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INTERVIEW WITH LIZ COHEN
interviewer Jan Rydén
FF: How did you come up with the idea of doing “BODYWORK”?
LC: Before working on BODYWORK, I was doing a project called CANAL. For several years I photographed a group of transgender sex workers along the fringes of the Canal Zone in Panama. One night they dressed me up in an effort to transform me. I started thinking about issues of group membership and its limits. They were biological men taking hormones to become women. Because I am a biological woman, it was impossible for me to enter that journey with them. There was also the sex work, and I wasn’t willing to do that. After CANAL, I wanted to try to become what I was looking at. This brings up a whole bunch of questions about what one is allowed to become and what happens when someone tries to become something she’s not, along with the need we have as humans for love and acceptance.
I decided to try to become a part of a subculture that requires making something to be legitimate. I chose lowriders. There are lots of kinds of members of the lowrider community – builders, owners, models, aficionados, etc.
FF: Why did you choose to rebuild specifically a Trabant into a Chevy El Camino? Was it an intuitive idea or more was there more conceptual analysis?
LC: The Trabant and the El Camino were both born of culturally specific utopian ideas, and are both no longer manufactured. The Trabant has a 2-stroke engine, and duraplast sidewalls. Meant to be practical and inexpensive to manufacture, the Trabant is slow, smelly, and its duraplast walls become flexible in the rain.
The El Camino car-truck was designed to have the power and comfort of a muscle car and a flatbed for carrying a full truckload. Meant to cover a range of functions if an El Camino's flatbed is filled to its specified capacity its frame will crack.
When the Trabant goes through the transformation to an El Camino, it is adapting to a different configuration of values, but the Trabant brings its history with it. The Trabant will never be a stock El Camino. It will be an eccentric El Camino.
FF: The Lowrider subculture is a very American thing. So someone from Sweden will interpret your work in a different way than when it is shown in e.g. San Francisco. What is the main thing to know about Lowriders and that subculture?
LC: Lowrider culture is originally a Chicano subculture. Chicanos are the kids of Mexican immigrants or Mexican-Americans. Now lowriding is much more diverse, and has exploded into a bunch of sub-subcultures.
There’s a difference between racing and cruising. Racing is about speed and performance. Cruising is about going slow and being noticed. The classic street lowrider cruises, shows off. There are also “dancers”, “hoppers”, and “circus cars”. They’re all different kinds of lowriders that do different kinds of tricks. With lowriders, it’s all about how creative you get with your car. Sure, there’s a vernacular, but people are rewarded for being different. Like anything, lowriding has changed over time. At first, suspensions were lowered. Now they’re lowered and with hydraulics given the ability to rise and rise and jump. Lowriders are also getting into engine performance – low rods (a combination of lowrider and hot rod).
FF: The learning process seems to be an integral part of the piece. Could you tell us something about that?
LC: I deliberately chose to become part of something I wasn’t already a part of. In that sense, I’m going through the same process the car is going through. I didn’t want to merely camouflage myself into a new social space. It takes time to become a part of something.
I’m an unusual lowrider. Because I’m building my car instead of paying somebody to do it for me (which is what a lot of lowriders do), I think it will be difficult to question my legitimacy – or the question of legitimacy becomes more complicated. The custom car world is a learn-by-doing world. You learn from people with experience. I learn from Bill Cherry at Elwood Bodyworks. He’s worked on cars for the greater part of his life.
FF: Did you think in terms of former communist countries like DDR changing or do you see it more as an art piece about issues like migration, the Trabant being the migrant desiring acceptance?
LC: Both. Lowriders are ornate. They’re the opposite of purely utilitarian. They’re ostentatious. I think it has to do with a desire for wealth. Culturally (in the US), there’s an enormous value to being wealthy and having leisure time.
As far as migration, there’s more to it than the desire for acceptance. There’s something amazing that happens when a person is navigating new territory. One has the opportunity to reinvent oneself (of course with a lot of baggage). It opens up an innovative space.
FF: You are not only rebuilding and transforming the car, but also your own body. Why did you want to become a lowrider bikini model? Is it to be accepted in the low-rider community? Or is it to counterbalance your taking on the traditionally male role of a mechanic? Or both? Why did you chose that type of femininity?
LC: I’m not becoming a body builder. I’m just developing a sexier appearance.
There are lots of kinds of people around cars and lowriders. The car designer is smart. The car builders are strong. The car models are sexy. All of these qualities are appealing. People are dimensional. Why not be all of these things?
When a lowrider appears in a magazine, it almost always appears with a model.
FF: In fact, is it one, two or several types of femininity?
LC: I don’t know what you mean by this.
People are complicated. They can be lots of things at once and they change over a lifetime. I hesitate to start talking about essential qualities of femininity and masculinity. I don’t think it’s the way people work. It’s the way stereotypes work, and I’m interested in playing around with them as popular images of unattainable desires.
FF: Someone thought the bikini model was like an illustration of how women are forced to become objects or commodities. Do you agree?
LC: Sometimes people are “forced” or coerced into doing things that they don’t want to do. Most of the time they’re not. People have choices. That’s not to say that people aren’t influenced by societal values and expectations. It’s just to say that within a cultural context, people have choices – even to transgress expectations.
I think it would be insulting to assume that all bikini models are exploited victims of a sexist culture. Like anything, I think it depends on the person. Anyone can become a victim to a “role”. There are bikini models that are very smart, assertive, entrepreneurial, and in control. It’s easy to make judgments. Somebody can look great on paper – like they’ve chosen a “respectable” profession or hobby and have a shitty sense of self worth.
FF: Is there any type of feminist vision in your art work?
LC: I am a feminist. I believe women should have the opportunities and healthy environment to realize a healthy and dynamic life. Everybody deserves this. As human beings, we’re complicated. Seemingly disparate qualities can become unified in a person creating a bunch of unexpected opportunities.
FF: What kind of reactions or discussions do you think BODYWORK will provoke in Sweden?
LC: I’ve never been to Sweden, so this is difficult to answer.
The Trabant is really exotic in the US. Most people haven’t heard of it. It immediately starts a conversation about the car. I suspect that in Sweden more people have heard of it. The US had a very strong arrogant position during the Cold War toward all things communist or socialist. I have a feeling Sweden’s position was different because of its economic history and geographic location. I think the lowrider aspect of the project will be more exotic in Sweden than it is here.
I hope the project provokes questions about the nature of change, the ways we judge difference, and the tremendous efforts people make to be a part of something.
PIMP MY LIFE!
by Jan Åman
As I write this, the Paris riots enter their eleventh night. The unrest has now reached other cities around the country. From the suburbs of Toulouse, Marseille, Nice, Dijon, Lyon, Nantes and several other cities come reports of the same burning cars and Molotov cocktails that we have seen outside Paris.
But not just there. Last night, central Paris was also attacked. Cars were set ablaze in neighbourhoods that usually feature in American romantic comedies – where the Seine flows peacefully past the Notre Dame and the Île de France. Where people are beautiful and the shopping is divine.
The rioting in France has already made history. It shows a new side of the (post-) modern big city. It is a rebellion from below and outside. It comes from the suburbs and directs itself erratically against the centre. It is a rebellion without a clear direction, without a visible idea – other than a deep distrust of politics and society in general. You set fire to your neighbour’s car just to show your discontent. And thereby you show that you dare show it.
In Paris in 2005 there is no Lenin, no Ulrike Meinhof, no sub-comandante Marcos. It is not an intellectual or ideological rebellion. There are only kids here. Kids communicating with other kids via text messages on their mobile phones. That’s how the actions spread. The riots have made history on that count too, as the first text-messaging rebellion.
It began with two teenage boys being electrocuted in an electrical sub-station as they were fleeing the police. It was then stoked by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. When he spoke of a “merciless war” against suburban crime he only widened the gap between the centre and the periphery. He embodied power and politics – and words, words that want to mean so well but seem to have lost all their force.
Soon the rioting had spread.
If we really want to deal with the issues surrounding equal opportunities and segregation, we cannot ignore what has happened and is happening in Paris. Particularly if we link these issues with ideas about the big cities of the future.
This is because the problems are inherent in the very structure and idea of the modern city – and of modern society. This is the idea that we Swedes excelled at constructing. In fact, we were the best in the world at it. People from other countries made pilgrimages of learning to our welfare state, our ABC cities and our million-homes programme. So the question is not whether what is happening in Paris could happen here. It is already happening, albeit with less violence.
That which was surely brimming with good intentions has shown its downside. The Modernist dream of the good city has become a direct route to increased differences and alienation. This is because it places people in different areas, which in time have become organised according to social, economic and ethnic belonging.
The rich in one area, the poor in another. You don’t work where you live. You don’t live where you work. Everything is separate – and the result is a city whose different parts don’t communicate. And the areas which were intended for recreation and leisure – the spaces in between – also get their downside. The greenery isn’t just green, it takes on a social dimension too. It creates barriers between different areas – and when darkness falls, it doesn’t exactly feel safe.
What is paradoxical in all this is that the whole idea is based on a benevolent ambition to provide care, security and equality of opportunity. Social services for everyone. The green areas around the suburbs were meant to provide easy access to nature. The words were pretty. But reality turned out different.
As privatisation and global competition accelerate and public services begin to be dismantled – things that Sweden can hardly do anything about –, the modern city, the one we Swedes have been so clever at creating, becomes a time-bomb. Differences increase. The inner city becomes a reservation for shopping and the new middle class. The possibility of exchange, of contact, of seeing something other than your own back yard, becomes limited. And thereby we lose that which the city once both symbolised and embodied: the melting pot, the place for encounters, collisions, differences side by side.
In Paris the bomb has already gone off.
And therefore, if we want to resolve these problems, it’s not going to be enough to try to find solutions to individual expressions of them. That’s just empty words and window-dressing. There will be no integration without getting to grips with the structures that create segregation. And that is why most government efforts to “rehabilitate the suburbs”, or to create equality of opportunity, are empty gestures. They have no effect when the bigger picture is moving quickly in a different direction.
What’s needed is a bigger makeover. There won’t be any improvements in security, welfare, integration, health care, leisure, the environment or schools if the whole isn’t addressed – only empty gestures. Politically correct clichés – the most extreme example of which has been the reaction to Sarkozy’s statements. Words without credibility, quickly seen through by those whose concerns they claim to address.
That is why the Gender Turntable is so important. And so necessary. It is a central component of a wider investigation begun at Färgfabriken in 2001, and which will continue until 2009. This looks at the whole spectrum of issues – from the physical city to social and actual life factors – to see what new possibilities there might be.
How do we go from a city of enclaves to a networked city? What can we learn about the future from the old structure? And how do we create a new narrative?
We’ll be hunting for new models, new ways of creating co-ordinated approaches. Updated ways of making contact, of speaking, of organising care and of ensuring the long-term improvement of the environment, the city, and knowledge. And we’ll be chasing a new urban model, one that works beyond the inner city.
All this is necessary if we are going to be able to deal with the 21st century’s global world. The old Western map is going to be completely redrawn. New technology will give us new possibilities. At the same time, the urban explosion in Asia and Africa demands new ways of solving everything from social issues to long-term energy and environment management. We can choose to create meaning in this context, or to stick our heads in the sand and pretend nothing has happened – and then experience a scaled-down version of Paris.
The first person at Färgfabriken to put a finger on Stockholm’s problem – and really every big modern city’s problem – was the British-Iranian architect Farshid Moussavi. She described Stockholm as one of the most segregated cities in the world, precisely because Modernity’s dream had been so strong here. She pointed out that what we needed to do was not to “solve” the problem with an even better network of streets or public transport. What we need is a good DJ. A social DJ. To mix and remix what is here already. So that collisions, encounters, contacts can begin to happen again.
Some people have asked what the hell that actually means.
Liz Cohen offers one response. For the Gender Turntable, she has converted Färgfabriken into a car body shop and a gym. Not as static installations, but for real. For over a year she worked in a car body shop in Arizona, USA – with no prior knowledge of cars whatsoever, but with a burning interest in the culture that surrounds them. She learnt to weld and bolt in order to turn an old East German Trabant into a custom-made American Chevrolet El Camino. German functionalism into American low-rider. And the artist plays all the roles here: she owns the car, works on it and climbs up on its hood to pose in a bikini.
Liz Cohen isn’t just words. Liz Cohen is deeds.
She is not passively “interested” in the world of car mechanics or body-obsessed gyms. She is not trying to understand from a distance. She is not describing something from the sidelines. She goes headlong into new contexts – full on. She doesn’t talk about boys with wrenches or bikini girls on hoods – either as phenomena or problems; she tries out for herself what these things are about.
Pimp My Ride, a TV show in which old cars are hotted up, is one of MTV’s biggest success stories. And that’s not because of the cars, but because of what the cars mean – the fact that they’re part of a culture, a lifestyle.
Regardless of whether you are a man or a woman, of whether you live in a high-rise or a detached house, of whether you want to make your presence felt through your words, your body, your clothes or your credit card, this is a reality we all share. Different, parallel lifestyles in one and the same city, one and the same society. Not integrated, as the 20th-century dream had it. But clued-up means of creating connections, junctions and nodes.
Welcome to the Gender Turntable.
(translated by Tomas Tranæus)
Seminarier & workshop