Sgt. Coco Fusco and Emily North at the Symposium - picture by Danielle Latman

One panel that caught my attention was On Display: The Role of Performance. It began with a drill by Sgt. Coco Fusco. She entered the stage in military uniform and ran through the “Strategies for Gender Management.” Her power point presentation ran through six bullet points which included points like Don’t Deny - Contain and Fair and Balanced. Don’t Deny - Contain discussed showcasing beautiful women as feminists. This way feminism will appear less radical and appeal to more people. Fair and Balanced asserted making sure to place opponents of feminism at the table so as not to exclude the important argument for why feminism shouldn’t exist. She also noted that erotic exhibitionism is marketable. Fusco referenced Tracey Emin, among others, as an artist who gets media attention with her outrageous personal exploits and that success of women artists today is measured by the money they make rather than the meaning of their work, showing a shift in the goals of feminist art.

Her multi-messaged performance critiqued how feminism functions today in the art world as well as women’s role in the military and other concepts that my exhausted mind couldn’t process. Coco Fusco is an amazing woman to watch and uses performance as fiction to take people to a place that’s real.

Dr. Midori Yoshimoto spoke next on the On Display: The Role of Performance panel. She presented the work of four Japanese women artists and how they “obliterated” or “hid” their bodies in their work. She showed the work of Yayoi Kusama who emersed her own body within installations of polka dots or phallic sculptures. Then she presented the Electric Dress by Atsuko Tanaka. This dress is made from hundreds of lights that create a sort of cave which the artist would enter. This heavy piece commented on the history of the atomic bomb in Japan and themes of energy and life cycles. Of course Yoko Ono’s, Cut Piece was mentioned. In this piece Ono asks the audience members to cut pieces of her clothing off of her body. And finally, Miyori Hayashi boxes were shown. In these pieces the artist lies down motionless inside a box, the dark box representing an endless hole, death or the universe.

Yoshimoto discusses how Japanese women artists do not explicitly identify as feminists for various reasons but work to show more universal themes about the complexities of life and the universe around them. I found her presentation even more interesting after the question and answer period, when she was asked why Japanese women artists were “invisible” from the art world in America.