CS: The work plays with concepts of gender, most visibly in your casting of Cook with a woman actor in the final iteration of the work. What informed that decision?
LR: There are a series of vignettes in the work that look at gender politics and different ways of viewing roles. When you read some of the journal accounts by botanist Joseph Banks, Cook, and other explorers of the period, you can read between the lines and see how Pacific people were playing with the visitors to their shores. There’s a funny account about Banks being sent a boy for nightly activities more than once. And as Cook wore breeches covering his genitals, there was uncertainty about his gender. There is a fluidity around gender roles in Pacific societies, so I wanted to signal this in the work as these issues are as important today...perhaps more so.
CS: How is time configured in in Pursuit of Venus [infected]?
LR: Even though this work uses Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique and historical stories as a starting point, it is a contemporary work of digital art that addresses current concerns. The loop is seamless and endless. I quote anthropologist Nicholas Thomas: “Reenactment necessarily places us, in some sense, ‘after the fact’: it creates a space of theatricality, continuity, discontinuity, and confusion, while always begging the question, ‘Is this present staging of the past, how it was?’ Yet in Pursuit of Venus [infected] overtly infects the past with what are simply performances that Islanders can and do engage in today. In one sense, the work is unambiguous: Oceania is the locus of creativity, the realm of life and art in the present.”
Interview by Claudia Schmuckli, Curator in Charge, Contemporary Art and Programming
Lisa Reihana’s installation in Pursuit of Venus [infected] is on view at the de Young through January 5, 2020.