RENEE COX g r it
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. 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
Portrait by Andrea Blanch. All following images from the series, The Discreet Charm of the Bougies.
72
