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Coco Fusco

Visiting professor discusses art, activism and her problems with the Patriot Act

by Smita Sharma and Cat Pierro

Art in activism extends beyond painting signs for a protest, and Coco Fusco revels in such art. Deeply concerned with issues of race in American culture, as well as government censorship, Fusco was a visiting professor at Grinnell this semester. She taught a short course called, "Only Skin Deep." The course focused on "the many ways in which photography in America has shaped racial and national identity." Earlier last month, Fusco gave a lecture entitled "Conduct Unbecoming: the Impact of the Patriot Act on Arts Professionals" as part of the Humanities symposium on intolerance.

As well as a curator and professor, she is an accomplished video-artist and writer. Her works include AKA Mrs. George Gilbert, a look at the trial of '60s civil rights activist Angela Davis, and Couple in a Cage, in which she and a colleague posed as undiscovered American Indians in a traveling exhibit. She has written the books English is Broken Here and The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings.

Given your academic background, you?ve been exposed to a number of critical theories. Does this background affect how you approach art?

Well, I mean, I do a lot of research before I watch a performance or make a film. The difference ... between doing something pragmatically in business or engaging in scholarly research and making art is that art doesn't always have a purpose?- at least not a direct purpose. You can open up a series of questions and allow people to explore the questions if you want or you can provide them with an experience. I'm not so sure if art always has a direct purpose. Do painters have a purpose when they paint paintings? Probably not, other than to make a painting. I don't ask myself what the purpose is.

Do you ever consciously decide whether you want to make your art more or less controversial?

The topics that interest me are topics that trouble the culture in a more general sense, so some of the work I've done is interpreted as critical of or dealing with difficult questions or things like that. But those are just things [in which] I'm interested.

How do you formulate a method to approach your art? Take us through that process. How do you move from an idea to an end product?

Well, a lot of times the ideas that I want to deal with inform the strategies that I'm going to use. In the case of AKA Mrs. George Gilbert, I was interested in photography of Angela Davis from '69 to '72. She was one of the most photographed black women in America from that time. Her story became a national drama in which all of America wanted to participate in some way, and all of America was being enlisted to participate by helping her be put into prison and ensuring she was executed or by defending her. So I was interested in how the images functioned as part of that struggle.

But I thought about how I [could] reflect on that some 35 years later. I had to have a filter through which to see these things ... I needed to create a story in which viewers from the right and viewers from the left would face off with one another, so my conversation with the FBI agent is a way to bring to the foreground the fact that it's not just the left that's interested in Angela Davis. It's rare that a president, a governor and a head of the FBI would be so focused on making sure that a black professor gets killed. And here was an instance in which Governor Reagan, President Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, who was head of the FBI, were working together consciously to try to get her executed.

To what extent would you draw a parallel between the Vietnam War era and today's "War on Terror"?

I think the difference is the role of the media for me. I think the media played a really critical role in the war in Vietnam in galvanizing public opinion to be against the war. I think the media has pretty much abdicated its role as a critical viewer of the conflict with the exception of a few independent sources. The American networks are pretty pro whatever the U.S. position is. In that sense I see a big difference.

In Nixon's time the atmosphere of war allowed certain laws to be passed that wouldn't be permitted otherwise, just like today's Patriot Act. How do laws that are justified by extreme circumstances affect the work that you do?

The Patriot Act is extremely invasive, and it affects basically any person in the United States because it justifies the unwarranted search and seizure of your correspondence. Anybody's emails can be read, anybody's letters can be intercepted and you don't have to be under investigation for anything.

Also, there have been attempts to criminalize things like translation of texts from so-called enemy states. Well, that affects scholars who are trying to get access to information about other societies and other countries [with which] we may be in conflict. What if your specialty is Iranian cinema and you want to translate a text from Persian script to English? Are you going to go to jail because you translated an Iranian text?

There are other problems that have to do with artists being accused. Several of my colleagues have been investigated; one guy was indicted. Several other artists have been arrested for performances and artwork that are critical of the government. Shows have been shut down. It's that climate of anything critical of the presidency or of the war can come under scrutiny at any time. And that is something that is directly and indirectly a result of the Patriot Act.

There have been culture wars that led to a spread of cultural values in organizations and universities for a while. I teach at Columbia, and there's been some controversy there in the last two or three years involving professors who spoke out against the war and involving professors who have been accused of being pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic. That has led to the creation of tribunals where professors can be tried because students feel that they are being prejudicial towards them in the classroom or intimidating or whatever. So there's a climate of paranoia about expressing certain points of view that seems to be spreading.

A lot of artists involved in activist projects have come under scrutiny or been harassed by authorities and so have professors who have made statements against the war. There's the case of War Churchill in Colorado; of John Laramy, the artist at ASU in Arizona; Steve Kurts from Critical Art Ensemble, who was indicted for using bacteria as an art project. There are lots of artists and intellectuals who've been affected as part of the political climate.

Artists have a unique role as social and political critics in that they bring in creative elements. What are these and how can they be used to subvert the system, so to speak?

Well, I'm not so sure that they subvert the system. I just think that art is a state in which things can be said and done because artists in general have a little bit more independence, a little more autonomy. So they can get through the cracks a little bit more, whether or not people want to pay attention to that work; in some contexts they don't, in some they do. But I'm not so sure whether art actually does subvert the system per se.

I mean, there are some examples like the Yes Men, for example, and how they get into the board rooms of multinational corporations or made the fake website for Dow Chemical in which they apologized for the Bhopal incident and got Dow all upset because it looked like they were real representatives from Dow. I think those are examples in the present of how art has tried to intervene and address a public that is outside of the world of art and raise important political issues. But I think that they're an exception; they're not the rule.

What thinkers, not necessarily current writers or filmmakers, influence you and your work?

I was a semiotics major at Brown and studied a lot of critical theory. I was very influenced by people like Foucault and by psychoanalytic theory, and I started after graduate school to get more interested in post-colonial thought and to read people like Spivak, Edward Said, Homi Bhaba and Stuart Hall. I got very interested in their work, and I think that that was sort of the beginning of what has sustained itself as an ongoing theoretical interest.

What message are you trying to send to society and how would you like your audience to respond to it?

One of the things I've learned from the experience of making art is you can?t control what people do with it. I can say, "Oh, I would like people to have this kind of experience," or "I would like them to think about these things," or "I would like them to go away with a different understanding," but I can't control it! I cannot. And if I try to control it, I'm focusing on the wrong thing. What I need to focus on is my work, not how to force the audience to think one thing or another or to come away with one thing or another.

They will go away with what they go away with. They'll think about it, and maybe they'll think one way about it tomorrow and another in two weeks and another way about it in two years, and I can't control that. I can say what I think about things, but that doesn't mean that you or anybody else is going to understand me. So I can't worry so much about making sure that they get it. I just try to make the work that is important to me and hope that others will get something from it.

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