Steven Cohen
This artwork was loaned to the exhibition Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance curated by Kathryn Smith and Roger van Wyk, Iziko South Africa National Gallery, December 12, 2009–February 28, 2010. It is indexed here as part of Smith and Van Wyk’s revisiting of the Dada South? Archive of materials at A4 Arts Foundation.
b.1962, Johannesburg
A performance art provocateur, Steven Cohen’s work is notable for its baroque excess and high drama. His more famous pieces include walking the length of Wall Street in high-heels set on human skulls, appearing in a South African informal settlement dressed as a chandelier, and floundering in the blood left on an abattoir floor. In Paris in 2013, dressed as a bird and with a live rooster attached to his genitals by a length of string, Cohen was arrested and tried for sexual exhibitionism. This public rebuke, however, did little to dampen his subsequent work. Cohen’s performances offer a provocative engagement with the limits of identity politics and are in turns absurd, whimsical, and abject.
