CRAWLING…
_performance

This work comprises a costume which relates visually to that of Ugly girl. The shoes in this piece are pink spangled high heels, styled like a woman’s stiletto, but with the heel of the shoe extending beyond the reach of its toe. This heel has the diameter of a knitting needle, and is complemented by a costume that draws on and subverts drag.

Like Ugly girl, and manifestations of Princess Menorah, this figure wears a wig adorned with feathers, her characteristic head make-up, and a corset, stockings and gloves ensemble. Like Faggot, it makes use of a sparkler-bearing dildo in its filmed sequence.

© John Hodgkiss

In all his performance works Cohen places the body in extremis. They are about constriction, inability, (partial) failure; they are “un-dance” and
“non-entertainment”. The intent is to change the body’s physical and spatial range, to invoke forms of disability, even as the outrageously decorated outfits of works such as Crawling invoke the hyperbolic glamour of drag. From Cohen’s first “living art” works (Faggot, Ugly girl, Dog, Jew) onwards, the heels of his shoes get higher and higher and thus ever more difficult to walk in. Some are so high that he might as well be walking en pointe — a trenchant cross-referencing of European high art as fetish.