Political art can work in many ways. It can set off alarm sirens, go for laughs, promote reflection. “Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I will Become an Island” at El Museo del Barrio hits all these keys – combative, comedic, poetic – in a three-decade survey of the career of one of our most imaginatively polemical artists.
The show starts beautifully, quietly, with a brand-new video playing in a gallery labeled “Immigrant Narratives.” At first it looks to be nothing more than an image of luminous empty blue sky. Then you spot a flicker of movement: A skywriting plane is spelling out, one smoky white character at a time, “Only in darkness can you see the stars.”
The sentence paraphrases one written by Martin Luther King Jr. And some “stars” are here in the gallery — Bambi, a student from Colombia; Nada, an Egyptian scholar; Alom, a Cuban filmmaker, along with a pair of young Ecuadorean fruit vendors from Queens — all seen in black-and-white portrait photographs shot by Fusco over the past ICE-haunted year and collectively titled “Everyone Who Lives Here is a New Yorker.”
Fusco herself is what might be called an almost-immigrant to America: She was born in New York City soon after her mother arrived here from Cuba in 1960 and has maintained close ties to Cuba since. And although her art rarely focuses on her own history, she makes an appearance in this opening gallery.
A closed-circuit television monitor high up on a wall carries shadowy, surveillance-style images of what look to be scenes of a woman being harassed by a man. Fusco based the piece on a real-life story told to her by a Mexican factory worker named Delfina Rodriguez, whom she met in Tijuana, and who reported that she’d been locked up for 12 hours and abused by her boss after he accused her of trying to organize a labor union. In Fusco’s dramatized video version of the incident, the artist herself plays the borderland figure under attack.
For many years, performance art, often in collaboration with other artists, was Fusco’s primary medium. In 1991, in advance of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, she turned up at the Brooklyn Academy of Music dressed as Queen Isabel la Católica of Spain, selling deeds for New World property for $1. (The fabulously goofy gown she wore for the occasion, designed by the artist Pepón Osorio, is in the show.)
And she may still be known for a second satirical work, a live collaborative performance with the Chicano artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, called “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West.” For this counter-quincentenary piece, which debuted in 1992, the artists presented themselves, dressed in feathers and skins and enclosed in a gilded cage, as natives of an invented tropical island called Guatinau. Inside the cage they went about “native” business — sewing voodoo dolls, watching TV — while audiences gawked, poked, tsked and photographed.
The piece traveled internationally and was a hit at the 1993 Whitney Biennial, though there was no consensus about what to make of it. A jab at colonialism? An ethnological display? A racial insult? Yes, yes and yes, depending on who was looking. (A replica of the cage is in the show, but like most performance-based work this one survives mainly as documentation: videos, photos, texts.)
Fusco has geared much of her performance work to audiences beyond the art world; mixing fact and fiction, reality and critique, is a dynamic she’s after. Such calculation animated a cluster of performances inspired by the post-9/11 “war on terror,” and specifically the treatment, by the U.S. military, of suspected enemy combatants held in detention centers at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.
For a 2006 video piece called “Operation Atropos” she hired a team of former U.S. military interrogators — self-described specialists in the “psychology of capture” — to demonstrate their persuasion techniques on a group of female actors (Fusco among them) with results that are, even though clearly staged, pretty unnerving.
And for a related project called “A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America, 2006-2008,” encompassing a video and a series of prints, she appeared dressed in combat fatigues and delivered a funny-scary lecture on how female interrogators could weaponize their sexuality and use it as a torture tactic in military prisons, as indeed happened at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
(In 2007, Fusco delivered a version of the lecture at a MoMA symposium called “The Feminist Future” and gave the reigning ideal of female empowerment a usefully uncomfortable twist.)
More recently, she has trained her critical sights on another geopolitical target, Cuba, in a group of videos installed toward the end of the visually succinct show, which has been organized by El Museo’s interim chief curator, Susanna V. Temkin, and its former chief curator Rodrigo Moura.
Three of the videos focus on contemporary Cuban literary figures, all stars of varying magnitudes in the global firmament, who experienced censorship, and worse, at the hands of the Revolutionary government.
“La Confesión (The Confession)” (2015) is a documentary-style take on Heberto Padilla (1932-2000), a poet who initially supported the Castro-led regime but later parted ways with it. He was jailed in 1971 for what was condemned as “ideologically divergent” writing, and he made a forced public confession of guilt; he also implicated other writers, as well as his wife, as counterrevolutionaries.
A second video, the feature-length docudrama “La Noche Eterna (The Eternal Night)” (2023), tells the story of the poet and essayist Néstor Díaz de Villegas, who was imprisoned at 18 for similarly offensive work but managed, with the help of fellow inmates, to turn incarceration to creative ends.
And the third, and most moving, of these homage-like works is the one dedicated to Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990), a poet and novelist jailed in 1974 for his dissident writing, but also for being openly homosexual. (Like Padilla, he self-exiled from Cuba in the United States in 1980 and, after contracting AIDS, died, by suicide, in New York City.)
To escape official oversight, Arenas organized clandestine literary gatherings in the rambling Lenin Park near Havana. (For a while, dodging police arrest, he even took up residence there). That park, now derelict, is the setting for Fusco’s 2018 video “Vivir en Junio con la Lengua Afuera (To Live in June With Your Tongue Hanging Out).”
There we find three Cuban artist-writers — Lynn Cruz, Iris Ruiz, Amaury Pacheco — all with politically precarious status, meeting to recite, from memory, one of Arenas’s poems, one mourning a lost homeland, and to commune with his liberationist spirit.
Although Fusco directed the video, she was not on site behind the camera. (Assistants did the filming.) For her support of anti-government artists, she was barred from entering Cuba, She is still present there, though, in a 2012 video.
Titled “La Plaza Vacia (The Empty Plaza),” the 11-minute piece on Cuba’s history alternates long shots of Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, officially the political heart of the city, with archival photos of the same civic space from earlier days. In the past it was filled with crowds celebrating, spontaneously or by official design, a grand utopian venture. Here it’s only occupant is Fusco herself, a sharp dot of red against a sea of sunbaked asphalt.
The artist’s final appearance in the retrospective brings her back to New York, her home city, in a 2021 video titled “Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word,” filmed during the coronavirus pandemic and shown at the Whitney. In it we see her rowing a skiff around a small island in the East River: Hart Island, which has for centuries served as public cemetery for the city’s poor, dispossessed, and plague stricken,many of them, like most of us, immigrants.
So the show ends as it began: beautifully, quietly, poetically, though I like to think that quietude is not its takeaway. As you leave El Museo be sure to pick up a copy of a rude, crude comic book version of a tabloid newspaper recently published by Fusco and two artist friends, Noah Fischer and Pablo Helguera. “Culture Wars 3.0: MAGA is coming for the arts” reads the cover headline in the current issue. “Deportation Wayback Machine” reads a photo caption. “My First Chat with my Interrogator in Cuba” reads the header of an op-ed. The newspaper’s name is The Siren. It’s free.
Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I will Become an Island
Through Jan. 11, El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue (at 104th Street); 212-831-7272; elmuseo.org.
Holland Cotter is the co-chief art critic and a senior writer for the Culture section of The Times, where he has been on staff since 1998.
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