Vernita N'Cognita in conversation with Áine Phillips
25-5-07 Canal St. New York City

BIOGRAPHY:
www.ncognita.com
Vernita N'Cognita is a multi-media performance artist in New York City. She has been performing and exhibiting internationally since the late 1970's. She organised and was part of the first feminist art exhibit held the USA called “X12, 12 Women Artists” 1972. In her recent work she performed in Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum, New York 2007, in Darmstadt Germany in 2005, an international project of art & performance in gardens. She was part of the 5 Cities Project in Tokyo and a presenter at the PSI (Performance Studies International) Conference in Mainz Germany in 1999. In 2006 Vernita N'Cognita presented a guerrilla performance at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, France entitled "The Silver Rose."

CONVERSATION:
Vernita - I recently performed at the Brooklyn Museum for the show “Global Feminisms”. There is a resurgence and a renewed interest in Feminist art these days. Feminists approached their art making & focus in whole new ways in the 70's which male artists have borrowed from them and now made acceptable. Feminism is very postmodern!

Áine - On your website you say you were involved in the very first Feminist art exhibition in New York City "X12" in 1972.

Vernita - An artist friend and I met at meetings of "Art Workers Coalition", "Artists Meeting for Cultural Change" and "Women Artists' in Revolution" (more popularly known as WAR). We started talking about doing a show where only women artists would be invited to exhibit their art. At that time (1969), women artists didn't get picked up by galleries for the most part unless they used their initials and pretended to be males. It made us angry & of course, it was not fair. We wanted to use our names publicly and decided not to curate the show, but to include the first 10 women artists who were courageous enough to join us. It was a conceptual idea and now after all these years, of those 12 artists some are still working and doing well, some have died and the others I’ve lost touch with.

Áine - Did you make autobiographical work then?

Vernita - During that time I was in a marriage falling apart. I had been painting, collaging, drawing up until then but before, growing up, I had always sewed my own clothes. Sewing was something I did easily and Claus Oldenburg (a male artist!) had begun using sewn objects in his work so I too decided it was ok to sew my art. I hung from the ceiling sculptural figures of my husband, my lover and myself made from canvas that I had sewn & stuffed and made graphite drawings on them from photographs of each of us. I don't know if people knew what the piece was about, I didn't spell it out but it was so much of my life it had to be in (the work). Since the late '70s, I do it more through performance art.

Áine - When we deal with autobiography in work we have to find techniques, devices that allow us to filter the lived experience. It has to go through a frame. What are the ways you use to filter, or reinterpret life in a new way?

Vernita - I want to represent these moments in a new way so other people can say - “yes- that has happened to me too”, but to make it less personal and to make it art by using poetry, actions (like dressing, undressing) or reality disguised. Memory is very selective and though there are aspects of my memories that still fascinate me, there are things I want to reveal very carefully. I did a performance called "The Last Confession (Lies & Half-truths)" in 1981. It was a performance that I hoped would be the last one where I revealed personal material because I was again beginning a new love relationship. In that performance, I wanted to express the act of ending one relationship & beginning another, but do it with poetry and female actions that I felt ambiguously expressed my feelings. In the end, it wasn't truly a last confession, because personal material still always comes through in my work.

Áine - I think more material all the time surfaces – to make the last confession is impossible unless you are on your deathbed!

Vernita - Exactly, it all comes from experience. The piece for the X12 show came from the story of a relationship ending and another one beginning. It was different in "Last Confession" because it was more filled with my own choices, it was more deliberate and I also created as a set for the performance an installation of lavender photographic paper crumbled against the wall and a clothesline with clothes hanging out to dry as a symbol.of that traditionally female side of relationships.

Áine - What do you think about using poetic forms? In my own work, I try and take real physical experience and make it poetic through images both visual and through language.

Vernita - Absolutely! I too use my poetry and simplified actions that are universally symbolic. That is the possibility our performing art form allows us – the combination of text, image, movement, object, gesture and human presence.
I'm very conscious of the human presence we carry and that this presence embodies experience. I think about vocabulary and body language and I rehearse movement for posture and breathing during the performance.
Interesting, what you are talking about is different from how I get there. I try to feel entirely focused when I am in a performance mode- to feel the atmosphere of the space, the audience mood so that I can respond to it in relationship to the theme of the piece. I try to integrate into the performance that moment with the audience, in that space which is separate from the regular flow of life. The combination is what becomes the performance.

Áine - Is that a space of feeling?

Vernita - Yes. An earlier performance called 'Private Spaces' is based on the experience of my mother finding my secret “dirty” drawings hidden in my dresser drawer under my underwear. I expanded it to cover other teenage experiences and portrayed them in projected slides behind my actions. I used slow movement which helps to focus the performance. I've been studying Butoh for the last few years. For me it is akin to meditation while I’m working and moving (or not) when I am performing. I love shoes. I have used the action from reality of taking off my shoes as a performative Butoh action more than once in my performance. Butoh is an evolving form, there is no special way of doing it really. It is a focus, a way of self regard. In my performance work, I begin with an idea that becomes a rough outline, and then I also throw in some improvisation on those and jam, sometimes with musicians The spontaneous is as important to me as the already conceptualized. In the more recent performance piece “Trapped” at the Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Global Feminisms”, I am a man in a suit with a mustache, cynical but in a “tongue in cheek” sort of way talking about the show and the situation today for women artists. People didn't recognise me as I walked through the exhibition before performing yet already I was “performing” really. I love to play with that idea of performing “off stage”. In another piece I did at Gallery Onetwentyeight in New York, I couldn't get to the performance area because it was so crowded with people. I had to scream to make them move out of my way & and that scream became the beginning of the piece.

Áine - So for you the performance comes out of a real response to the situation?

Vernita - Yes and the next time I do the piece, that improvisation sometimes becomes part of the text. Each piece is constantly evolving. After I performed the piece at the Brooklyn Museum, I felt I shouldn't have spoken for the first 5 minutes. So in the next performance of the piece, I will remain silent for 5 minutes & perhaps just move slowly like a man.

Áine - So each piece evolves and changes over time taking on board different conditions?

Vernita - Yet the thread and intention are still consistent.

Áine - Who are you in the performance?

Vernita - I am myself and someone else. A lot of times I am an image. In the "Trapped" piece, where I was a man, I tried as much as possible to look like a man with the mustache, hat, watch, and briefcase. I was in reality in an angry frame of mind which made me tougher and to me, that felt more masculine. I was so focused on what I was saying, performing as a man allowed me to say things I could not otherwise say about the “Global Feminisms” Show that my work was not part of. I was able to express the frustration of what my generation of women artists feel about the pioneers, those who broke the codes, yet still have not gained recognition although many are still working seriously. I did the performance using that frustration as my energy, but already my feelings are changing so when I do it again, perhaps in Ireland, I will do it differently.

Áine - Interesting how life follows art – through the enactment of performative rituals something changes in the perception of life. Life changes because of the thing that's made in its image. I am aware of that happening in my own work in beautiful ways. There are results and consequences of our enactments.

Vernita - I am involved in a project with Linda Montano & other well known performance artists (Koosil-ja, Annie Sprinkle etc in Montano's "7 Years of Living Art". As a part of that group, I/we try to keep that idea of life and art constant intermingling and always on the edges of our consciousness …

Áine - How do you create the image of yourself in performance, are your
performances 'self portraits'?

Vernita - It is something I discover after I do it. The performances are self- portraits but they are also a diary. At the moment, I am trying to document myself with video here in my studio space. I have already made an exhibit with my studio as an art object, as an installation and will do so again.

Áine - How do you take personal material and present it so that it becomes universal. In the words of feminist Carol Hansch, from the personal to the political.

Vernita - It is about transforming experience, seeing the larger issue and it becomes something you learn form. I was in therapy for a time and what I was getting from that was pointing to my performance. The "Last Confession" came from a dream, it came out of reality. I dreamt I was on the front of a bicycle and one man (I was involved with two men) was riding me down a hill and I was going to be killed or destroyed. My fantasy was that I wanted a Jean Paul Satre-like man who would respect my work so in the performance, I talked about an experience from Simone De Bouvoir's diary.
To make the performance of personal material universal I generalise, leave out the unnecessary material, create an analysis. I remove all the unnecessary details of reality that are irrelevant.
The distinction between theatre and performance art is that performance art comes from the personal. I feel that in Performance Art, we do not hide the personal – we emphasize that rather than using a script by someone else. That essence is what is fascinating for me. For me, being an artist is also about living an artist's life, whatever that may be. Art is a religion, a belief system and we spread the word through art.

Áine - If your work is performance, then your body and your life is the performance. As I said about Raimond Hogue, his living being, his body and experiences as a disabled body are completely integrated and unified into his performances.

Vernita - This is the basis of Linda Montano's "Life=Art" work.

Áine - What are the challenges of making autobiographical work? For example, autobiography implicates others (as we already talked about), are there any other issues for you?

Vernita - It’s a smart thing to be careful because what hurts others can also hurt you too or your children. There are consequences. I'm terrified about getting old, I forget I don't look like I used to anymore. I have transformed and there is no value to aging in our culture. I would like the courage to do a performance again called 'It all goes so quickly' that I did first in Germany. It is a Butoh performance, I don't speak at all in it (but for a baby's cry in the beginning) but through movement, I try to show the various stages from being born to growing up, becoming a woman, getting old. It is only 20 minutes long, but it's a trippy performance to do!
This is one of the reasons why I got so involved in Butoh, its total involvement in the honesty of who you are and what you look like and celebrating what life has done for you.

Áine - What is the function, the purpose of performance for you and what are its challenges?

Vernita - Performance makes me reflect back on my life experiences and examine how people respond to my actions and work. What I am getting is validation of my own interpretations of life. The challenges have to do with the revelatory, what to expose about reality and how much to disguise it without being dishonest. My performance now is often about dealing with the reality of how I am changing as I get older, trying to still look good and to be honest about it, to enhance what I have become and find new conceptions of beauty. We know from looking at movie stars as they age, the most beautiful ones were beautiful often because of their flaws. It's an unconventional beauty that I am after and that's what I will go for. For me, Art is redefining what beauty is.