, and live performances streamed to the internet, inviting audiences to chart live-chat interaction. She is now developing a series of performances exploring the role of female interrogators in the War on Terror
. Fusco's work explores the relationship between women and society
, war
, politics
, and race.
. She received a Bachelors degree in Literature and Society from Brown University
in 1982, her Masters in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University
in 1985, and her Doctorate in Visual Culture from Middlesex University (England) in 2005.
Coco Fusco has also presented performances and videos in some of the most prominent events worldwide, including The Whitney Biennial
, Sydney Biennale, The Shanghai Biennale, Transmediale
, and The London International Theatre Festival. She published five books: A Field Guide for Female Interrogators, Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings, Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, and English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. She has received fellowships and grants from over fifteen universities and organizations. Fusco also was on the College Art Association Advisory Board at Columbia, Cultural Politics Journal Editorial Advisory Board, was a member of the PEN American Center, the consulting editor at the NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, and was on the Board of Directors of the Yaddo Artists Residency. In 2000 and 2002 she worked as a Critical Studies Tutor at the Whitney Museum's independent study program.
Fusco was also the recipient of the 1995 ATHE Research Award for Outstanding Journal Article, the 1995 Critics' Choice Award for her book English is Not Broken Here. She has also participated in eleven different curatorial projects, and in many lectures and conferences at universities and art schools since 1987.
Performance adaptable to any location, which deals with themes of women and war. In this performance, Fusco plays an American military interrogator, who explains to the audiences Virginia Woolf
’s belief that women need income and privacy in order to express themselves creatively. Fusco then expresses that during the 21st century, American women have had the opportunity to use their sexuality and charm to be excellent interrogators and encourages women to do their part in promoting democracy by joining the military forces. These themes also appear in her book A Field Guide for Female Interrogators.
The Last Wish (El Ultimo Deseo) 1997
Site-specific performance at the Galeria Tejadillo in Cuba about death and the repatriation of exiled Cubans. Fusco lays beneath a blacklight in a long, white dress, surrounded by a design of white flowers in the shape of a rectangle to simulate a coffin. Inspired by the passing of her grandmother, the performance deals with themes of death, strength and immigration. Fusco's mother and sisters spent all of their young lives deciding upon where they would live, believing that their homeland was unimportant and had nothing to offer them. Her grandmother, who had experienced a life of hardship, was brought to the US to be supported by her daughters. Just after her 80th birthday, Fusco says, her grandmother went back to Barcelona to visit, checked into a hotel, lay down, and died in the night. Fusco states that when she traveled to see her grandmother at the hotel, there was not so much as a suitcase that her grandmother had brought along. To Fusco, it was as though her grandmother knew of her own impending passing, and wanted to be sure that it happened in her homeland.
Rights of Passage (1997)
Designed specifically for the Johannesburg Biennale, the performance deals with themes of race and apartheid. The Biennale is a semi-annual art festival hosted in South Africa. Fusco wears the uniform of security personnel, issuing five thousand replicas of the South African passbook, to every person entering the Biennale. In Apartheid days, the Afrikaner government forced black Africans to carry passbooks which they would need to show when they entered white areas. The performance was meant to force people to identify the struggle of black Africans during the apartheid.
Stuff (1996–1999)
Fusco and Nao Bustamante play off the stereotype which links Latin women and food with tourism and consumption through sexuality. The piece discusses Latin America's historical references to cannibalism, functioning as a symbolic representation international relationships (European and American consuming Latin America's resources), and eating food (representation of sex), to make a statement on how cultural consumption can make us uncomfortable with our own identity. This collaborative performance with Nao Bustamante, commissioned by London's Institute of Contemporary Art, deals with themes of tourism and stereotype. The performance premiered at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow and toured internationally.
Multi-media performance with video projections about the US-Mexican border region. This collaborative play with Ricardo Dominguez
, deals with themes of death
, sex
, art
, and immigration
between the US and Mexico. Audience members see the relationship among the characters in the room unfold. What binds these characters is their relationship with Death, played by a woman. The scene is represented as a chatroom, where those who log on may choose to pick from several galleries of social, political, and sexual taboo (the two live characters onstage role play the choices of the consumers). The performance is meant to make us question how much is too much information, and whether the increase in technological development in contemporary society is a good thing or a bad thing.
Dolores from 10 to 10 (2001)
A twelve hour collaborative performance about surveillance with Ricardo Dominguez which deals with themes of degradation of women in the work atmosphere. Re-enactment of the story of a woman in Mexico who was said to have caused trouble at work. As a punishment, her boss locked her in her office without food, water, or a telephone for 12 hours, trying to get her to sign a letter of resignation. She later took the boss to court, but no one believed her. The piece is a selection of video footage with captions, featuring the interaction between the lady and her boss over the course of the 12 hours. This performance received Honorable Mention in 2003 at the Transmediale Festival in Berlin.
The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–1994)
A collaborative performance piece with Guillermo Gomez-Pena
which premiered at Columbus Plaza in Madrid
as part of the Edge '92 Binnial during May, 1992. For about two years, the piece was displayed in prestigious art and natural history museums around the world. In the work, Fusco and Pena put themselves on display in a ten-by-twelve foot cage, advertising that they were native to a fake island that was untouched by European culture, Gautinau. They outfitted themselves in uncommon, outrageous costume that were supposed to be representative of "the primitive" and performed outlandish "native" tasks such as sewing voodoo dolls, and eating bananas which were passed to them through the cage by museum guards. The pair would also perform for the audience; for a donation, Fusco would do a "native" dance, Pena would tell "authentic" Amerindian stories (in a gibberish language), and both artists would take pictures with the crowd. Fusco wore a grass skirt, leopard skin bra, sneakers and a baseball cap, and braided her hair. Gomez-Pena wore a breastplate, and a leopard skin wrestling mask. The pair decided to do the piece as part of a counter-quincentenary project protesting the official quincentenary celebrations of Christopher Columbus
landing in the Americas. Both Fusco and Pena saw that finding historical justification for Columbus's actions became a way in which Western culture could assert its right to consume. Out of this context, the pair decided that they would take a vow of silence with the cage in opposition to this- both artists momentarily departing from their work as public speakers. The two hoped to use the project to explore the limits of "happy multiculturalism" that dominated American institutions. The pair was also trying to find an origin for the cultural link between the concept of "Otherness" and "discovery." Their performance is rooted in the American and European tradition of displaying indigenous people from other parts of the world in circuses, museums, and freak shows. In her book, "English is Broken Here," Fusco describes the dynamic between the performers and the audience members: "The cage became a blank screen onto which audiences projected their fantasies of who and what we are. As we assumed the stereotypical role of the domesticated savage, many audience members felt entitled to assume the role of colonizer, only to find themselves uncomfortable with the implications of the game" (Fusco 47).
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
and writer who began her career in 1988. Fusco has performed and curated throughout America and internationally, and currently is full-time faculty in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design
Parsons The New School for Design
Parsons The New School For Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is the art and design college of The New School university. It is located in New York City's Greenwich Village, and has produced artists and designers such as Marc Jacobs, Dean and Dan Caten, Norman Rockwell, Donna Karan, Jane...
. Her recent work combines electronic media and performance in several formats, including large scale projections, and live performances streamed to the internet, inviting audiences to chart live-chat interaction. She is now developing a series of performances exploring the role of female interrogators in the War on Terror
War on Terror
The War on Terror is a term commonly applied to an international military campaign led by the United States and the United Kingdom with the support of other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation as well as non-NATO countries...
. Fusco's work explores the relationship between women and society
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
, war
War
War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...
, politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
, and race.
Education
Fusco was born in 1960 in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. She received a Bachelors degree in Literature and Society from Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
in 1982, her Masters in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
in 1985, and her Doctorate in Visual Culture from Middlesex University (England) in 2005.
Career
Fusco began her career as an assistant professor of visual arts in 1995 at Temple University. She became an associate professor in 1998, holding the position until 2001 when she transferred to be an associate professor of the arts at Columbia University in New York.Coco Fusco has also presented performances and videos in some of the most prominent events worldwide, including The Whitney Biennial
Whitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial is a biennale exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, USA. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932, the first biennial was in 1973...
, Sydney Biennale, The Shanghai Biennale, Transmediale
Transmediale
transmediale is an annual festival for media art and digital culture taking place for one week in February in Berlin, Germany. The festival engages in reflective, aesthetic and speculative positions in between art, technology and culture...
, and The London International Theatre Festival. She published five books: A Field Guide for Female Interrogators, Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings, Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, and English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. She has received fellowships and grants from over fifteen universities and organizations. Fusco also was on the College Art Association Advisory Board at Columbia, Cultural Politics Journal Editorial Advisory Board, was a member of the PEN American Center, the consulting editor at the NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, and was on the Board of Directors of the Yaddo Artists Residency. In 2000 and 2002 she worked as a Critical Studies Tutor at the Whitney Museum's independent study program.
Fusco was also the recipient of the 1995 ATHE Research Award for Outstanding Journal Article, the 1995 Critics' Choice Award for her book English is Not Broken Here. She has also participated in eleven different curatorial projects, and in many lectures and conferences at universities and art schools since 1987.
Select Performances
A Room of One's Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006)Performance adaptable to any location, which deals with themes of women and war. In this performance, Fusco plays an American military interrogator, who explains to the audiences Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
’s belief that women need income and privacy in order to express themselves creatively. Fusco then expresses that during the 21st century, American women have had the opportunity to use their sexuality and charm to be excellent interrogators and encourages women to do their part in promoting democracy by joining the military forces. These themes also appear in her book A Field Guide for Female Interrogators.
The Last Wish (El Ultimo Deseo) 1997
Site-specific performance at the Galeria Tejadillo in Cuba about death and the repatriation of exiled Cubans. Fusco lays beneath a blacklight in a long, white dress, surrounded by a design of white flowers in the shape of a rectangle to simulate a coffin. Inspired by the passing of her grandmother, the performance deals with themes of death, strength and immigration. Fusco's mother and sisters spent all of their young lives deciding upon where they would live, believing that their homeland was unimportant and had nothing to offer them. Her grandmother, who had experienced a life of hardship, was brought to the US to be supported by her daughters. Just after her 80th birthday, Fusco says, her grandmother went back to Barcelona to visit, checked into a hotel, lay down, and died in the night. Fusco states that when she traveled to see her grandmother at the hotel, there was not so much as a suitcase that her grandmother had brought along. To Fusco, it was as though her grandmother knew of her own impending passing, and wanted to be sure that it happened in her homeland.
Rights of Passage (1997)
Designed specifically for the Johannesburg Biennale, the performance deals with themes of race and apartheid. The Biennale is a semi-annual art festival hosted in South Africa. Fusco wears the uniform of security personnel, issuing five thousand replicas of the South African passbook, to every person entering the Biennale. In Apartheid days, the Afrikaner government forced black Africans to carry passbooks which they would need to show when they entered white areas. The performance was meant to force people to identify the struggle of black Africans during the apartheid.
Stuff (1996–1999)
Fusco and Nao Bustamante play off the stereotype which links Latin women and food with tourism and consumption through sexuality. The piece discusses Latin America's historical references to cannibalism, functioning as a symbolic representation international relationships (European and American consuming Latin America's resources), and eating food (representation of sex), to make a statement on how cultural consumption can make us uncomfortable with our own identity. This collaborative performance with Nao Bustamante, commissioned by London's Institute of Contemporary Art, deals with themes of tourism and stereotype. The performance premiered at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow and toured internationally.
Collaborative Works
The Incredible Disappearing Woman (2003)Multi-media performance with video projections about the US-Mexican border region. This collaborative play with Ricardo Dominguez
Ricardo Dominguez (professor)
Ricardo Dominguez is an artist and associate professor of visual arts at UC San Diego. He has been the subject of controversy over a number of acts of electronic civil disobedience on his own and with the Electronic Disturbance Theater, which he co-founded.Dominguez, the founder of the Electronic...
, deals with themes of death
Death
Death is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. Phenomena which commonly bring about death include old age, predation, malnutrition, disease, and accidents or trauma resulting in terminal injury....
, sex
Sex
In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into a male or female variety . Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents...
, art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
, and immigration
Immigration
Immigration is the act of foreigners passing or coming into a country for the purpose of permanent residence...
between the US and Mexico. Audience members see the relationship among the characters in the room unfold. What binds these characters is their relationship with Death, played by a woman. The scene is represented as a chatroom, where those who log on may choose to pick from several galleries of social, political, and sexual taboo (the two live characters onstage role play the choices of the consumers). The performance is meant to make us question how much is too much information, and whether the increase in technological development in contemporary society is a good thing or a bad thing.
Dolores from 10 to 10 (2001)
A twelve hour collaborative performance about surveillance with Ricardo Dominguez which deals with themes of degradation of women in the work atmosphere. Re-enactment of the story of a woman in Mexico who was said to have caused trouble at work. As a punishment, her boss locked her in her office without food, water, or a telephone for 12 hours, trying to get her to sign a letter of resignation. She later took the boss to court, but no one believed her. The piece is a selection of video footage with captions, featuring the interaction between the lady and her boss over the course of the 12 hours. This performance received Honorable Mention in 2003 at the Transmediale Festival in Berlin.
The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–1994)
A collaborative performance piece with Guillermo Gomez-Pena
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City and moved to the US in 1978, where he established himself as a performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. He has pioneered multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, performance photography and installation art...
which premiered at Columbus Plaza in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
as part of the Edge '92 Binnial during May, 1992. For about two years, the piece was displayed in prestigious art and natural history museums around the world. In the work, Fusco and Pena put themselves on display in a ten-by-twelve foot cage, advertising that they were native to a fake island that was untouched by European culture, Gautinau. They outfitted themselves in uncommon, outrageous costume that were supposed to be representative of "the primitive" and performed outlandish "native" tasks such as sewing voodoo dolls, and eating bananas which were passed to them through the cage by museum guards. The pair would also perform for the audience; for a donation, Fusco would do a "native" dance, Pena would tell "authentic" Amerindian stories (in a gibberish language), and both artists would take pictures with the crowd. Fusco wore a grass skirt, leopard skin bra, sneakers and a baseball cap, and braided her hair. Gomez-Pena wore a breastplate, and a leopard skin wrestling mask. The pair decided to do the piece as part of a counter-quincentenary project protesting the official quincentenary celebrations of Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...
landing in the Americas. Both Fusco and Pena saw that finding historical justification for Columbus's actions became a way in which Western culture could assert its right to consume. Out of this context, the pair decided that they would take a vow of silence with the cage in opposition to this- both artists momentarily departing from their work as public speakers. The two hoped to use the project to explore the limits of "happy multiculturalism" that dominated American institutions. The pair was also trying to find an origin for the cultural link between the concept of "Otherness" and "discovery." Their performance is rooted in the American and European tradition of displaying indigenous people from other parts of the world in circuses, museums, and freak shows. In her book, "English is Broken Here," Fusco describes the dynamic between the performers and the audience members: "The cage became a blank screen onto which audiences projected their fantasies of who and what we are. As we assumed the stereotypical role of the domesticated savage, many audience members felt entitled to assume the role of colonizer, only to find themselves uncomfortable with the implications of the game" (Fusco 47).
Select Exhibits
- 2008: The Project, New York
- 2007: Killing Time, Exit Art, New York
- 2006: My Country, The Hungarian Cultural Center, New York
- 2006: A Room of One's Own: Women and Power in the New America, Performance Space 122, New York City.
- 2005: Collection Remixed: Learning to Read, Bronx Museum, New York
- 2005: Black Panther, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY
- 2004: Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China
- 2003: House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany
- 2003: The Incredible Disappearing Woman, ICA, London, UK
- 2000: El Evento Suspendido, El Espacio Aglutinador, Havana, Cuba
- 1999: Third International Performance Art Festival, Odense, Denmark Washington State University Museum, Pullman, WA
- 1999: Stuff, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
- 1993: The Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Fundacion Banco Patricios, Buenos Aires, Argentina Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL
- 1992: The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
- 1992: Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL
- 1991: La Chavela Realty Company, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY
- 1990: Norte:Sur, The Mexican Museum, San Francisco, CA
- 1987: Havana Postmodern: The New Cuban Art, KCET Latino Consortium and for WNET's Hispanic