From Cape Town to New York, Steven Cohen walks his own fashion show!
Stepping in-and-out Leigh Bowery’s Heritage, the South African artist sceneries fashion performances putting out what society advocates hiding.
Mixing genders through physical transformations and exhibitions, Steven Cohen Fashion Art performances walk in reaction with political and social borders.
Crossing-in-meeting social and cultural limits, the artist dates the non conventional and the Extravagance.
Cohen isn't one and unique character: in fact, the artist stars infinite personalities, patterning characters he's the only one to perform: Starring a dog or a living lustre in rural environments isn’t commonly seen on fashion stages. However it’s still a fashion language Cohen fluently speaks. Feeling in pain or ashamed is part in the artist experimental work. Living the fashion appearance from an outside look is good but being able to perform it from the inside remains an emotional and physical challenge.
Using diverse materials to nurture his Fashion Art, Cohen revisits and extracts performed accessories from their original contexts. Then, lustres, horns, animal’s skins or animal body parts serve Cohen’s “trance-formations”. They become shoes, hats or corsets ornaments, contributing to the birth of the performed characters.
Reactions aroused toward Cohen’s audience are meeting the size and the originality of the artist fashion performances: Touching, smelling, laughing, mocking or provoquing, Cohen’s audience is fascinated, trying to understand who stands behind the costume.
More than an artist, Steven Cohen is a performing Fashion "Avatar".
When Art pieces tend to be conventionally fixed-in the “politically-defined”, Cohen undresses and designs stories through fashion performances, walking in urban or rural environments he never stood before.
The artist isn’t second-guessing when he walked Wall Street and Time Square skulls shoed while smocking clothed. He turned those corporate places into the private stages of his self-performed fashion show. He overcomes fashion codes and creates "Skulletos”, transforming human skulls into walking high-heeled stilettos. This performance is called “Golgotha”: Controversial manifestation, “Golgotha” showcases the death in life, crossing morality codes in presenting on urban stages a fashion Antithesis of life and death continuity.
S.Cohen told me: “it’s not about bringing the dead to life, but it's about bringing the dead into life literally and physically…".
Matching a Black Smoking, “skulletoes” created a fashion-conscious message carried with proud, pain but faith: Shopping or not shopping? Walking or not walking the line?
Connecting “fashion shows” with Art motions, "Golgotha" performance is a reflexion about Capitalist society and Human infinite nature. It is dialectic between what we buy and what we leave behind, what we owe and what truly remains.
More than a message the artist shares pieces of dreams where butterflies, eye shadows, corsets, horns, “unwearable” heels, are magical keys.
Daring to stand in places he creatively never stood before, Cohen is constantly reinventing himself, stepping through different levels of shame, vulnerability and nudity. He takes the risk to expose himself dangerously, embracing its own fashion limitations. He claimed: "the important is not what you wear but what you take off.
Steven Cohen reminds us the general process of international fashion performances. While modelling scene is perceived as part of a glamorous system, Cohen illustrates with his own fashion conscious language the role played by icons in the manifestation of showcased fashion events. Walking a stage means playing a role that can drive us far from our own fashion limitations.
Steven Cohen
envoyé par MickeyKuyo. - Films courts et animations.
