MANHATTEN REAPS THE GRAPES OF WRATH

The section of Michael Stevenson’s exhibition devoted to Steven Cohen forms a retrospective survey largely consisting of works which have been extensively discussed.

Its title, Life is shot, art is long, a play on Seneca’s dictum ars longa, vita brevis, affirms the centrality and permanence of art in the face of a radically flawed world. A concern with universal moral issues provides the impetus behind Cohen’s breathtaking new video Golgotha (2007-2009), a magnum opus that makes everything he has done hitherto, seem a mere dress-rehearsal for this, the supreme performance of his career so far.

Gone are the bludgeoning shock tactics of Faggot, Dog, Jew and Ugly Girl. Gone are the vivifying crassness, brashness and vulgarity of yore, for Golgotha’s hallmark is limpid classical purity and restraint. The impulse behind the work, created in the wake of a searing bereavement, is a tragic awareness of the irreversibility of human actions and a fierce yearning for the irretrievable. Trauma and grief inspire a meticulously concerted performance of religious inspiration in which all those hoary, bearded prophets of the Old Testament, all those Jeremiahs, Ezekiel’s and Isaiah’s, rise up atavistically to ventilate their ire and righteous wrath.

Golgotha was the site of capital punishment in Jerusalem. It was the place of Christ’s crucifixion, and the Hebrew word Golgotha refers to the skulls that littered the ground.

On a visit to New York Cohen was appalled to find a shop selling human bones, and the performance originated in his outraged disgust at such mercantile obscenity. If his earlier work reflects the politics of the anus, then Golgotha explores the reeking arse-end of the American moral landscape where economic exploitation persists beyond the grave. Golgotha is an apocalyptic indictment of American capitalism and materialism, America’s death-dealing foreign interventionism, America’s intolerance of the ‘other’ and their counterparts around the globe.

The video, a sumptuous aesthetic spectacle, opens with an elegiac exordium in which the camera slowly inches over Cohen’s body to the strains of a heart-breaking, plaintive lament. His tutu is formed from diminutive gilded mirrors with richly carved crowns and floral and foliate scrolls. His bald head references the shaven scalps of the victims of the Holocaust, be they Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Communists or dissident clergy. His face is heavily made-up: butterfly wings and feathered eyelashes adorn his eyes. Finally his high heels rise from human skulls which, he says, ‘heighten his awareness of the presence of the dead’.

Costume and maquillage allude to the emblematic devices underpinning the 17th century vanitas which proclaims the brevity and transience of human life and the inevitability of divine judgment. Mirrors, blossoms, leaves, crowns and butterflies are all traditional tokens of vanity which transform Cohen into a living Memento Mori. However the Janus-faced artist is not just e.e. cummings’ ‘blue-eyed boy, Mister Death’, he also incarnates a swatch of victimized identities.

He is the Jew, the queer, the representative of all marginalized and threatened beings. The leaves, blossoms, butterflies and feathers that adorn him, identify him with nature and threatened species. He is the imperiled planet, the martyred Christ and the Jewish ritual scapegoat, Azazeel who expiates the sins of his people.

In the next sequence, a grey, pin-stripe suit replaces the tutu, turning Cohen into a latter-day Jedermann, as he picks a path down the New York streets. The intervention - a series of genuflections, abasements and prayer-like invocations - takes place where Wall Street - the epicentre of global capitalism – converges on Trinity church. There Mammon meets God in a confluence of immense energies, and the artists slow, stumbling progress forms a parallel to the Via Dolorosa and the stations of the Cross.

The strain Cohen endures sustaining these apostate or salvatory identities expresses itself in his precarious equilibrium. The human skulls not only create the persona, they dictate his movement and stance. His gait betrays his human fallibility and weakness. The artist totters, sways and seems forever about to fall. To stand or walk is to undergo a trial that proves his faith. Every step he takes is an heroic ethical assertion, a challenge to evil. Virtually immobilized by the high heels that ‘bring him closer to God’, Cohen bears witness on the godless streets.

The shamanistic aspect of his practice, his redemptive attempt to heal a sick world through rituals of expiation, emerge from the sweeping, balletic gestures whereby his fluttering hands mime out prayer, entreaty, lamentation, helplessness, bafflement, prostration, obeisance and resignation.

Golgotha abounds in deliriously seductive images. The surreal dynamic of the close-ups of the two skulls treading a path amidst the pulsing neon of Times Square, or hovering over the New York skyline in a prophecy of doom, lend them galvanizing presence. The inevitable triumph of divine virtue is forcefully conveyed by the rousingly affirmative finale in which the skulls march triumphantly through the Manhattan streets in a devastating subversion of that most stirring of all American anthems, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which the artist twists into his own torch song and threnody to the deceased.

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.”


Images: Michael Stevenson Gallery