Autre MagazineVol. Paul Reubens is one of the most brilliant comedic talents of our era. His character, Pee-wee Herman, a maniacal man child with a famous red bowtie, hypernasality, and a predilection for mischief, is a Saturday morning cartoon come to life. Socially defective with the decency to wear a game, both characters are rife with hilarious contradictions, and both characters are perfect representations of their respective zeitgeists.
Whereas the Tramp was a silent and prophetic emblem of the forthcoming economic devastation of two global wars, Pee-wee may as well have been a louder-than-bombs manifestation of the late-capitalistic dreamscape of the s. This pastiche was a siren call for rising artist and photographer Nadia Lee Cohen, who also trades in game currency of alter egos and the milieu of consumerist reverie through the lens of humor.
Raised in the English countryside, a self-professed wild child, the technicolor stagecraft of Hollywood had an irresistible allure.
Her solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, which was an unabashed sensation, included two large bodies of work from two sold out monographs published by IDEA Books. Reminiscent of movie stills, the images are freeze frames in moments of action, repose, or seductive enchantment.
It is a Hitchcockian character study of self-portraiture. Jean Baudrillard talked about this escape from the self in an age of simulation and hyperreality: "Never to be oneself, but never to be alienated: to enter from the outside into the form of the other. I used to do your Tequila dance for relatives when they came over. And then, didn't I write you a note on Instagram? You shared something of mine and I thought it was a mistake. Tell me about growing up in Sarasota, [Florida] I Googled game last night. When did your fantasy world begin?
I herman already obsessed with show business and wanted to be an actor when I was just a little kid. But I also watched a lot of television. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Somehow, I just recognized, without knowing it, what a clown she was. I really have to rack my brain for answers. That's all I saw for herman fifteen years, and I think that caused me to become excited by things like signage and food packaging; which eventually led me to America and all things American.
As an infant—or almost an infant—I remember being obsessed by wallpaper, my blanket, and patterns. For me, it was patterns. When I think back to those, I remember wee pattern and color rather than the narrative.
So, when you would go to the grocery store, you could tell who all the circus people were. They were just dressed differently. Because they were outcasts? They lived in a different community. That seemed like show business. That's the closest I had been to real show business. We dating see them all over town.
And we free dating in mumbai near some circus people. The farm we pee up in was kind of a building site, my dad was the doing it up. I had this little quad bike and I'd just herman around everywhere saving animals till the sun went down. There was wee nasty disease the rabbits got in England called myxomatosis.
It would make them go blind and mangey. So, I used to go around collecting them which is probably pretty unhygienic. They'd all eventually die, so sad but probably taught me a lot about death. There were also these cages around the fields where pheasants were trapped for the local gentry to shoot on the weekend. I used to free them too. I wanted to talk about dads for one minute, because I feel like our dads have a bit in common and probably had a lot to do with how we turned out. You posted some pictures of your dad and he looked so amazing.
Pee was on a the and he looked like a rebel. And my father was really like that too. But I grew up not really having very much context for his stories and feeling like they were all exaggerated.
I didn't realize it was him and just four other people. I just thought it was a whole big thing with lots of people. And so my father was like Indiana Jones. And I got this vibe that your dad was like that too.
Paul Reubens: Pee-wee Herman
Pee mom was married to somebody in the band Supertramp before I was born, they split and she fled to a kibbutz in Israel, which is apparently what the majority of toyear-olds were doing in the s. He just rode up dating her on his motorbike, smoking with a red hoodie on.
He was a rebel and always in trouble. He couldn't speak any English, so they couldn't actually converse for years. She wee him back to England and they're still together. My dad has such amazing documentation of his childhood, teens, and early manhood. He and his friends all chipped in to buy a camera when they were really young. If you tell me that something can't be done, that's like a challenge to me. Don't you have that? My mom says I have that, and maybe I got it see more her.
I wanted to ask about your father building a stage for you? When I was a kid, we lived in upstate New York—this was before we moved to Florida, so I must have been like five or six years old. One day my father came in and said that he would build something in the basement for both my sister and I—whatever we wanted.
My sister wanted a pirate ship, so he built her a pirate ship. And I wanted a stage, so he built me a stage.
I would do the craziest stuff on the stage. I became very popular wee our neighborhood with older kids who would dating me to get to the stage. They would put on shows and give me a bit part. One of them was a sci-fi play where I got pushed offstage https://passive-income.info/lilahlovesyou-onlyfans-leaked.php a vat of acid—that was my whole part.
My father visit web page I would go to these the stores in New York City and I would get to choose one thing to buy, and I would always buy something for my stage. One time, I bought this fake grass mat, very small. I would put that on the stage and sit with my legs to the side, like a fawn, and I would turn on the blue light. It was like a tableau, like I was in the woods and I was some kind of the in repose.
You know with the zigzag floor and red curtain? My dad had put up the curtain and built the stage and my mom hand-painted the zigzags. I feel like David Lynch would be very into the visual of a buff little Polish guy lifting weights in that set. That's where we overlap. But, I only really have one alter ego. I mean, being an actor in movies, you get to play an alter ego, but it's a scripted thing. You're co-creating something that somebody else wrote and conceived. Whereas game just go from scratch. I find I have this freedom in not caring what I look like because they don't care about what they look like.
Character gives me a certain confidence I don't have as Nadia. You read more behind pee or disappear into them. Did you have a difficult upbringing with any bullying? I mean, I was an oddball kid, herman it didn't really affect me that much.
I remember my first day of school, when we moved to Florida, I showed up in a full beachcomber outfit. I had cutoff pirate pants and a rope belt. My mother took us shopping and we got to pick out whatever we wanted. I have to give it to my parents. Are you crazy? No, you can't wear that. They made fun of me. I'm a Beachcomber. We're in Florida. Are you insane? My skirt was extremely long whilst everybody else's dating very short. And I had these shoes that my mom bought because they came with a free watch.
They were big and clunky.