For the artist Liz Cohen, photography initially seemed well suited to her to serve her natural curiosity for the lives of others, but she soon had to come to terms with a sense of voyeurism that alienated her from her subjects. His first big project, CHANNELwas a four-year job of street photography and portraiture in Panama City, where Cohen ended up meeting a group of trans sex workers.
“They taught me performance,” she said Hyperallergic. “They started making me pose and showing me how they posed, like storefronts, and they started dressing me. And then I did a photo shoot where I was on the street with them.
But there was a problem. “There was a moment when I realized that I was participating in a masquerade because there was a fundamental and essential difference in our experience – I am not a street sex worker, there was a difference in class,” Cohen said. “There was a difference that I wasn’t in a trans body, having a trans experience, the difference that I didn’t want or need to work in sex.”
Determined to find a more authentic, expansive and reciprocal way of learning about otherness, Cohen moved on to her next project, TRABANTIMINO, in which it manufactured an automobile for almost a decade. Starting with a Trabant, an almost painfully simple and ingenious vehicle produced in socialist East Germany from 1959 to 1991, Cohen installed an expanding hydraulic system that combined the car with a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino, to create a lowrider personalized.
“I knew I was the last person to think I would build a car,” Cohen said. “Why would I build a car? My parents were professionals; they weren’t gears and there were no tinkering in the garage. It wasn’t something I did or was exposed to.
Along with the reconstruction, Cohen created BODY, a connected project in which she remade herself in the image of the bikini models that were a staple feature of custom car culture, in order to accompany the lowrider to shows around her native Southwest environs. She also modeled around the former Trabant factory in what was once East Germany, in a series called ZWICKAU ROUTINE.
“I had short hair and hairy legs and armpits,” Cohen said. “I wasn’t the person you thought would become a bikini model.”
Not only did Cohen manage to make the car and develop an abiding interest in lowrider magazine models, an interest that would fuel two subsequent works so far – STORIES BETTER TOLD BY OTHERS (2018) and BODY MAGIC (2021) — she has found a way to break down the fourth wall between the artist-documentarian and the subject. In a sense, Cohen has become her own artistic material.
“The project gave me the opportunity to try a lot of things that I just wasn’t inclined to try,” Cohen said. “Can I become a true member of the custom car culture? Can I really become a low rider? Can I become a bikini model? As far-fetched as it sounds, with enough work, I thought it might be possible.
Perhaps Cohen’s interest in fringe culture and the experience between outsiders and insiders stems from his transnational roots. Born in Phoenix, Arizona, to a a parent from Colombia who came to the United States through a visa lottery, Cohen’s first language was Spanish and his childhood involved extensive travel between the Southwest and his extended family in Panama and Colombia. Coming from an intermarriage between a father from a Syrian Orthodox Jewish family and a Catholic mother, Cohen’s legacy was a heady mix of influences and culture clashes.
“My father was a doctor, but two of his brothers were traders like their father. That’s why he moved to Panama, because of the free trade zone and the canal,” Cohen said. “We used to go to Panama when I was a kid and my grandmother had Shabbat, which was a very Middle Eastern Shabbat. It was always contentious because, in terms of belonging, me and my sisters were in it, but also ‘mestizos’.
Cohen eventually went to college in San Francisco and spent a total of seven years in the Bay Area, at a time when the tech boom was still nascent and the city was a destination and haven for queer culture and social experimentation. Along with car culture, the bodies and stories of trans people have been an interest for Cohen throughout his career, captured at the start of CHANNELbut revisited again in HIM (2016). This body of work translates the poetry of Eric Crosley – a male-presenting, self-describing eunuch who has engaged in radical physical transformations in his search for a body he believes reflects his identity appropriately – in a minimalist language of shapes and colors, which Cohen has transformed into textile works, some of which are worn by Eric during photo shoots.
“That’s always been central to my work in a way, gender and representation and that’s left out,” Cohen said, “and I identify with that in some way. .”
The shapes and patterns of HIMa sin ZWICKAU ROUTINE, and other aspects of Cohen’s work allude to another of his perennial themes: the influence of Soviet and communist ideology on culture and society. His latest work in progress, CAFÉ GAZ, Build #2 transforms a 1969 GAZ-69A truck into a working coffee station. The work is the centerpiece of an upcoming personal exhibition, American Pan-Soviet Cafeat MOCAD in Detroit.
Like most of Cohen’s work, COFFEE GAS is a living process and a collaboration between artist, audience and subject. Cohen is more ready than ever to get her hands dirty, whether it’s changing the oil, dressing up with models or sitting down for a cup of coffee with a museum audience.
“What interests me is finding ways to belong when you’re different,” she said. “How do people find ways to be whole and free, while finding a way to exist on the margins in a meaningful way. How do you participate when there is something about you that is fundamentally different?”
