Monsieur Zohore is nothing if not intentional. Every flower, wig, paper towel, diaper, Windex bottle, art book, and designer clothing item within his studio has its place. His studio and physical presence are enigmatic. Zohore describes his artistic self first as a “producer” and secondly as a “clown.”
His work ranges from performances painted with the sound of applause, to video work of him covering his body in lotion, to eight-foot-tall canvases adorned with puce-colored paper towels. His most traditional works are radically untraditional, a result of not only his process but also his use of unconventional materials. The spectacle of his creations is nearly ineffable.
“My main medium is my history,” he says.
Teri Henderson: What is your real name?
Monsieur Zohore: I have a lot of names. In my practice I go by Monsieur Zohore and I think it’s a very easy way to organize everything. It’s also my dad’s name and I think it’s really funny. Monsieur Zohore, that’s my father. It’s also me and my brother and a bunch of other men in my family. In New York, everyone calls me Peter. With everyone I grew up with it’s Alex, because my first name is Alexander… and then in Baltimore, Sandy is short for Alexander. I change my name every time I move, and it keeps it going. That’s why I’ve got so many damn names.
How do you describe your practice? Are you a painter, a sculptor?
I struggle with this, but I would call myself a producer. I practice in performance and in painting. I think I make performances about painting or paintings about performance.
Maybe you’re a poet.
I am a comedian. [Laughs] I’m a clown.
Okay, I’ll write your job title as “I’m a clown?” [Both laugh]
No, write that down, honey: “I’m a clown.” I clap in museums for hours on end. I love to cover myself in lotion, for no apparent reason.
Who is your favorite living artist?
Tracey Emin is someone that I recently have fallen in love with after hating her work for many years. When I was in New York at Cooper Union, I was trained in this elitist mentality, that “selling out is for sell-outs.” I had this posturing without any understanding and I didn’t like Tracey Emin, because I thought that artists who make neon signs are stupid. It was last year, over winter break, that I asked myself, why do I hate Tracey Emin so much? And I realized that she talks about life being dangerous and difficult in her work, and there’s also a religious read to it, and an obvious love of art history. And there’s a religious read to my work also, and I found a sense of kinship.
How does your identity, however you want to describe that, inform or affect your artistic practice?
Being a queer man of color is in and of my practice. I think it’s my relationship to humor and sadness and being able to like understand those two ideas, my relationship with my Blackness and Frenchness, my Africanness, is truly the material that I started to build my practice off of. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I was one less thing, or one more? I think everything would look different. Truly, my main medium is my history. I think a lot about my identity. I think a lot about acts of labor. I think about who’s working and what work they are doing. I think a lot about privilege and who has it and what it is. I think about it from a lot of different perspectives.
