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Interview with Coco Fusco At 45 Mount Auburn Street, about an hour into the lecture, someone asks Coco Fusco how she sees the political impact of her work. Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist and writer who currently holds an associate professorship at Columbia University, answers the question in a forceful, steady voice while her baby sits placidly in a stroller nearby. She has no illusions about the power of art: people don’t change overnight, she replies, and her work is not about “consciousness-raising.” Many artists view their work as a vehicle for a particular political cause, as an occasion for fire-and-brimstone moral indignation. Fusco’s work starts from the opposite premise: the conviction that political life is too complex to be scuttled by sermons, and the faith that the viewer is intelligent enough to come to his or her own conclusions. Her subject matter has always been political. She has lectured, performed, exhibited, and published on NAFTA, sex tourism, and the cultural stereotyping of Latin American women. The video of her 1993 performance “The Couple in the Cage,” in which she and Guillermo Gómez-Peña exhibited themselves as authentic American Indian “savages” to bewildered audiences around the world, has been screened in over two hundred venues internationally, and probably remains Fusco’s best known piece. More recently, she has turned to the War on Terror, specifically the role of military interrogators. At her lecture in February organized by The Harvard Advocate, she screened excerpts from a work in progress called “Operation Atropos.” The video documents a course offered by former US military interrogators designed to simulate the prisoner-of-war experience, a course which Fusco and several of her students took. With a lack of squeamishness characteristic of Fusco’s work, the video meticulously details the various psychological techniques employed by interrogators to extract information: “fear up mild” involves intimidating the detainee verbally, while “fear up harsh,” naturally, requires the interrogator to get more physical. The Harvard Advocate had an opportunity to talk with Coco Fusco after her lecture. HA: Five years ago, in your book The Bodies That Were Not Ours, you wrote about a backlash in the art-world against identity politics, and against “socially engaged art practice” more broadly. Do you think anything has changed since then? CF: No. I think it gets worse and worse. HA: More generally, how do you understand the relationship between art and activism? You addressed some of these questions in your talk, but do you think of your work as raising awareness about issues, or is it more abstract? CF: I think this goes back to what I said to one of the women here about how I’m not a journalist or a documentarian trying to teach you about something, but rather to reflect on issues and ideas in a more metaphorical way. I don’t expect what I’m doing to have an immediate effect. I hope it’s not agit-prop work in any way. I think that most activist stuff is more agit-prop, like protest art: aimed at the Bush Administration, the war, gay marriage, or whatever. There are activists on the right, too. I’m trying to do something that deals with social issues but in a more complicated and more reflective manner. HA: You’ve written about the effects of globalization on the Latin American art world, particularly in Mexico after NAFTA. Latin America has seen a political shift to the left, with elected leaders like Evo Morales in Bolivia, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva in Brazil. What effect, if any, do you think the leadership is having on artists in these countries? CF: I haven’t heard too much good from friends of mine in Venezuela, when it comes to the effect on artists. They’re distressed because they feel that the policies of the Chavez government are all about a very narrowly defined notion of what constitutes radical art that they’re not really that happy with. So I can’t say that I’ve heard good things about the situation. In terms of Mexico, there might be a progressive president brought in if [Andrés Manuel López] Obrador wins, right? But the Mexican cultural bureaucracy is very centralized, and positions in the cultural bureaucracy are appointees that are made by the party in power. So if the PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution] is elected then they will choose the equivalent of a Minister of Culture, and that will affect how state cultural institutions are run. But most contemporary artists in Mexico are not working for those public institutions. They’re working to sell to private collectors who may in many cases be outside the country. HA: Do you think Latin America over the years has had a special relationship to political art in practice? CF: No, I think that there’s an assumption in this country that Latin Americans are more political but I think there are just as many artists who are not interested in politics there as there are here. However, I think that what is different, and I mentioned this in the essay that I wrote for the introduction to Corpus Delecti, is that the strongest form of pressure that many artists feel here is from the market whereas in many Latin American countries, where culture is very much run by the state, the strongest pressure that people feel there is from the state. So they end up responding to the state, whereas the equivalent in an American context would be to respond to the market. HA: Moving to some of the pieces you screened tonight, a lot of your recent work has dealt with the mistreatment and torture of “enemy combatants” in the War on Terror. How do you think performance as a medium helps or hinders your efforts to address the issue of physical humiliation? CF: I wouldn’t say that the work is about torturing enemy combatants, I would say that the work is about female interrogators. That’s different. I’m really not making work about prisoners and detainees, I’m making work about the military and how it sees itself, how it imagines itself and how it imagines the goal for women inside it. That to me is something that’s distinct. But what was your question again? HA: What do you think is the value of enacting the choreographed humiliation scenes that you performed in Brazil, for instance? This gets back to the earlier question about raising awareness or sparking some kind of social change, but do you think that there is more abstract, intrinsic value in enacting those types of scenes? CF: Yes, I think that the military knows about the power of theater, too. They engage in a lot of ritualized displays of power because it increases power exponentially to display it in this manner. I guess I’m trying to work within that to see if there’s a way to undo what is being done by them. HA: In your 2000 piece, “The Incredible Disappearing Woman”, Mexican custodial workers re-create a performance from the 1970’s in which an American artist travels to Mexico to have sex with a dead woman. What are the ethics of art practice as you understand them? Should there be limits to artists who are trying to make “transgressive” work? CF: You know, you can say that there should be and then someone will come and break the rule. I guess I would put a limit for myself: I wouldn’t want to create anything that involved physically harming another person against their will, or a living thing against its will, an animal. I personally wouldn’t want to do it and I think I would have a lot of difficulty with artists who tried to rationalize destroying life for art. That’s my limit. HA: Just one final question. You’ve published two collections of writing, recently curated a photography show on race, and continue to work in video and performance. Do you see yourself as moving more definitively into a single area in the coming years? CF: No. I’m just not that kind of person, I don’t think that way. Even with this project I have two performances, a film, an artist book, all together because I see how the material can work its way into these different forms.
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