Coco Fusco: Observations of Predation in Humans

From the Archives
February 12, 2015 Written by admin
From the Archives – Coco Fusco: Observations of Predation in Humans at the Studio Museum in Harlem

Today, from the archives, we bring you Lia Wilson‘s review of Coco Fusco’s Observations of Predation in Humans, originally performed at the Studio Museum of Harlem in December 2013 for Radical Presence, a survey of performance work by black visual artists. This month, Fusco will be resuming her role as the legendary female chimpanzee psychologist Dr. Zira at Participant Inc., as part of the Performing Franklin Furnace exhibition, which showcases the historical import that Franklin Furnace and its founder Martha Wilson played in fostering avant-garde and activist art practices in New York City. This article was originally published on January 7, 2014.

Coco Fusco. Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist (study), 2013. Photo: Noah Krell.

Critical distance can be an ambitious aspiration for an artist, particularly if her practice strives to directly engage complex economic, environmental, or social justice issues. How can traditionally partisan discourses be avoided? Can a political viewpoint be communicated without merely contributing to a staunchly divisive cultural dialogue that is easy to tune out? There is no single strategy or formula for this challenge. Coco Fusco’s recent performance at the Studio Museum in Harlem deftly employed science fiction to gain some critical space. Her successful approach afforded her a new viewpoint and a platform—from a whole species away.

For Observations of Predation in Humans (2013), her contribution to the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Fusco revived and fully embodied the character of Dr. Zira, the female chimpanzee animal psychologist from the 1968–71 Planet of the Apes films. With a Skyped-in introduction from Donna Haraway, an esteemed commentator on hominoid interrelations, it was explained that despite the narrative of the third film, Escape from Planet of the Apes, which portrayed the character’s assassination by the U.S. government, Dr. Zira had actually survived and had been in hiding in an isolated cabin in the Midwest for more than twenty years. Over the course of this seclusion, she had been observing human behavior via the Internet and television. It wasn’t until the 2012 Cambridge Declaration, in which brain scientists concluded that non-human animals do have consciousness, that Dr. Zira felt safe enough to resurface as a public intellectual and present her findings on human predation.



Thus a crowd gathered in the basement of the Studio Museum in Harlem to listen to a female chimpanzee psychologist from the future lecture on the destructive and unsustainable human alpha-male proclivity for profit and punishment. Using the classic academic presentation software PowerPoint, Dr. Zira clicked through a multitude of examples of human aggression she collected from our visual culture, from news clips and soap operas to social media and Hollywood films. She discussed her observation of alpha males of the Homo genus as being “overly self-confident,” always “passing off their compulsive behavior as goal oriented.” An initial illustration of this dynamic, paired with the slide title “human alpha male assertion of dominance,” was a snippet from independent trader Alessio Rastani’s 2011 interview with BBC News: “Most traders don’t care about how to fix the economy. They want to know how to make money from it. Personally, I go to bed at night and dream about another recession.”[1]


Coco Fusco. Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist (study), 2013. Photo: Noah Krell.

Coco Fusco: Undiscovered Amerindians, 1992

Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña. Undiscovered Amerindians, 1992. (Click on the image to see a larger version)

In order to address the widespread practice of human displays, Fusco and Gomez-Peña enclosed their own bodies in a ten-by -twelve-foot cage and presented themselves as two previously unknown "specimens representative of the Guatinaui people" in the performance piece "Undiscovered Amerindians." Inside the cage Fusco and Peña outfitted themselves in outrageous costumes and preoccupied themselves with performing equally outlandish "native" tasks. Gomez-Peña was dressed in an Aztec style breastplate, complete with a leopard skin face wrestler's mask. Fusco, in some of her performances, donned a grass skirt, leopard skin bra, baseball cap, and sneakers. She also braided her hair, a readily identifiable sign of "native authenticity."

 In a similar fashion to the live human spectacles of the past, Fusco and Gomez-Peña performed the role of cultural "other" for their museum audiences. While on display the artists' "traditional"  daily rituals ranged from sewing voodoo dolls, to lifting weights to watching television to working on laptop computers. During feeding time museum guards passed bananas to the artists and when the couple needed to use the bathroom they were escorted from their cage on leashes. For a small donation, Fusco could be persuaded to dance (to rap music) or both performers would pose for Polaroids. Signs assured the visitors that the Guatinauis "were a jovial and playful race, with a genuine affection for the debris of Western industrialized popular culture . . . Both of the Guatinauis are quite affectionate in the cage, seemingly uninhibited in their physical and sexual habits despite the presence of an audience." Two museum guards from local institutions stood by the cage and supplied the inquisitive visitor with additional (equally fictitious) information about the couple. An encyclopedic-looking map of the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, showed the supposed geographic  location of their island. Using maps, guides, and the ambiguous museum jargon, Fusco and Gomez-Peña employed the common vocabulary of the museum world to stage their own display.

Despite Fusco and Gomez-Peña's professed intentions that Undiscovered Amerindians should be perceived as a satirical commentary, more than half of the visitors to the museums who came upon the performance believed that the fictitious Guatinaui identities were real.

In 1992, Fusco and Gomez-Peña first staged the performance on Columbus Plaza, Madrid, Spain, as a part of the event Edge '92 Biennial, organized in commemoration of the quincentennial of Columbus' voyage to the New World. The performance piece had an illustrious two year exhibition history  including performances at Covent Garden in London, The National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., The Field Museum in Chicago, the Whitney Museum's Biennial in New York, the Australian Museum of Natural History and finally in Argentina, on the invitation of the Fundacion Banco Patricios in Buenos Aires.

Quote about Undiscovered Amerindians from Coco Fusco:

According to Fusco, she and Gomez-Peña aimed to conduct a "reverse ethnography . . . Our cage became a blank screen onto which audiences projected their fantasies of who and what we are. As we assumed the stereotypical role of the domesticated savage, many audience members felt entitled to assume the role of colonizer, only to find themselves uncomfortable with the implications of the game"  (Fusco 47).