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Steven Cohen writes:
'The birth of this idea to remove my make-up with adhesive tape came at an elegant museum supper one night 10 years ago, with an accusing glare followed by a rebuke from across the dinner table: "There's glitter in my soup!"
I had just finished performing. I was embarrassed. In my bag, I had a roll of duct tape, and I used it there and then to remove the glittered make-up from my face. It was efficient. There is a real relief in peeling off the eyelashes - eyelashes are pointe shoes for the eyes. After that, the breakdown of the make-up using pressure-sensitive adhesive tape became part of my post-performance ritual.
I apply my make-up for hours with a pathological dose of patience and a plethora of glue. The breakdown of it this way is sudden and full of sensation. Removing the make-up leaves me feeling pulled and slapped and plucked and stripped. After the ritual of de-facing my cosmetically enhanced performance self, I feel gently flayed and beyond fragile ... as naked as the bare bones of a depowdered butterfly wing. It is strange to make a work by unmaking one.'
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'put your heart under your feet... and walk!' Bonlieu Scène Nationale, 21 jan 2020, Annecy
'There is a lot of discomfort and sometimes some pain in each of these self-portraits, but there is also a consoling serenity born of art lived out and performance accomplished ... palimpsest in the sense of it being made for one purpose and subsequently re-used for another.
In every tape self-portrait is a lot of being looked at – but also a lot of being looked out at from. The energy of the experience of being in the make-up is trapped in, and suspended by, the ultra-adhesive nature of the archival tape, every bit as much as are the chemicals of the make-up or of the powder-like tiny scales of the butterfly wings ... held fast in trust for time to come.'
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Opening of the season, Théâtre National de Bretagne, 8 Sept 2020, Rennes
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'put your heart under your feet... and walk!' film captation, Théâtre National de Bretagne, 3 April 2021, Rennes
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'Taste', National Institute of Art History, 3 Dec 2019, Paris
'These tape faces are a process, an action literally stuck in time. Camouflage cream, powder, glitter, lipstick, sweat, DNA, some skin cells ... and a whole lot of skill and patience is embedded in what we are looking at - 50 years and three hours of savoir faire.
I am sort of startled to see this side of my make-up mask, the in-side. I only know my painted face in representation or reflection, photographs or mirror. Now as a result of this art-making process, I see the actuality of the "make" standing "up" for itself in the transition from 3D to 2D, from motion to fixedness in the reveal of its real. What used to be supported by resting against my skin has now become the independent façade of itself. The destruction of the artwork is in itself the creation of a new one. The doing is in the undoing ... and vice versa.
It's not a mask, it's an interface.'
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Steven Cohen was born in 1962 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and lives in Lille, France. He works across the visual and performing arts, staging interventions in the public realm as well as in galleries and theatres.
He has performed extensively on the festival circuit, at such prestigious venues and events as the Festival d'Automne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; the ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival; Théâtre du Rond-Point, Paris; Montpellier Danse and Festival d'Avignon.
Cohen participated in the 38th EVA International, Irish Biennial of Contemporary Art (2018); the 11th Havana Biennale (2012) and the first Aichi Triennale in Japan (2010). More recently, his works have featured in group exhibitions at the Opéra de Bordeaux, France (2020); BOZAR Centre for Arts, Brussels (2019); and Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (2019).
Cohen is among the artists exhibiting in ‘my whole body changed into something else’, opening at Stevenson Cape Town and Johannesburg on 1 July. He will perform Sphincterography: The politics of an arsehole at Trente Trente, Bordeaux, later that month.
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Photography: Allan Thiebault; Pierre Planchenault; Steven Cohen
Studios: Steven Cohen | Lille
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