Visual artist Yve Laris Cohen reflects on his exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art entitled 'Studio/Theater' with Jacob's Pillow Director of Preservation Norton Owen. The exhibition featured remnants of the Pillow's Doris Duke Theatre, which was destroyed by fire in November 2020. This is a sequel to Episode 44 with MoMA curator Martha Joseph and former Pillow Director Liz Thompson.
Visual artist Yve Laris Cohen reflects on his exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art entitled 'Studio/Theater' with Jacob's Pillow Director of Preservation Norton Owen. The exhibition featured remnants of the Pillow's Doris Duke Theatre, which was destroyed by fire in November 2020. This is a sequel to Episode 44 with MoMA curator Martha Joseph and former Pillow Director Liz Thompson.
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
INTRO: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow Archives. I am Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it’s my pleasure to host this episode focusing on Yve Laris Cohen’s exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, entitled “Studio / Theater,” as the follow-up to a previous episode with exhibition curator Martha Joseph and former Pillow Director Liz Thompson, here I’m in conversation with the artist himself.
NORTON OWEN: Well, here we are, at The Museum of Modern Art. And I'm speaking with Yve Laris Cohen. And it is the month after the end of Studio/ Theater. So, I want to find out what has happened since the exhibit and the performances have ended?
YVE LARIS COHEN: So all of the installation materials are back in storage, ironically, maybe or coincidentally in the same location where I worked with them for all those months to reconstitute them. And they'll remain there for who knows how long.
NORTON OWEN: So it's almost full circle in some kind of way.
YVE LARIS COHEN: Yes, I'm trying to think of, it's interesting the way you phrase that what else has happened? because this is now a fallow period. And as I tell my students, it's one of the most critical moments in an artist's working life. Even more critical than their periods of activity and art making. And it's a frightening time in that way. With absence, lack of project.
NORTON OWEN: Well, it's interesting, isn't it that that in a way this project started out with loss. It's another full circle thing in a way.
YVE LARIS COHEN: On my computer, the desktop image is the 33 foot intact wall at the Pillow when it was snowy. It was just before the demolition crew came and tipped it down on its face. And when I opened my computer, a few days after the exhibition closed, which was on January 1st, I felt just ultimate, what did I feel, overwhelming grief. And I thought, oh, this is maybe what everyone who had a connection to the Doris Duke Theatre, everyone who is affiliated with the Pillow who's been involved in this or not, but this is what they must feel seeing the exhibition maybe, or something like this, which is not necessarily what I feel inside the installation or inside the performances. But now, I think, mediated by the project, the show I feel a similar type of grief and loss.
NORTON OWEN: I understand. Well, it's it's an interesting place to start a conversation. But I feel like that's the elephant in the room at the moment is that the elephant is no longer in the room. The the wall is no longer in the museum. And so I wanted to address that right off the bat. But, but actually, I would love to go back in time and and talk about the beginning of this project, because that would have been another, you talk about this as a fallow period. So I guess in a sense, that must have come out of a fallow period in a way. I wonder if you could talk about what happened when you first heard about the fire and what thought process went on in your head at that point?
YVE LARIS COHEN: Well, it wasn't just a personal fallow period, but a collective one for the globe in some respects with the pandemic. Of course, different regions experienced it differently different times. But…
NORTON OWEN: Yeah, let me just remind everybody that this was November of 2020, [Cohen: Yes], when the Doris Duke Theatre burned…
YVE LARIS COHEN: So as an artist, it was a year of relative inactivity, I mean, for for many of the arts, but specifically for performing arts, it was a fallow period that the field had never seen. And it was one that we didn't know if we'd recover from. And I imagine that the Pillow institutionally was dealing with those kinds of questions, not, how do we demo the aftermath of a fire demolition that is. So to lose a key structure. And not just a functional one, but a symbolic one, I, that was not lost on me. It seemed very significant.
[music plays intermittently]
Someone shared an article on social media. I don't remember who the first person was that I saw, but many of my friends were posting about it. Many friends who had performed there had residencies there.
NORTON OWEN: But you yourself never had, you had never, [Cohen: no], you had never even been to the Pillow before that time, right?
YVE LARIS COHEN: No. Never.
NORTON OWEN: So it, it's fascinating to me that it would have struck such a chord for you.
YVE LARIS COHEN: I knew that the Pillow was significant to dance and the development of American modern dance. And that fact was enough to compel me to visit and and observe the aftermath.
NORTON OWEN: And in the beginning, that's really all it was, right? You didn't hear about it and say, I'm going to do an exhibit on this. What, so how can you talk us through maybe the stages of what you did in the beginning and how it began to take shape?
YVE LARIS COHEN: I had a feeling that there was something there that would pull me back into thinking artistically, again, I hadn't in not just since the beginning of the pandemic, but frankly, even a year before that, when I had had a series of very invasive abdominal surgeries. I did one performance shortly thereafter, which was very kind of urgent and time-sensitive, because it involved a part of my body that would subsequently be transformed, such that I wouldn't be able to do the performance ever again. Or actually, who knows, maybe maybe later in my life, I'll have an ostomy. But I no longer do. Anyway, but…but after after that urgent performance, I had nothing scheduled except for teaching. And that was already a frightening fallow period. And I had this fear that curators and institutions and that I had previously had relationships with were kind of afraid to approach me, especially those those that are situated squarely in dance as a system, as opposed to an art museum. But I, because of you know, kind of long standing and maybe inherent ableism in the field, I think so I was afraid that my tether to, to dance had yeah, had been irrevocably changed or destroyed. And this was, this fire somehow was the way that I could reenter dance.
NORTON OWEN: Well, that's really amazing to hear that it was actually, that it was an instrument of change for you and an instrument of creativity that that that that came out of this fire because I think in a more generalized way, that's one of the things that has excited me so about this project is that it takes a tragedy and turns it into something that nobody could have ever imagined. So I, I just, it's miraculous what you were able to do with something, with an event that ended so much and yet you took the end of something and made it the beginning of something else.
YVE LARIS COHEN: And I appreciate that you see it as a beginning because I think there's a tendency to assume that this exhibition was a memorial to the theatre, a memorialization of what that theatre represented, perhaps. But I think and hope it was more forward-looking in the way that Jacques Derrida thinks of archives as not being of the past, but in fact, they're anticipatory, they're lying in wait, and they're future-oriented.
NORTON OWEN: That's a wonderful, that's a wonderful idea to bring out. Can you say more about that?
YVE LARIS COHEN: I mean, I, of course, can't say more without acknowledging your life's work now. Or at least since 1990, officially, as the archivist, in your role as Director of Preservation at Jacob's Pillow. So I guess I'm, I'm saying it to maybe introduce a counterpoint to something you have said in the past, which is that you are interested in, did you say, the past in the present? And that that is the domain of your work? But maybe my argument is that it's also and maybe even more so than these other things of the future?
NORTON OWEN: Well, it's that where else can the future come from? [Cohen: True] Except from from the past and the present. But I wonder if, you know, one of the things that has happened, even since we had the previous conversation is that there was a quite a lengthy and thought-provoking article in The New York Times by Gia Kourlas. And one of the things that, that of course, this is what a writer does is to to crystallize things and to boil things down. And one of the phrases that she used to describe the project was she said that it was about the fragility of space, art, and the body. I wonder what you think about that distillation? And if if you would have anything to add, or…?
YVE LARIS COHEN: I'm so curious about what Martha thinks, actually, about that because one of the Martha and I had many…
NORTON OWEN: You’re speaking—you're speaking about Martha Joseph. [Both: Martha Joseph, the curator, yes].
YVE LARIS COHEN: We had many volleys and long discussions about the specifics of the language that would describe the show, the performances, the installation, and also the structure itself before it had burned down. I say structure now because throughout it's been, I've been careful to, to not call the Duke, even the Duke Theatre a studio theatre or a studio. And because that would I would be taking a position and even in speaking about it, casually behind the scenes. Anyhow, but back to this idea of fragility. One of the early things I think I had written in the first proposal, or did I say that to you? It's a phrase that that Martha was compelled by, and I think Pam was as well.
NORTON OWEN: Pam Tatge, the Director of the Pillow.
YVE LARIS COHEN: Yes, was the idea of somehow reworking or reassembling the remains of of the structure into a fragile theatre. And I abandoned that term because I didn't want I was resistant to the idea that I was re-composing a complete theatre in and of itself. It it, I was harvesting parts and and reassembling parts and MoMA’s parts supporting the Pillow’s parts. And and yes, they were standing in for a space for a theatre perhaps, but I don't know the but the idea of fragility and Martha and I spoke a lot about this too, you know, the MoMA’s studio, for example, is, is a fragile thing and…
NORTON OWEN: So this is the space in which the wall was shown and where the performances took place.
YVE LARIS COHEN: Yes. And and all, back to this idea of memorials too I think that theatres, theatres that are still with us, our theatres are already memorials and even if they no longer exist, they're memorials themselves.
NORTON OWEN: Do you mean that there are memorials to the performances that have taken place in them or to the to what has what has happened in those spaces in the past?
YVE LARIS COHEN: Or even themselves [Owen: Mmmh]. I want to think more about that argument before, before I go further. But but yeah, I feel committed to the idea that all performance spaces are contingent, dependent, fragile. They need support, but you're saying not just once, but continually.
NORTON OWEN: Well, isn't it interesting to think that even even if you had moved away from using fragility as a way to describe it in some way, that was still what a journalist saw, when, when, when viewing the exhibition and the performances? And I guess, in a way, it says that that is an inherent quality, in a sense of what you what you accomplished, and and also what was being exhibited.
YVE LARIS COHEN: While also, when you when you looked at the installation, where did you see the fragility?
NORTON OWEN: Oh I guess we see, one of the things that we see with the wall that was there are the the the what the fire did to it. I mean, even though it was relatively intact, there were there were there was charred wood, around the perimeter of it, the the windows had been broken because of the, because of the the effects of the fire. So there were things that had, yes, it was structurally intact, it didn't to some degree, but it was also quite visibly transformed.
YVE LARIS COHEN: Right well. So that was one of the challenges in working with the big museum like MoMA is that everything needed to be more than stable. And there needed to be no, no possibility of, no physical instability. And so how, how do I bring out the not, not just the injury and the fire, which, you know, in really simple terms, you could liken that to surgery, and then the gradual and inevitable degradation of all materials as chronic illness or, or maybe just aging. But, so that's where I saw connections to my own body.
NORTON OWEN: You know, one, one thing about this fragility that that brings up, it brings up some of your past work. In in particular, I think about the work that you did with the Martha Graham Company, with Embattled Garden, to the Isamu Noguchi set that had been destroyed in Hurricane Sandy. And that project, well, I should let us you talk about what that project was.
YVE LARIS COHEN: So the much of Martha Graham Dance Company's archive was destroyed in Hurricane Sandy. It was fully submerged in water in a basement at the Westbeth Artists Housing complex, where they now have their studios. They had just moved in only a few months prior to the hurricane, or I guess superstorm technically. But in that flood, all their paper archives were submerged, costumes and all of the sets that they had stored on site, most of which were designed by Isamu Noguchi. And most of, I had asked the company…I was working for them at the time as a production assistant. And I asked them if I could repair one of the sets for them because I knew in a very hands on way I was moving these sets into into a secondary storage facility in Yonkers. Well, that's where they transferred everything. They decided to no longer store anything at Westbeth but but as I was doing that work, and seeing how long the piecemeal process was taking, and a lot of this was determined by resources there. They didn't have the funds, nor would any dance company to replace an entire archive immediately. But it was a long and sustained effort. And I asked if I could repair one set for them. What I learned was that the repair process was in fact, a duplication. They were, these sets were damaged beyond repair. And they were having copies made. And in some cases, keeping original sets and costumes and in other cases, mold and other problems that would pose a risk to workers’ health, made it so they but they needed to discard those materials. Embattled Garden had held up better than some of the sets but was still not stable enough to support dancers. They actually stand on top of the raked platform in that piece. I had in my practice built a number of sprung floors and also worked with an existing traveling sprung floor—New York City Ballet’s— in a piece I did a Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church. So reconstructing a piece, a set with a platform made sense within the language of my own work up until that point. And this was the first time that I had done any kind of manufacturing of a historic work in any sense or, you know, repair. I had, a lot of my work had been in the other direction: materials had worn away, including my own knee cartilage, for example. And there wasn't at least a visible aestheticized within the parameters, or I guess, the frame of the artwork.
NORTON OWEN: So it was really like, in a way, though, that that project, I mean, I know it, it wasn't a precursor necessarily to this project. But but in a way because it did happen before. it really can be viewed as you know, it as something that was a precursor that that it did, that you were building on that, that part of your own artistic past to go one step further. I mean, there you recreated, you know, or were commenting in some way on dealing with the destruction of a set. You've then moved on to working with the remains of an entire theatre.
YVE LARIS COHEN: And again, just as the remains of this theatre are not just, this isn't just to theatre, it's standing for much more within the Pillow’s own history and within dance as a field, as an economy. The set and my role, and its refurbishment, I think, had a lot to do with where our field was in the 2010s, where the Graham Company was in terms of figuring out how to prolong the life, not just of their archival materials, but of the works themselves in the wake of Martha Graham's death. I mean, yes, it was in the 90s, but it's something they're still figuring out. And many more companies since have had to deal with many more, you know, mid-century modern, American modern dance companies. This is a preservation crisis. What do we do with yeah, not just not just the archive? What do we, what does, what do we do with this board of directors that we've gathered? With the dancers - are we going to give them a severance and send them on their way? Or is it worth having a, as some people, say, a museum company?
NORTON OWEN: So how do we go on? is the question.
YVE LARIS COHEN: Right. And so I was then I guess, complicit in the, in lengthening the life of the Graham Company in its current iteration. And so but also, I think that was troubled by my relationship to the Company as a wage laborer that was important. I didn't just enter that idea as an outside artist. It was I came to that project, through touch, through feeling the damaged sets, and having that kind of haptic knowledge of the archive, like through my body, as a way to feel into the project. Feel my way through the project was important. So here, it was definitely a different type of operation, although I think there was a similar kind of feeling of my way into the final presentation through this very long research process. And ultimately, the same kinds of conversations that I had initially with people who would become performers such as yourself. Those, those conversations just continued, and were staged. And there was really not much of a difference in method between research, curiosity, investigation, and presentation.
NORTON OWEN: Yeah, well, you you certainly drew upon the people that that you involved in the project. Not only myself, but Liz Thompson, former Executive Director of the Pillow and Tony Tung, who had been an important planner that led up to the the theatre as well as Stephen Furnstahl, who was the architect of the theatre. And it, it was something that you clearly felt that those individuals that those, that those voices needed to be centered in some way.
YVE LARIS COHEN: Yes, because uh um, wait is the question why did I think those voices needed to be centered? I wanted, I wanted, I wanted the performers in the Preservation performance to have all or at least mostly been employees of the Pillow. I wanted a worker's relationship to the building. And also and not an artist’s perspective because that is what is usually foregrounded. We see what is staged, and I want to know what's in the basement, which, in the case of the archives….
NORTON OWEN: …Quite literally, it's true. Well, that, I must say it was a very self-effacing way to present the project because in a way, I mean, your voice was very present, of course, overall, because every choice that went into to, everything about it was was yours. And yet, at least in these, in the performances that took place, you really ceded a lot of the control. But you had a lot of control to you or the person who was who was asking questions. But you were not giving the answers you are, in essence allowing other people to do that. So so you were giving the overall structure to it, but in essence really allowing other people to have their say.
YVE LARIS COHEN: I'm happy that you think that because I, I fear that I’m overbearing and micromanaging. So that's at least a perspective counter that. It’s helpful.
NORTON OWEN: Well, and I should say also you, you had an entirely different as aside from we've been speaking mostly about Preservation, which is the performance that was chiefly about Jacob's Pillow. But every other week, you had a companion piece called Conservation, that was mostly geared around another fire, the fire that took place here at The Museum of Modern Art. So I wonder if you could say something about how the two things fit together in your mind, Conservation and Preservation?
YVE LARIS COHEN: Before I do, can I ask you, I'm curious what you thought, once you saw the Conservation performance?
NORTON OWEN: Mmm Well, I I was struck by how different they were. I mean, certainly how, how the structure of them was similar, of course. But for me, and I would say a relatively few number of people who probably saw both both presentations, but I thought the thought process that went into conceiving of them was really fascinating. And I hope that our listeners, as well as other people will get a chance to experience both of them either through reading transcripts or reading about, about this in the aftermath of the project. Because I do see how they were two different pieces of a puzzle to some degree.
YVE LARIS COHEN: And just how connected they were didn't even reveal itself to me until the project unfolded over those three months. I had, as you know, each of you had a counterpart in the other performance like kind of mirror or a shadow self. And I wanted your counterpart to have some, some kind of similarity to you as far as your relationship to either the remains or to the two institutions at play in MoMA or Jacob's Pillow. In your case, it was Lynda Zycherman, who is a Conservator of Sculpture here at MoMA. You two are the only current employees of the two institutions. One pair that became eerily similar was Stephen Furnstahl and Peter Rosenbaum. Stephen Furnstahl, the original architect of what was at the time Studio 4 and would become Studio Theatre, and then the Doris Duke Theatre. And Peter Rosenbaum was the Theater Consultant for MoMA’s studio.
NORTON OWEN: Which was the space in which this was taking place?
YVE LARIS COHEN: Yes, not the architect. He was that yes, theater consultant. But both of them, aside from having similarities in their comportment and the way they dress, would speak about architecture and their own design recommendations and choices in very similar ways. And it was so eerie to hear Stephen talking about his vision for Studio 4 in 1985, and have that description match the room that we were sitting in, with everything from the windows to the so called flexibility of this space to have multiple functions. Both of them had, both of them had a one of their respective spaces to have to kind of recall the black box either in, you know being something adjacent or opposition or in opposition to the black box as a void. Interestingly, the two of them had some varying definitions for certain terms like studio theatre meant something very different to Furnstahl than to Peter Rosenbaum. But I was interested in the ways that that historical moment in the mid-80s within dance is now echoed here in the 2020s, I believe it's the 2020s [Owen: Mmmh yes] as opposed to the 2010s, here in 2020s in a visual art museum.
NORTON OWEN: Yeah. Well, I think that's one of the real gifts that you've given, certainly to us at the Pillow but also to the world, I'd say, in terms of, of putting, putting a larger context around, what happened. And, you know, it could very easily have just been this, this theatre burned, and, you know, the end. And instead, you've opened up a whole new area for discussion about it for people to be able to process it in a sense. And also to see it in, in another context. In in the context of how, how is it similar and different than a very different institution like The Museum of Modern Art? But this is something that would not have happened if not for your intervention, let's say, and, and the whole project that you envisioned here.
YVE LARIS COHEN: Can I say one thing about the performances that just that maybe you're not, you might not know? [Owen: Please do]. It's been so interesting to watch how, you know, I had expected that your positions on certain questions that I asked, and also, the way that you describe certain events, I expected a kind of distillation and crystallization that would happen over time. And I expected that the variations in the story would narrow. And there might be a, for better or worse, not a final, it's never final, but it would result in something, maybe it's even a duller version, or something with less grit, or it's more polished or something toward the end. But it was interesting, and that did happen in some cases, and with some questions, but each of you, each of you 12 speakers had and you know know actually I should say, 14, because the firefighters also included some degree of adlibbing even though their speaking role was the only really scripted thing. But each of you I think, you were all very thoughtful and reflected upon things you had said in previous performances and changed your mind sometimes. And that was exciting to see. And back to fragility, I think that just shows the instability, and I mean, in an exciting way. And the fragility and the [Owen: Well] flexibility of, of history itself of the way that we narrate our own pasts.
NORTON OWEN: Well, it was happening in real time [Cohen: Yes]. I mean, you know that that was the exciting thing as being part of the part of these performances. And you never asked the same question twice. So that that would that would also meant that we had to be on our toes and coming up with new ways of thinking of things all the time, which was, made it very exciting to be part of.
YVE LARIS COHEN: Oh, I'm glad it was exciting.
NORTON OWEN: Well, listen, we're we're running out of time, but I want to just give you an opportunity, the same opportunity that you provided to us for the last performance, which was, you said to each of us, on the last performance, was there anything else, you asked us if there was anything else that we wanted to say that you hadn't asked us about. So I wanted to offer you that same opportunity here. Is there anything else that you want to say about this project that I didn't ask you about?
YVES LARIS COHEN: When I asked you that you got kind of choked up in the performance, and that's happening to me now. Something you don't know is that after you walked back to the green room, I asked Dominick Tursi, the stenographer, if he included a note about you getting choked up. We talked about nonverbal things that he includes in the record, and he said he did. So I'll be curious to see how how that's recorded when we see the transcripts. But I don't know, I almost don't want to answer the question, because I don't want it to be over.
NORTON OWEN: Well, that is an answer in a sort of way, isn't it? [Cohen: Yeah]. Well, I can assure you that it's not over. And one of the remarkable things about this is that there will be a new Doris Duke Theatre. And I think the miraculous thing about that is, of course, that would not come to pass if it weren't for everything that we've gone through, which I think is also a great life lesson. Thank you, Yve.
YVES LARIS COHEN: Thank you, Norton.
[Music begins, composed and performed by Jess Meeker]
OUTRO: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob’s Pillow, we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at danceInteractive.jacobspillow.org and of course through live experiences during our Festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts and visit us soon, either online or onsite.