From Alex Da Corte’s Rubber Pencil Devil.
The cover of our new Summer issue features a detail from The End, a painting by the Venezuelan American artist Alex Da Corte. Da Corte works across film, sculpture, installation, and performance; using costumes and prosthetics, he has assumed the guises of Eminem, Mister Rogers, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Pink Panther, and Marcel Duchamp, among countless others. At the beginning of June, I went to Philadelphia to speak with Da Corte in his studio, tucked away in a warehouse behind the gates of a labyrinthine high school campus. In the back room, filled with books, papers, and a number of cartoonish props, we talked about Judy Garland, Mariah Carey, and Carey’s 1999 album Rainbow. When we broke from chatting to have lunch, Da Corte served me an excellent tuna salad.
INTERVIEWER
Will you tell us about The End?
ALEX DA CORTE
The End is what I call a CD painting, a reverse-glass painting I painted on plexiglass to obscure part of an image from the cover of Mariah Carey’s Rainbow.
INTERVIEWER
I was listening to “Heartbreaker” last night. She is so good. Why that album?
DA CORTE
I probably shouldn’t go on too much about how I love her, but I was part of the Mariah Carey fan club in the late eighties, and I wrote letters to her as early as I could. I remember reading that her father was Venezuelan, and I was like, Oh, my father’s Venezuelan! I was eighteen when I first heard Rainbow, and while my relationship to music, to my own sexuality, has changed since then, I also listened to the album just yesterday.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by “CD painting”?
DA CORTE
The CD paintings were born out of an interest in the readymade, a term associated with the work of Marcel Duchamp, relating to the idea of the found object. If I think about how I first began listening to music, part of what drove me to buy a CD was the image on the cover of the album. It never changes, but the image gets scratched, the liner notes get wrinkled, a kind of touch is transferred onto the music. The CD paintings are evidence of that transference. To make them, I took the liner notes of all the CDs I had that were beloved to me—Janet Jackson, Madonna, Mariah Carey—and scanned them and had them made into flags at a store across the street from the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia. The image that was scanned from the liner notes became a flag printed on cotton, stretched the way one might stretch a canvas. Then I laid a piece of plexiglass over the flag and painted a layer onto the plexiglass that obscured some of the image printed on the flag.
Photograph courtesy of Alex Da Corte.
INTERVIEWER
Why remove Mariah herself from the image?
DA CORTE
Part of it was to give the rainbow some freedom, but the removal of Mariah also allows a new viewer to project their body into that space, like they did in the earliest shopping arcades, where people would look through glass windows and see their reflections on headless mannequins, imagining they were wearing the clothes the mannequins wore. When I was thinking about redacting Mariah I was also thinking about making space for other figures to adorn themselves with the rainbow, which is of course associated with Judy Garland and the queer community that celebrates her—“friends of Dorothy,” this league of people who bond together over the promise of what a rainbow gives. Although its promise is hope, it is quite elusive. As a young person who was not out of the closet, when I first listened to Rainbow, I had the thought, Why not dress myself up in these colors? Many years later, to remove the figure and frame this rainbow in the way I have was an arrival at some kind of desire that had long been on my mind.
INTERVIEWER
Was the video you sent also born of that desire?
Title card from Rubber Pencil Devil.
DA CORTE
Well, in 2017, I stumbled across a photograph of someone painting the backside of Mariah Carey for the album cover, and was reminded there is some kind of invisible labor at play in all photographs we see. The video was born of that photograph. There is someone who had to light what you’re looking at. There is someone who took the photograph. In 2018, I made a film for the Carnegie International called Rubber Pencil Devil, where I remade fifty-seven scenes from photographs and fragments of culture I had collected from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which I narrated while dressed as Mister Rogers. Seeing behind the curtain was a big part of that. The video has a title card that says LIVE + LET-LIVE, which was born out of this mural that was created outside my studio by a local plumber named Denny, using paint that I was getting rid of. He made it his business to paint a mural on this fence near my studio for every holiday. During the month of June, apropos of nothing, and also everything, he decided to write a big phrase on the fence that just said simply, LIVE AND LET LIVE. The rainbow serves a similar purpose. It’s just to look at and ponder. It’s not doing anything, but it brings out in you this desire to commune with it. We were never taught to do this. We didn’t have to be.
Hazel Byers is the Review’s engagement editor.
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