Sassyfrass Circus Freak Show

davideveritthowe:

“Two years ago at St. Cecilia’s abandoned convent in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the New York-based artist [Yve Laris Cohen] prepared for his performance WILLY, clustering several softboxes and umbrella lights in front of a marble altar. For several hours on the night of November 6, 2010, he performed the iconic mad scene from the ballet Giselle…over and over again, endlessly deferring its end until his body, exhausted, could hardly perform the part. Wearing nothing but football trousers and sneakers, Cohen, who is transgender, left his mastectomy scars clearly visible. They cast the ballet’s male-female archetypes in dubious relief, as if WILLY was an attempt, in vain, to alter them.”

-yours truly, an excerpt from a feature I wrote for the March issue of Modern Painters