Q&A WITH LIZ COHEN: MULTIMEDIA ARTIST AND EDUCATOR
by Sam Ellefson
Zwickau Routine: Red Cossack; 2010; 16x20 inches; C-print
Liz Cohen is a multidisciplinary artist and educator at Arizona State University. Her new exhibition, Body/Magic, which is on display at the ASU Art Museum until the end of May, culminates her decade-long Bodywork project. The exhibition examines the intersection of labor, femininity, representation and self-expression and poses the question: What does it mean to be seen, by ourselves and by others?
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sam Ellefson: To start, give me an overview of your career, both as a teacher and as a solo artist.
Liz Cohen: I’m an associate professor in the photo area at Arizona State University, and I’m also a visual artist. As a visual artist I work in a variety of media, and as a professor I mostly teach in the area of photography–but the critical issues in photography can be applied to many other mediums when you think of issues pertaining to representation.
Throughout my career, both as an artist and an instructor, issues of representation have guided my work in different ways. Or issues of identity, how we see ourselves, and how others project onto us, how joyous it is when that projection and the way we see ourselves match, and how awful it can be when they’re really different.
I went to the Museum School for my undergraduate career and to Tufts University where I majored in philosophy. I was really interested in ethical theory; I wrote my honors thesis on group responsibility and feelings. It was really about how you hold groups of people responsible for their actions, and what is the appropriate response to, for example, guilt. I feel like those kinds of ideas around groups and who’s in and who’s out and how you define a group have always been a part of my work.
I went to graduate school in San Francisco at California College of the Arts. So I lived there for many years, which is, you know, the birthplace of many American countercultures. I’ve always been interested in various forms of radical self expression in the face of social pressure or resistance.
I first started teaching in San Francisco, adjunct in many places, and then I got my first full-time gig at Cranbrook; I was the artist in residence of photography there for nine years, and now I’m here at ASU, and loving every minute of it.
On the River Road with Brian and Rafael; 2012; 50x60 inches; C-print.
SE: You touched briefly on how philosophy informs your art, tell me more about how your philosophical background translates into your work.
LC: I see myself as a pretty analytic person, and an analytic artist. I would say I approach my work, and produce my work, from a very analytic place. It may be rooted in emotional experiences I’ve had, but I’m not emoting on a page, I’m very thoughtful and calculative of the things that I do.
I think that comes from–I studied philosophy and the Western analytic tradition, so that includes logic, doing proofs, thinking about premises, and things that are sound and things that are unsound. I think that that kind of thinking is reflected in my work, but people might not know that.
I do a lot of research for my work, visual research. I start to place things in buckets and if-thens, like thought experiments; I mean, for me, artworks are thought experiments, and that’s what you do in philosophy. That’s why you do logic. I think the same is true for artworks and proposing ideas that could exist or couldn’t exist, or should exist or shouldn’t exist; it’s a safe place for all kinds of ideas.
SE: Tell me about Body/Magic and how the exhibition interacts with your previous work, Bodywork. What aspects of the exhibition are new to you or foreign?
LC: The title Body/Magic comes from a book that was written by the first woman championship bodybuilder, Lisa Lyon. She wrote this workout book in the ‘80s called “Body Magic”, where she has a lot of ideas around this kind of animal energy and the female body and how to express it through bodybuilding.
I started thinking about her when I was younger as an artist because of her relationship to bodybuilding. She saw herself as a performance artist, and she only competed once, and won. I think the intense discipline, the way that she saw herself and her body as a woman were really fascinating to me. I started to think about her a lot in terms of these ideas of method acting, when actors live a part before they play the part.
That was always interesting to me: The idea of doing performance in the visual art world and using some of the ideas of method acting without being a method actor. I’ve been thinking about her for a really long time. When I started doing my Bodywork project with the car and building the Trabantamino, working at shops and modelling for my own photographs, I thought a lot about Lisa Lyon and this idea of method acting–and about reality television, because I started the project at the beginning of reality TV. It’s a really long project, I started in 2002.
BODY MAGIC 3; 2020; 40x30 inches; Archival Inkjet Print
Then I hadn’t thought about her for a little while, and I really stopped performing with my own body for the lens for a while, for the lens or live. I really don’t perform live at all anymore. I had kind of stopped, but there’s a demand for it. I think that people who are fans of my work always love it when they see me in front of the camera.
I was just trying to think about what my issues are right now versus what they were in 2002, and the way that I see myself. How do I see myself, versus how the world might see me. I started thinking a lot about ageing; Lisa Lyon was probably in her 20s when she was photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, who was her lover at the time. He photographed her for a six year period. She’s his most photographed subject and least talked about subject, because we really think of him more in terms of homoeroticism and his pictures of men and of himself that have more to do with him being a gay man.
So I started thinking about aging and I started thinking about her. I tried to find her, and it’s very mysterious, you can find nothing about her online. I know she’s still alive but you can’t find a picture of her after the ‘80s. There’s very little information. I know that she was inducted into the BodyBuilding Hall of Fame, but it’s very hard to find anything else about her.
That was super intriguing to me, and I started thinking about my car project, about her and about method acting. When I was doing the modelling I was really trying to be a lot like this icon in the lowrider world, Dazza Del Rio, who I was fascinated with, because she was a Latina, but not Chicana, doing lowriding stuff.
BODY MAGIC 13; 2020; 40x30 inches; Archival Inkjet Print
I was like, ‘How do I bring this all together?’ Lisa Lyon was in her 20s, she’s obviously older now and she’s just this ghost in these new Body/Magic images. I’m in my late 40s and Daz is around the same age as I am. So I feel like those photos were this kind of performance dialogue and this method acting dialogue between Lisa Lyon when she was in her 20s, Dazza Del Rio and I hovering around 50, and the mystery of Lisa Lyon today who, I don’t know, maybe she’s around 60, 60-something.
I was thinking about these generations of women and taking on roles. All of the Lisa Lyon photographs shot by Mapplethorpe are all about these different roles and archetypes and her body, which is this female masculine body because she’s doing the bodybuilding.
Those photos that I shot with Dazza Del Rio, inspired by Lisa Lyon, are the reason the show is called Body/Magic, and those are in the show, they’re new to me. Those are on the third floor of the museum, and also on the third floor is a series of photographs called Stories Better Told By Others, which are newer. They’re a meditation on the women of lowriding, the women that modelled for Lowrider Magazine who really set the attitude for a culture and have gotten very little credit for their contribution. I wanted to do something to honor them.
Stories Better Told by Others: Yolanda and Kim; 2018; 35x26 inches; Archival Inkjet Print
I love the way Julio organized that third floor. It has so much to do with the empowerment of women and body positivity, and a certain kind of being and it being OK. For me, that floor becomes this response to the need to judge women, and it’s also a celebration of the gals that are a part of all that work.
The downstairs part of the exhibition is really about labor, the labor of building the car, making money for the car, testing the car. All this ephemera from working for the photoshoots, working on the car, going to the former East Germany. That’s kind of more of the labor, “Workers of the world, unite,” part of the show.
SE: What mindset do you think individuals should try to have when they’re engaging with your work? Or rather, what notions pertaining to labor, immigration, femininity or media should viewers consider when they’re going to see Body/Magic?
LC: Well, you know, everyone brings a different self to an artwork. I would hate to dictate what anyone should think. But I would say that, like I said earlier, artworks, bodies of work, exhibitions, they’re thought experiments. The idea is to get someone to join in on that thought experiment and think about, what if this were really real life? Or, what does it mean that this happened? How can I make sense of this? What about this is different than it seems?
To me, this exhibition is about pointing to several things, like the fact that there’s a huge Soviet influence in Latin America that people don’t often think about, and connecting that to the history of lowriding and the Cold War. Connecting the history of women in cars and the use of the body, and the sexualization of the body as something that’s OK to be proud of. That it can be owned and done on a woman’s terms. That it doesn’t have to be exploitative.
Those are all just thought experiments. I’m open to someone saying that they disagree, or saying that it makes them uncomfortable. I’m not interested in making work that affirms they’re questions and provocations of pieces. I think those provocations function differently depending on your own life experiences and your own biases. So I’d hate to say too much.