← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Cuban-American Artist Coco Fusco Receives Her First US Museum Survey
00:21:57
Today marks the opening of a new survey at El Museo Del Barrio of artist Coco Fusco.
Loading summary
Transcript69 lines
- [00:09]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Today, artist and writer Coco Fusco is receiving her first ever survey at a U.S. museum. And it's fitting that the survey is taking place in her hometown at El Museo de Barrio. It's called Tomorrow I Will Become an Island. Fusco was born in New York, the daughter of immigrants. She's a Cuban American through her mother, a physician who came to this country in the 1950s, around the time of the Cuban Revolution. In its fall art preview, the New York Times said of Fusco that she's, quote, one of the art world's most persistently keen and eloquent political voices raised against repression in her home countries and elsewhere. And speaking for those who are not heard, in the show, you'll see Fuchso's films and performance pieces, some of which have appeared in Whitney Biennial. The show is called Tomorrow I Will Become an Island. It opens today and it runs through January 11th. And we are so glad to have her in studio. Hi, Coco.
- [01:07]
Coco Fusco
Hi. Thanks for having me.
- [01:08]
Alison Stewart
Tomorrow I Will Become an Island is the title of the show. What does that phrase mean for you?
- [01:14]
Coco Fusco
Well, it is a sort of paraphrase of a line from a poem by a Cuban writer, Virgilio Pineda. And in the poem, he talks about transformation. Right. And the way that he talks about transformation, he says, you know, tomorrow, at a certain time, I will become an island. And, you know, the. That basically new life will spring from me.
- [01:35]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [01:36]
Coco Fusco
And I really. I really love his work. I've quoted him in many of my pieces, and I wanted to allude to that idea of the, you know, the power. The potential of the. The power and potential of transformation and of art to transform.
- [01:54]
Alison Stewart
Thinking about a survey of your work, how did you decide what would be in the show?
- [01:59]
Coco Fusco
Well, those decisions are not entirely up to the artist, ever in a retrospective. I should explain that the idea of doing a kind of overview of my practice started many years ago. And the first exhibition took place in Europe, in Germany, in Berlin, at KW Institute of Contemporary Art. And that is where the first Tomorrow I Will Become an Island was presented in the fall of 2023. Then a more expanded version that included more of my activist engagements and collaborations opened in Spain and Barcelona under a different title, also from called Swimming on Dry Land. And that was last spring. And so El Museo El Barrio is the sort, is another version of this show that has some work that isn't in the other shows. And. And so that's what we're talking about today.
- [02:56]
Alison Stewart
Can we Talk.
- [02:56]
Coco Fusco
But. But the curators decide. I mean, we have conversations. They look at all of my practice and decide what fits, what they want to focus on, what they want to concentrate on in some cases. I mean, Makba owns a couple of videos of mine. Museo has other works of mine. So it depends, you know, on. On what the curators say. And then we have a conversation about what will work best.
- [03:21]
Alison Stewart
What did you want the show to say?
- [03:23]
Coco Fusco
Well, I want, in those conversations, like.
- [03:27]
Alison Stewart
This is my point of view.
- [03:29]
Coco Fusco
I guess it's important to me to present the spectrum of what I've done over the last, you know, 30 some years. I think that in the United States, most people who know anything about me identify me with the undiscovered Amerindians piece because the video is shown known in a lot of university classes, because it's now in some art history textbooks, you know, and I mean it. At the beginning, when we first did it, when I first did it with Gomez Pena, it was not without controversy and not without negative criticism. But as time gone has gone on, people's ideas have changed about what that piece means and what it meant. So that's the piece that I'm probably most known for. But I did want to share with audiences, particularly younger audiences that, you know, deal with them all the time because I'm a professor.
- [04:26]
Alison Stewart
You are a professor?
- [04:27]
Coco Fusco
Yes. So my students now, they were not even born when I was in a cage. And so I, you know, it's important to me that they know the breadth of what I've done over the last three decades, not just one performance. I'm curious.
- [04:42]
Alison Stewart
It's going outside of the scope of the interview. But what do your students want to know about that time?
- [04:49]
Coco Fusco
Not everybody asks me about the time. They ask me about the performance when they see the video. Yes. I still get, you know, I would say every month at least a couple of letters from, you know, students who are writing papers or people who are doing research of some kind and want to question me again about a performance that took place more than 30 years ago. So it's. I've written about it many times. I've done works about that experience. I did a piece 20 years later, and, you know, I feel like there's. I don't have very much more to add, but I understand that, you know, it resonated with a lot of people and that they want to know. But I think my students are very concerned about what's going on in the present when we begin to talk about history through artwork. What I try to do is to pose questions that open them to the past.
- [05:45]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [05:46]
Coco Fusco
Because it's not a given. So, for example, last week I took a group of students to see the Afro futuristic period room at the Met, which is a very interesting example of a contemporary art exploration of the idea of what a period room is. And it's also poses a problem of how do you represent authentically or faithfully a place that we have very little documentation of? No material culture is left, Right. I mean, the village was raised to the ground to create Central Park. And so a lot of the students were kind of curious of, like, well, why? You know, this isn't true. It isn't. It isn't real. It's just like a fictional recreation. And I said, well, it's not exactly like the other period rooms in the Met.
- [06:30]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [06:30]
Coco Fusco
I said, you know, you guys, you see a lot of paintings of Jesus Christ in the history of Western painting. None of the people who made those paintings ever saw Jesus Christ. They didn't live at the time that he lived. They didn't have very much to go on except the New Testament. So it's equal. It's equally valid to ask that question about half of the history of Western painting. But you don't ask that. You're asking only about this room. So that was a way to start a conversation about what it means to imagine, to invent, to think about history, to think about the past. And how do artists contend with that?
- [07:04]
Alison Stewart
I don't take your class. I'm speaking with Coco Fusco. We're talking about her new survey of work called Tomorrow I Will Become an Island, the first survey of her work in a U.S. exhibit. Excuse me, U.S. museum. It opens today. I want to talk about a couple pieces.
- [07:18]
Coco Fusco
Sure.
- [07:18]
Alison Stewart
I'm going to look down to make sure I get them correctly. It's La Plaza Vasia.
- [07:23]
Coco Fusco
Yeah. La Plaza Vasilla.
- [07:25]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [07:25]
Alison Stewart
It means empty plaza.
- [07:26]
Coco Fusco
That's right.
- [07:27]
Alison Stewart
In English, it's a film that depicts the revolutionary square in Havana. What did you want to explore about these public squares?
- [07:35]
Coco Fusco
Well, that. I'm glad you asked me. It's a good example. So the Plaza of the Revolution, in English, or La Plaza de la Revolution.
- [07:43]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [07:44]
Coco Fusco
Is the most famous political theater site in Cuba. It is the place where Fidel Castro used to give speeches to hundreds of thousands of Cubans. There are tons of documentary, famous documentary photographs shot from behind Fidel looking out at the crowds. It was a. It was a space during a certain period of the revolution in which the supposed acceptance of the Revolution was dramatized through that interaction between leader and, and the followers.
- [08:15]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [08:16]
Coco Fusco
It is still an important square. I mean, there's a monument to Jose Marti there.
- [08:21]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [08:22]
Coco Fusco
And many of the important ministries of the country surround the plaza. At this point in time, though, when, with the exception of a few kind of displays of military power or parades to enact, to dramatize supposed support, it's empty. The only people you see going through there are guards of the square or tour buses occasionally, and a handful of tourists will come out, take pictures of themselves in front of the silhouette of Che Guevara and leave. So there's a sense of, you know, its role is, has. Is severely diminished. When I made the piece, it was in the wake of the Arab Spring. There were lots of examples at the time, mostly transmitted through social media and news, of the use of major public plazas in cities in the Arab world. You know, whether it's Tire Square, whether it's, you know, in Syria, whether it's. It was in Tunis, or of people going out and taking those squares over as an expression of their desire for political change. And at that time, a lot of Cuban intellectuals and others who were online having conversations, we're talking about, well, when, when are we going to do it? When is, when is it going to be our moment?
- [09:39]
Interjecting Commentator
Right?
- [09:40]
Coco Fusco
And it was not. That was not happening in the plaza, in the plaza of the revolution. And so I started thinking about the emptiness of the plaza as a political statement. What did, you know, what does that mean?
- [09:52]
Interjecting Commentator
Right?
- [09:52]
Coco Fusco
Because we were so focused on the plazas that were full of people. What does it mean when people refuse to go to the square, when people don't want to go demonstrate their support or can't come out to protest? There had been an attempt to carry out a kind of political intervention by an artist that was suppressed, right. So I got in touch with Yoani Sanchez, who is a very well known and very respected Cuban journalist, and she agreed to write a piece about the significance of the emptiness of the praza. We agreed on, you know, what, what it meant. And then I went to Cuba. Cameraman and we had to figure out a way to shoot in that plaza that would not draw negative attention to what we were doing. Fortunately, at the time, tourists were still coming to the plaza to take pictures. And it was a moment in which the government was trying to open up to more tourism. And so they were not being so strict about what kind of camera you could bring in and so on and so forth. So, but, you know, the cameraman and I And an assistant who was working with us had to figure out how not to get in trouble, basically. So we marked a spot, and we would shoot as long as we could before guards would start asking us questions and then go away for a while, wait for a changing of the guard, then come back to the same spot, set up the camera again, and do it again. Because I really wanted to show morning, afternoon, night, sundown, and nighttime in that plaza and the continued emptiness of the space. So that's why we did it, and that's how we did it.
- [11:38]
Alison Stewart
I'm speaking with Coco Fusco. Her show is called Tomorrow I Will Become an Island. We'll have more after a quick break.
- [11:45]
Coco Fusco
This is all of It.
- [11:56]
Alison Stewart
You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. I'm speaking with Coco Fusco. She's an artist, a writer. She's got a new show at El Museo de Barrio. It's opening today. It's called Tomorrow I Will Become an Island. It's on view through January 11th. One of the most recent pieces in the show is a series you worked on last year called Everyone who Lives Here Is a New Yorker. The project first began as a public art commission. What was the original commission?
- [12:25]
Coco Fusco
It was from an organization called More Art. And what I wanted to do was to create a piece for Link NYC signs, and we put them around Union Square. It was a very short animation. You know, when you do spots for the signs, they have to be. It has to be under 30 seconds.
- [12:42]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [12:43]
Coco Fusco
But I designed it as a kind of something that looked like an old silent movie. And I wanted to compare photographs, portraits that were taken by Lewis Hein, the great documentary photographer, best known for his work on child labor. But he also photographed immigrants at Ellis island and elsewhere between 1904 and 1914, which was a period in which there was an even larger wave of immigrants arriving to New York than the wave that we have just experienced.
- [13:11]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [13:12]
Coco Fusco
And there's. There are some incredibly wonderful portraits that he took. And so I wanted to find new arrived, new arrivals, immigrants in New York now, and restage those compositions, in other words, to photograph the immigrants now the way Hein had photographed immigrants in the early 20th century. And so in the animation, it goes back and forth between, you know, the old one comes in, walks out, the new one comes in, to understand that we have. That the city has always experienced waves of immigration and that the people who now consider themselves to be fully American are the children and the grandchildren of those who emigrated seeking the same thing that immigrants who are coming now are seeking, which is opportunity, safety, freedom. Same same things. So that's how it started. I had a lot of photographs from that animation because I was working with animating still imagery and continued to shoot photographs both of immigrants who I know personally and others who I, you know, would go up to groups of workers at Home Depot or, you know, be driving along Atlantic Avenue on my way to the airport and see, you know, a family begging and, you know, stop the car, get out, have a conversation and ask them if I could take a photograph. So it's a combination of people who I met through my searches and people who I knew, but all, you know, framed and composed in a way that recalls the style of Lewis Hein.
- [14:46]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [14:47]
Alison Stewart
There's another image in the show. It's you in a rowboat rowing past Hart Island.
- [14:54]
Coco Fusco
Yes.
- [14:55]
Alison Stewart
For people who don't know, Hart island is a burial. I think it's like a tenth of COVID survivors are buried.
- [15:02]
Coco Fusco
I don't know exactly how many people are there, but I do know that it was a large number unclaimed people who did not survive. Who died.
- [15:12]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [15:13]
Coco Fusco
Because it's a mass grave. It's the largest potter's field or mass grave in the United States.
- [15:20]
Alison Stewart
Why did you try. Why did you decide to do that?
- [15:24]
Coco Fusco
Well, I stayed in New York during COVID I was at working from home. I considered that. I didn't consider that I was really in very much danger because I had the privilege of being able to work online. But I was very aware of other people who did not have that privilege who were getting sick. Many people I know, from the woman who I've known for most of my life, who took care of my mother in her last days, to a lady who used to be at the desk at the YMCA where I would take my son for swim lessons, who died of COVID to the people who work in the supermarkets in my neighborhood were all endangered, and many of them got ill, and some of them got extremely ill, and some of them did not survive. So in addition to that, I couldn't obviously, go to a gym or anything like that. So to do exercise, I would go out on my bicycle and drive by hospitals where there were trucks, refrigerated trucks full of dead bodies. There were lines of boxes outside crematoriums. There were, you know, cadavers waiting to be buried in cemeteries because there's simply just. There were too many people dying all at once. And I was very taken by this because I've had to live with death for much of My life, my father died when I was a child. My brother was killed when I was in my early 20s. So, you know, I mean, I've lost many close relatives, so I've negotiated death. But I had not really felt what it was like to be around dead people. And that's something that we didn't. That we. That I think that people in the present are unaccustomed to. In other cultures or in other times. It would have been much more common to find oneself surrounded by dead during epidemics.
- [17:07]
Interjecting Commentator
Right?
- [17:08]
Coco Fusco
And because the disposal of bodies just. You can't do it that quickly when you don't have the technologies that we have now. So the idea of being surrounded by the dead, I thought this really ties us to deep, you know, past, right? To plagues in the Middle Ages, to epidemics, to also to other kinds of cultures and countries. And it made a big impression on me. And so that made me want to do something about the presence of the dead and the presence of death. And I was also. I had been asked to create a work for an exhibition that was an homage to a friend of mine who died, Maria Therese Encapier, a Colombian artist who was a performance art pioneer in Latin America. And there was going to be a retrospective of her work. And two artists, a Colombian artist who had studied with her and me, we were both asked to create works in the spirit of her work. And Maria Teresa did very ritual style performances. We were very different in our approach to art. But I really love her work and I really loved her and I wanted to try to think of some sort of ritual that would recall the spirit of her practice. In Spanish speaking countries, it is common to throw flowers into the sea to memorialize the dead. So I thought of doing that and then I. I don't know, it must have been like a news story came into my, you know, news feed or something like that about Hart Island. And I looked at that and I looked at the pictures of prisoners on Rikers from Rikers island who go to work there, opening the graves. And I was like, I have to do something with that right with there. So then the question became, how could I do it? Because at the time the island was controlled by the Department of Corrections and it was almost impossible to get access. And I, you know, went to sort of try to check it out with a photographer friend of mine, a Cuban photographer. I went to talk to people who rent boats in the area from City island who didn't want to go to the side of the island that I wanted to go to. And my. The Cuban photographer friend of mine was like, don't pay attention to them. I know people, you know, I know Cubans. We got Cuban fans with boats. We'll get the boat. We'll do everything. Don't worry about it. And in fact, he did have a friend who had a boat. And so we brought. I brought one still photographer and two camera people. We all went out on the. On this Cuban friend of ours boat. They lowered a dinghy into the water. So that was for me. And then they. One of the cameramen had a drone. Because I had done a lot of research about how artists in the past had represented epidemics and plagues and such. And I had seen a lot of work where death was represented in a personified way, either as a skeleton or as some sort of figure above in a kind of triangular configuration, like floating in the sky, hovering over the. The world that's diseased.
- [20:16]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [20:17]
Coco Fusco
And so I wanted to. To represent that in a way by having a bird's eye view of the island, right? As if I. As if we were looking from the point of view of death. So that's what the drone camera was for. So I'm in the water throwing flowers and rowing. The drone is flying above, right? And that's how we made the piece. And then after shooting then, I wrote an essay about the presence of the dead, right. And what that feels like. And I was so struck by the feeling in the early months of COVID when New York was so heavily affected, that it felt like being in a war with an invisible enemy, right? That. Where the enemy's all around you, but you can't see, right? And you know that the enemy is the air, right? Because the. It's being transmitted through the air. But you cannot stop the air from. Nothing protects you from the air. It's just there, Right? So that was what I tried to explore in the piece.
- [21:13]
Alison Stewart
You can see it. El Museo Bit de Barrio. Tomorrow I will become an island. It is Coco Fusco's show in 30 seconds. Can you tell me what's in my hand?
- [21:23]
Coco Fusco
Absolutely. Right now? Yeah. 30 seconds. Okay. The Siren is an online and print publication that I started with Noah Fisher and Pablo Elghera last year. And it is a collection of satirical cartoons and writings that tries to poke the bear in terms of going after Maga.
- [21:45]
Alison Stewart
Coco, it's very nice to have you on the show.
- [21:47]
Coco Fusco
Thank you.
- [21:49]
Alison Stewart
And that is all of it for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you, and I will meet you back here next time.
- [21:58]
Multicare Announcer
For 140 years, MultiCare has been in Washington prioritizing long term solutions, partnering with local communities, and expanding access to care. Together, we're building a healthier future. Learn more at multicare.
- [22:12]
Sustain Pro Announcer
Org Suffering from dry, Tired, Irritated Eyes? Don't let dry eyes win. Use Sustain Pro. It hydrates, restores and protects dry eyes for up to 12 hours. Sustain Pro Triple Action Dry Eye Relief.