Gimme Shelter | No Future
Miranda July as Sophie, who is attempting to make a YouYube dance hit. Image via Roadside Attractions.
I didn’t know I’d go to film for the second post of this performance art column, but here’s a surprise. Miranda July’s The Future. That’s right, a performance within a film within a laptop screen within a film within a performance. In the film, July plays Sophie, an aging dancer who fails to make a viral YouYube dance video. Pause. It’s not that I relish depictions of my generation as hapless dreamers full of delusion and neuroto-narcissism on the verge of a charming nervous breakdown. It’s that part of indie-stream film personae that makes me want to vomit out the Winona (Ryder)-worship of my youth. But July has captured something here about performance, the desire for visibility — albeit a very private, framed sense of it – that is real. July’s use of a laptop, YouTube, and the, “30 Dances in 30 Days,” project she sets up for Sophie situates this character in a familiar trope of contemporary persona-making where the number of online hits determines success. Sophie, however much she tries, cannot allow herself to dance for the camera on her computer screen. Suddenly, something very private, and therefore seemingly easy, becomes the voyeuristic eye that shames her out of her “star” potential.
Sophie's epic t-shirt dance, image via Sales on Film
She clings to a worn, yellow shirt that she feels between her fingers over and over again. When she attempts to leave it behind, it floats through the L.A. suburbs to the house where she is living with an older Daddy character. Alone in his bedroom, she folds the shirt over her body and begins to dance. Unlike the self-conscious moves she tries in earlier attempts to dance alone, she jerks about the bedroom to an internal sense of timing that doesn’t match up with the Beach House song playing on her laptop. There is no dialogue here, there’s no interaction, and yet it is an intensely climactic scene. I don’t remember how long the dance lasts, whether it’s the duration of the song or longer, but its cathartic and eerie imagery generates a powerful impact on the viewer, as both a dance and a symbol of time travel, blindness and a dark, shrouded mystery. The Daddy character, once noiselessly peering from the bedroom door, turns away as she rolls across the door frame. Does she see him? Either way, it doesn’t matter. The character, Sophie, is dancing for no one, but Miranda July is dancing for everyone.
It’s About Time: Gimme Shelter, A New Column on Performance Now
Mick Jagger, 1968. Photo from "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus" © 1996.
In an interview for Rolling Stone, Mick Jagger described the 1969 hit “Gimme Shelter” as a song about apocalypse, about the end of the world. He channeled the rage of an era, popularizing dissent in the face of the devastating visibility of war: “Oh, a storm is threat’ning my very life today; if I don’t get some shelter, oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away.”
In 2011, performance emerges out of the “storm” — that cultural flux set in motion by the turmoil of social order over the past ten years. As markets collapse, we are beginning to question the values and beliefs that have contributed to current states of personal and political devastation. Performance has the potential to transform the wreckage into something worth seeing, discussing, and arguing about.
With an amorphous history as a fine art threading back through visual art, theater, dance, video, and photography, performance is usually the medium artists use to rebel against definition or to critique the constraints of other art forms, politics, and socio-economic issues within both the art world and the real world.
Art21′s newest column, Gimme Shelter will feature essays, interviews, “studio” visits, documentation, creative responses, evaluations, and propositions of performance. Posts will shift between current work and historical reference points, as new connections and developments converge. What is at work in the translation of experience is an engagement of faculties beyond the normative gaze. At the core of this column is the unique voice that comes from the subjective experience of the live event. The only way to go forward, right now, is to step up with your whole body and literally, move there.
Robert Whitman, performance for "Passport" on the Hudson River
Note: The Saturday, April 16 performance of Robert Whitman, Passport, has been cancelled.
The Sunday, April 17, 2011, performance will take place as scheduled at 8pm.
Robert Whitman is 75 years old. Talking to him is like if Tristan Tzara swallowed Carl Jung. The artist is a visionary who is gripped by the mysterious power of the image. In the late 1950s and 1960s, Whitman sought to innovate cross-disciplinary art forms. He founded the organization, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) with Robert Rauschenberg and engineers Billy Kluver and Fred Waldhauer. One of their collaborations, Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering held at the 69th Regiment Armory in 1966, is known to have involved eight or nine cars with men holding projectors in the back seats.
Robert Whitman, "Two Holes of Water -3," 1966
Whitman likes the spectacle that turns into an immersive experience that can be viewed from multiple perspectives. His upcoming piece, Passport, premiers April 16-17 at Riverfront Park on the Hudson River near Dia:Beacon, New York, and Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University, New Jersey. At this time, the performance at Riverfront Park is sold out, while seats at the Kasser are still available. Imagine that, to be wise, still making work that’s hot, and to have survived Allan Kaprow as Happenings maven?! Fortunately, I got to interview Whitman before going on location on the Hudson River.
Marissa Perel: In Passport, you’re going to be using pre-recorded video projection, live performance, and real-time streaming of the actions and environments of Riverfront Park and the Kasser Theater. How do the two locations connect? How do you set up each location so that it can be in dialogue with the other?
Robert Whitman: In terms of the set-up, I have the privilege of working with a wonderful production crew. I have many hands and people working with me to make the two locations part of one piece. I wanted to create a simultaneity of experience made up of two distinct environments. What performers can do in the Kasser Theater as an indoor venue, they can’t do on the Hudson and vice versa. But all of the actions will have a vocabulary and rhythm that unifies them.
Marissa Perel’s Top 10 of 2010
Felix Gonzalez-Torres at the Deadline, exhibition @ Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, image courtesy of LeFigaroPresse
1. Felix Gonzalez-Torres in Deadline, exhibition at the Musee d’ Art Moderne, Paris. October 16, 2009 – January 10, 2010. Curator Odile Burluraux said of the exhibition, “Deadline has chosen to examine a group of artists who died during the last twenty years and whose concluding works are marked by an awareness of imminent death, the urgency of the task at hand and impulse to self-transcendence.”When I got to the long corridor of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ xeroxed birds and beaded curtain at the end, I just lost it. The impression left on the beads of visitors’ bodies as they passed through, then the swishing of the beads as bodies disappeared to the other side truly struck me. I was overcome by a feeling of fragility, loss, a sense of absence all in this one moment. It was the most powerful experience I had in the museum, and that I have ever had with Gonzalez-Torres’ work. Other artists in the show: Absalon, Gilles Aillaud, James Lee Byars, Chen Zhen, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hartung, Jorg Immendorff, Martin Kippenberger, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joan Mitchell, Hannah Villiger.
2. Smithsonian’s censorship of Fire in My Belly by David Wojnarowicz from the Hide/Seek Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. An inversion of my #1? Maybe. Here, the threat of the video’s absence only strengthened the attention called to it. I went to a screening of 3 versions of the video held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where we also Skyped with curator Jonathan Katz. This show was denied so many times before it was accepted into the National Portrait Gallery that he was not entirely surprised of it wreaking havoc. What would Wojnarowicz’s work be if there wasn’t at least someone in the religious right gnashing his jowls to tell us it’s the work of Satan?
Jerry Saltz kissing a Wojnarowicz-face poster at the NY Wojnarowicz March Against Censorship, photo by Bradley Wester
3. Elles@centrepompidou, Women Artists in the Collections of the National Modern Art Museum, Paris, May 27, 2009 – February 21, 2011. If I was struck by lightening at that moment, I would have been ok with that – sitting in a room of projections of Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta, and Carolee Schneeman in their early performances. But then I wasn’t and I stepped into a Pipilotti Rist floor-to-ceiling video projection on my way to Nan Goldin’s screening room. The over-stimulation mellowed a bit when I got to Agnes Martin and Hanne Darboven, but my pleasure never subsided. I couldn’t repress a chuckle at the Guerilla Girls’ poster on my way down. Hello! 2010 = IT’S TIME TO BE A WOMAN ARTIST. DO IT! And go to the Pompidou while the show is still up.
“Elephant,” or Why I Love Performance Art
Recent guest blogger Marissa Perel wrote a post following up her residency on this site. — Ed.
Deke Weaver as Hero in "Elephant." Photo by Valerie Oliveiro.
2010 wouldn’t be complete without the Art21 world knowing about this mind-blowing show in a stock pavilion at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign from September 23-27. I don’t know where to begin here — whether it was Deke Weaver’s humor, epic video productions, or thoughtfully crafted dance and music by his collaborators, Jennifer Allen and Chris Peck. Of course, I loved all of those aspects of Elephant, which is why I love performance art. It might be one of the rare forms where too many cooks can actually make a genius broth that appeals to more than one palate.
Elephant is the second in Deke Weaver’s Unreliable Bestiary, a project that utilizes writing, video, and performance to explore the lineage of animals and chart our relationships with them in feats of compelling and intimate grandeur. The show, which was funded by Creative Capital and the Center for Advanced Study has been picked up by the Sundance Film Festival to be performed there this January.
The show opens with four dancers led by Allen, dressed in gray jeans and playing on the iron rails that line the pavilion. The clothing doesn’t give anything away, but as they continue tilting their heads and necks, it becomes evident that they are in fact embodying baby elephants. The pavilion darkens to reveal a video and what looks like a talk show. Weaver comes out in an elephant mask and gray suit to tell the story of his life as an elephant to a TV personality.
Choreographer Sarah Michelson and Parker Lutz, image from Movement Research, Critical Correspondence 2006
Marissa Perel: The first artistic influences I had were in New York and were choreographers. I was really inspired by the dance world, but didn’t understand why it was marginalized in relationship to visual art. I guess I wanted to go to school to understand how dance, performance, and visual art are related. This was before I became aware of Tino Sehgal and his success, and people who have been able to make dance work as currency.
David Velasco: He is someone who is interesting in terms of dance and performance because well, I don’t want to say he was able to commodify dance, but certainly applied an economic structure to dance and performance that previously wasn’t there before.
MP: Yeah, that is also how I see his work, which is mostly because I have a reverence for dance that doesn’t have to be validated by an application to visual art [that’s me referencing The Kiss in a tongue-in-cheek way]. What is your relationship to dance?
DV: First off, I don’t have any formal dance training. I also don’t have any art historical or visual art training even though I’ve been at Artforum for 5 years, and I’ve been writing about art. I started writing about art because it seemed to be the best place that I could talk about ideas in relationship to the material world. It wasn’t stuck in academia, and it wasn’t stuck in any one discourse. Art writing, as turgid and complicated as it can get, is still one of the most interesting fields for experimental writing.
MP: It’s funny that you say that because when I told Jerry [Saltz] that I was going to interview you, he said, “I saw the best minds of his generation lost to academia,” and I was like, “what do you mean?” and he said, “talented writers that could have been critics went into academia or they fell to their teachers’ tastes.” Then he went on to say that he thought what you’re doing is so important for art criticism and it’s leading a new generation of critics.
DV: I did come out of academia in a heavy way. I went to Reed College where I studied anthropology, and then to NYU for critical theory, where I studied with great minds like Avital Ronell, who is a huge influence for me even now. But for me, I couldn’t stay there, and I didn’t want to take on academic writing as my only medium.
Saltz of the Earth: An Interview
Jerry Saltz. Via guestofaguest.com.
One of the hot topics among young artists these days is the show Work of Art on Bravo. Take a dozen artists mostly trained in art schools, give them really inane art assignments and let them have at it. Throw in gallerist, curator, critic personalities whose job it is to make the artists pee their pants, and there you have a reality art TV show. To be honest, I watched it a few times but got bored with the art. I guess that not even a pep talk from Sarah Jessica Parker was enough for them to raise the stakes.
One surprise, however, was the presence of Jerry Saltz as one of the judges.
When I just loved art, before I decided to study it, and at the beginning of making it, I used to read his articles in the Village Voice. His direct style, humor, and sincerity were a bridge to a world that I wanted to inhabit. His writing inspired me to articulate my own thoughts about the work I was seeing regardless of training.
Eventually I got to meet him – at art school – and he was pretty much the same in the flesh as on paper, but I got to see him wave his arms at my studio mess (akin to the image above). Shortly thereafter he appeared on a very high stool on networked TV wreaking havoc. After I read his reflection on being part of Work of Art in New York Magazine, I decided to track him down and ask him a few questions. I wanted to know about his experience on the show as performance, and whether it changed his perspective on his role as a critic. The following is our interview and its many twists and turns, read on!
Marissa Perel: I’m glad I caught you. You’re going on a tour, right?
Jerry Saltz: Yes, I’m giving a lecture tour, “Criticism Never Sleeps” starting in Detroit, then Chicago, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, NYC, then London where I’ll be at the Frieze Art Fair.
MP: You’re like a traveling minister.
JS: My career policy is to just say yes, try anything, try everything, get terrified, try harder and don’t look back.
MP: Sounds like your debut as a television personality made you fearless. When I was reading your article, I was struck by the physical scrutiny and augmentation you went through doing the shoots. Can you talk more about that and how it affected your sense of authority? What was it like to have to talk about the work live vs. the personal space of being a critical writer?
JS: The make up, all the people standing around me while I had to stand on a box with a hundred cameras on me was actually ok. It was more a temporal problem. The form I’m comfortable in needs more time. I’m a slot writer. It takes all 6 days for me to write a little column. Writing is a way that I think, and speaking does not access all of my critical responses, thoughts, etc. I didn’t fully relate my critical self even though my personality was there. I wasn’t articulate enough about what I like because in speaking there is no time for editing. The Bravo people more or less made me who I am on the show by their editing. I’m not ashamed of it but I wish I could have [done that] on stage more articulately or clearly.
