South African man and his Cock arrested in Paris

No one is really sure what possessed 51 year old South African, Steven Cohen, to dress up as a bird wearing 8-inch heels, with a cock on a leash tied to his... um... penis... and put himself on display right next to the Eiffel Tower, one of the busiest tourist spots in Paris.

He gave the tourists an eyeful but his dancing and prancing lasted all of 10 minutes before he was arrested, interrogated, made to provide a DNA sample and undergo a psychiatric evaluation. After being held for a few hours, Steven was eventually bailed and will appear in court on 16 December 2013 charged with Sexual Exhibitionism.

His lawyer, Agnes Tricoire said that she was outraged that her client was thrown in jail and said that he “wanted to express his personal situation, in which he divides his life between two countries, his native South Africa and France, where he currently lives,”  Lawyer Agnes went on to add that she thought his arrest was disgraceful because France was silencing it's artists. When asked about the bird, she did not say how it helped to illustrate his situation nor did she say if Steven was referencing a Jewish custom of using the chicken to absolve past sins ahead of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. She did however tell the Metro that the cock's name was Frank. 

French papers reportedly quoted Steven as saying: “It's the Day of Reconciliation in South Africa, but the day of judgment for me,” he then went on to explain that the message of his work was “about being pulled in many directions simultaneously." 

"Frank is a feisty cock and wonderfully capable of deciding the choreography."

Steven was born in 1962 in SA and now lives in Lille, France. He stages interventions in public as well as in theater and gallery spaces and intends to bring attention to everything that is belittled in society. He started by bringing attention to himself and his identity as a gay, Jewish man - often referring to himself in interviews as a Jewish Gay Monster.

Steven graduated with a BA from Wits University, then studied at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Woodstock, Cape Town. One of his best known 'performances' was in 2001/2 called "Chandelier" where Steven dressed in some unstable and revolving heels, wore a lit up tutu made of a chandelier and went into the Johannesburg Township, Newton to mingle and engage with the local residents.

No stranger to the inside of a police car, Steven has consistently been arrested for his shocking, nude public 'performances'. He has performed at places like Lyon's Holocaust Memorial as well as Ground Zero in New York.

Last year he performed at Avignon wearing nothing but anvil-shaped shoes, a girdle, yellow body paint and the Star of David painted on his forehead. In response to a question regarding his use of Jewish symbols, Steven said “A lot of what I do is to protest Fascism, I was born in South Africa because my parents fled Fascism. They would have been exterminated had they stayed.”

In an interview published on a South African gallery's website Steven sums himself up quite brutally by saying: 

"I never really fit any traditions -- African, European, male, Jewish or queer; it's actually really quite similar everywhere in the world. Except that in Europe people try to observe the sounds I am making, to hear the images. In South Africa I am quickly dismissed as a drag queen, a shock artist, a fraud, an arsehole."

On his own website, Steven says:
“I don’t know what the f*** performance art is, yet I’m brilliant at it.”