Performing the Institutionalization of "Bare Life", Coco Fusco Operation Atropos Bare Life Study #1 A Room of One’s Own Commentary, Jill Lane

Commentary
by Jill Lane

In her influential essay “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” performance artist and theorist Coco Fusco reflects on the colonial practice of exhibiting nonwhite peoples for European and United States spectators throughout the long history of European colonialism. She marks the practices of “living display” as the first practice of intercultural performance, quite opposed to the self-congratulatory practices of “multicultural exchange” that appeared in so many museums and theatres of the early 1990s. Further, Fusco suggests that this history of forced exhibition is the relevant historical context in which to understand the development of performance art itself, particularly by artists of color. Through living display, colonized subjects like Sartje Baartman (the famed “Venus Hottentot”) were asked to perform “themselves” and open their bodies to public scrutiny long before such self-referential or explicit performance was the hallmark of body art. Both in her writing and her practice as a performance artist, then, Fusco suggests that performance art is specially suited both to index and critique the histories of racial and gender violence that have been deeply coded into the ways we both inhabit and interpret the physical body.

In her most recent work, Fusco uses performance art to explore our most recent and equally violent scenarios of intercultural performance: the clandestine military interrogation rooms where U.S. soldiers and officers interact with prisoners. What is new in this iteration, Fusco tells us, is participation of women:  still barred from most combat zones, they are nonetheless allowed protagonizing roles as interrogators. Coco Fusco’s newest works, which she introduces to us in images and text in this section, thus explore the expanding role of U.S. women in the so-called “War on Terror” and its scenes of encounter. Operation Atropos is a 59-minute film about the experience she and a group of collaborators had training with retired military interrogators. Bare Life Study #1, which in part references Giorgo Agamben’s provocative notion of the state’s ability to reduce at will citizens to their “bare life,” is a group street performance that uses routine methods of humiliation in military prisons as choreography. Finally, A Room of One’s Own is a theatrical monologue that satirically celebrates the benefits and opportunities for women as military interrogators. Throughout, Fusco illustrates the critical role of performance art in illuminating and contesting this regime of state violence.