SCOPOPHILIC
Created by C.B. Cooke
Manhattan Public Access Channel 67
Mondays, 12 a.m.

© 2004 C.B. Cooke

Filmmaker C.B. Cooke increasingly turns his voyeurism onto himself, above. A view of the Gansevoort Market district at sunset for Cooke’s January 28 show, middle. Cooke focuses his lens on a wall of art in a studio for his April 15 show, bottom.

Film artist C.B. Cooke understands the allure of voyeurism

On the screen in the peepshow booth, a disembodied crotch was urinating in one bathroom after another, but some of the viewers were too busy groping each other to pay attention.

For the filmmaker C.B. Cooke, theirs was a new but not unwelcome reaction. The creator as well as “star” of his latest work, “21 Pees,” he was premiering it at the unlikely premiere location of the Ann Street Adult Entertainment Center near Wall Street.

“21 Pees” is a recent episode of his experimental video series “scopOphilic,” which celebrated five years on-air September 20 and runs very late Monday nights––12 a.m. Monday, to be precise––on channel 67, Manhattan’s public access television station.

Considering Cooke’s marrying of public access TV and peepshow booths, it makes sense that fellow public access provocateur “The Robin Byrd Show” is among “scopOphilic”’s inspirations. Like it, “scopOphilic” aims to startle and captivate the people that flip past it at midnight. But Cooke prefers to vary the subject matter of his episodes from introspective photography to sexually explicit imagery, or at times simply combine them.

Cooke’s work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, the New Festival, OutFest, on a wall near the Holland Tunnel, in the base of the Brooklyn Bridge and at the recently closed “Terminal 5” group exhibit at LaGuardia Airport. As provocative as the content of his films and video is, he’s also interested in non-traditional venues that push the limits of where his art is seen and who sees it.

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