Steven Cohen’s Flying at the Zoo.
Cohen engages with animals at the Johannesburg Zoo, entering enclosures including that of seals, zebras, elephants and rhinoceros. He wore his trademark antelope horn heels which would have made the artist 10 feet tall if he stood up. On his blog we learn that these horns were formerly a wall decoration that he bought at a junk shop – casts off of the barbaric act of hunting. Unable to walk in the heels, Cohen performs what he calls dances – laying on his back and shoulders as he flays his legs and arms in the air as if he was a fly stuck on its back. The performance is aimed at addressing the artist’s disgust for human instincts to hunt and kill animals: “I am dismayed and delighted with fashion – it reforms me. Couture brings out the animal in any drag queen.”In the pursuit of performance, he explores the extremes of cruelty and vanity. He writes: “I use my body as my medium to make ART with. I do not want the adrenaline of murdered animals to go into my mouth. I want animal-blood-free shit to come out of my arsehole.”
Conceptually the work addresses the fetishistic tendencies to be amazed by animals, while at the same time enslave them within zoos and kill them for food. Metaphorically black South Africans are equated with the zoo animals, who for centuries have been the subject of Western imagination yet enslaved, colonized and denied dignity and self worth. Cohen the fag identifies with the caged animals (and thus with blacks) and attempts to form a bond with his fellow marginalized constituents: “Physically I was so close to the rhinoceros that emotionally it felt like we were kissing.”And even implies a commonality of fag status: “Some of the zebras watched the dance, and others not, and one in particular was a great fan, probably a fag, who followed everything we did intently." The animals’ plights are equated with that of the blacks, as there are segregated and kept socially dejected.
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