Andrea Cote in conversation with Áine Phillips
25-5-07 Tompkins Sq Park, East Village

BIOGRAPHY:
www.andreaspace.net
Andrea Cote is a multi-disciplinary visual artist and dancer living in New York. She received her MFA in Sculpture from SUNY Purchase USA in 2003. She has presented solo and collaborative installations and performances in Seattle, Miami, Philadelphia,
and New York. In her work she questions the boundaries that have traditionally divided artistic disciplines, taking on multiple roles using her own body as subject, object, and
medium. For many years she worked as an artists' model. These experiences informed her current work, in which she mediates the space between the world inside an artwork and the one our bodies inhabit. Her work continues the legacy of feminist and performance art.

CONVERSATION:
Áine - How did you start working with autobiographical performance?

Andrea - I was working as an artist's model in Seattle in 1995. I had already been exploring themes of the body in my artwork, and discovered that artist modelling was an ideal format to investigate my concerns about the body in a more direct way. I was really inhabiting my body from the inside rather than talking about it from the outside. I began working with a partner, Robert Treat, and the culture in Seattle at the time was very open, so we performed in classrooms and in artist studios. We would come in with music, costumes and props, and create scenarios and tell stories, experiment with movement or challenge perceptions of gender, and all the while the artists were drawing and re-interpreting what we were doing. It was an ideal format for a performer to develop- there always an audience of artists present and we could really experiment.

Because I was using my body as the main tool- both as subject, object, and medium- it was inevitable that autobiographical subject matter would filter into my work, though it tends to be on a metaphorical level. My performances moved from the life drawing room to the gallery, theatre, or public space, and along the way I have sought out the shifting contexts and challenges that emerge with each space and audience.

Áine - Are you taking elements from your real experience and abstracting them?

Andrea - As an example, I can trace the content of several works back to my personal history of dealing with madness. I’ve struggled with depression, manic-depression, and bouts of psychosis throughout my life. One of my video installation pieces, “Dialogue” from 2002, explored manic-depression. It involved 2 video monitors facing each other. I filmed myself performing, reflected in Mylar, so on one monitor it appears as though I am kissing and making out with myself. I merge with myself in the centre. In the other, the opposite piece, it appears that I am stuck to myself, in deep pain and trying pull away (like the Janus figure, with two heads.) I perform for the camera but I am reliving the experience of what these states of mind really felt like. The viewer experiences these two states in opposition, and must choose which screen to watch, to be absorbed by, and experience one state to the exclusion of the other. The viewer probably does not know about my personal experience with manic depression, but can relate these oppositional states to their own experience. It can be about love and hate, joining vs. tearing away, desire and frustration.

Áine - Does performance have a therapeutic function for you?

Andrea - Well, when I was young I was unusually quiet. I hardly spoke and often felt as if I was invisible. I lived in my own sort of imaginary world. I played with my friends in the mirror who looked like me. Later, interestingly, I became an artist model, occupying a position where I was the focus of everyone’s attention – the naked body fully exposed for everyone to see. And yet at the same time I sometimes felt invisible, I could be the fly on the wall. And I was also the muse- hundreds of artists created replicas or interpretations of me.

Later I made performance pieces that explored that contradiction. On the one hand I want so desperately to be seen; on the other hand I want to disappear into a world of my own making. In many of my works I create a space, an environment that I make from my body, for example, filled with the markings of my hair or my breast. I then paint myself with these identical markings and move slowly or hold a pose, camouflaging into the space I created. I am also fulfilling a need to “recreate” or replicate my own interpretation of my self, my body.

When I look back on my pieces, I find it eerie how I re-enact something that happened and I think maybe I went through the circumstances in my life because my life called for it, and I needed to act it out or manifest it in performance. Which really is the origin? Did I just happen to become an artist model because I needed a job at the time, or was there a deeper need to re-enact that metaphor from my youth, and did I even create that situation in my childhood because there is some core part of my make-up that can only be actualized in the world this way. Was all this practice to later become a performance artist and enact this reality in front of others? There are a lot of themes that recur in my work- the camouflaging, self-confinement, the encounter with my own image. If there is a therapeutic function, it might be that I need to experience and explore these impulses, and it is certainly healthier (and even more interesting) to do this as an artist, than to watch the impulses emerge in unpredictable ways, as anti-social, self-destructive or narcissistic behaviour in my life.


Áine - How do you make your personal work, dealing with yourself, relevant to others?

Andrea - You have to make it real, when talking about your own personal experience, you have to touch a chord with others’ experience or make your experience open so the audience can enter into it.

A strong part of performance for me is risk taking, creating the piece with the audience in that moment. In my performance, there is vulnerability and power at the same time. It comes from being the artist's model – you are the only naked person in the room which is vulnerable but also powerful. In all my performances I am naked (literally or metaphorically,) exposed and yet owning my authority in the same moment. Conveying that authority of the performance is most important.

You must create a space for the viewer to feel both the risk you are taking by being present together, and the confidence that you have the authority to bring them there. You are not wasting their time or energy. It is an invitation you extend to the viewer, and they might start out a little wary, but if you can speak truthfully with your body, and show not only conviction, but confidence, they come to trust you and enter into this engagement.
I believe the same experience often occurs in the way we engage with objects of art, our encounter when walking into a gallery, for example and deciding how long we want to spend with the work- I want to trust the respect and truthfulness of the artist in that artwork. But in performance you have the live element, and it’s so much more heightened, performer and viewer aware of their every momentary thought and sensation.

It is interesting the role of the performer – you can be so present, in a sort of heightened reality, and at the same time outside of reality. You can occupy the role of both performer and observer, sensing all that is around you.

As for the content of my work, I have to trust that if I not only speak my truth, but relate it to the larger truth, for example translating my experience with mental illness into anyone’s struggle with pain, confounding emotions, or self-confinement, then it has a greater chance of being relevant for others. At the same time, as I mature as an artist and person, I accept that not all work is relevant or interesting to everyone, and that is okay. Each artist will have different audiences that their work speaks to, and some who don’t respond at all. As a viewer I myself have to make those same choices- there will be some work that speaks to me on the deepest level of my being, some that I merely find interesting or enlightening, and some that simply doesn’t speak to me at all. And yet for a different person, the reactions could be reversed.


Áine - What are the issues and challenges you face in making autobiographical work?

Andrea - I may accept that my work might not speak to everyone, but of course there are times when I wish it did. I often think about ego as a particular challenge in this type of work- both the need for it, the doubting of it, and sometimes the need to ignore it. I sometimes have to honour something that is emerging in my work without question or judgement, which can be hard, and the studio can be a safe place for this. Much of my work starts in the studio from the impulses of my body, so I might suddenly start exploring sexuality, for example in a piece where I began to cast my labia in rubber and then use them to print heart-like shapes on my body. I have to confront my own issues with sexuality, my personal history, and the thought that “what the hell am I doing- people are going to think this is nuts!” Do others really want to see my body covered with labia marks and think about how I made them? Now, while I have made some drawings and sculptures with this material, I haven’t yet come upon the right format for a public performance involving the labia markings. But sometimes it is a challenge to even let myself explore this subject matter in the studio, to shut out the voices, the possible audiences, and just let myself see where it will go. And of course, once I commit to a performance, those voices will probably keep at me as I rehearse, will bubble up before, during, and after performances. But they serve a purpose in forcing me to gauge whether the performance really will be relevant, whether it is simply serving my own narcissistic needs and should stay in the studio, or whether it is worth the risk and will serve some value for others to see.
So the ego is both a challenge but also necessary in having the audacity and the conviction to put yourself out there!