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Coco Fusco

Coco Fusco is a New York City–based artist and writer and the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba. (April 2020)

IN THE REVIEW

Love Among the Ruins

Workers repairing a colonial palace in Old Havana, 2007

The Fallen

by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne

Turcos en la niebla [The Disoriented Ones]

by Enrique Del Risco
Anyone who lives under the sign of things Cuban—as a national on the island, an exile in the diaspora, or (like me) an American-born descendant of Cubans—knows what it’s like to contend with the persistent scrutiny of one’s political views by both Cubans and non-Cubans.

Sex, Art, and Misogyny

Suzanne Lacy: Three Weeks in May, Los Angeles, 1977

Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970

by Vivien Green Fryd
In 1974 the performance artist Marina Abramovic stood naked and immobile in a Naples gallery. Next to her was a table with seventy-two objects, including a loaded gun. Beside the objects was a document absolving the audience of responsibility for whatever they might choose to do to her with those objects. Freeing the audience from accountability turned the performance into an exposé of their ethics: they became actors in a scenario as well as witnesses of one another’s behavior. Some of them made violent gestures toward Abramovic—they were not exclusively sexual, but many were. She endured cuts to her skin as well as what one critic described as intimate caresses and minor sexual assaults before the audience erupted into a fight when a participant put the gun to her head. Interestingly, as soon as Abramovic ceased to be immobile and began to walk toward the people around her, they fled the gallery rather than reckoning with what they had done.