This interview was originally featured in Issue: 18 Humanity

ANDREA BLANCH: So, do you read the papers everyday?
RENEE COX: No, not everyday, but I certainly look at news sources to see what’s going on in this crazy

world we live in nowadays, which has just gotten madder.

ANDREA: Well, in the paper today, there was a story about Rudy Giuliani walking on the beach. He fell and hurt his knee and he had to go to the hospital right away to have surgery. When I mention the name Giuliani, what comes to mind for you?

RENEE: Oh God. In a nutshell, not intelligent, ignorant, bad taste, no sense of aesthetic, crude, back- ward thinking, and perhaps downright evil.

ANDREA: In coverage of your work, people talk about you being a controversial artist. Why do you think people label you that way? Do you still feel that you deserve that label? Do you think your work has changed so as not to warrant this label?

RENEE: People are going to label things how they want to label things, and I don’t have any control over that. I prefer to be controversial over being a victim. Perhaps they’re trying to say that I speak my mind and I say what I actually believe, so I can work with that title. It doesn’t offend me at all. I’d rather be that than whatever is the opposite of controversial, like mealy-mouthed. A lot of times I think people want artists to be that dysfunctional person who is going to sit in the corner and cower, like, “Boo hoo, I need more Prozac,” or something. That’s not me. I’m going to take on whatever issue it is head on and go into it with complete passion and vigor and make my point, and hopefully there will be people who agree. Even if they don’t agree, that’s ok. I’ll say, “Let’s have a discussion at least. Let’s have a discourse, a conversation. You don’t have to agree with everything I say but we should open it up so that we can expand together, and not be living in this narrow world that we never left.” It was nice for eight years, Obama was there, it was like a vacation, and now we’re back to reality. In regards to African Americans, nothing has changed. Racism is just rearing its ugly little head up again. It never went away. Black Americans have been around since the roots of America, for hundreds of years. It’s crazy to me.

© Renee Cox from the series The Discrete Charm of the Bougies

ANDREA: Does the work that you’re doing today send the same message as your early work?

RENEE: In terms of my own trajectory, I would say that my current work has definitely changed because I’ve changed. I don’t want to sound like hippy dippy or anything, but once I understood how to be happy, that whatever negative thinking I had was only emanating from my ego, it was a lot easier for me. You just have a moment of enlightenment. Once you understand this from your heart, the transition happens overnight. It’s not an intellectual thing that you understand and just write it down in a book, you really have to feel it, or as Eckhart Tolle said: once you suffer enough, you can kind of get to that point, because you’re like, “Why are you feeling so bad? Why do I feel so inadequate? Why do I have all these negative feelings about myself? What’s stopping me from reaching my greatest goal?” And then you realize, “Oh my God, it’s my egoistic mind saying that I’m not enough.” All of us in our society right now are suffering from this illness and a lot of people are making money off it. That’s why the shrinks and pharmaceutical companies want to prescribe drugs to you. When I lived in Chappaqua all the women were taking anti-depressants and then peeing them into the sewer, now we find traces of anti-depressants in the drinking water.

ANDREA: How did you segue from being a fashion photographer to fine art? How did that fit into your enlightenment and aspiring ego death?

RENEE: It goes back to having a dinner at Jerry’s in SoHo on Prince Street around 1989. I was having dinner with the people from the New York Times, because at that moment I was shooting adver- tisements for Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. The conversation was pretty superficial, as it often is in fashion. They were talking about shoes or some crap, and at one point I said to them, “Oh my God, today is the day that Nelson Mandela got released from prison. The guy was in jail for 27 years...” And they all looked at me kind of dumbfounded. There was a pause and then somebody said, “Oh, also Donald and Ivana are getting a divorce.” I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me? Who cares?” Because at that point Donald Trump was on my shit list because he had put that full page ad in the New York Times asking for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, which was basically like calling out a lynch mob. Plus, I knew people at the time who used to work for him, and I knew his whole cheating scheme. This persons’ a sleazebag and now you guys, here at my table, are telling me I should be concerned that Trump is getting a divorce! Mandela wanted to make serious changes for people, he got released from prison, and you don’t care. That was the moment I said, “I don’t want to do fashion anymore.” I’d just had my first kid and I thought, “What’s my legacy? Magazines that are crumbling because they’re getting yellow?” I thought, “I don’t want to do that. I want something that’s lasting, that has some longevity to it. I like my work and I have things to say with it.” I decided to go to the School of Visual Art. I graduated from there in ’92, and then after that the icing on the cake was the Whitney independent study program. Then I started doing work that I thought was pertinent to the greater good.

ANDREA: I felt similarly working at Vogue, and getting similar assignments. You worked for Essence a lot, right?

RENEE: I worked for Essence, yes. I also worked for Seventeen Magazine. I did covers for Seventeen, in fact. ANDREA: What was your experience at Essence like? Did they assume because you’re black, that you

should be shooting black people?

RENEE: No, I mean, at Essence I had a little reign of terror so to speak. I got to do what I wanted to do and every month it was a bit of an argument with Susan Taylor as to what we were doing, but I had the art director and the fashion editor on my side. We, as black people, bring so much to fashion. We create so much. And at that time, Times Square was this little huba huba, and it was connected to the South Bronx and the beginning of hip-hop. People were wearing the belts with their name on it and all this wild stuff, and Essence was just sitting there ignoring this. Like, “Oh, that’s what they’re doing in the ghetto.” In the meantime Mademoiselle was all over it. But it’s our style. Why wasn’t Essence doing this kind of thing? So I said, “Let’s make this fun. Why can’t black women have fun? Why do they always have to wear the same horribly cut polyester business suit? What is the point?” We should be setting our own trends, our own pace, because that’s what we do. We need to love ourselves and stop waiting for other people to show love to us first. One of the interesting things is that, when I started out, my first job was Fiorucci, and then I went to Glamour magazine and worked as an assistant fashion editor. I have to give credit to Deborah Turbeville, because she basically gave me the game plan, because at that time they wouldn’t hire females as assistants. Deborah worked at Mademoiselle, and one day the photographer couldn’t do the front of the book. So they said, “Go ahead, do the front of the book,” and they liked it, and it grew from there. Each time I wanted to bring more. I enjoyed my fashion photographs. I resented the fact that they only had a 28 day lifespan, or less.

ANDREA: So going back to when you went through this epiphany. A lot of things have been written about your work. You talk a lot about self-love, and people have written that you’re narcissistic. Roberta Smith said that your work is simplistically self-aggrandizing. Would you talk about the dif- ference between narcissism and self-love?

RENEE: First of all, let’s be really clear. When you have black people who express self-love it becomes revolutionary for white society. They have perpetuated over the past 400 years that you, the African American, are a victim. You’re starving. You don’t know which way is up. You’re a mess, basically. I think once you have a black person who steps up and says, “No, I’m not going to be your victim, I’m not interested in being a victim,” now suddenly it’s like, “Oh my God, this one is full of herself, how dare she think she can be a superhero or anything for that matter except some slave-like person.” If you look at art over the years, what has been rewarded, for the most part, is black people doing art in which they are depicted as victims. They get MacArthurs and I’ll leave it at that. At whose expense, though? Am I going to do an Aunt Jemima in sugar, with a big ass and her pussy sticking out in the back? What am I trying to say? That’s great, but you haven’t told anyone what it’s like to be a slave on a sugar plantation. When I go to see this shit, I see a bunch of white tourists standing in front of the pussy and trying to take a selfie, or even asking Anne Pasternak to take the picture for them. I actually saw that.

ANDREA: Hottentot Venus, do you have multiples or was that a one-off?
RENEE: No, it was a one-off.
ANDREA: I think it’s a beautiful picture of you. There’s a vulnerability in your eyes that is absorbing.

RENEE: The gaze is important to me, because it turns its back on the person that’s looking at it, the spectator. People say, “Oh, you’re doing the same thing as Cindy Sherman.” I say, “No, Cindy Sherman never looks at the camera.” She always looks off. It’s more lucrative to look off.

ANDREA: That’s true. I always had people look into the camera and people always thought my work was confrontational, not me.

RENEE: If you look off they can transpose whatever they’re about onto the image, but if you’re look- ing back at the viewer, then they’re like, “Oh, what’s going on? She’s owning this? They don’t own anything!” And I’m like, “Yes, I own it. I will continue to own it. I’ll always look back at you. I’ll have my subjects look back at you.” I don’t find photographs of people looking up that compelling. I want to know what they’re thinking.

ANDREA: In Hot en Tot, even though you’re looking back, there’s something different in your eyes.

RENEE: Yo Mama has that too, where I’m holding my then 18-month-old child. It’s the same sort of look but turned back. The difference between the Yo Mama and the Hot en Tot is simply the stance. With Hot en Tot, my body is in profile. With the Yo Mama it’s flat, it’s straight on.

ANDREA: You also say that looking at the viewer creates freedom. Can you say more about that? RENEE: There are no limitations. I’m not afraid of anybody. I don’t live in a state of fear. Our society wants us to live in a state of fear because when people live in a state of fear you can control people more easily. But I don’t live like that; I didn’t grow up like that.

ANDREA: I’m curious, you’re married. How many years?

RENEE: I’ve been married since 1980. I got married in college, like my mom always said I should. I rejected the idea at the time, but that’s how it worked out. Whenever I want to shock a feminist crowd I tell them that. They are like, “Oh, no,” but I say, “You know what, girls, if you want to get married and have a family, and you’re here in college, this is the time to be looking around for your possibilities, because once you get out everyone scatters. So now is the time,” and if you’re in the arts, I suggest you go to the business school and see who’s over there.

ANDREA: How has your husband enabled your work?

RENEE: He’s enabled my work by providing a roof and food on the table. Honestly if I was depending on my work to support myself then I’d probably be living under a bridge by now. We got married as students. My husband is a banker. I didn’t get married to a banker, I got married to a student who was studying international relations and then became a banker. It’s not some gold digging situation, but I have to be honest with people: if you want to be in the arts you have to have some sort of support system because we’re not in Denmark. The government isn’t going to do it for you. In Denmark artists get studios and stipends. Here you get a kick in the ass.

ANDREA: What art do you like?

RENEE: I like art that’s real. I love Kehinde Wiley stuff, because there’s an uplift in terms of how we see African Americans. I appreciate that wholeheartedly. I like things that are real. There may not be words to express it, but you know it when you see it. Not like Damien Hirst, where he cuts a shark in half and puts it in formaldehyde. That’s evil and sensational and then I’m like, “Why?” There’s something evil about that even though it generates all that money. I don’t get it.

To read the rest of the interview, check out Issue 18: Humanity here

Feb 18 From Our Archives: Renee Cox

Feb 19 Flash Fiction: Street Feast

Feb 18 Ira Lupu: On Dreams and Screens

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