Oh Deer, Oh Deer, Oh Deer

This has to be parody, because surely nobody can be so up themselves and live.

From the Albany Times Union arts pages:

Accidental human
C. Ryder Cooley pushes notions of life through music, art, trapeze acts

By DANIELLE FURFARO, Staff writer

I should’ve stopped when I saw the word trapeze, but no i had to go and read the whole thing. Bigger fool me.

There’s plenty of people who take themselves and their silly artistic affectations seriously, but not many do so as assiduously as does wannabe multimedia artist C. Ryder Cooley. And when a wannabe multimedia artist meets a journalist willing to take them at their own self-inflated valuation, well then there’s disaster in the making.

Multimedia artist C. Ryder Cooley thinks she has had better incarnations. But she’s trying to make the best of this one.

“I started working with animal themes probably before I was born,” said Cooley. “I think I just was an animal. Somehow I accidentally turned into a human, and I’m trying to get back to my animal.”

[…]

For the past few months, she’s been working on her thesis performance, titled “Animalia: Stories of Collapse, Calamity and Departure,” which will include elements of video projection, aerial performance and the accordian.

Call it an interspecies fairy tale.

Call it what you like, but how’s it going to play in Peoria?

“I like looking at animals for evidence of different structures of living,” said Cooley.

Don’t we all? Personally, I’d love to be a squid, but I can’t see me making a living decking myself in bits of rubber hose and a bodystocking and flying through the air with the greatest of ease, that daring notsosyoung blogger on the flying trapeze, just to make the point that water’s wet and squid live in it and humans don’t.

With her earth-toned clothing, childlike voice and haunted eyes, Cooley looks more like someone out of a storybook than someone likely to be standing right in front of you. She looks out of place in the 21st century. Or maybe it’s that she looks out of place as a homo sapien.

Or maybe she looks like someone you’d take a running punch at… but no, that would be animal cruelty.

Interspecies deer

Most people who have seen Cooley perform locally associate her with a deer, as she is often seen wearing antlers or a cut deer head strapped to her back.

The deer, she says, is her “East Coast animal,” a creature she began feeling an affinity for shortly after she moved from San Francisco to the Capital Region.

I wonder what her West Coast animal is..?

“The deer heads I have are trophies that were killed by hunters. By putting them on my body, I can bring them back to life and be their body for them,” she said. “And there’s a certain perceived gender to wearing antlers. I become a cross-gender, interspecies deer.”

No, sweetie, you become an overeducated, underdisciplined, spoiled western madam with a stinking deer carcase on her back and outstanding gender issues.

It’s that reinterpretation of the gendering of animals that appeals to Cooley.

“How people deal with gender in animals is even more intense than how they deal with it in humans,” she said. “It’s hard to find research of animals that isn’t based on hetero-normative mating behavior.” In other words, even nonhuman animals are not as set into their gender roles as humans want to make them out to be.

Oh, Cooley, Cooley, Cooley. It’s not illegal to have a fetish you know. What should be illegal is you boring others silly dressing it up a fetish as art and worse still, using an accordion and a trapeze to do it.

Just go buy a Furry deer outfit and get yourself to a Con. Free your antlers, and your ass will follow.

Then go back to campus, get your faunsuit on and have sex with your roommate. You know that’s what you really want.

Much more about Cooley’s deer carcase/accordion/trapeze masterwork here, if you can stand it.