Artist Coco Fusco on poetry’s power to confront social issues

The recent Sam Gilliam Lecture Series speaker shares more about her multidisciplinary practice and how it intersects with activism and anthropology.

For multidisciplinary artist Coco Fusco, art can be a powerful tool for confronting and challenging established power structures. A Cuban American artist who works across media, including video, books, and performances, Fusco has explored the politics of colonialism, migration, race, gender, and power.

At the recent Sam Gilliam Lecture Series at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center, she shared one of her videos, To Live in June with your Tongue Hanging Out, which uses a poem by Cuban revolutionary Reinaldo Arenas to explore the relationship between artists and the state in Cuba. Her lecture emphasized the relationship between poetry and Cuban politics, juxtaposing poetic language with traditional political discourse.

In this Q&A, the Hopkins Bloomberg Center sat down with Fusco to further explore the unique power of language in societal commentary, the role of art in countries with different political systems, and how the arts and sciences can complement one another in supporting inquiry and discovery.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

You have experience with many different media as a multidisciplinary artist. Can you speak to the unique way poetry, or language more broadly, can reflect society?

I don’t think I really understood very much about poetry when I was younger. I felt a little afraid of poetry. I felt more comfortable with fiction, nonfiction, and drama. I could latch onto stories there, so those genres made more sense to me. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to appreciate certain things about poetic language, particularly in trying to understand the very complex situation that Cuba represents, what Cuba symbolizes for the rest of the world and how much language plays a role in either furthering understanding or misunderstanding of the Cuban situation.

What I found in the work of several poets who have been vilified by the regime as dissidents or traitors was a kind of clarity and lucidity about existential questions: what it means to be Cuban, what Cuba means to the world, what Cubans might want for their country and for themselves. I don’t find that in journalistic accounts. I don’t find that in political discourse. I don’t necessarily find it very often in scholarly work either. And I’ve been very moved by that clarity and by these poets’ ability hit the nail right on the head without saying things in a literal way.

Knowing that a good portion of your work focuses on Cuba’s suppression of artistic expression, can you share why art is vital to democracy or a free society?

Well, fortunately for humanity, art happens everywhere, whether the society is free or not. People may suffer from other things, but they always have some kind of cultural expression that articulates a way of looking at the world that may not necessarily coincide with the interests of government. And I think this can be said of many places, even here [the U.S.].

The situation in Cuba is an interesting one for me as an artist and as somebody who is very invested in supporting human rights. Artists were, at the very beginning of the revolution, very much a part of the transition. And then in subsequent decades and in subsequent generations, they’ve also been at the forefront of articulating critical positions. Many have paid a price for that: expulsion from the country, imprisonment, banishment of different kinds, censorship.

In recent years there emerged a movement led by a group of artists, musicians, and writers that galvanized the rest of the population. Their articulation of dissent, mostly through social media, helped to bring about, in some ways, the protests of July 2021, which were the largest protests that had occurred in Cuba since the beginning of the revolution.

Do you see art playing a different role in a political environment like Cuba compared to a democratic society?

It is difficult to generalize about what kind of art emerges in different historical contexts or different situations, because what the general public has access to is not the sum total of what is made or what is expressed. You have to deal with the mediating factors in different societies at different times. Who’s in power? Who buys art? Who supports art? Does it get support from the public sector? Does it get support largely from the private sector? Is only the commercially viable art form the one that we get to see? Do we get to see other kinds?

In societies that have mixed economies for culture, you might see some kinds of art that are supported by industry, commerce, or a set of very powerful collectors. And you might see other kinds of art that are supported by foundations, biennials, or nonprofit endeavors.

In countries where only the state supports art, then censorship is probably more obvious because the state has a monopoly over what can get out to the public. But in those situations, I find again and again that there are people working in culture who find ways to subvert that monopolistic control, either by having underground movements, by getting their work out of the country through secret means, or by creating alternatives that don’t necessarily connect with the state. In the same way that there are histories of avant-garde movements in the United States that operated outside the commercial sphere or outside the museum sphere in different decades of the 20th century and beyond, you also find in societies where the state attempts to control everything that people often feel overly constrained by those situations and try to find ways around them.

“In the same way that there are histories of avant-garde movements in the United States that operated outside the commercial sphere or outside the museum sphere in different decades of the 20th century and beyond, you also find in societies where the state attempts to control everything that people often feel overly constrained by those situations and try to find ways around them.”

The Sam Gilliam Lecture Series is hosted by the U.S.’s first research university. With this in mind, how might art and academic research work together to address critical social issues?

It’s tough, because I do think that many people in the social sciences or in politics cite literature and artists when they are making big speeches and so on, but I don’t know if anybody is actually looking at art for the answers in the same way that they might look at scientific research for answers. So art is assumed to have a slightly different kind of relationship, I think, to knowledge.

I do think that there is art that can be understood as knowledge production, but I don’t think all art is about knowledge production. I think that there are superficial artworks, or artworks that are very decorative, or artworks whose purpose is really not to educate in any way. I don’t necessarily think that’s bad. I just think it’s different. It serves a different purpose.

On the other hand, I do think that there are artworks that have shown things to humanity. Picasso’s Guernica lasts for a long time in our consciousness for a reason, because it taught us about the horrors of war. In the same way that other artists have addressed a series of important issues, whether it’s [Francisco] Goya talking about the disasters of war, or whether it’s the Guerrilla Girls telling us about institutional sexism and educating us about the practices of institutions and how they shape our understanding of what constitutes quality in art in order to keep our attention away from the work of women artists, or the way that many other artists have enlightened, pointed to, or explored dimensions of consciousness, awareness, lack of awareness, or elements of history. A lot of people have been talking recently about a show that took place in California that has to do with the transformation of Confederate monuments. Kara Walker’s piece was one of the most famous in that exhibition, and it invites people to think about monuments and the past in a different way.

So there are lots of examples of how art can make you reflect on society, social realities, political problems, and inequalities that you might not otherwise have thought of. But I don’t think that the way it happens is the same way as when you read a textbook, for example, or when you learn about a scientific inquiry.

My son is studying to be an engineer in optics. I ask him to tell me about what he does and what he studies, and it’s so far away from my understanding. But he’s studying light, and I make films. You can’t make films without light. And if you want to understand how to make films and work with a camera, you have to understand light. He’s at one end of the spectrum and I’m at another end of the spectrum, but we’re looking at the same thing.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I have a lot of respect for people who care for culture and work really hard to protect and support the arts. I think they deserve our respect. I also think that trying to educate a population without exposing them to the arts, to culture, and to a variety of perspective—both on our own history and on people from all over the world—impoverishes us as a people if we don’t protect access to that kind of education.

I’m the child of an immigrant. I was the first predominantly English speaker, and I grew up translating for older relatives. I am a beneficiary of an education that opened worlds to me—many people in my family didn’t have that opportunity, so I know what it means to have a good education.

I was exposed to a lot of art, culture, and history in school and at home. I was curious and wanted to learn about people who weren’t like me because there wasn’t anybody at school who was like me. And I think a culturally rich education is an opportunity that every child here should have.