GAGA for COCO

 

 Born in New York city on June 18th 1960, Coco Fusco is easily a walking legacy. She's of Cuban and Italian decent and has come a long way in her 50 plus years of living. Her work ranges over topics such as being a woman, race, politics, war, and society. Her career started in 1988(a year after I was born!). She's an artist of many forms(especially in the art of performance), a writer, an art critic, a director and has even been a curator(an educator of sorts who overlooks art collections at museums and makes sure that the art serves a higher purpose rather than just hanging on the walls). Her education includes a B.A. in Literature & Society/Semotics from the prestigious Brown University, an M.A. in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University, and most recently, a Ph. D in Art & Visual Culture from Middlesex University. She was a professor from 1998 until 2008 and has received a handful of awards.

In  1995 she received the ATHE Research Award for Outstanding Journal Article from the Association of Theater  in Higher Education for the essay, " The Other History of Intercultural Performance", which was published the year before that. She won another award in 1995 and it was the Critic's Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association for her book, "English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas".  In 2000 she received the Tyler School of Art Merit Award for Outstanding Research. More recently she received the Herb Alpert  Award in the Art in the Film/Video category. So not only is Coco incredibly educated and knows how to educate other, her artistry is revolutionary.

She's published many articles and performance scripts, but most importantly, books. Her 1995 book, English is Broken Here, Fusco explores the role of race through North and South America art work. In 1999, her second major publication was the book Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, which was a collection of studies based on Latin Contemporary Performance. She explores how Latin society, culture and history shape Latin Performance art. In 2003, she published Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self. In that book she focuses on the impact of photography. She explains how photography has had an effect on race and racial identity in America. In 2008 she published A Field Guide for Female Interrogators. In that book she analyzes the role of women in the military and pokes at the idea that the U.S. military has basically been capitalizing on the increase of women in the military and also adapting to old feminist ideas of sexual assertiveness during interrogation processes.

I think that Fusco is revolutionary in way she approaches topics that most people aren't comfortable speaking about because they are touchy subjects. She's is courageous and unafraid of the truth. I like the educator quality in her works. She's modern and strong and has very clever ways of getting her messages across. Although this has nothing to do with her accomplishments, I can't believe how young she looks in all of her most recent pictures!

Performance wise, Fusco is truly a genius. She's diverse with her performances and each one is completely different from the last. Currently she is working on the Black Codes which she premiered in Brazil just last year. Here are some of Fusco's performances that I like and stood out to me the most.

In "Sudaca Enterprises"(1997), Fusco, Juan Pablo Ballester and Maria Elena Escalona. Wore shirts with the words Sudaca Enterprises on them, covered their faces with ski masks, and tried selling printed shirts with the same words on them. "Sudaca" is a term used in Spain to refer to Latinos as "dirty southerners". This performance took place at the1997 ARCO Latino Art Fair. After about three days of being harassed by security, the group was finally ejected from the fair.

In "Stuff"(1996-1999), Fusco collaborated with Nao Bustamente, to show depictions of how America and Europe have consumed Latin America's resources, through the use sexuality and food. Her message is to make us aware of losing your identity through cultural consumption. It premeired at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow( Scotland) and toured internationally.



In her "Better Yet When Dead"(1997) performance Fusco brought awareness to the idea that Latin Women had almost no control over their bodies and they were better off dead, the younger the better. Her message was that men had the power to make most decisions even if it was about the women in particular. One example was how a woman couldn't have an abortion, and yet still couldn't do anything about the person who raped her. In the performance, Fusco wanted to recreate herself as the artist who lived the beautiful life and died a tragic death just like other Latin American women such as Frida Kahlo.

In 1998, on a trip to Mexico, Fusco met a woman named Delfina Rodriguez, a factory worker who was being accused by her employer. In order to get her to resign, the employer locked Delfina in a room with no access to food, water, or a bathroom. Delfina was locked in that room for 12 hrs. When Fusco heard her story she was convinced that there must have been surveillance cameras and so Fusco created her interpretation of how the incident went down through her video performance.

 

I think Coco Fusco is very inspiring and is a huge wake up call for women all over the world not just Latin women. She's brave and knows who she is as an individual and I think a lot of people can take notes from her and the way she lives her life. It's as if she's living for a culture and wants people to understand more about themselves. She's beautiful inside and out. Her intelligence is vast and she is very creative and innovative. She's unstoppable and I can honestly say that she is now on my list of role models.

"I am drawn to performative modes of art making, from body art to staged drama, to live street actions, to public speaking because of my interest in working through the complex psycho-social dynamics of lived encounters among people of different cultures in the real world." - Coco Fusco (June 2005)