Steven Cohen

Notes

"Five Heads is a work by Cohen that addresses 'deviant' sexuality, and was made before he engaged in performance art, where he uses his own body to explore these themes. In this work the image of a young man's head is rendered repetitively in flat comic-book fashion, each head supported by corseted and feminised bodies out of which leer and glare the lipsticked, pouting, lecherous faces of a quite different persona. Implicit is the idea that behind the façade of every 'normal' and 'decent' boy lurks the freer, more joyful and irreverent 'other', a more gender-confused 'other' and certainly, within the confines of 'normal' society, an entirely unacceptable 'other'. This reading of the image is enhanced by the fact that the faces within the corsets are photo-silkscreened, their realism standing in robust contrast to the conformist, thoroughly two-dimensional heads above them."¹

^1. Michael Stevenson (ed) (2001) Works From A Private Collection of Contemporary South African Art on Permanent Loan to The Chancellor Oppenheimer Library, University of Cape Town, Cape Town: University of Cape Town, unpaginated.

Provenance

João Ferreira Gallery, Cape Town, 29 October 1998.

Property of a Gentleman.

Literature

Michael Stevenson (ed) (2001) Works From A Private Collection of Contemporary South African Art on Permanent Loan to The Chancellor Oppenheimer Library, University of Cape Town, Cape Town: University of Cape Town, illustrated in black and white, unpaginated, cat. no. 7.