To describe Steven Cohen’s performance art as “shameful” would be true on two levels. First, the South African artist shames himself – for example, he caused a stink during 2000’s Limping Into The African Renaissance when he shat on the Dance Umbrella Stage. Cohen’s work can also be described as shameful in a slightly different, slanted way: it is, quite literally, full of shame. The 54-year old’s elaborate and highly personal pieces force the viewer to confront and digest shame.

Growing up in apartheid South Africa as a Jewish gay man, however white, Cohen witnessed bigotry at its most virulent. In performance, he hopes to combat the shame his peers thrust upon him. When asked about coming of age in such a perilous, segregated and wholly Christian nation, Cohen’s as forthcoming as his art:

I was well mocked for being a fairy and a yid, which entrenched in me a profound awareness of 'otherness'. I had Jesus shoved in my face at school, then God at home, all the while pre-occupied with thoughts of cock and hole. So I had a real work in making joy and pride out of mess and shame.

Cohen’s work draws on this rich history of unspeakable racialist horrors, sexual secrets and religious scapegoating to bring the viewer what he refers to as “living art”.

As he says on his website:

When I appear (visual art) as a beautifully constructed and living artwork, the performance of the place and the performances of the people there are what may be called performance art - I am living art. I am full of spirit. I breathe and radiate defiance and fear and dignity and sacrifice. It is the magic from my imagination literally given life. Temporarily, I am more powerful than any dead drawing or stillborn genius oil painting.

Cohen’s can also be categorized as living in that it draws on the living social organism – or, at the very least, the recently departed.

Apartheid got under people’s skin. It molded them, for better or for worse. In Cohen’s case, the National Party’s horrific policy of enforced – and ultimately unenforceable –segregation helped transform him into the artist he is today. To keep the rigid racialist divide, all South African men were forced into the South African Defense Force.

Though the army sent him to a mental hospital soon after his conscription, Cohen’s experience left an indelible mark on his development as an artist.

Conscription was a very precious time to affirm my principles; for example, my refusal to ever touch a weapon. For the first time in my life, I actively pursued meaning in making art.

Cohen’s entire existence came to revolve around his next creation. It wouldn’t be until later that his being would be the creation.

Cohen’s work started as static as the oil paintings he would later deride. He upholstered armchairs with outlandish designs and faces; he dabbled in self-portraiture and played with colorful, sensual collage. He took over art spaces, filling every crevice with bizarre, slightly absurd installations. The end of the century, however, brought a definitive change to Cohen’s creative vision. He and his art were slowly becoming one.

Starting in 1997, Cohen, painted, glossed and certainly wild, began installing himself in communal arenas and assault unsuspecting pedestrians with his rowdy, riotous visions. And, not surprisingly, not everyone got it. His first attempt at public displays of artistry – Divorcee Drag, which he performed at Hyde Park Shopping Centre in South Africa – ended prematurely when police acted as art critics and hauled him off. Despite such an inauspicious beginning, Cohen kept at it, slowly but surely weaning himself from the gallery and becoming a full time performance artist. Or rather, art that performs.

With no walls to display his handiwork, Cohen had no choice but to hang his ostentatious visuals on himself. A literal and figurative example can be found in 2002’s Chandelier Piece, during which draped himself in lights and made his way to a township dump. A byproduct of apartheid’s geographical and social segregation, the townships had been built hastily and haphazardly, becoming shantytowns for the nation’s oppressed. Though apartheid had cracked years before, the townships still held (and still hold) pockets of black poor. Dressed all in white, Cohen certainly left an impression.

Playing with race has become a hallmark of his mark-leaving art, but Cohen’s also played with his Jewishness. And how could not be? As mentioned before, apartheid South Africa operated as a wholly Christian nation. Jews may not have been segregated from the rest of the population in a physical way like the blacks, but they certainly weren’t welcomed into the fold.

A 1999 show involved him dressing in full drag with a menorah on his head. Certainly aware of his Jewishness in South Africa, it wasn’t until Cohen joined France’s Ballet Atlantique Régine Chopinot in 2003 that his people’s plight came into focus.

The recent history of holocaust still resonates in the stones of the buildings. I see still the haunted eyes of murdered Jews in the elegant darkness. So suffering from Jewishness became a more acute focus of the work.

It may have become more acute, but it hardly became the thrust. In fact, neither Cohen’s whiteness or gayness or Jewishness dominates his aesthetic. His work highlights all three to compress them, like a piece of coal pressed in a diamond.

Asked about his costuming – painted face, straw hair and a frilly pink dress, for example – Cohen laughs: “It's a gay Jewish African art mask from head to toe.” He is all and he is one – a fact he made startlingly clear with 2004’s Dancing Inside Out, in which Cohen inserted a camera into his rectum for all the world to see. Describing the piece in South African art magazine ARTTHROB, Cohen writes:

With the help of a micro-camera mounted inside a dildo, I made a work where I filmed inside and out my own private ground zero, my dirty arsehole, hemorrhoids flecked with shit and glitter - red, purple and inflamed, not pink! Pink is the stuff you can sell. I'm trying to make work a color that's hard to buy.

You can’t put a price on this shit. Literally.

Cohen’s work isn’t simply about addressing social differences, shocking the audience or becoming “living art”. His performances act as personal and cultural sacrifice. They fulfill a vital and utterly queer duty. In that same ARTTHROB essay, Cohen explains:

In my work, I am a magnificent goddess... part punk, part princess, a hyper-vigilant and militantly critical soldier in stilettos in the service of beauty. All this created from a short, fat, bald, middle-aged Jewish man with his head up his arse. That's the art of being queer, the magic we can make from the abject, and our power is, unlike secretive witches, to cast those spells well seen in public.

When asked whether or not he feels queers must sacrifice their comfort zones to push normative boundaries and make life a little more wild, he replied with a knowing and chilling, “We don't have the option not to.” The shameful lessons of apartheid and the Holocaust ring loudly, but not necessarily proudly.