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Coco Fusco 2018: An Interview

Video Data Bank

2018 01:21:35 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
Activism , Interview , Latino/Chicano , VDB Interviews , Visiting Artists Program

Description

Coco Fusco is a Cuban-American artist and author who investigates race, gender, politics, and identity through installations, performances, video work, and writing. In her second On Art and Artists interview, Fusco discusses her recent works with Romi Crawford — an art historian at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — and describes how she has evolved as a storyteller over her career.

"Coco Fusco's work invites many lines of analysis. Since it is so layered, and so deliberatively self-conscious, it begs a prismatic hermeneutics, which would use each register to analyze not just the conditions of artistic production in a post-cold war and postethnic situation but also the very meaning and possible valances of race and gender and the reinscription of the exotic, forbidden, and liminal." 

— Eduardo Mendieta, Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom, 2007

The Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collection features innovative video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view. The collection includes seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. Works in the collection employ innovative uses of form and technology, mixed with original visual style to address contemporary art and cultural themes.

Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement in the United States, the Video Data Bank is one of the nation's largest providers of alternative and art-based video. Through a successful national and international distribution service, the VDB distributes video art, documentaries made by artists, and recorded interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics.