Ralph Lemon review, article from Artcritical.com

How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?

NY premiere by Ralph Lemon, BAM Next Wave Festival, October 13-16, 2010

The first part of Ralph Lemon’s new performance piece “How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Do Anything?” consists of the artist, seated by a microphone and playing narrator to “Sunshine Room,” the video that plays behind him on a large screen. In it, new material and found footage combine, mainly to display overlapping themes from his previous body of work as well as heartfelt thoughts on the death of his partner, the Odissi dancer Asako Takami, who died of cancer in 2007. Excerpts play from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris— the 1972 film about a man who is visited by his wife’s ghost—along with re-creations of scenes from that film. The new footage features 102-year-old ex-sharecropper Walter Carter and his 80-year-old wife Edna. Lemon met Carter back in 2002 in Mississippi when he was researching “Come Home Charlie Patton,” 2004, and Carter has been showing up in Lemon’s work ever since.

In the ending portion of “Come Home,” which was Lemon’s last full-length work for the stage, dancers throw themselves about in an ecstatic, aggressively physical movement sequence without discernable pattern. This was also featured prominently in the video. We see footage from the old performance as well as recent rehearsals of work being created in the same vein. Lemon, as the live-narrator, explains the footage: “What you are watching is a ‘drunk and stoned dance’ with a few rigorous parameters…and in this zone, gap, void, where they diligently want to follow the rules but can’t—that is where I want this work to live and flourish.” After the video and narration portion, part two of the performance features Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Darrell Jones, Gesel Mason, Owui Okpokwasili, Omagbitse Omagbemi and David Thompson dancing this beautiful but confounding piece of material, sober of course.

Underlying the lecture-performance Lemon designed for part one is a lot: a riff on the visiting artist’s talk; an evolution of 1990s European non-dance dance made popular by the French choreographers Jérôme Bel and Xavier Le Roy; a performance of theory, specifically of the ideas of spectator emancipation developed by Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière. But Lemon’s explicitly stated intention in this piece, overarching the three distinct sections, is to move beyond or outside of form itself. To do so—to be free of form—is nearly impossible when dealing with bodies that have ingested and, in a sense, become their physical training and technique; hence, perhaps, the idea of drunk and stoned dancing. Likewise, disruptive cross-disciplinary forms like combines of lecture-performance and staged video are by now so established, his attempts to disrupt form are obvious failures.

Lemon, however, is more interested in the questions and problems he poses, and is just fine without the achievement of answers or solutions per se, as he continues to posit the unanswerable. In the film from the first half of the performance, Carter, we’re told, asks dancer Okpokwasili (who plays “the Hare”) the performance’s title question, “How can you stay in the house all day and not do anything?” In response, Lemon our narrator says, “The hare stares blankly. The question is, of course, the answer and the form in which the answer exists.” So in a search for formlessness, we come to this: a question as the essence of form.

Okpokwasili and Lemon perform the third part of the evening-length performance in a section titled “Come Home,” which starts with Okpokwasili’s loud, long off-stage wailing. When she enters the stage and picks up a tambourine—back to the audience, audibly crying with her broad, strong shoulders slightly hunched—the slight gesture seems to indicate both the necessity and the futility of art at moments of desperation and despair. Later, Lemon walks onto the stage wearing one sock, removes it halfway through a weightless-seeming movement sequence, folds it, places it on his knee, and then dances tenderly with it. Finally, the two brilliant dancers move together on stage to close the work. Quieter and more resolute, their minimal duet was a distillation of the massively physical ending sequence from “Charlie Patton,” where this thread of meaning began. It looked the way pain feels as it fades over time. Internal violence is replaced by nagging sensation; memory intact, but you still have to show up to dance on stage with your one white sock.

Article originally published HERE

Article about The Silo, published in The Brooklyn Rail

Raphael Rubinstein on Art's Past and the Future of Publishing

by Patricia Milder

In his review of the New Museum’s The Last Newspaper show, a collection of works made on, with, or inspired by printed newspapers, Holland Cotter walked off with these lines: “But a genuinely ‘last newspaper’ is still nowhere in sight. And you read that here.” Yeah, I thought as I read it, here on nytimes.com.

Jonathan Borofsky, installation, Paula Cooper Gallery, 1980.

If the New Museum show is concerned with the afterlife of tactile news materials in art, including the in-house performative creation of boutique broadsheets, why is Cotter throwing in cute lines like this as if the survival of theNew York Times and other publications doesn’t have to do, 100 percent, with their transition into digital formats for downloading into e-readers?

Here’s a more forward-thinking idea (admittedly not mine, but the poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein’s): What may be happening with the advent of e-readers is that more conventional writing will start to influence what is happening on the web.

When I sat down with Rubinstein to discuss his new blog The Silo (only called a “blog” because we don’t yet have the language for what it is), it didn’t take long for me to realize that what we were discussing went beyond one writer’s thoughtful creative project into the larger subject of new uses for existing online forms. His website is one that optimizes independence and criticality from within the standardized confines of mass-produced self-publishing software.

As exhibitions like The Last Newspaper and the growth in popularity of the artist’s book as an art form provide examples of culture-makers wanting, and needing, to revisit the tactile and personal quality of old-school ways of disseminating journalistic and creative writing, The Silo subverts the ubiquitous technological takeover of the culture industry from within. It uses the web’s archival capability to display and house—potentially forever—finely written documents of historically revisionist art criticism. This is not your average hastily written, gossip-laden, ego-driven art blog. There are other websites that hold good writing that is not also printed offline on paper (a dying indicator of quality), but these are usually in the form of legitimate online magazines with multiple writers, editors, and advertisers.

Daniel Spoerri, Triple multiplicateur d’art, Assemblage, 1972, 76 × 48 × 48 cm. Courtesy Galerie Henze & Ketterer, Wichtrach/Bern. Photograph: Claude Opprecht, Copyright: ProLitteris, Zürich.

“Being able to write exactly what you want, when you want, how you want it, and being able to reach, potentially, a lot of readers was just, as a writer, a temptation I couldn’t resist anymore,” Rubinstein, who was senior editor at Art in America for 13 years and has published numerous volumes of art criticism and poetry, explains. Sounds like anyone who decides to write a blog, right? Well, here’s where The Silo takes a new turn: based on the writer’s frustration with theOctober group’s exclusionary accounts of art history, typified by the well-known resource book Art Since 1900, the website is designed to be a cumulative reference work that will eventually reach a critical mass of entries and then just stay there, as an archive, on the web. It’s also the antidote to something like Wikipedia—here is one trusted, named source, writing with a level of finish reminiscent of book publishing (i.e. no post-post editing) on highly focused, personal interest-based subject matter. With this project, Rubinstein asks, “Is it possible and is it worthwhile to give writing this kind of attention and finish in an online context? Is it appropriate for this medium?”

Each short entry provides access to information and opinion about thought provoking international artists who never quite made the canon in this country or whose importance has been forgotten by standard art historical accounts of the last 40 years. The style of these entries is taken, in part, from a book that Rubinstein wrote several years ago, published in its entirety only in French, called In Search of the Miraculous: Fifty Episodes from the Annals of Contemporary Art. I read the few of these episodes that are available in English; they place art history somewhere between dry fact and fanciful fiction, which feels like being immersed in a world you always wanted to live in but never knew might actually exist. The book tells each artist’s story without using his/her name, except in the index; artists are pulled from history as well as literature. The entries in The Silo are more about advocacy for specific artists, so Rubinstein doesn’t delve into the same ambiguities between art criticism and fiction.

Logo for The Silo, designed by Elena Berriolo.

There is some crossover between the book and the blog, starting with Daniel Spoerri, a Romanian-born, half-Jewish, half-Swiss artist who was part of Fluxus and Nouveau Réalisme. From In Search of the Miraculous: “In the years to follow, his life will take him to a Greek island where, for 12 months, he will keep a detailed record of his meals, the recipes they involve and the lives of those around him as they relate to eating; he will open a restaurant in Germany where, at the end of each day, he will glue the remnants of selected meals (plates, glasses, silverware, chicken bones, cigarette butts, etc.) to the tables and sell them to an art dealer who will display the table tops, shorn of legs, on the walls of his prestigious gallery.” From The Silo: “Despite the price exacted on his family by European history, Spoerri has a strong attachment to the continent’s past: Europeans have, he says, ‘2,000 years of culture in the ass’ while Americans have only 200.” Like Spoerri, many of the artists on whom Rubinstein focuses our attention are post-war European figures. He believes there remains an ingrained (though fading) prejudice against them in the U.S.

Many artists featured are subjects, also like Spoerri, about whom Rubinstein has written in the past; they are not figures without influence or a measure of recognition. But the artists he is including first in The Silo are those that aren’t but should be, he feels, acknowledged at the highest level. Art history is often confined to what certain academics write about it. Hence, someone like Jonathan Borofsky, an American artist who was highly visible in the late 1970s and ’80s, can be forgotten today. Rubinstein chose to add him to The Silo when he realized that his M.F.A. studio art students’ work owed much to this artist, yet so few of them recognized it.

He explains as much in the profile—Rubinstein’s writing on the site is refreshingly transparent—and then continues: “These students aren’t influenced directly by Borofsky but by artists of the 1990s who, consciously or not, derived much of what seemed fresh and exciting in their work from Borofsky. I’m thinking, for instance, of Raymond Pettibon, whose vigorous comic-influenced drawing style and taste for large chunks of text, gangs of drawings push-pinned to the wall and sprawling installations closely echoes Borofsky’s late 1970s work. Ditto Karen Kilimnik’s messy theatrical installations. Yet another contemporary mode that can be traced back to Borofsky is the manic painting-sculpture confrontations that most people associate with Martin Kippenberger.”

The Silo is only collaborative in that it gets its clean, readable, black-and-white design from the sculptor Daniel Wiener, and its logo and title from the artist Elena Berriolo, who is also Rubinstein’s wife. Concerning matters of content, the writer is completely independent, which means that he need not limit his focus, as almost every kind of publication prefers writers do, to work that is currently on view. This is not a small issue: art critics, for the most part, have their agenda set by what the market and the art world happen to be looking at. Although he is not, by any means, anti-market, Rubinstein says that with this project, “I am trying to do something about my skepticism about how institutions behave.” With museums beholden to the interests of their boards of trustees, and other less-than-straightforward reasons why certain works are shown in particular places, it’s no wonder that a critic would choose not to rely solely on the subjects that these institutions offer up for consideration.

Despite this independence in his choices of artists to profile, coincidentally during the first couple of months that Rubinstein was posting entries to his blog, two Silo artists were being shown in New York. Gene Beery, a reclusive artist who has been living in the wilds of Northern California for about 40 years, had his first show in years at Mitchell Algus’s new space in the West Village. Likewise, around the same time that Rubinstein wrote about the marginalized (until recently) artist Marjorie Strider, she was featured in an article in Art in America discussing Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968, a traveling exhibition currently at the Brooklyn Museum. The magazine even printed a photo of Strider’s large triptych of bikini-clad women from the early ’60s that Rubinstein discusses at length in The Silo. Of this piece he writes, “Done in a bright, flat illustrational style with a minimum of modeling, the three figures sported three-dimensional breasts (‘build-outs’ as the artist termed them) that, by literalizing the volumes of Playboy-style imagery, drew attention to and subtly critiqued what would later be called the ‘objectivizing male gaze.’”

These kinds of coincidences don’t bother Rubinstein; he says, “I know I’m not the only person that is doing this kind of rethinking of the past.” But he is the only person doing it in this particular form, born out of the problems and possibilities of publishing in the 21st century. Reading The Silo isn’t exactly the same as sitting with Rubinstein in his living room in TriBeCa, looking through old art books and obscure catalogs while he explains the work and lives of amazing artists you’ve never known. In lieu of a “moment,” it provides archival longevity—but the feel is still personal, the touch as expertly handmade as a blog can be.

The Perfect Object: Circulating the Fine Art Adoption Network (article from the Brooklyn Rail)

Art objects have long been the centerpiece of many a tale of intrigue. There are innumerable stories replete with counterfeiting, stealing, high stakes trading, and political maneuvering à la the Barnes Collection, any one of which could (if it hasn’t already) be made into a fast-paced Hollywood blockbuster.

This is not one of those.

It’s an account of a network of people moving through never-before-codified social interactions in a way that doesn’t harm anyone, isn’t meant to disrupt the market, and doesn’t lay claims to a grounding in theory, Marxist or otherwise (though ideas like Marcel Mauss’s gift economy and Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural heritage have been applied to the organization post-creation). This is the Fine Art Adoption Network (F.A.A.N.): a quiet, consistent online space where a less moneyed collector such as myself can use her love of art as a kind of currency, and an artist who wishes to engage in a more wholesome type of exchange can find pleasure in gifting a select work. At least, that’s one experience of it. Every interaction is different. Institutions and more traditional collectors also frequent the site—it’s really up to the individual artists to choose who, if anyone, gets to own their work, and why.

The Brooklyn-based painter Adam Simon started F.A.A.N. in 2006, after receiving financial backing from the then-new commissions program at Art in General. Simon prefers to look at the network not as some sort of intentional social sculpture but as a natural outgrowth of his work as a painter. The idea that this kind of social project is historically at odds with an object-oriented studio practice seems to weigh on him, but the ease with which F.A.A.N. fits into today’s art world reflects the waning ghettoization of forms. In a sense, it is the perfect performance document. By imbuing art objects with the essence of a progressive social experiment and performative life event, an object transcends, even further, the materials with which it was created.

Simon doesn’t talk in these grandiose terms, however. He’s pragmatic, down-to-earth, with the kind of intelligence that naturally sorts through all the muddled motivations and systematic pitfalls in a place like the art world and comes up with solutions that can only be defined with words like “simple” and “good.” There have been and are highly visible artists participating in F.A.A.N. (notably Amy Sillman, who set a precedent by refusing a major museum’s bid for adoption in favor of an artist named Peter Ferko, who runs the nonprofit Artists Unite and who wrote to her: “I sleep. I dream of heads moving across a canvas. One is obscured by an orange square…”) But there are also a lot of good artists on F.A.A.N. (as there are in Brooklyn and all over the world) who, as Simon remarks, “will never really sell a lot of work and never really show up in the history books.” It occurred to him at some point, that “when they look back on their lives, they’re going to see their epiphanies in the studio and they will have some objects that they think are really great, but they’re also going to look back on a lot of social interaction—that’s a really big part of being an artist. It’s a lot of talking.” A big part of F.A.A.N. is facilitating a certain kind of heavily invested art talk—whetted by the potential of actual art ownership—between artists and a diversified, less exclusive set of collectors.

Screen shot with snap shots. Cover image for Adam Simon’s book Fine Art Adoption Network, published by Art in General. Photo by Adam Simon.

When I went to Nancy Brett’s top floor SoHo loft one morning to pick up the painting that I had requested for “adoption” on F.A.A.N. via an email exchange with the artist, natural light was flooding the large space; the works on the white studio walls had me a bit stunned. I knew before I arrived that I liked her abstract, organically grid-based paintings, but my immediate and emotional attachment to her body of work surprised me. The name of the network, like the language many collectors use to describe their art pieces—“members of my family,” etc.—started to make a little more sense.

Brett and I had what felt like a very delicate, respectful conversation about the process as we acted it out. She described how nice it was to hear someone directly saying that not only did she like the work, but that she wanted to have it in her life: “Because that’s what I would hope for my work. Since it’s not going to be in my life anymore, that it would be somewhere where it would be appreciated. I think you assume that when something is collected in a gallery, but you don’t really know what someone’s reason for collecting it is. You don’t know if they want to have it in their life, which is the biggest commitment of all, much more than the expense of it. Incorporating it into your mentality, your consciousness; it changes your life in some way.” We also talked about New York and Los Angeles, and what it means to be a parent, an artist, and a woman. I told her I liked her shoes. We talked about how great the idea of veganism is, but how difficult it is never to eat cheese. She carefully wrapped up the painting, and gave it to me.

Simon tends to describe the origins of F.A.A.N. as a solution to a storage problem: too much good art in the world without a useful enough system of distribution in place. He refers to the vault that Al Held had carved in the side of a mountain to hold all the paintings he had in his possession at the end of his life: “Even if you’re successful, you still accumulate a lot of objects.” And he self-deprecatingly exaggerates his anxieties about the burden his own paintings may become for his son some day. But F.A.A.N. is not about moving large volumes of work; it was created with a huge respect for each individual object, and the process takes time, energy, and real emotional investment for all parties involved. It’s not a process that makes sense in the (art) world as we know it, but maybe we’re all just unnaturally accustomed to bureaucracy, competition, and padlocked doors. When I left Brett’s studio that day, painting in hand, the air just beginning to taste crisp in that late morning, mid-September New York way, I felt lighter for my new possession, and pleasantly, hopefully, confused.

Original article HERE

A Soft Space, Label Free - Review of Raimund Hoghe in the Brooklyn Rail

How easily a display of difference can fall into becoming—or at least appearing—exploitative at one extreme, and didactic at the other. The space in between those equally dangerous poles, though, holds great promise; one fulfilled by the tender, quietly physical depictions of self and other by Raimund Hoghe and Faustin Linyekula. Though their evening length performance Sans-titre (Untitled) at Dance Theater Workshop was by no means a complete extension of this perfect moment, the highly selected, minimal movements and actions these men engaged in were mostly spot on. Hoghe has talked in the past about his works and their attention to unusual forms of beauty—he shows variations on the human figure, not to shock or offend, but rather to open us up to new expressions of human fragility as achingly, pleasingly aesthetic. It’s all a bit much to take in emotionally: the balance comes from extra slow pacing and highly edited small, precise physical action.

Hoghe has an untraditional body for a performer, and as the show begins he gives the audience time to get to know this body and get used to him in shared space. He walks slowly, along with Linyekula, across the stage, covering most of the area before any more real action happens. This isn’t the first dance piece to ever start slowly and methodically, but the particular kind of slowness experienced here is distinct. It’s not boring, though I’m sure more than one mind wandered a bit. But this kind of individual mental wandering seems built into the experience, or at least doesn’t seem to be in direct opposition to it. Hoghe lines the perimeter of the stage with pieces of white printer paper and it is a beautiful ritual; it is pure visual pleasure caught up with the difficulty his body has bending over to drop the paper down and Linyekula’s less repetitive actions that happen simultaneously inside the in-progress frame.

After introducing us to his small body and prominently curved spine through his humble parade around the space, Hoghe’s participation stays peripheral for much of the first half of the show. He stands with his back to the audience and then lays face up for a while in the back-center of the space. Linyekula approaches a pile of small, smooth rocks at the front of the stage and, at first, lines them up from the front to the back of the stage in an action that recalls Hoghe’s white paper placements. He moves, bending at the waist and dropping his head’s weight toward the ground, swaying with control and grace, yet charged with animal-like momentum. He rises onto his toes, but his legs curve as if he has no knees. Once he removes his shirt, we can see this body as a specimen of ideal anatomy; we see every muscle and bone. When he moves to the front of the stage after gathering the stones, we can see his breath and the subtle and not-so-subtle flexing of his spine even more clearly.

The two performers are meant to represent different cultures, but more basically than that, they are there as individuals in their quite obviously different physical forms. The politics of cultural representation come from Hoghe’s European perspective, and though I was not personally offended by the depiction of an African body within the aestheticized European frame, the point of view is less racially sensitive than we’re used to in progressive dance in this country. It takes a certain amount of belief in the intentions of the artist here, and an acceptance of his use of difference to create new beauty from forms that are both archetypal and original. It’s tricky, with works like these we’re always left thinking about whose image is not seen: a woman with a deformity, for example, or the truly emancipated black male form. Total inclusiveness, however, is not a requirement for art to hold great meaning, to be truly good, or to be beautiful.

The essence of each performer’s movement becomes representative of them; there is little in the way of virtuosic dance, though it is more than obvious that Linyekula is capable of technical perfection in many forms. His body is shown to be incredible, and a strong contrast to Hoghe, but not “better,” necessarily. At one point, Hoghe takes off his shirt, lies down on his belly, and Linyekula places stones along his curved spine. Small, unexplainable movements that follow this—sliding the rocks along the floor away from him, for example—contain all the emotion of the most dramatic acting or danced movement. Every small action is charged. You wait for it a long time, past the point of interest even, and then still feel it quite deeply. Linyekula places his arm around Hoghe and Hoghe returns the gesture; they walk slowly to the front of the stage and then simply look at the audience. They have done little, but contained a lot in a relatively short period of time: moments of transcendence, the occasional drop in momentum, nakedness, imperfection, and one man’s sensitive vision of a softer, more tender humanity.

Original article online HERE

Light and Movement in a Bushwick Loft- Review of Anna Sperber in The Brooklyn Rail

It is possible for site specificity to take over a performance to such an extent that an awareness of place becomes, in a sense, the subject of the work itself. There was no denying the Bushwick-ness of Anna Sperber’s Naomi, performed the evenings of September 9 – 11. It was shown in her loft space called Brazil, a small room with an exotic name that floats precariously above Flushing Avenue as if continuous with the night sky. Bushwick itself felt its most romantic from this vantage point; it is a place that at times feels alive and raw, a reincarnation of some murky image our collective memory holds of an early ’80s SoHo. But there is more remoteness here: it is an extremity far enough away from the source of the city’s pulse to be cold in moments, even depressing.

There must have been less than 20 chairs in the audience, pushed as far up against the back wall as possible and facing a many-windowed corner. The dance started with looking outward; in the dark, dancers walked the perimeter of the space and then paused to gaze stoically or longingly out the windows. We are here, they acknowledged.

Later in the performance, individual dancers spent some time ignoring the windows and either turning and balancing independently in the center of the room or standing right up to the audience and looking beyond us, as if still gazing out of a window. But the dancers kept coming back to the open borders of this loft that seemed at once claustrophobic and dangerously open. A small room with big windows set high in the sky: limbs dangled outside; heads leaned out in unison; a stage light shone onto a building across the street.

Other lights were at play inside, both soft and sharp; sometimes it was just the streetlights outside in this industrial stretch of city that naturally lit the small space. Constant shifting had the piece crossing back and forth over the line between convincingly high dramatics and trying too hard. If the site-specificity was the star of the show, Joe Levasseur’s collaboration with Sperber on the lighting provided good enough support.

In danced movement, there was indeed a slow build from pedestrian movements into a progression of disparate solos and group actions that stayed miraculously disconnected from each other in a space that should have made any real distance impossible. One dancer writhed and twisted on the floor, others played with costumes, putting on and then loudly dropping to the floor their heavy, bejeweled, cropped jackets. The girl in me delighted at the sparkle of these garments in the changing lightscape. There were many moments of beauty, but amidst them, I had the nagging sense that one more edit might have brought these charged particles into something more cohesive, secure, and meaningful.

Original article online HERE

Ideological Formation/ Artcritical.com

Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly, Ideological Formation at Mount Tremper Arts in the Catskill Mountains, New York, August 14^th, 2010

Back in March, after repeated visits to the Guggenheim to secretly record an audio score for Tino Seghal’s “The Kiss” (2002), Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly directed two male performers at the Volta Art Fair in a disruptive “corrective” of Seghal’s original work. Performance critic Claudia LaRocco suggested they post the video documentation of this and a subsequent performance on her now-defunct blog on WNYC’s website, which resulted in the creation of their video work, “You Call This Progress?” The video itself, a political performance document with overlaid text, is limited as an aesthetic product. However, over the last five months, Gerard and Kelly have developed the video’s content into a more mature, layered, if at times intellectually overwrought (even amid Lady Gaga references) performance for three dancers. “Ideological Formation,” shown August 14^th at Mount Tremper Arts, is a mash-up of high and lowbrow references that, even as they are decontextualized and collaged together, stay concretely based in militaristic and sexual representations of the male body.

Like Seghal, Kelly (a former New York City Ballet dancer) and Gerard have earned crossover art world appeal because of the critical foundations of their choreography. They just completed the theory-heavy Whitney Independent Study studio program and tend to focus on contemporary ideas about the commodification of the body (hello, Marina and Tino) and the fetishistic elitism of live art. But this particular piece is grounded in seductive, historically and pop-culturally aware danced movement, which at times feels like a guilty pleasure. Perhaps that’s because in it, three beautiful young men are actually dancing to music—a rarity in contemporary interdisciplinary dance works, though the tides may be changing—and that music happens to be “Material Girl” and “Alejandro.”

Kelly performs with Jose Tena, a lanky 15-year-old who attends high school at LaGuardia, and the exquisitely present Ben Asrial. As a trio, “Ideological Formation” recalls, abstractly, Brown’s choreography, and explicitly, a petition for human relationships moving beyond the conformity of the couple. Tena and Asrial—both deeply vulnerable performers—are used in sexually or emotionally suggestive formations that challenge the assumed neutrality of Seghal’s male-female couple. The work claims a broad heritage by inhabiting other artists’ movements, something Seghal has famously, and revolutionarily as far as the economics of performance go, sought to make impossible.

They also trace a lineage from Martha Graham through Madonna, who was once her student, to Gaga. By recreating these women’s choreography directly, gay culture is, in a sense, stolen back or re-appropriated. (Madonna and Gaga are commonly critiqued for poaching and repackaging a queer aesthetic.) Young Tena performs Graham’s iconic contractions, which she designed with a sexually mature woman’s body in mind, and even speaks her words: “I am a dancer. I believe that we learn from practice…” More formally, the piece uses the minimalist aesthetic of Trisha Brown’s early work as well as certain of Robert Morris’s dances, referencing his use of performers hidden under and then interacting with white cardboard boxes. These Morris references, like every aesthetic choice, are also loaded with questions about gender representation and intellectual property in danced movement; he’s rumored to have stolen much of his choreography from Simon Forti when they were married.

Video and installation artist Chelsea Tonelli Knight collaborated with Kelly and Gerard on a video, which was screened halfway through the performance. It featured the same dancers and choreography, only the performers stood waist high in the Esopus River, which is just a short walk from the performance venue at Mount Tremper Arts. Again, Brown’s formal challenges to theatrical conventions during her heyday in the late 60s and 70s get a nod. But beyond that, the video succeeds because it is used simply as another medium through which to present these male bodies in motion as both formal aesthetic instruments and as human beings with thoughts, lovers, and a shared representational history.

Original article posted on artcritical.com HERE

Mount Tremper Arts / The Brooklyn Rail

Whatever broad definition one can generally make for “critical distance” these days, I know I didn’t have it during the month and a half I was living at Mount Tremper Arts. In fact, I didn’t even have much normal personal distance from the artists in residence most of the time, not to mention the founders of the festival, Aynsley Vandenbroucke and Mathew Pokoik. I lack that outside eye, which can produce both the best and the worst kinds of comparative analysis. But I do have a broad view of this small, intelligently curated residency in the Catskills where some of the most interesting contemporary dance artists ate, slept, worked, and performed during July and August. This is a story about how a space can hold an idea: the blurring of the line between art and life. Or: how individuals are an extension of what they produce, especially when their product is—despite documentation and memory—essentially ephemeral and site-specific.

When Ryan Kelly and Brennan Gerard, the last artists in residence, left the property on August 15, you could feel the well-worn, turn-of-the-century white farmhouse heave a big, empty sigh of relief. Over six weeks it, along with the barn style post-and-beam performance space up the hill, had housed ideas, creations, stories, discussions ad nauseum, frustrations, miscommunications, and the budding of many a new friendship. The performances themselves, the public face of the festival, were just a small portion of the artistic process, and arguably, just a small part of the artwork itself. Yvonne Rainer was staging rehearsals as performances back in the ‘60s; in the years since, all aspects of artistic process and an artist’s life have become increasingly recognized, especially in the performance world, as inseparable from the artwork itself. This summer, many of the works hinted at full disclosure of this fact, and when they didn’t do so explicitly, glimpses into the common parts of each performer’s existence made even the most specifically topical works incredibly personal during their presentation.

July 9, 2010: D.H. Lawrence wrote about Cézanne and his lifetime of fighting the cliché. Lawrence said that the artist was able to find the “appleyness” of the apple, but that in most of the other subjects, he still painted the cliché. Lawrence seemed mainly concerned about the loss of the sensual, intuitive experience—we are all intellectual, spiritual people, he said. It is the intuitive, sexuality driven selves that know, and we ignore that. Or, at least, the English painters ignored that. Rashaun Mitchell told me he doesn’t want to make a solo work. He gives Silas Reiner all the emotionally taxing bits of physical work and builds his second dance piece from the outside, rather than on his own body. I wonder if that has anything to do with painting and Lawrence—if at all, only remotely. Mitchell and Reiner totally inhabit their bodies; they are so beautiful, even when they aren’t moving. Intuitive reason might, however, have been trained right out of their instruments, physical as they are. Sex can be out of touch with essentiality, too.

Those thoughts came up before I had seen even a run through of their performance, which occurred publicly on the opening day of the festival. The night before, there was a giant dead pig lying on ice in our bathtub at the house. It inspired bad dreams for at least one person that night, but fed the largest audience in Mount Tremper Arts history once it was roasted. Pulled pork sandwiches, cole slaw, pasta with pesto, potato salad, fruit salad; so much of it grown right from the garden. Mitchell and Reiner performed Adyton early in the afternoon. Later that day, they performed a Cunningham “Minevent” with fellow Cunningham dancer Marcie Munnerlyn. Music for the event came from the post-classical string quartetETHEL, a group that, when it performed alone earlier in the day, was the obvious favorite among the local audience members. (Contemporary experimental dance performance is a bit of a stretch for the rural Catskills crowd, but that’s the beauty of this place. It’s a challenging head on culture-clash from start to finish. No one is in his comfort zone—performers in front of a mixed audience, less of a knowing crowd than they’re used to, and audience members seeing new advancements in an art they’ve never been exposed to before. But there’s food shared, and tenderness just seems to grow from the soil, so everyone is safe and comfortable. It’s kind of amazing.)

Select descriptions pulled from a forthcoming essay I wrote for PAJ:

After dropping in through the window only inches away from the first row, Riener writhed on the floor. He was enacting a death, but the physical actions were more striking, more external than any real pain seems to ever appear. Mitchell knows his collaborator’s body well; the movements he designed are physically extreme—deep arches of the spine, the slamming of his chest upon the floor. Tensed limbs, and then he lies motionless. Jumping down from the windowsill, Mitchell grabs Riener and gracefully drags him to the back of the room. This is the first of a number of explorations with dead weight that are scattered throughout the piece. Then, once the blinds were closed and Riener was outside of the space again, Mitchell began a sweeping, gentle glide that took him spinning in circles around the room. Loud pounding sounds (Riener jumping against the space’s walls from the outside) didn’t budge his internally focused float through this solo. Occasionally, a soft wind would blow the window shades open a bit, providing randomly strewn natural light that illuminated Mitchell for a moment or two, then moved the daytime darkness deeper into our awareness.

Minevent featuring dancers from Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Photo by Mathew Pokoik, courtesy Mount Tremper Arts.

August 7, 2010: I’m sitting on the porch with Foofwa d’Imobilité now. He’s wearing a black Adidas tracksuit, the kind with the three white stripes down the side, and a hood. He also has on white running shoes. Today is Saturday. He’ll perform tonight and then he’ll leave. Goodbyes keep happening, but the porch stays the same. The giant maple tree in my line of sight keeps on being just as beautiful; the sound of gunshots from the shooting range across the river, those can be counted on. Funny, I thought those noises were fireworks when I arrived here around the Fourth of July.

I look up: Foofwa’s massaging his calf with some strong-smelling oil now. He looks a like an athlete in this Adidas get-up; I notice he’s tied some beige linen pants around his neck, white earbuds connected to his computer keep him in a trance in front of it. Last night, running around with the kids, he played the clown, handing out acorns as silly little surprise gifts, and dancing with a maniac 6-year-old whose rhythm was off, but who was original and interpretive in his funny little body. Foofwa dedicated his second dance that night—he performed with Alan Sondheim and Azure Carter—to this inhibition-free little kid and his dinner dancing. Foofwa’s improvisation included an absolute mimic of this child’s jerky, consistent style. When he recognized his own movement, the kid jumped up and joined in; his father had to remove him from the performance space.

An email from Will Rawls, August 10, 2010: “Hope all is well at MTA since we left. Had fun. Miss the landscape and garden freshness and moonrises. I don’t miss making the solo. It has been nice to have a break.”

Understandable, considering the physical trials he goes through in the piece. As it was performed the week he was up in the Catskills, Rawls’s solo was actually a trio. He worked with two musicians, Mallory Glaser and Chris Kuklis, who sometimes go by the Plumes, and here experienced their first foray into creating and participating in staged movement. It’s not always interesting to watch untrained dancers, but Rawls used these musicians’ physicality sparingly in the construction of the piece. I saw it twice—the first time, alone with the three performers and just one other witness, there was a thick layer of tension that made the short distance between us and them seem a real third element, alive with its own energy. I felt in the piece, like if I broke eye contact for a moment, then the room would drop out from under us and we would just float into some oblivion of art and confusion. I didn’t feel that again when the performers did the same piece, their energy diffused throughout the hot room full of 80-plus people, two nights later.

I told Rawls that his eye contact during that rehearsal unnerved me. I said this publicly, while a room full of people ate corn on the cob with lime and butter and salt. Here, at this Friday night BBQ and discussion the night before Will’s public performance, Karinne Keithley, Ursula Eagly, and Sarah Smith presented their group writing project and then opened the floor to discussion stemming from their incredibly broad topic. Their goal: to document, from the inside, what they see as the “new sincerity” of dance. In their minds, it has a lot to do with a shared experience of pop culture—inhabiting a pop song, for example, in postmodern, post-ironic joyfulness. Whether or not the artists used it in a way that exactly fits these ladies’ thesis, there was certainly a lot of pop music and dancing to it during the festival this summer. Miguel Gutierrez and his 10 performers did a line-dance to K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s, “Keep it Coming Love”; Kelly and Gerard used “Material Girl” and “Alejandro,” which I still can’t seem to get out of my head.

In Dance Magazine, Christopher Atamian reviewed Rawls’s piece by comparing the work itself to the artist’s statement, a point of entry I find almost always to be fruitless. Specifically, he didn’t think that Rawls created, as his months old blurb in the flyer read, “new forms of folkloric expression based on nature, identity, playfulness and misinterpretation.” Instead, he felt that “Rawls was really exploring the dichotomy between community and individual life and—perhaps—the alienation that ensues from the latter.”

Besides the fact that these two statements don’t exactly seem mutually exclusive, the analysis misses the point of new performance that is grown in a residency such as this one. Experimentation and change are the most exciting parts of the experience, especially for an audience member. During the course of the summer, names of shows were changed, ideas were pulled from the site itself or from conversations during the week, and there wasn’t a lot of holding back. That’s a good thing for everyone. It keeps the work fresh and honest; holding an artist to an earlier statement is a misguided, not to mention boring, approach to critiquing this kind of work.

An excerpt from Keithley’s book, Montgomery Park, or Opulence: An Essay in the Form of a Building, which was in the form of a performance with Katy Pyle one Saturday night in Mount Tremper:

If I was the wall—and I am—If I was the wall, I’d say, uncover me. And you would, if you were compliant, uncover me, which would mean that eventually you would remove my function. We call it a kind of nature. Under snow I saw a deer this morning coming at me under canopy. I saw a deer coming at me I thought it was a dog.

In this particular performance, almost every little bit of the architecture of the performance space was utilized. That excerpt came from a speech Keithley made from the porch, toward a group of people still waiting to get in and find a seat. This was the most theater-based and intricately constructed of the performances this summer, but almost everyone molded their work to the venue in this way. At the end of the festival, just as it seemed all the creative uses for this beautiful, but essentially uncomplicated studio had been used up, Kelly and Gerard turned our attention toward usually closed doors. One of the residency bedrooms and the bathroom became locations for performance, which was appropriate for the work since it creates, among other things, new images for alternative intimate relationships. When Ben Asriel and Jose Tena went into the bathroom with Kelly, there was enough of a set-up beforehand to imply that sexual acts were being committed. That was the content; I loved being in the big, dark room with all these audience members shuffling in their seats as a stream of light from the slightly ajar door drew our attention to what we couldn’t see.

Pokoik and Vandenbroucke, both working artists themselves, say they curate—and I’ve found this to be true—based on potential dinner conversations. It’s not just about what work they want to see created in their space, but also what artists they want to spend quality time talking with. The walls of the performance space act as the visual arts gallery as well, so the curatorial choices in one department are thrown into a discussion with the other. Dancers find, when they enter, an unplanned collaboration. In the future the visual arts portion of the festival will grow, including residencies for photographers and other artists working outside of dance-based performance. The conversation will inevitably and positively broaden, but if a separate gallery is built, something very particular and special might be lost. It would be those unexpected visual moments when, say, a dancer is running full speed toward a wall where a valuable Roe Ethridge print hangs, and you feel all the anxiety of potential danger along with the pleasure of accidental beauty.

What was so exciting about Mount Tremper Arts this summer was that now in its third year, the festival has become bigger than itself. Every day the atmosphere around the property bulged with content, and the house heaved under the weight of bigger-than-life personalities and more concepts than could be developed in 10 lifetimes. It’s never going to be a corporatized entity; unlimited growth is just not a part of the administrative structure and definitely not the ultimate goal for the directors. But it will continue to be known, and not just as another country stop-off for cultural tourism in the summer. Public performance is one thing, but this location is built to feed artists and once you’ve seen it, it becomes clear that there’s nothing more important than a space where life and art aren’t ever at odds, all creative work is valued, and the true currency exchange is in ideas.

See original article at the Brooklyn Rail site HERE

WORK OF ART TALK: Critics on Bad TV

My father is a painter. When I called him, in a craze after obsessively watching nearly the whole season of Bravo’s Work of Art in one sitting, he told me that being a chef is about keeping a kitchen clean and consistently putting out a solid product day in and day out. It’s not, he said, about making one new dish in 10 minutes out of three esoteric ingredients. Meaning, of course, that Work of Art isn’t any different thanTop Chef, I shouldn’t expect it to be, and I’d be better off turning my attention to other matters entirely. He’s right. But the one argument I heard in defense of the show that seemed to make sense, one that recalls my favorite position on Ann Liv Young (another train wreck I wish I had the power to ignore, but don’t), is that the phenomenon holds value in its ability to inspire discussion. I can’t quite get beyond my initial “makes me want to stab myself in the eye with a sharp pencil” response, but others, including a couple of writers in this issue of the Rail, have explored further; the gloriously inane conversation speaks volumes about mainstream commercial television and, like its topic, not a thing about art. What follows is a best-of of sorts; this summer’s guilty, art-world semi-pleasure; a discussion with all the depth of celebrity tabloid coverage. Still, it’s just so hard to look away:

The art critic Jerry Saltz is the most engaged and illuminating of the judges (and I promise you that I was not inspired to like him more than anyone else just because he is the husband of my colleague, the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith). The socialite gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn is the best looking.

–Gina Bellafante, New York Times

Critic Jerry Saltz was the biggest disappointment for me: Is it the editing, or does he really believe that the mission statement of art is, “Art is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.” So is vomiting.

–Jen Graves, Seattle Stranger

I’m fairly certain the show gave critic Jerry Saltz a pair of Puma sneakers, as I’ve never seen him wear them out gallery hopping.

–Paddy Johnson, artfagcity.com

I immediately realized that if he was ingratiating himself to McGinness, he was probably doing this with us all along. Look very closely at this scene and you’ll see me grimacing and turning away in total disgust.

–Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine blog (509 comments on this post)

In the real art world, artists don’t compete for exhibitions through assignments like “Make a work of art based on your drive through a city in an Audi,” or “Design a cover for this Penguin classic novel.”

–Greg Lindquist, artcritical.com

Fifty years of marvelous, disruptive paintings and photographs by Alex Katz, Chuck Close, Dan McCleary, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, John Sonsini, Rineke Dijkstra and countless other first-rate artists, internationally known and not, and we’re still trotting out the wheezing cliché about portraiture’s required significance being bound up with the revelation of the sitter’s inner essence? Really? The 17th century lives on.

–Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times

Christopher Knight eviscerated it, and that’s enough for me to know that there are other things tonight that interest me more.

–Tyler Green, Modern Art Notes blog, artinfo.com

In the traditionally opaque world of art and art criticism, where opinions are usually safely buried under layers of jargon, “Work of Art” has caused a sensation. On the one hand, its very existence has ruffled art critics, who deride the concept as puerile...

–Carolina A Miranda, Time Magazine

The comments after the article demonstrate a schism that a show as pedestrian as this one cannot bridge.

–“Patrick,” commenting on an artfagcity.com post about Miranda’s Timearticle, which positions the show as more concerned with a mass audience than an art audience. The article also quotes artfagcity’s Paddy Johnson, who says she’d like to be in the cast next season.

When the loser’s dismissal is recited, “Your work of art didn’t work for us,” what the host neglects to say is neither your art nor your personality any longer works for the show.

–Greg Lindquist, artcritical.com

It is arrogance that might be forgivable if the judges were my mother, Larry King, and my fourth grade art teacher, Ms. Parkerson.

–Shane McAdams, The Brooklyn Rail

Rather than making art, the cast is charged with dramatizing the act of making art. Before the series ends, one or more of the contestants might recognize that. (It’s what the academic critics call television’s “performative” quality.)

–Christopher Knight, The Los Angeles Times

Next week, Sarah Jessica Parker shows up again. Which artist who is not Peregrine will be victorious? Our money’s on Miles, though in our hearts, we’re pulling for Abdi.

–Hillary Busis, The Wall Street Journal

Since the onset of video art, countless forays have been made into television, and specifically reality TV, but none before have so scrupulously mimicked the conventions of mainstream.

–Alex Gartenfeld, Art in America

I don’t think the art world has infiltrated the mainstream. The mainstream has infiltrated the art world. The mainstream is like, “Oh, a show about artists, that’s cool,” whereas the art world is more up in arms about it. I think a lot of people in the art world have been distressed that the conversation on the show isn’t up to their level.

–Nao Bustamante, in an interview with Brian Sloan, NYFA Current Magazine

By comparison, Jeffrey Deitch’s never-really-seen 2005–2006 show Artstar, featuring artists relatively established and demonstrably more skeptical about the constraints of the show, looks like a bit of obscurantism.

–Alex Gartenfeld, Art in America

It suffers from comparison to the schmatta show’s glory days a few seasons back, when Project Runway garnered its own cult-like art-world following.

–Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times

The Tim Gunn character, auctioneer Simon de Pury, seems like he is hopped up on goofballs, and for his sake, I hope he is.

–Jen Graves, Seattle Stranger

Article published online at the Rail HERE

Walking the Elastic City / The Brooklyn Rail

Becoming suddenly conscious of time and place can inspire melancholy. The experience can also be pleasing, or beautiful; Todd Shalom calls this “heightened awareness.” He says he felt it most profoundly when he was traveling, living for long stretches in Israel and Argentina. The first glimmer of an idea for Elastic City, his Brooklyn-based art-walk company, came when he was semi-delusional, high on altitude sickness in the mountains of Peru. Now he’s curating the walks in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and while they might not change your life, it’s refreshing to find a deliberately constructed experience—a performance—that exists just for itself, or just for you. No one here is begging for an institutional stamp of approval, and yet the walks don’t exist in a vacuum, either.

When I asked if there was some conversation to be had between what he did on the street and what was going on in museums, galleries, and performance venues, Shalom mentioned Marina Abramović at MoMA. I realized, when he started talking, that I couldn’t stand to hear any more about Abramović from anyone (at least for a while). I regretted asking the question. I wondered if he had a boyfriend. Then I felt guilty for wondering that. I tried to focus on the Abramović connection, but then he started talking about Twitter. I was distracted. I apologized, saying, “I keep losing my train of thought. I keep listening to everything on the street. That’s what’s happening to me. Because of the walk, it’s true.”

I meant his “Carroll Street Soundwalk,” which he had just taken me on. It was post-walk; the two of us sat on stools in front of a café on Fourth Avenue. We were drinking tea and watching cars and people pass by. A friend on her way to a talk on experimental Jewish poetics rode up to us on a bike. When she told us about the talk, I found out that Shalom had studied poetry, too: “I felt like poetry needed to live off the page for me in performance in some sort of way,” he said. “The words themselves weren’t expressing all I had to express.” My phone rang and I answered it. Kids played around on their skateboards for a while at the curb.

Only a couple of hours before, I met Shalom and a few other people in Carroll Park, where he told us that the only rules on the walk were that we had to silence our cell phones and refrain from talking. We followed him past the basketball courts and then down Carroll Street as he pointed out sounds; the idea, it seemed, was just to notice them. At one point he mentioned that when John Cage and Merce Cunningham lived in an apartment together in SoHo, Cage threw out his records and said that when he wanted to hear music, he just opened his window. When I listened, the neighborhood sounds quickly transformed. It wasn’t much of a stretch to hear them as music.

About halfway through the walk I began to feel as if I couldn’t see so well anymore. Or maybe I didn’t want to see. Seeing was distracting attention away from the “soundscape,” a term coined by the acoustic ecologists that means pretty much what it implies: the landscape of sound. Shalom told us to pair off; a stranger watched me walk down the street with my eyes closed, taking responsibility for keeping me safe. He didn’t touch me as I walked, but every now and again I would hear him say, “here’s a curb,” in some thick, European accent. He had a nice voice. I tried not to wonder anything about him, accepting, instead, my own heightened state of vulnerability—watched but unable to see. I directed my mind even deeper into listening: for cars, for the breeze in the trees, and for my caretaker’s sometimes quiet warnings about walls to my left and broken glass in my path.

Those two hours later, then, as I was sitting and chatting with Shalom on stools on Fourth Avenue., my ears were still open—more open than I can remember them ever being—and the sounds of the city were distracting me. This, he said, is one of his greatest joys to hear. “I remember giving a sound walk in Tel Aviv,” he told me, “and I got a phone call the next day saying, ‘I’m walking down the street and I’m hearing things that I don’t normally pay attention to.’ And that was the best compliment that one could give me.” In this way, the walks can be interpreted as educational, though not overtly so.

The essential politic inherent in each walk is subtly recognizable but so experientially based that there is room for every participant to have his or her own private reaction. Niegel Smith, the other half (with Shalom) of the performance group PERMISO, and the creator and leader of popular Elastic City walks “Follow the Leader” and “Monumental Walk,” says that this is actually one of the most important components of his walks. “My walks are political statements in as much as I’m saying we need access to these spaces, but I want to give space for each person to create their own dialogue around that.”

My own dialogue about public spaces during “Follow the Leader,” Smith’s walk in lower Manhattan, went kind of like this: It’s amazing how deeply ingrained my obedience to the symbolic authoritative gesture has become. I’d rather refrain from questioning than deal, on any level, with an armed guard. Further, the parallels with this in my personal life are alarming—I’d rather talk aesthetics. When we spoke after the walk, I tried to understand, again, where this sort of site-specific experience fit into the performance landscape. We were on the grass in City Hall Park, doing that leisurely kind of park-sitting that’s almost like laying down, but isn’t quite:

“Carroll Street Soundwalk” with Todd Shalom. Photo by Russell Austin.

Rail: I noticed, in both walks, these really interesting moments of aesthetic awareness. So let’s speak of this as performance, like what makes “Follow the Leader” a performance and not just a lesson about government and public spaces? Watching, for example, each participant walk so closely behind the passerby he chose to follow—I felt so aware witnessing that. It’s very beautiful to see everyone else’s little pair and to be in step with them as well.

Todd Shalom: That’s actually referencing Vito Acconci’s “Following Piece.”

Niegel Smith: But even more rudimentary than that, it goes all the way back to the principles of aesthetic design. The one I hold on to the most is repetition, which is how we get to ritual. Literally seeing an object repeated draws our attention to that object: seeing the lines, the form, the color, the shape, the momentum.

Shalom: I’m thinking of the concept itself of following someone in public, whereas you’re looking to all of these different components, and both ideas are present.

Rail: So there are intentionally layered art historical and design references happening the whole time.

Smith: Yes. But it’s also curious to me, because I started in the theater and later found out that a lot of my theater stuff had actually come from the visual arts world. I started to see that the theater is far behind visual art, and all these principles that we’ve been working out of came from performance art.

“Carroll Street Soundwalk” with Todd Shalom. Photo by Brendan Chill.

Smith then told me a bit about his theater background, which made me realize just how precisely directed the experience he had just led us through really was. “11 Tony Nominations!” he exclaimed and raised his hands up over his head—he’s the assistant director of FELA! on Broadway. He also recently directed Neighbors at the Public, and says that the most exciting thing about theater is that the audience is actually present. It’s easy to forget, in the rarified live-art world, how infrequently “liveness” actually occurs in most popular entertainment forms (theater being the exception, as Smith points out). On these walks, the audience is present, and they’re also participants.

The concept reminds me a little of Sharon Hayes’s street performances—the “Love Addresses”—though Shalom and Smith don’t admit to being on as direct a mission as she is to confront “the public.” Hayes sees two specific audiences: her performance, she knows, will be different for each group. There are those who come specifically to see her (and the reactions of those just passing by), and passersby who don’t know who she is or why she’s speaking into a microphone about her lover and current events (or why a small group is attentively listening to her speak). Passersby during Elastic City walks like “Follow the Leader,” who inevitably notice the participants at some point, are acknowledged by the artists, but never directly confronted. The work is not meant to offend them—this is to the artists’ credit. In a performance world where offensive behavior often seems rote, it’s refreshing to see people filling spaces with productive and energizing ideas.

Shalom and Smith started working together in 2006 as PERMISO (the name comes from the Spanish term for “permit me,” essentially used to barge one’s way into a situation), creating a shared vocabulary that combined free form performance art ideas with theatrical structure. They have a manifesto, cheekily titled “Our Core Values,” which includes a commitment to never create work inside or in private spaces. Elastic City is Shalom’s baby, though, and in addition to including as many of Smith’s walks in the program as Smith is willing to give, he’s curated walks in this first season led by artists he has, on some occasions, sought out and coached in the form. Neil Freeman, an artist whose work focuses on cities, lists, and maps, gives a micro-level view of the streets in Bushwick combined with a bird’s-eye view. Daniel Neumann, a German-born sound artist, gives a soundwalk in DUMBO, under the bridges.

As with everything about this small company—only a business because it “needed to be”—choosing artists and concepts for walks is more personal than strategic. “What do I want to explore?” and, “how can I find the experts?” are the guiding questions. A more body-focused walk led by a downtown choreographer or dancer is still on Shalom’s wish list, as well as a strictly text-based walk led by a poet. There might be a scent-walk in the works, led by a rosarian, and if it’s starting to sound shticky—exploring the senses!—don’t worry, he’s conscious enough of the danger.

I’m the first to run from gimmicks and insincerity, but there’s something about the way Shalom talks about his walks, which are sometimes one-man experiences, that makes me trust that he’s genuinely excited about his and others’ personal, performative interactions with the less dramatic bits of living. (This is, after all, a guy who wanted to create a gay zine entitled “Snuggle.”) Why else would someone do a solo walk through the suburbs on a rainy day, snapping photos and re-imagining childhood memories? Or advertise a free walk over the Brooklyn Bridge—one time only, for one person only—to mark his first time crossing that particular monument? “In doing this thing that I really want to do, am I their escort or are they mine?” Shalom wonders.

Smith also develops walks around his own interests and experiences. Upcoming for him is a walk through Harlem, designed to unearth tensions between black culture and counterculture, titled “This Ain’t Yo’ Mama’s Walk.” Both performers expressed a need to inhabit their own discomfort in the walks, which is why the performances have short runs and new ideas are continuously in development:

Shalom: If I don’t feel nervous before a performance, then I’m over it.

Rail: Then you’re just going through the motions…Though it seems these walks give you a lot of opportunity to feel nervous.

Smith: I can’t wait to do “Monumental Walk” in a cemetery, which actually came up because I had a make-out session in a cemetery once and it was one of the most intense, wonderful making out sessions I’ve ever had.

Rail: Because it’s a little scary?

Smith: It’s a little scary, but it’s also this pristine, Victorian landscape.

Shalom: I’ve never made out in a cemetery actually, have you?

Rail: Um…no.

Smith: It’s really hot. Maybe it will be a couple’s walk. Maybe you’ll have to bring someone to make out with.

And there you have it: what I’d want to understand as a queer, participatory (not to mention economically morbid, as in “you can’t take it with you”) response to Tino Sehgal’s politically backward “The Kiss” (2002), is first about nervousness, personal experience, and specifically, how fun it is to make out. For the record, however, Shalom shot the couple’s walk part of that idea down. His exact words were, “No, no, no,”—but still, you never know.