Jan 4, 2012
33 notes

“Two years ago at St. Cecilia’s abandoned convent in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the New York-based artist [Yve Laris Cohen] prepared for his performance WILLY, clustering several softboxes and umbrella lights in front of a marble altar. For several hours on the night of November 6, 2010, he performed the iconic mad scene from the ballet Giselle…over and over again, endlessly deferring its end until his body, exhausted, could hardly perform the part. Wearing nothing but football trousers and sneakers, Cohen, who is transgender, left his mastectomy scars clearly visible. They cast the ballet’s male-female archetypes in dubious relief, as if WILLY was an attempt, in vain, to alter them.”

-yours truly, an excerpt from a feature on Cohen that I wrote for the upcoming March issue of Modern Painters

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About
David Everitt Howe is a Brooklyn-based writer and curator who hails from the Deep South, but can barely manage a mountain drawl. He writes primarily on contemporary art, culture, and technology for ArtReview, Modern Painters, frieze, and Afterall, among other publications, and spent his last year in grad school at Columbia poring over critical texts on relational art, fashion, and shopping, which, when he has the means, does in abundance. This makes him a somewhat paradoxical Marxist. Subscribe via RSS.