Performance Art Realness with a Twist
Marina Abramovic, "The Artist Is Present," performance documentation, 2010. Courtesy the New York Times
It starts like this:
One snowy night last month, as New Yorkers rushed home in advance of a coming blizzard, more than a hundred artists, scholars and curators crowded into the boardroom of the Museum of Modern Art to talk about performance art and how it can be preserved and exhibited.
And somewhere close to the end we find this, in reference to Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim in 2005:
Ms. Abramovic saw that show, she said in a recent interview, as a way “to take charge of the history of performance.” In the 1990s, as younger artists became interested in work of the ’60s and ’70s, she said she noticed that some were restaging historical works themselves, often without consulting or even crediting the originator. “I realized this is happening because performance is nobody’s territory,” she said. “It’s never been mainstream art and there’s no rules.” Finding this unjust, she decided to set them herself, by recreating the works in consultation with the relevant artists and estates. Better she should do it now, she said, because “they will do it anyway when you’re dead behind your back.”
And so Carol Kino reports for the New York Times on March 10 in an article entitled “A Rebel Form Gains Favor. Fights Ensue” on the Museum of Modern Art’s private “Performance Workshops.” She brings attention to the issues raised by these “Workshops” in the field of the conservation and presentation of performance art and the involvement of museums in this project.
I decided to take those two bits of writing out of the piece to bring attention to a fact that has seemed self-evident to me from the moment I first saw Abramovic’s work, but has become completely evident after a flurry of articles and profiles on her have appeared in many publications lately: Marina Abramovic is a total stone-cold diva. Now don’t get me wrong, this is certainly not meant as a negative value judgment. It’s a fact that makes me love her more, and with the same part of my brain that loves incredible women like Kate Bush, or Tyra Banks. I could see it, from the first interlaced fields of her brushing her hair in 1975’s Art Must Be Beautiful to the time she got in people’s way in 1977’s Imponderabilia, to her most recent alpha female diva moment, The Artist Is Present, in which she stares you down in public.
In short, “doing” Marina Abramovic would be an amazing drag performance. In an alternative universe in my head, this is a very common occurrence. In my head, drag queens LOOOOOOVE “doing” La Marina with almost the same zeal they they usually reserve for “doing” Ana Mendieta or Maya Deren. Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning has a whole section on Guerrilla Girl Realness with a Twist and Chrissie Iles is a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race. But camp fantasies aside, what these extracts from Kino’s piece show is that Abramovic is tough as nails and — for better or for worse — has decided to grab the performance art bull by the horns and try to change its course in her favor. I’m ambivalent about this exertion of will on Abramovic’s part. On the one hand, who else is going to do it? She’s charismatic, people like to see her and listen to her, and she certainly has the street/ivory tower cred to do so. On the other hand, I question her intentions. Is Abramovic pulling a Rhonda Rulebook because she basically doesn’t want people touching her stuff?
New guest blogger: Ivan Lozano
Photo: Ben Aqua
Thanks to Kevin McGarry for his excellent guest blogging and coverage of recent art. Up next is Ivan Lozano. Ivan Lozano is a (mostly) video artist currently working on an MFA in Film/Video/New Media at the School of the Art Institute. In another life, while living in Austin TX, Ivan was the programming director for the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, an arts writer for various publications, and a co-founder of the artist collective the Austin Video Bee.
First Impression: Skin Fruit (Part 2)
Tim Noble and Sue Webster, "Masters of the Universe," 1998–2000. Translucent resin, fiberglass, plastic, and human hair.
(continued from Part 1)
Down the stairs, Nathalie Djurberg’s sexually violent claymations are followed by Cady Noland’s sculptural image of Lee Harvey Oswald at his death. She has him riddled with holes, one in the place of his mouth and gagged with an American flag textile.
In the corner of floor three is one of the most iconic works in the show, Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s Masters of the Universe (1998–2000). The pre-human couple have been installed on a extension rolling down from the museum’s white walls. It appears as if they’re stepping out of a time vacuum into a context vacuum to survey the room. From their vantagepoint, Pawel Althamer’s Schedule of the Crucifix (2005) is the work that demands the most attention, featuring a live performer posing on a cross ten feet up on the wall. He is stationary in a crown of thorns until his schedule dictates that he descend the ladder, change, and exit the room. Nearby, the figure in Andro Wekua’s Wait to Wait (2006) is seated in a motorized rocking chair upon a brick base and within colored glass. He wears clownish make-up and a dress shirt and, lacking pants, you see that this guy’s genitals have been effaced. Subtly in motion, he still seems disconcertingly real, particularly beside Althamer’s living sculpture.
There are odd consistencies between floors. Just about below the floor of Tauba Auerbach’s dimensionally expansive black and white dots are Nate Lowman’s silkscreen of the same ilk. Wrapped around the far side of the room, like Gober’s bed upstairs, is Maurizio Cattelan’s Now (2004), the wax body of JFK in an open casket—a more disquieting sense of sleep, to say the least.
Profile: Matthew Savitsky (artist, Philadelphia)
Matthew Savitsky's studio: Temp. storage salon, Northeast Philadelphia
The artist Matthew Savitsky has based himself in Philadelphia for the past three years after a lengthy tenure in New York. His practice primarily spans sculpture and painting, working with lived materials in response to lived experiences. A meticulous hoarder, he often incorporates personal belongings into his sculptures, installations and tableaux inspired by his own, continual upbringing and relationships to and within communities: Methodist, Pennsylvania Dutch roots; the pristine, coded culture of galleries and collectors; the geographically dispersed Radical Faeries network of intergenerational gay men; decorative trades that monetize craftsmanship to realize clients’ personal visual fantasies, like muralism and interior design. His works convey a kind of autobiographical exhibitionism, formal therapy processing subjective elements of life, ideas and reflections on culture.
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Report: Olav Velthuis at Juicing the Equilibrium (at Independent)
a black sclera contact lens from the Juicing the Equilibrium website
Amidst the storm of attractions and distractions pummeling New York last week while the art fairs were in town, one event stood out for making an earnest attempt to rehabilitate the potential for real criticality in today’s art world. Organized by curator Howie Chen and artist/attorney Jason Kakoyiannis (in collaboration with Columbia University’s Center on Organizational Innovation), Juicing the Equilibrium is a series of talks that solicits thinkers from outside the art world to apply their own readings and methodologies to the infinitely complicated matter of the art market. Essentially, how can an artist actively be both cognizant and critical of market forces?
The series launched at Independent, the new, boothless hybrid art fair/consortium sited at the former X Initiative and former-former Dia building on West 22nd Street in Chelsea. The March 5th event featured a talk entitled “The Return of the 90s–The Art Market in Times of Crisis” by Dutch economic sociologist Olav Velthuis.
I interviewed the organizers in advance of the event, and now I’d like to report on Velthuis’ talk.
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Profile: Nina Schwanse (artist, New Orleans)
In 2009, artist Nina Schwanse relocated from New York City/Philadelphia to New Orleans to continue her video practice at the University of New Orleans. Her work refreshes the typically didactic terrain of mediated female objectification with verbal and visual wit. With each video, she channels a fascination with notoriety into an ongoing exploration of self-representation—an ontological dilemma faced in social contexts of all scales, but especially the macro that is increasingly common in our technological age of instant and accidental celebrity.
In her words, she aims to “restructure the narrative and formal language of news media, advertising, and pornography to create disjunctive portraits that intend to disappoint the expected course of entertainment,” and while doing so, she evokes personas that are genuinely entertaining. She plays most of these characters herself, limiting the degree to which they are allowed to present themselves on camera. When they address the viewer in first person, their speech is matched with speechless modeling, a separation whose tension produces caricatures that resonate beyond superficiality.
k-a-t-e(s) (11 mins., 2010)
Schwanse becomes the pantheon of celebrity Kates who congeal as a somewhat multi-faceted contemporary definition of the name. Her Kates offer deadpan excerpts of their biographies, personal PR, and, of course, humility.
First Impression: Skin Fruit (Part 1)
Robert Cuoghi, "Pazuzu," 2008. Epoxy, solvent varnish, fiberglass, polystyrene, and steel. Installation view, New Museum, New York, NY. (Foreground: Urs Fischer, "Cioran Handrail," 2006. Epoxy resin, pigment and enamel) Photo: Kevin McGarry.
This morning I previewed the hotly anticipated exhibition at the New Museum of Greek collector Dakis Joannou’s art holdings, impishly titled Skin Fruit and curated by Jeff Koons. I’ve been looking forward to this show largely due to the controversy surrounding it and the intrigue presented by the curator/collector pairing. However, I’m happy to report that my journey up and down the museum’s galleries wowed me as a genuine art experience, independently of any provocations external to the art itself.
Beginning on the fourth floor via elevator, I was greeted to my right by a larger-than-life, mannequin-ish sculpture of a glamorously conservative blonde businesswoman by Charles Ray (Fall ’91, 1992). To my left, Liza Lou’s Super Sister (1999), nearly as tall, is coated in rhinestones and sports skin color, an afro, tight little clothes, and a gun. The two stand as polar stereotypes of empowered contemporary/American women. This slash between words points to a wide open but unresolved, era-defining ambiguity: which empire does the curator (does anybody) have in mind? Is it America, the international contemporary art world, or the latter as a product of the former? That is, visual culture as an iteration of the global corporate culture that has, if from one seminal place, radiated from the United States.
The other fully rendered figure in the room—elsewhere in the museum there are plenty more; the show is predicated on the human form in contemporary art—is Robert Cuoghi’s Pazuzu (2008), a mammoth casting of the Assyrian and Babylonian king of the demons best known for possessing Linda Blair in The Exorcist. This is according to the wall text, which also mentions that Pazuzu is a symbol both of hope and of powerful civilizations in final decline: fitting. I found its presence oddly captivating, and as the sculpture was blown up in size from a pendant forty times smaller, its preserved plainness of detail is frightening on a massive scale. Beneath it, the rest of the room is shaded by an abject, eschatological distress.
New guest blogger: Kevin McGarry
Thanks to Leanne Gilbertson for her excellent work covering the Houston contemporary art scene. Up next is Kevin McGarry. Kevin is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. His journalism has recently appeared on Rhizome, T Magazine Blog and the online editions of Art in America, Artforum and Interview. He is a director and programmer of Migrating Forms, a festival of new experimental film and video held at Anthology Film Archives in May.
Raiding, Mining, and Resurrecting: Maurizio Cattelan at The Menil Collection
Maurizio Cattelan, "Untitled," 2003. © Maurizio Cattelan. Photo: George Hixson, Houston. Installation view, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX.
The current Maurizio Cattelan exhibition at The Menil Collection, Houston (February 12– August 15, 2010) marks the U.S. debut of recent large-scale works, site-specific installations, and four new works. Cattelan’s first solo show in this country since 2003 celebrates the artist’s return to sculpture after several years of publishing and curatorial work, including his 2002 co-founding of The Wrong Gallery in Chelsea, New York, his collaborations on Permanent Food (an occasional journal comprised of altered pages torn from other magazines) from 1996-2007, his co-editorship of Charley (a conceptual project and independent series on international contemporary artists) from 2002–present, and his curation of the Caribbean Biennial in 1999 and the Berlin Biennial in 2006. The notion of revisiting to give new life–suggested by Cattelan’s own turning back to his past artistic practice –is provocatively carried through the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, Maurizio Cattelan: Is There Life Before Death? on a number of levels.
The exhibition consists of large-scale works first seen in Europe in 2007, along with recent sculptures, including works created in response to Cattelan’s site visits to the Menil that riff on the museum’s renowned Surrealist holdings. Organized by Franklin Sirmans, the Menil’s former Curator of Modern and Contemporary art, the exhibition juxtaposes a range of objects–mostly from the 1960s and 70s–that Cattelan, in collaboration with Sirmans, selected from the Menil’s large permanent collection. They are suggestively installed to create conversations with the artist’s own new and recent works. This installation strategy trips up the typical arrangement of a solo artist show—an arrangement that, more often than not, isolates the featured artist’s work from examples of artistic predecessors and contemporaries in order to foreground the sense of an internal, exclusively personal, development.
Rather than confining Cattelan’s artworks to a couple of galleries, the exhibition has examples of the artist’s works sprinkled throughout, even on the Menil’s main building. Some are buried in the intimate recesses of Antiquities and Surrealist galleries, others are more visibly displayed, including Cattelan’s Untitled (2003), depicting a “drummer boy,” which has been relocated from its usual position atop The Rachofsky House in Dallas to perch coyly upon the roof of the Menil’s Renzo Piano building.
The Menil Collection: 20th and 21st Century Art as “Daily Companions”
“Art: Take it off its marble pedestal and show it as a daily companion, refreshing, human and rich: witness of its time and prophet of times to come.” – John de Menil
On the evening of Friday, February 5, the director of the Menil Collection, Joseph Helfenstein, and the Menil’s former curator of modern and contemporary art and new chief curator of contemporary art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Franklin Sirmans, hosted a twenty-first century conversation about the Menil’s installation of twentieth century art. Discussing the philosophy informing the arrangement of the twentieth-century galleries, the two gave an overview of their choices while highlighting the significant divergence of the Menil’s collecting and exhibition strategies from other art institutions, like MoMA, that are committed to an encyclopedic overview and didactic presentation of the history of modernism.
The evening began in the entrance room of the Renzo Piano designed building (1982–86) where the dark wood floors, diffused lighting, and the surrounding park-like setting of the Menil offered a relaxed, contemplative environment for the approximately 100 visitors. After a brief introduction, the two led the visitors into the galleries where the artworks are, as Helfenstein pointed out, exhibited without the typical barriers that tend to prescribe the viewing experience and ensure that viewers never come too dangerously close to the art. Through a lack of didactic wall panels, docent tours, and audio guides, the institutional philosophy of the Menil Collection aims to allow its art objects to take the lead and withhold a sense of a single narrative direction. Helfenstein and Sirmans discussed how specific juxtapositions of twentieth-century and contemporary works–such as those by René Magritte and Robert Gober–generate visual and intellectual dialogues without making explicit connections or foregrounding any single concept.
Unlike MoMA, the Menil Collection is a considerably more intimate space to encounter modern and contemporary art and unlike that much larger institution, the Menil also has limited holdings in classical European modernism, specifically Cubism. Helfenstein frames these differences in terms of positive potentialities, drawing attention to the Menil’s exceptional examples of two alternative lineages, each of which weaves a significant path through modernism’s history. The first is a trend toward spiritual abstraction—represented in works by Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, and Bryce Marsden, among others. This impulse extends beyond the displays in the Piano building to the Rothko Chapel, resonates in the stunning Dan Flavin installation at Richmond Hall, and reverberates with the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum. The second alternative Helfenstein identifies is what he refers to as figurative Surrealism, a tendency he aligns with a more political, activist impulse. This trend is reflected not only in the Menil’s rich holdings of Surrealism and non-Western art–specifically the arts of Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Pacific Northwest coast–from which Surrealism drew considerable inspiration, but also in the examples of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Robert Gober.
The current exhibition of the work of Maurizio Cattelan (February 12– August 15, 2010) weaves its own unique way in and out of this Surrealist narrative, reflecting upon the Menil’s holdings, perhaps unraveling some preconceptions about several well-known works, and opening up multi-directional dialogues with other works in the Collection. In the next post, I will discuss this exhibition in relation to these issues.
