Coloring Coorain’s Big Questions
Coorain Devin is not afraid to ask the big questions: What’s it like to be popular? What comes after skinny jeans? Does it get any better? TV-host extraordinaire (mostly “extra”) graduated with two whole degrees: a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and a BA in philosophy from Tufts. It is probably the latter that inspires the aforementioned deep questions.
Devin is on a mission: to interrogate celebrity from the inside-out. But deep down, maybe they just want to be a celebrity. How do they do this? They get all the art-world luminaries they know and talk to them (with costumes). And, yes, naysayers, Boston has “art-world luminaries,” something Devin is trying to make known focusing simultaneously on community, but also the weird intimacy of the arts.
Their most recent work, a video focusing on Anum Awan and Nabeela Vega of Radical Queer Possibilities engaged with themes of queerness, race, the scene, why the hell are we even still in Boston?, and more with a lot of gaudy backgrounds and blonde wigs with front bangs. Devin’s work is about bringing people together as much as it’s about themselves, evident in the fact that this most recent “episode” was screened at the closing reception for the exhibition they co-curated with Christina Huilan Wang entitled Resting Bitchface. Partially a way to redecorate, it speaks to a desire for both campy excess (artwork above the bathroom door, anyone?) as well as to converge a creative community and a community of affinity. Raquel Kober and Couple’s Counseling performed in the living room. There was mulled wine and peanut butter cookies. Everything was cozy. Intimate.
And intimacy, or the tension thereof, is a common theme perhaps not immediately visible in Devin’s work where colorful excess and bright eyeshadow and questions of what’s “in” and what’s “out” predominate. But, where these sort of ‘vapid’ questions might be asked, Devin also talks about chronic illness while multiples of them dance around, belly exposed. They talk about how hard it is to market yourself as an artist and how they hate it, all the while trying to run a (now successful!) Kickstarter campaign to up the production values. There’s a destabilization of these duplicitous systems of values, there’s an earnestness through drag.
The closeness is also doubly obvious, too. These are friends, people Devin is trying to get together with. They’re trying to get closer. But, in the age of Photo Booth and proliferated Youtube video diaries — that maybe no one watches — the desire to reach out to all the people who might be there is an intimacy of profound potentiality, but also a profoundly solitary one where the way we engage with our feelings and fears is reified on our screens and through the ways we perform ourselves in our bedrooms for an audience or not.
This paradoxical cleave is critical to Devin’s work: intimately theirs, it is also profoundly ours. Community, support, friendship, and failure make up the sort of aloofness of our (probably) singular viewership. It’s the sort of comfort TV promises with a lot more radical potential. Plus, it has this tenderly queer relationship with celebrity itself: ‘we can all be a celebrity, right?’ seems to be not only asked but also promised in a utopian green-screen space set apart from the abject reality we inhabit.
But still why TV. In 2015? Like a bad psychoanalyst I wanted to know why. We’re in our twenties. We don’t own TVs. Maybe it was a childhood trauma: nothing but public access TV till age 13. Or maybe, speaking a little more ontologically, the form of “TV” not only meshes well with ideas of celebrity, talk-shows, and the quasi-fictive presentation of reality, but also can be more than just a show. It offers the idea of a “fantasy space,” which is (un)bound by working within and testing the limits of TV as a metaphor. Plus, TV is so much more than just the show: it is this alternate reality that can be plugged into. It can even be a website and Twitter and products, it’s the presentation of a certain view on ‘reality,’ as it were. After all, Devin has said they want to be the Kim K of the art world.
Like Kim K, you can keep up with them if you’re interested (though not in ‘People,’ yet). To see Coorain in action check out their Youtube channel. Or, if you want something more up close and personal. Coorain is taking the long legacy of cooking and art (Martha Rosler, The Barefoot Contessa) and performing Mixed Up Salads April 10th at Mobius’s Tinderbox event in Cambridge.
By Drew Zeiba