{"id":174287,"date":"2026-06-28T10:00:06","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T14:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=174287"},"modified":"2026-06-27T17:48:51","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T21:48:51","slug":"the-mariah-carey-fan-club-a-conversation-with-alex-da-corte","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/06\/28\/the-mariah-carey-fan-club-a-conversation-with-alex-da-corte\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mariah Carey Fan Club: A Conversation with Alex Da Corte"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_174289\" style=\"width: 1044px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-174289\" class=\"wp-image-174289 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/c9bad799.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1034\" height=\"971\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/c9bad799.png 1034w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/c9bad799-300x282.png 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/c9bad799-1024x962.png 1024w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/c9bad799-768x721.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-174289\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">From Alex Da Corte\u2019s <em>Rubber Pencil Devil<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n<p><em>The cover of our new <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/back-issues\/256\">Summer issue<\/a> features a detail from <\/em>The End<em>, a painting by the Venezuelan American artist Alex Da Corte. Da Corte works across film, sculpture, installation, and performance; using costumes and prosthetics, he has assumed the guises of Eminem, Mister Rogers, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Pink Panther, and Marcel Duchamp, among countless others. At the beginning of June, I went to Philadelphia to speak with Da Corte in his studio, tucked away in a warehouse behind the gates of a labyrinthine high school campus. In the back room, filled with books, papers, and a number of cartoonish props, we talked about Judy Garland, Mariah Carey, and Carey&#8217;s 1999 album <\/em>Rainbow<em>. When we broke from chatting to have lunch, Da Corte served me an excellent tuna salad.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n<p>Will you tell us about <em>The End<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">ALEX DA CORTE<\/p>\n<p><em>The End<\/em> is what I call a CD painting, a reverse-glass painting I painted on plexiglass to obscure part of an image from the cover of Mariah Carey\u2019s <em>Rainbow<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n<p>I was listening to \u201cHeartbreaker\u201d last night. She is so good. Why that album?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">DA CORTE<\/p>\n<p>I probably shouldn\u2019t go on too much about how I love her, but I was part of the Mariah Carey fan club in the late eighties, and I wrote letters to her as early as I could. I remember reading that her father was Venezuelan, and I was like, Oh, my father\u2019s Venezuelan! I was eighteen when I first heard <em>Rainbow<\/em>, and while my relationship to music, to my own sexuality, has changed since then, I also listened to the album just yesterday.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n<p>What do you mean by \u201cCD painting\u201d?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">DA CORTE<\/p>\n<p>The CD paintings were born out of an interest in the readymade, a term associated with the work of Marcel Duchamp, relating to the idea of the found object. If I think about how I first began listening to music, part of what drove me to buy a CD was the image on the cover of the album. It never changes, but the image gets scratched, the liner notes get wrinkled, a kind of touch is transferred onto the music. The CD paintings are evidence of that transference. To make them, I took the liner notes of all the CDs I had that were beloved to me\u2014Janet Jackson, Madonna, Mariah Carey\u2014and scanned them and had them made into flags at a store across the street from the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia. The image that was scanned from the liner notes became a flag printed on cotton, stretched the way one might stretch a canvas. Then I laid a piece of plexiglass over the flag and painted a layer onto the plexiglass that obscured some of the image printed on the flag.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_174291\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-174291\" class=\"wp-image-174291\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image-1-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"996\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image-1-1.png 500w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image-1-1-300x300.png 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image-1-1-150x150.png 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-174291\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photograph courtesy of Alex Da Corte.<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n<p>Why remove Mariah herself from the image?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">DA CORTE<\/p>\n<p>Part of it was to give the rainbow some freedom, but the removal of Mariah also allows a new viewer to project their body into that space, like they did in the earliest shopping arcades, where people would look through glass windows and see their reflections on headless mannequins, imagining they were wearing the clothes the mannequins wore. When I was thinking about redacting Mariah I was also thinking about making space for other figures to adorn themselves with the rainbow, which is of course associated with Judy Garland and the queer community that celebrates her\u2014\u201cfriends of Dorothy,\u201d this league of people who bond together over the promise of what a rainbow gives. Although its promise is hope, it is quite elusive. As a young person who was not out of the closet, when I first listened to <em>Rainbow<\/em>, I had the thought, Why not dress myself up in these colors? Many years later, to remove the figure and frame this rainbow in the way I have was an arrival at some kind of desire that had long been on my mind.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n<p>Was the video you sent also born of that desire?<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_174293\" style=\"width: 1045px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-174293\" class=\"wp-image-174293 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/screenshot-2026-06-25-at-45307pm.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1035\" height=\"962\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/screenshot-2026-06-25-at-45307pm.png 1035w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/screenshot-2026-06-25-at-45307pm-300x279.png 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/screenshot-2026-06-25-at-45307pm-1024x952.png 1024w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/screenshot-2026-06-25-at-45307pm-768x714.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-174293\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Title card from <em>Rubber Pencil Devil<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">DA CORTE<\/p>\n<p>Well, in 2017, I stumbled across a photograph of someone painting the backside of Mariah Carey for the album cover, and was reminded there is some kind of invisible labor at play in all photographs we see. The video was born of that photograph. There is someone who had to light what you\u2019re looking at. There is someone who took the photograph. In 2018, I made a film for the Carnegie International called <em>Rubber Pencil Devil<\/em>, where I remade fifty-seven scenes from photographs and fragments of culture I had collected from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which I narrated while dressed as Mister Rogers. Seeing behind the curtain was a big part of that. The video has a title card that says <small>LIVE + LET-LIVE<\/small>, which was born out of this mural that was created outside my studio by a local plumber named Denny, using paint that I was getting rid of. He made it his business to paint a mural on this fence near my studio for every holiday. During the month of June, apropos of nothing, and also everything, he decided to write a big phrase on the fence that just said simply, <small>LIVE AND LET LIVE<\/small>. The rainbow serves a similar purpose. It\u2019s just to look at and ponder. It\u2019s not doing anything, but it brings out in you this desire to commune with it. We were never taught to do this. We didn\u2019t have to be.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Hazel Byers is the\u00a0<\/em>Review<em>\u2019s engagement editor.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI probably shouldn\u2019t go on too much about how I love her, but I was part of the Mariah Carey fan club in the late eighties, and I wrote letters to her as early as I could.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2654,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Mariah Carey Fan Club: A Conversation with Alex Da Corte by Hazel Byers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" 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