Poem published in November Brooklyn Rail

Cover Me with Turtles (after Amy Cutler*)

by Patricia Milder

1.
Fall into the cracks
Where elephant trunks are useful.

Where patterns open at the seams,
Revealing nakedness.

Where to finish is a process of picking fruit.
And big, round, yellow orbs fall

But don’t squish and squirt
Because you made them all up.

Cheer for the death of the imagination
and the moment where reality bleeds enough.

Make a sign. Take it down to Wall Street.
Make sure all the letters fit on the cardboard.

2.
Empty your pockets.
Sew a dress for me.
Long, blue, elegant—
I will wear a crown
and frown in glory.
It’s not floating heads,
but the drooping skins of creatures
once upon a time fierce.

Charge up a mountain
and then call down one last time
So that I can see you
before it’s over and my shame
Has eaten up what’s left.

Is that an instrument for making music?
Or do you carry it for style?
This world still has plants,
and there is no mayor;
No one to declare me wrong.

3.
Hold your own head in your lap.
Place it on the floor and use it as a footstool.
Attach my living bust to the front of your
Fishing boat and
I will drag a net into the sea for you.
Sleep next to me.
Cover me with turtles.

4.
We declared our independence

last night

in front of a small crowd.

Later, we drank,

tired, and became sad again.

5.
You are ageless
in your beginnings:
black and white like text,
or some perceptions of science.
You hug a snowman,
but don’t show feeling.
Not much, anyway.
I wish my lines
were more intricate;
tricky; time consuming.
I wish my thoughts
could marry yours,
but we’re working
Next to one another
and we can’t see in.
(I’m thankful for this.)

Stop reminding me
of other things.
Just let me stay
here in the spaces
that create nothing
from my memory.
Don’t make me angry;
you pulled my braids.
You once drew me
sitting on a hill
with an expression
that seemed thoughtful,
but was probably
more insecure.
I held an inner slice—
You scowled and
grasped both ends.
Apple head, where’re
your brain guts?
What are those ears for?
Oh! how your patterns
compliment each other
so exquisitely!
And you, of course.

I’m not the footrest,
but something
Underneath that.
Squid legs
incapacitate me.
Hold my hand.
Sew me into existence
when you’re done
doing you.
Anchor me.
Plant a redwood
Forest in my chest,
above my breasts.
I will tilt my
head back
to make room
for the trees
to grow.

You make me laugh
when you rub
your eyes like that.
Floating without water,
with a life vest
And a raft—
saved before
there was any
real danger of drowning,
like Danielle before the towers fell.

Huddle like Forti,
only backwards.
Can you do it?

Score me a river and bundle up
until only the top of your head
peeks through.
Eyes open,
but still you wear that expressionless stare.
Frumpy face, put your shoes on,
you’re embarrassing me.

---

*Inspired by “Amy Cutler: Acquainted” at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, September 15 – November 5, 2011, as well as by the artist’s monograph Amy Cutler: Turtle Fur (published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011).

The Review Panel at the National Academy Museum

Friday October 28th, 2011, 6:45pm
Patricia Milder, James Panero and Peter Plagens
join David Cohen to discuss:

AMY CUTLER: ACQUAINTED
Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, 535 West 22nd Street

MICHELLE LOPEZ
Simon Preston Gallery, 301 Broome Street

MELISSA MEYER
Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. Paintings 514 West 25th Street
see also Melissa Meyer: Just Painting (hand-made book of watercolors) at
BravinLee programs, 526 West 26th Street, Suite 211

NICOLA TYSON
Freidrich Petzel Gallery, 535 and 537 West 22nd Street

Admission $12, includes museum admission.

Toward an Ethics in Art Writing

TOWARD AN ETHICS IN ART WRITING moderated by Aimee Walleston

Tuesday October 4th, 2011 at 7pm
133/141 West 21 Street, Room 101C

Is it possible to define a cogent code of ethics in art writing? In this panel discussion, four young contemporary art writers–Adam Kleinman, Quinn Latimer, Patricia Milder and Matthew Schum–will investigate the problem of ethics in relation to their own work and to criticism at large.

Adam Kleinman is a writer and curator and dOCUMENTA (13) Agent for Public Programming. Kleinman is a frequent contributor to multiple exhibition catalogs and magazines including Agenda, Artforum, e-flux journal, Frieze, Mousse and Texte zur Kunst.

Quinn Latimer is an American poet and critic based in Basel, Switzerland. Her criticism appears regularly in Artforum and Frieze, and she has also written for Art in America, ArtReview, Bookforum, East of Borneo, Interview, Kaleidoscope, and Modern Painters.

Patricia Milder (MFA Art Criticism and Writing, 2010) is an art and performance writer, and independent curator based in Brooklyn. She is the Managing Art Editor of The Brooklyn Rail; she also contributes regularly to Artcritical and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.

Matthew Schum studies modern and contemporary art in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California at San Diego. In 2011 he has been based between California and Italy, where he is serving as an editor for Flash Art International in Milan.

Aimee Walleston (MFA Art Criticism and Writing, 2009) is a writer based in New York City. She contributes regularly to Art in America online, Flash Art, V Magazine, The New York Times' the moment blog and The Last Magazine.

Free and Open to the Public

http://artcriticism.sva.edu/

Increasingly More Movements for L.

Original article at the Brooklyn Rail HERE

I understand why the person next to me drooled all over his shirt, nodding off like so many in the audience. More Mouvements für Lachenmann wasn’t exactly entertaining. It required a certain amount of austerity on the part of the viewer—while prompting a few embarrassing attempts at physical showmanship by its performers.

The first piece was a solo for the cello performed by Andreas Lindenbaum. All of the evening’s music was composed by Helmut Lachenmann, with choreography by the French choreographer Xavier Le Roy. As the evening progressed, the distinction between music and choreography became quite obvious, but in the case of this first solo, “Pression,” one man simply played his instrument for the audience. Sure, there was plenty to look at—tapping the bow, and other actions with the instrument that didn’t beget traditional sounds but instead created out of the ordinary ways for a person and object to interact. The resulting hissing or scraping we heard came almost secondarily, but was indeed a major aspect of the full Lachenmann experience. Still, it wasn’t a jarring choreographic experience. It was Lachenmann’s work, perhaps intentionally left alone by Le Roy in order to give the audience an intellectual base, a kind of control group, to compare with his later experiments with form.

More Mouvements fur Lachenmann by Xavier LeRoy, photo by Monika Rittershaus, courtesy F I A F.

Le Roy’s first career as a molecular biologist is well known, and this evening’s work looks as if it was created through an application of scientific method. The second piece, “Salut für Caudwell,” started from the absolute beginning. Four musicians brought out their chairs—two in front and two behind—as well as music stands and custom-made moveable walls that blocked the audience’s view of the back two chairs. The musicians behind the walls played their guitars while the musicians in front played air guitars. Sometimes their timing matched up, so that what you saw mimicked what you heard, but this structure became tedious after a few minutes. Life was injected into the show at moments when the symmetry was knocked off by human error, or when the sheet music of the musicians pretending to play their instruments differed from the music of those behind them.

All in all, “Salut” is easy enough to “get,” and for the duration of the exercise either boring and grating or meditative and spacious, depending on your point of view. For me, it changed from moment to moment. At first, the more intently I focused on it, the less I wanted to close my eyes, scream, tear my hair out, or stand up and leave. At a certain point, however, following the intricacies of the asymmetry was crazy-making, especially without having sheet music to refer to, and moments of listening without looking became an absolute necessity. Surely, this audience impulse was expected and built in to the piece. Though it’s hard not to refer to the work as simple, it’s anything but tossed off; it’s very clear that Le Roy doesn’t build a performance around what people want to see. Part of his charm as a maker of dances is that even if you don’t like a specific work, it doesn’t feel like a disaster, because there isn’t that sense that he failed while trying hard to please or entertain you. Instead, it feels as though you’re watching an artist try to bring to life a concept that is intellectually intriguing to him and it happens to not be compelling to watch all the way through. That’s not such a bad brand of failure.

Where the show did go too far and actually become a bit lame was toward the end of the final piece, “Gran Torso.” We had already had an example of a musician making music on their instrument; and then musicians pretending to play while others made the music; so it did make sense to round the evening off with musicians miming the actions they would use to make music, but doing so in silence. And this is exactly what happened. Six musicians sat on the stage in a half circle with their string instruments, played them a bit, and then stopped and stared back at the audience before continuing on with the actions in silence.

Some people in the crowd might not have seen the staring trope on stage before; there was a bit of laughter and the beginning of applause indicating that people didn’t know what to do with the first (or second) long pause from the stage. Even for those familiar with such a strategy, the recycling of such a simple move isn’t really a problem. It refers to a conceptual dance vocabulary that does in fact exist and can of course be used when appropriate. But the aesthetics of this last section were, unfortunately, off enough that even the stopping and staring felt contrived and annoying. When Le Roy got to where he was going—making pure physical actions out of the actions of musicians—the idea sat flatly, not beautifully, on stage. As the musicians tried to sell his idea (and to their credit, they were fully committed) the potential in the first two pieces disappeared into disappointment.

There are plenty of evenings I wish I could relive, doing anything other than watching the performance piece I was seeing. This is not one of them. Besides the intriguing new sounds and extremely high level of skill (at least with creating new music) that the musicians displayed, there was an idea being tossed around that I’d never seen worked through in quite this way. It brought a rare clarity to mind—and even seemed to have always existed, much the way scientific discoveries fit seamlessly into the world, as they uncover and illuminate phenomena that were already there.

The Whitebox Project / Artcritical

Original article HERE

Noémie Lafrance, The Whitebox Project, dance performance at Black and White Gallery/ Project Space, Brooklyn, 2011

People gathered in the bleak concrete backyard of the Black and White Gallery, chatting in groups, milling about. “The Whitebox Project,” Noémie Lafrance’s performance piece, had already been described as being influenced by flash mobs, so everyone knew what was about to happen. Still, we stood and talked to one another in anticipation. The volume of human voices speaking out loud in the roofless room started to escalate unnaturally, to the point where to continue a conversation, you practically had to shout. Then the volume dropped drastically, and performers emerged from the mass of people, starting to make simple patterns of movement along the floors and walls.

Eventually, about 20 dancers revealed themselves to be a part of the piece, and proceeded to work their way through just about every existing postmodern dance reference. They walked, ran, talked, shouted, kicked, shimmied, sat down, stood up, laid down, and even created some strange cheerleader-like formations of movement and chanting. None of the sequences lasted too long—some of the performers undressed within the mob of people, a trope that didn’t shock and wasn’t tender or powerful, but did make me feel sorry for the dancers participating in the pretentious nod to vulnerability. They put their clothes back on; they herded us the way my parents’ border collie used to, running in circles around us a little too close for comfort, forcing a shift in location. They also encouraged us to join in and participate in the simple physical motions. I noticed one young woman who happily followed along with the Simon Says-like instructions from the score; most resisted.

At the post-show talk with the audience that comes at the end of every performance, and is actually a part of the piece, my fears about the breadth of the organizing concept for the project were confirmed. Underlying the somewhat interactive though hardly coercive gathering was a real desire to get the audience to dance. Lafrance and her dancers talked about the idea that once you “break the boundaries between audience and performer” or “challenge the conventions of the proscenium stage,” then the result will be a kind of physical participation by audience members—a democratization of the space whose perfect expression is the erasing of the distinction between performer and viewer. After over 60 years of this kind of thinking about the destabilization of theatrical conventions, including a popular resurgence in the 1990s, we’ve already had a backlash against it. Theorists have weighed in. Jacques Rancière pointed out, and I tend to agree, that there is nothing inherently wrong with recognizing the distinction between the roles of viewer and performer. What is wrong, he asserted in his book The Emancipation of the Spectator, is to assume that one role is less free, less powerful, or less interesting than another.

another view

As any critic will tell you, the experience of the viewer is always active—to initiate thought, to respond, and to feel are not verbs we should dismiss as non-participatory. Why, then, should viewers dance? And why should they be asked to verbally respond to the performance after the piece, in order to influence its future iterations? My problem with the concept of the piece—despite its often striking visuals and a few lovely experiential moments in space—can’t be removed from a general frustration with our culture of affirmation. We assume that we can judge success by how many people have jumped on in support and participation, and longwinded, inane comments are dutifully welcomed, as if they embody democracy itself. This kind of climate assures that no one gets heard; there’s a jumble of opinion, very little thought, and an overall lowering of the bar because of too much awareness of audience diversity and limitations. Ironically, in this piece, attempts to draw out active participation and response take away the true power of an audience member to have his or her own natural reaction to the visual material. I never liked to be talked down to as a child and I don’t appreciate it much now; if you’re giving viewers something to look at, step back and believe in their ability to see.

Charles Atlas Joints Array, in The Brooklyn Rail

At the Rail online HERE

NEW MUSEUM | JULY 7 – AUGUST 28, 2011

What’s in an elbow? The way it moves; the stretching of flesh over bones, then its gathering in tight wrinkles mid-limb. A knee: that complex, delicate system of ligaments that makes walking, running, dancing possible. But these images are non-specific—what of your own elbow? Your sister’s knee? Have you ever really looked at the wrist of someone you admire? I once noticed the way a man I love held a glass—his hand hinging with unconscious flourish—and it made me love him more.

People show themselves through their bodies as much as their minds: if you pay attention, you can see the world through a joint. Those who make their bodies into art are creating at the intersection of what is physically innate, tragically accidental, and tirelessly practiced. Seeing the body this way—as perfectly imperfect raw material—is a postmodern practice that came about in part from Anna Halprin, when she taught workshops to future Judson founders and other amazing people on her outdoor deck in Marin county in the 1960s and ’70s. When I visited her there last fall, the now 91-year-old, whose own joints remain a supple complement to her bright and impassioned mind, said she couldn’t even watch most of today’s dancers. They mask their instrument, themselves in their bodies, with slick technical training that makes the art that interests her impossible—the physical equivalent of commercial production techniques.

Merce Cunningham spent time in Halprin’s backyard workshops during the early years. I’ve seen videos of him leaping across the deck as a young man: already brilliant, seemingly fully formed, an unmistakable individual. Where Halprin and the postmoderns were interested in everyday movements as a way to reject stylized, expressive modernism, Cunningham famously embraced chance in order to move away from the same problem. He developed a specific strain of abstraction in dance that always seemed to point to something more. He knew innately what was in an elbow; that everything was already there. His work proved one needn’t pile on storylines and dramatic expressions of humanity when working with the most basic and personal of materials, the body.

From the beginning, Cunningham was interested in how the body related to technology, including computer programs for creating and recording dances. He pioneered, with the filmmaker Charles Atlas, media-dance, which is dance specifically for the camera. Before his time as the Cunningham company’s filmmaker-in-residence (1978 – 1983), when he made 10 dance films, Atlas was an assistant stage manager for the company, and was already filming Cunningham in little experimental movement studies during breaks from rehearsal. Since then, Atlas has shown video and performance works in museums and galleries all over the world, mostly in collaboration with choreographers and performers. To name just a few: Yvonne Rainer, Marina Abramović, Michael Clark, Douglas Dunn, John Kelly, and Leigh Bowery.

Atlas’s current show, Joints Array, on view in the lobby gallery of the New Museum, is made up of his first Cunningham experiments from the early 1970s, which were shot on Super 8 color film. He revisited these images in 2009 after the choreographer’s death, creating a four-channel installation called “Joints 4tet for Ensemble”(2010), which was on view at Vilma Gold Gallery in London in April. The piece on view at the New Museum is an extended version of this original. Differently sized outdated box monitors show film-transferred-to-video loops of Cunningham that create an incredibly beautiful portrait of an artist and a man. The videos show, alternately, close up images of a wrist, knee, ankle, and elbow.

Cunningham is not dancing in the films, but moving slightly, as if exploring in each instant the possibilities and the complexities of the joint in focus. Each of the monitors is set up at the top of its own individual pole, rooted in the floor along the perimeter of either one of the two back walls of the rectangular gallery space. Different videos play on the monitors at alternating times; the result is far from an overwhelming bombardment of moving images, as might be expected from so many videos playing simultaneously. Instead, the work feels quite intimate, capturing the essence of Cunningham, while skipping extraneous outlining and obvious description. There is also a rich and nostalgic texture to the visual information that comes from the film itself and the knobby, boxy black containers that house it.

At the end of each short clip, and before the next one starts, Atlas left several frames of lead tape, a brightly dated exposure of the technology itself. This technology forms a third personified character in the space, conversing in a timeless loop with Cunningham’s joints and Atlas’s ability to capture what may be abstract in form, but never in nature. Rounding out the experience are old, unpublished ambient noise recordings by John Cage that play in a loop in the gallery. You can hear the sound of the street, a car driving by, a faint honk, or the rustle of leaves meeting up with different, random points in the films. Atlas has confessed that when he was with the Cunningham company, he balked at the chance method; here, as in much of his recent video and performance work, he has, in a way, become more of a Cageian. The structure of Joints Array contains all of the right ingredients, but it’s the way he lets it be just a little bit wild in just the right way that turns a large formal display of video recordings of body parts into a living thing.

Distance and Dissonance: Xavier Cha at the Whitney / artcritical

Published HERE at Artcritical.com

Xavier Cha’s “Body Drama” may take up the entire lobby gallery space at the Whitney Museum, but it is a small work, expertly pointed in concept. Cha distills contemporary experience into a single note about incompleteness, using the most obvious “problem” of today’s performance—the essential dissonance between video and liveness—as a starting point. Instead of trying to solve the clash, Cha highlights it, shaking up oil and water in order to mimic the vantage point of an individual in the midst of contemporary art and the greater world, conglomerates impossible to see as a whole, to fully know or even think you know.

Without belaboring the point, Cha uses simple techniques to point out a very current strain of emptiness and isolation, born and bred in the information age. Every hour on the hour, an actor steps into the gallery space with a video camera strapped into a harness that is secured around his or her waist. The “SnorriCam,” a device commonly used in horror films, is attached to a short rod that positions its eye to squarely frame the actor’s face. The camera films the actor emote for 20 minutes; museum visitors can see the live action, but there is no live feed to compare one’s view to the image captured by the camera. The most noticeable thing about the live performance portion of this piece is the fact that although the actors, in turn, each work hard to express the psychological terror of being alone in an unknowable place—Cha’s direction to them—there is little to no actual emotional content resulting from their efforts. Stripped of story, distanced by the camera device strapped on, and sanitized as intellectual content, the acting itself does not compel its audience to connect to the performer in the way we are generally intended to in the theater.

Twenty minutes after each hour, a museum employee walks into the space, turns off the camera attached to the actor, and they both exit the room. At the same moment, a video appears on an island of a wall in the center of the space. It’s almost impossible not to be immediately distracted by the video and miss the actor’s exit. Such seamlessness in choreographing attention is surprising in this context, and intriguing. On the screen, we see taped footage of a different actor in the gallery. This actor is not present, but with access to the filmed footage, we sometimes catch glimpses in the background of viewers who did see the particular live performance on different day in the same room this summer. After the transition, the work loses steam. It’s more difficult to watch an extended portion of overacting on video out of context, than it is to sit through the same thing live. But this conceptually grounded performance piece is about the transitions—each section feels less than enough, leaving a viewer wanting.

In Trisha Brown’s solo “Homemade” (1965), the artist moved with an 8mm projector attached to a similar device around her waist that projected, behind her onto the wall, a video (shot by Robert Whitman) of the same movements that she was making during the live performance. The duel images—live and on video— of Brown moving her body parts and attempting to strip the physical actions of associative emotion, conveyed, and still conveys in re-performances, hopefulness for democracy and the possibility of wider, more fully realized individual views. It is fueled with the energy of collaboration across genres and the excitement of newly minted postmodern dance, which liberated the performing body and presented him or her as a complete person. Now, after all the years in between, Cha uses a comparable formal technique to criticize museum visitors’ technology-riddled blindness to their own and others’ inner lives. Distance, dissatisfaction, and an inability to connect—that’s the heart of it.

Writing and Performance at Mount Tremper Arts

Brooklyn Rail at Mount Tremper Arts:
A Weekend of Writing and Performance
CURATED BY RAIL MANAGING ART EDITOR PATRICIA MILDER
FRIDAY AND SATURDAY, AUGUST 5 & 6
647 SOUTH PLANK RD., MOUNT TREMPER, NY
ADVANCE TICKETS AVAILABLE AT SMARTTIX.COM

FRIDAY, AUGUST 5 - READINGS, MUSIC, AND DINNER AL FRESCO // TICKETS $20 // WEEKEND PASS $30

Both writing and performance exist in time. For this Friday night event, poet-critics share work that escapes neat boxes and definitions, and seeks to capture live experience, whether located in art, performance, or life itself.

7 PM: READINGS BY JOHN YAU, CLAUDIA LA ROCCO, CHRISTINE HOU, and PATRICIA MILDER

8 PM: PORK & POETRY!

Pig roast!

9 PM: MUSICAL PERFORMANCE BY NEW ZION

Featuring Jamie Saft (piano/keyboards), Larry Grenardier (acoustic bass), and Craig Santiago (drums), New Zion Trio unites roots reggae, dub, doom, and jazz styles in an extra-mellow acoustic setting. Burning reggae and dancehall beats provide the platform for complex original jazz and soul compositions, forging a unique and deep new world of sound. NZT's debut album, Fight Against Babylon, was released in May 2011 on Veal Records. Individually, they've performed and recorded with Pat Methany, Bad Brain, Beastie Boys, B-52s, John Zorn, Foghat, and Donavan. jamiesaft.com

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6 @ 8 PM - PERFORMANCE AS LANGUAGE // TICKETS $20 // WEEKEND PASS $30

AYNSLEY VANDENBROUCKE'S UNTITLED

Untitled is a written dance performed by one woman, her computer, and, perhaps, a couple of friends. An intimate meditation on the movement of language, it examines the making of meaning and the subtle processes of creating art and companionship. Choreographer Aynsley Vandenbroucke is Artistic Director of Mount Tremper Arts. Her work as been performed in New York City, San Francisco, and Brazil, and she is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Dance at Princeton University. www.movementgroup.org.

JIBADE-KAHLIL HUFFMAN'S TEEN WOLF/TEEN WOLF TOO

Teen Wolf/Teen Wolf Too is a poem in the form of two movies projected side by side. A text in the form of subtitles is projected in alternating turns on each of the two screens. As the projections run, Huffman will improvise a sound collage/score for laptop, turntable, and cassette players. Jibade-Kahlil Huffman is the author of 19 Names for Our Band (Fence Books, 2008) and James Brown is Dead (Future Plan and Program/Project Row Houses, 2011). He has exhibited and performed works of art and writing at MoMA/PS 1, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Tank.

THIS WEEKEND IS PART OF THE 2011 MOUNT TREMPER ARTS SUMMER FESTIVAL, FEATURING CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE AND VISUAL ART FROM JULY 9 - AUGUST 21. MORE INFORMATION ABOUT FESTIVAL PROGRAMMING CAN BE FOUND AT WWW.MOUNTTREMPERARTS.ORG.

Total Styrene 7.20.11

Doors open 8:00pm

$15 ($10 if you bring some Styrofoam to recycle)

Participant Inc., 253 East Houston St.

Total Styrene 7.20.11 is an event that is both a part of and a benefit for The Total Styrene Experience (TTSE), which is a project by the artist Lizzie Scott, curated with Patricia Milder and Michael Mahalchick. TTSE is a laboratory for recycling Styrofoam into art and performance, turning the glut of empty storefronts and the glut of discarded Styrofoam into an opportunity for experimentation and collaboration across live and visual art. It celebrates the alchemy of turning toxic Styrofoam trash into a source of artistic abundance.

Total Styrene 7.20.11 presents installations and performances exploring the material relationship between Styrofoam and the body. Guest artists working in performance, visual art, music, theater and dance have been invited to use the combined resources of the space and the collected Styrofoam to create experimental work of all kinds. Lizzie Scott will present two live sculptural interactions, which will be performed by dancers Georgia X. Lifsher and Kyli Kleven. Kennis Hawkins, Max Steele, Michael Mahalchick, and Rashaun Mitchell will each be performing a new live performance piece. Mitchell will be using music by Abelhearts, aka Thomas Arsenault. The evening is curated by Patricia Milder.

On view in the gallery will be visual art by Elisa Lendvay, Keiko Narahashi, Janice Caswell, Josh Blackwell, Michael Mahalchick and Lizzie Scott. The work will be for sale, through an innovative auction, to raise money for TTSE.

The Total Styrene Expereince is a sponsored project of New York Foundation of the Arts.

Find out more about the Styrene Fantastic by following these links:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Styrene-Fantastic/157740017572959

http://thestyrenefantastic.blogspot.com/

Questions? Email styrenefantastic@gmail.com

Ivo Dimchev: Som Faves, in The Brooklyn Rail

What to Throw Away, What to Keep

by Patricia Milder

How can it be? You can sit captive and captivated, wondering, “where is this all going?” —really feeling on the edge of something, as if driving a car through the fog on some unfamiliar, unlighted road. And then, even with a grand and bloody payoff, still, like some magical negation of the last hour or so, you are sent right back to the beginning, where there was never any promise of clarity, anyway.

How can it be that one performance can be all three: semi-autobiographical stream of consciousness, navel gazing didacticism, riveting?

One of the first things that Ivo Dimchev said to the Dixon Place audience at the Performance Mix Festival in April was, “Enjoy the waste.” (Referring, of course, to time in the form of art, which he also repeatedly ordered us to respect, sort of: “Respect art! If you don’t, that’s okay.”)

The contradictory internal dialogue that Dimchev gives voice to—speaking sometimes at and other times to those seated in front of him—and which changes for every performance of Som Faves, seems to be tinted, in different sections, different shades of true. Not that it matters: repetitive ramblings about his mother or his sister or his ex-boyfriend are emotional lifelines that, in their ordinariness, ground this strange and special strain of physical theater.

Two things I will always have a visceral reaction to seeing onstage: self-inflicted bleeding and misogyny. One was the climax of the show, and seemed generally well received due to a certain sad beauty; the other crept in, underlying certain moments, perhaps critically (I add generously) or intentionally (I assume, or maybe hope). Can it be desirable to listen to a man—one experienced with performing in drag—speak about the relationship between the audience and the clitoris, and then later spit all over a porcelain cat? Maybe. The tossed off reference to his sister’s pregnancy was equally grotesque, with sublime intentions.

Sublimity, according to Kant, “is not a quality residing in the object, but a state of mind awakened by an object.”* Since live performance inspires as individual and foreign a state of mind as an encounter with an art object, it’s easy to make a step toward the idea that Dimchev’s manic actions, which are studded with extremes in anti-social behavior, could be transformed through our reception of them, into what we can conceive of as beauty.

The stage itself was practically empty when he walked out in his messy blond wig, tight-fitting slacks, and long-sleeved button-up shirt. He sat at a keyboard, which was set atop a small table barely bigger than the mini keyboard itself. Next to the artist sat the shiny and still white kitty, and behind him, on the wall, a small painting of two white women made up mostly of blues and yellows.

Dimchev played a man with many faces. Some of these faces seemed about to explode from the pressure underneath his skin; none of his threads of thought quite made it all the way to cohesive individual meaning. But he repeated them enough times that the repetition itself created a familiarity with the strange texts he jumped between. Once slowly and clearly, and then once literally hopping from side to side and wildly gesturing, he recited the entire text of Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler,” which includes these lines:

You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.
Now every gambler knows that the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep.
‘Cause ev’ry hand’s a winner and ev’ry hand’s a loser.
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.

He framed his interest in this song by explaining that Kenny Rogers was a fat American singer, which he segued into by bringing up Mariah Carey, who he also said was a fat American singer. Such were the insignificant surface-level connections that brought Dimchev from bit to bit over this weirdly jumpy hour or so. It would be near impossible to make sense of his personal constellation of interests—he picks different choices from one hundred of his favorite themes for each performance—but the confusion is attractive. Who really understands her own mind and the connections and preferences living inside and jostling for attention, changing, relating or not relating to each other? Where I think we meet Dimchev is not only through his interests, which are clearly centered around himself and art, but also through this depiction of how the world and our minds really are: contradictory, unclear, sometimes hostile—and full of longing.

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*Monk, Samuel H. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960.

James Franco: Collage, in the Brooklyn Rail

Read review in the Rail HERE

When casually recounting—in person, to friends—stories about this or that performance last night, I have often been teased about my proclivity for starting with the less immediately relevant details about who was there, how many, which audience members left halfway through, and whether someone looked back to tell me to please stop talking so they could more fully enjoy David Parsons. What can I say? This sociological dimension is interesting—the entire, always unique, situation of being present in a particular space with a specific group of people actually affects and even constitutes live performance of all kinds.

I would even go so far as to include this kind of situational awareness under the heading of “theatrical ephemera,” a term I picked up from the playwright and curator Paul David Young, and which would also include interactions between directors and actors, financial exchanges, and anything else that happens off stage or in preparation. Theatrical ephemera itself—the stuff and people around, about, and making up a piece of theater—is increasingly being collaged or re-interpreted by visual artists. Its use has incredible potential in mature forms of hybridized time based work. Forget Michael Fried. Just think of Paul Chan’s MoMa installation of his “Godot”performances in New Orleans or Alix Pearlstein’s videos “Talent” and “Finale”on view last year at On Stellar Rays. The uses of theater in these works are legitimate and evocative, if hard to exactly pin down. Now, enter James Franco.

The celebrity/actor/performance artist/grad student/director/soap star/Oscar host, in his new work Collage, layers live pieces of theatrical ephemera, including excerpts from theater works, disparate pieces of choreography, and a behind-the-scenes style view of camera people. These layers extend, due to his singular position as movie star and aspiring art star, all the way to the great world stage that is Hollywood and the tabloids. In an unavoidable twist, the most interesting art-substance exists outside of the actual performance, which is itself a pretty long 45 minutes of bad acting in front of dizzying video projections; it is the circumstances of the performance that matter. The idea of “James Franco making a performance” is quite fascinating, and absolutely essential to the work being of any interest to anyone at all. This is, after all, the same artist who carved Brad Renfro’s name into his arm as an extension of his project “Rebel,” at the Venice Biennale: a publicity stunt that also attempts to place him art historically in line with early body art. It’s easy to be cynical about Franco’s mediocre product, but impossible not to appreciate that he’s turned fame into art. Not only does he appropriate pop culture, he is pop culture: this art does not exist without fanfare or video cameras taping from all angles.

Let me be clear about the two ways in which I am using “theatrical ephemera” as it relates to Collage. First, the actual performance: excerpts of Tennessee Williams’s and others’ texts, focused on the breaking point in bad relationships, are performed by acting students and combined with multiple live-feed videos of these intentionally amateur performances as they happen. Appropriating famous pieces of theater and combining them with video art is as old as the Wooster Group. What is different in this piece, and why theatrical ephemera needs to be explicated as something that exists separately from the trope of new uses for old texts, is that here the actors themselves—young, striving, trying too hard, loving the camera—are the real substance. They are put on display as such; we aren’t watching theater per se, we’re watching acting students trying to act.

We’re also watching ourselves watching them: at least one of the six camera people on stage filming the actors is always filming the audience. Everyone’s visage appears at least once on one of the projections during the performance—much as it would at a ball game. This is thanks to technology created by video artist Kurt Ralske, who collaborated with Franco (along with choreographer Chole Kernaghan) on the performance. From a seat in the back of the studio space, Ralske controlled which video would be showing on which screen—all three back walls were completely covered in projected video, and monitors hung in front of the actors. Throughout the performance, he used his computer to switch the positioning of the feeds, highlighting alternating actors. As this chaotic world crowded with too many actors for the stage and too much video for the walls unfolded in front of the audience, Franco stayed hidden in a booth at the back of the room, noticeably, as the only person in the small studio space who could not be seen. Playing the “narrator,” he would shout random comments to the actors, booming a ridiculous deep voice into a microphone that drowned out other sounds when he was talking: either notes on their acting, or comments pertaining to the storylines they were excerpting. “Are you a homo?!?!” was one of his more memorable lines.

Without the insanely long line outside the space with hundreds of young art student-looking people waiting for literally hours to get in (and then actually not getting in to the less than 50 seat studio), the comments about acting and celebrity that the work brings up simply would not hold as much water. Yes, it’s irritating. Yes, the lines are going to be just as long when the work is produced again for Performa11. No, the long lines do not mean that this is necessarily good work or better work than other kinds of performance. But the fans stuck outside and the celebrities in the audience: that is the work. Art has been expanding into all aspects of life, including pop culture, for a very long time; we keep renegotiating the boundaries between art and non-art. In this case, the blurring is being brought upon art and life by someone in a very unusual, very privileged position—even by Hollywood standards—to begin with. As to whether there is any real cultural or personal value in this kind of pop idol artwork: that remains to be seen. But as the Franco narrative continues to play out on art’s biggest stages, I, for one, will be sleeping with one eye open.

Specialized Vision: Curating Grace Exhibition Space / The Brooklyn Rail

Read the article in the Brooklyn Rail HERE.

What is the difference between performance art, contemporary dance performance, and experimental theater? Ask that question to twenty people and you’ll get twenty different answers, though in general there is a split between people who think these kinds of differentiations are vital and useful, and those who find them limiting or beside the point. Underlying the discussion—and what is actually interesting about it—is the fact that no matter how much artists working in performance may cross disciplines, collaborate, or seek to be heard outside of one or another particular historical framework, the actual locations in which they are working all come with different potential and different baggage. They just do; they always have. No matter how much a curator might want to support a particular artist’s concept, some locations just cannot afford to have a big wet mess ruining their newly installed hardwood floor. Alternately, a slow, introspective piece might need an audience’s quiet attention, in which case certain non-traditional locations would be as likely to ruin the work as to expand its meaning.

So it remains a truly great thing that New York has so many distinct places to present and see pretty much every strain of what in the U.K. is called “live art.” At the same second floor location where it has been since 2006—on Broadway in Bushwick, underneath the J train, next to a liquor store—Grace Exhibition Space is the sole gallery in this city that shows specifically, in its most intentionally narrow definition, Performance Art. Jill McDermid and Erik Hokanson, the husband and wife who curate the space, and who host visiting international artists in their home, are fairly clear about what that term means to them. It’s the kind of thing, as Hokanson says, “you know when you see.” Explaining is a little more difficult. Here’s what it is not: 1.) Dance 2.) Theater 3.) A catch-all phrase for performers in general. Hokanson elaborates, “People say Ann Liv Young does performance art, or the Vaudeville thing people do in Brooklyn is performance art. They say about the guy who kicks a drum and plays clarinet while wearing a diaper, ‘Oh yeah that guy’s a performance artist.’ They think what we’re doing is a freak show, like a circus side show or fire twirlers. No. All those things are not performance art.”

McDermid, who has an MFA from the University of Iowa in Intermedia and Performance Art, remembers that until recently, introducing oneself as a performance artist would elicit people “rolling their eyes, kind of embarrassed for you but not knowing how to tell you.” The increasing visibility in the art world for everything that falls under the umbrella of contemporary performance has made people more comfortable with the idea of this kind of work. But the newly found mainstream appeal may be misleading when it comes to those dedicated to the international performance art circuit. As McDermid and Hokanson curate it, this kind of work is far from a sanitized spectacle, more reminiscent of the raw and dangerous 1970s version than the glamorous theater-housed works that Performa presents. “Seeing performance is like watching a horror film,” McDermid says. “I don’t know which way it is going to go. I don’t know if people are going to get hurt or if we’re going to have to call an ambulance. It can happen; people push things.”

A writer friend I respect likened one evening at Grace Space to being in Andy Warhol’s Factory; there’s definitely a collective craving for a bygone, less professionalized New York that the location intentionally seeks to satisfy. The part of Bushwick it’s in is definitely no stranger to eccentric art spaces: The Bruce High Quality Foundation had their first location a little further down by Kosciusko Street, right across from Goodbye Blue Mondays, an experimental music venue and hoarder’s paradise. Other little galleries line the elevated train-shadowed street, along with a fair number of diners and 99¢ stores. Although the location can make it more difficult for people to get out to performances (crowds generally range from about forty to sixty people), the visiting international artists tend to love it. “If they are foreigners, this funky neighborhood is so exotic. Everything you need to make a performance is all within ten blocks. And you know, we try and maintain a no-rules policy. So here: go nuts.”

Before she opened Grace Exhibition Space, McDermid was already traveling all over the world to see and to perform in festivals of performance art. Her continued travels with Hokanson have made their gallery well-known to artists from Canada to Serbia—in fact, there’s much more interest in Grace Space abroad than among local artists. This may have something to do with the local performance world trending more toward experimental offshoots of dance and theater and the small but growing number of locations that are being built to support these artists in showing boundary-crossing work. Another explanation, according to a lecture-performance by Marilyn Arsem, an artist who teaches at the Museum School in Boston and who performs occasionally with her collective Mobius at Grace Space, has to do with funding. Arsem recalls that when artists started losing their NEA grants in the 1980s, four out of five of them were working in performance. Performance art became a blacklisted form for a while, she says, because if you had a space that received grants and you showed this kind of work, you were likely to lose those grants.

Even though Grace Space was overlooked in Exit Art’s recent Alternative Histories show, which featured many of the city’s alternative art spaces, when McDermid and Hokanson traveled to China for the 10th Open Art Festival in Bejing, their names, or at least their gallery, was known to almost everyone. While having late-night drinks with a bunch of artists who were performing in the festival, Hokanson mentioned that he was visiting from New York to a performer from Hong Kong. The artist told him, in a thick Chinese accent, “In New York I know Grace Exhibition Space. I will apply and I hope they accept my application.” Hokanson’s response, since he had seen and loved this artist’s performance during the festival, was “Dude, that’s us. You’re in!” While no one in this particular performance art world is making a ton of money performing, they have developed a strong community, where everyone takes very good care of visiting artists, arranging places to stay and making sure everyone eats. McDermid and Hokanson might host this artist from Hong Kong in their spacious Williamsburg apartment one week, and the next week, they might be off to Italy, where they would perform, see new work, and get taken care of by other members of the community.

Grace Space does not have official non-profit status, but as Hokanson says, “if ever there has been a non-profit entity in the world, we’re it.” However, the lack of funds for performance art of this kind (and really of most kinds) isn’t something they believe needs to last forever. Their potential business model favors the sale of documentation and, until recently, they had a second gallery in Williamsburg, the Alice Chilton Gallery—McDermid’s given name—that showed more installation-based, durational work and was dedicated to selling performance documentation. This gallery, which lasted about two years, was essentially a project to locate collectors and develop the market for performance art. As McDermid sees it, despite its difficulties in the market, performance art has the potential to be a very blue-chip kind of art form. Taking Fluxus as an example, there are very few objects from those performances that remain and now, with the resurgence in popularity of performance art, they are selling for a lot of money.

Though the Chilton gallery closed—it was just too difficult to maintain two spaces—the idea of saving and exhibiting ephemera and documentation from performances is still alive, and not simply to have something to sell. “We’re going to try and bring that gallery into here,” McDermid says of Grace Space, “so that hopefully when people come to see performances, there is actually a context for them to put the work in.” Performances happen most Fridays, though in order to support the other art spaces in Williamsburg, they are generally not scheduled when the galleries are open late on the second Friday of every month. For the donation-based cost of admission, you can usually get keg beer or a glass of boxed wine at the bar. People sometimes drink too much, and for the most part, do as they like—there’s very little of the preciousness one usually finds in the infrastructure around the presentation of art.

Sometimes, as the husband and wife artist-curators think about the future, they imagine moving Grace Space to a bigger, more convenient location, but they know that there is something about this particular loft that fuels a certain kind of originality and energy, which is something they want to maintain. Hokanson explains, “If you have a good night where the energy is really flowing, then people in the audience start doing crazy stuff they wouldn’t normally do. They might get involved in the performances in much more connected ways, like when artists started inviting audience members to take their clothes off, and they were like “fuck it, this is awesome.” This is really great and may be harder to do in a cleaner, formal environment. There is a safety and anonymity to having it be in this banged up loft.”

New in PAJ 98: Innovation Meets Tradition on Summer Dance Stages

Visit the MIT Press website HERE to purchase a copy of the journal or to purchase a download of the article.

Works discussed in the article:

Twelve Ton Rose (excerpt), You can see us, Foray Forêt, and L’Amour au théâtre, by Trisha Brown Dance Company, July 8, 2010, Bard Summerscape at the Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater; Adyton by Rashaun Mitchell, and members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform an Event with Ethel, July 10, 2010, at Mt Tremper Arts Summer Festival; Chui Chai (Transformation), by the Pichet Klunchun Dance Company, July 18, 2010, at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, Massachusetts.

Eiko & Koma / Artcritical.com

March 29 – April 9, 2011
450 West 37th Street, east of 10th Avenue,
New York City, (646) 731-3200

Eiko & Koma’s Naked, at Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) through April 9th, is a living installation accompanied, in a neighboring room, by videos of historical performances; it is the current installment of the three-year Retrospective Project highlighting the 40-year career of this artist duo. The durational performance, which inhabits a small, enclosed, nest-like area where viewers can either sit and stay or browse for a minute and move on, was designed for and originally installed last November in a gallery at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Despite the fact that Eiko & Koma have a long history as dance artists, the piece seems out of place at the destination theatre and dance venue of BAC. Installation in the 6th floor studios is not ideal for the work, which is a pocket of man-made nature more effectively stumbled upon than ticketed and controlled as in traditional theater. But the artists have done their best with this location; the work is free and open to the public any time and reservations are not absolutely necessary. You can enter and leave, at your leisure, a still space where the quiet, subtly painted naked bodies of a husband and wife barely touch, barely move, and yet pack a lifetime of craft, energy, and artistry into thoughtfully designed and extended moments.

Floor to ceiling canvas walls create a break between the entrance to studio 6A and Eiko & Koma’s bodies, which lie on the floor atop a messy swirl of leaves, twigs and black bird feathers. Holes in the canvas walls create little frames you can peer through to see the two of them, seemingly alone in the space. The small holes in the canvas, which itself is pasted with feathers and black marks as if intentionally dirtied by some natural habitat, creates a sense of distance between viewer and performer. Once around the corner and inside the small enclosure with the artists as well as the sometimes fully packed rows of floor and bench seating, this distance is completely gone. The artists’ two bodies were lying on their sides, facing one another, when I first entered. During the time I sat still and watched, there was no real change in their physical location, but there was an ever present tension of muscle, and ever-so-slight twists of each body open, exposing skin stretched tight over ribs, breath lifting bellies. After some time, the bodies closed into hiding, softly quivering fetal positions. The two did not move in unison, but played off of one another, appearing to sense and respond to the slight movements and occasional, always tender touches of their partner. One wonders how much of this action was planned and how much happened in the moment, and, after so many years of moving at glacial speed next to the same person, whether there is really any significant difference between planning and improvisation in their action.

Despite the nakedness of this performance, like Anna Halprin’s approach to nudity, the work is not sexual. The bodies on view are not specifically desexualized, but the actions themselves are already so fallen, closer to being of nature in the nearly dead sense than in the procreative animal sense—a seamless part of the landscape rather than an insertion onto landscape. There is no power struggle between the two bodies or with the bodies and the environment, which feels damp, like a cave; the only acoustics are random drips of water that fall from the ceiling and the rustling of dried leaves that hang in bunches from the overhead lights. Watching this nearly still tableau is unexpectedly riveting: time flies. In the next room, viewers are meant to understand the history of Eiko and Koma’s nakedness and its connection to the natural world, and how their work arrived at this point. Videos on display show works from the last 40 years in which the artists perform with nothing on. This room serves as an unintentional argument for the necessity of live performance—the performance documents, even the video installation that includes an underwater screen showing the couple’s Lament (1985) and Undertow (1987), clearly lack the moment-by-moment power of the living installation.

But the element of continuity and history that the accompanying videos bring into the work is the principal reason that Eiko & Koma are performing this week. Retrospective Project (2009-2012), of which Naked is a part, is designed after the museum-model concept for retrospectives: a visual art formula adapted and applied to performing artists. A large exhibition of the duo’s work will open at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art this summer, accompanied by a comprehensive 288-page monograph published by the Walker Art Center. With living performance artists, the video and ephemera based retrospective is a worthy accompaniment to an opportunity to see the real works, or at least the really interesting and exciting works, which are the new live performances by these artists. This was the case with Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at MoMA and it is certainly true for at least this portion of Eiko & Koma’s tour. Whether or not this model of performance artist as museum object can be sustained after the inevitable absence of the artist him/herself is a question curators will certainly be addressing in coming years as they rush to figure out ways to maintain famous but ephemeral works by canonized 20th-century artistic bodies-as-icons. For now, at least, Eiko & Koma themselves are on the 6th floor at BAC, laying in a nest of sticks and leaves, slowly moving their aging, breathing bodies with what is transmitted as a feeling of complete acceptance of the viewers’ intimate gaze. If you sit for long enough, you’ll notice that sometimes, they even look back.

View originally published article online HERE

Cori Olinghouse / Review published in the Rail

Cori Olinghouse of Ninja

by Patricia Milder

Cori Olinghouse is among a number of artists who appropriate existing underground forms in their contemporary art and performance works. Nothing against this practice—I’m a fan, for example, of Rashaad Newsome’s high/low paper and video collages and de-contextualized abstractions of gendered movements and sounds—but when it comes to fully formed styles as fabulous as voguing and waacking, there’s really nothing like the real thing.

Cori Olinghouse and Eva Schmidt in Olinghouse’s The Animal Suite: Experiments in Vaudeville and Shapeshifting. Photo by Bill Herbert, courtesy Danspace Project.

So it is to Olinghouse’s credit that she chose to present her new work, The Animal Suite: Experiments in Vaudeville and Shapeshifting, at Danspace in an evening length program also featuring a work by three-time House Dance International “Champion of the Year” Javier Ninja and the Grandfather of the House of Ninja (and Olinghouse’s Vogue teacher) Archie Burnett. Their piece, Elements of Vogue, was downright intoxicating. When I die and my soul is reborn, can it please be as a member of the House of Ninja? These men manage to express all the attitude and precision of hip-hop styles like breaking and locking, overlaid with a smooth, hyper-femme finish. And the drama! It’s easy to see the appeal of the form to an artist like Olinghouse, whose body spent years working Trisha Brown’s mostly desexualized, minimalist movement patterns. Also included in her evening length program was a short piece by the Japanese choreographer Kota Yamazaki. Now based in New York, Yamazaki has training in Butoh, ballet, and tutu design; his short solo was notable as much for the outrageous, kimono-like dress and bright pink wig he wore, as for his faintly creepy, slow moving Tokyo-fantasy dance.

Vogue and waacking might have been born in underground clubs and ballrooms, but these sister styles—the former originated in the East and the latter the West coast—are themselves a mash-up of elements from modern dance, Balinese dance, ballet, gymnastics, martial arts, and, of course, the emulation of supermodel and old-Hollywood glamour poses. In an interview with TV Brazil, Burnett says that waacking, in its infancy, was called “Garbo” after an icon of the times, which gives you an idea of how long its been around. (We’re talking late 1960s and ’70s, not Garbo’s heyday in the ’30s, but still.) Today these forms are completely comfortable in a setting like Saint Mark’s Church, electrifying a mixed audience of Ninja fans and contemporary dance people. The night I saw the program, the crowd was noticeably enthusiastic as Javier Ninja, with his slight yet muscular body, made his way into deep backbends and ridiculous splits; it seemed at times his arms had no bones and the normal limitations of human joints, as in knees, were a non-issue. His arms flew in fast, precise patterns around his head while Burnett strolled a slow runway walk and glanced coolly out from under dark sunglasses. Shouts of encouragement were heard from the seats: “Girl, you better work!”

And so the evening ended with high energy; out on the street after the performance, bundled-up theatergoers cut their arms through the frigid air with energetic, amateur imitations, as they made their way to somewhere warm. After a few more hours passed, however, it was Olinghouse’s thoughtful, exquisitely costumed (by Andy Jordan) work that lingered in the mind as it was intended: as the intellectual anchor for the evening-length experience. She used vogue sparingly in her piece, including it as one method of her exploration of transformation through movement and dress. In The Animal Suite, her dancers became bears and birds as she herself slid between genders in the most natural way.

Starting with men’s clothes and an old-timey straw hat, her image and footwork in a style inspired by Buster Keaton in The Playhouse, Olinghouse feminized her character as the piece slowly—sometimes a bit too slowly—progressed. Seeing vogue through her exquisitely trained body, which she had presented as masculine only minutes earlier, was destabilizing and strangely satisfying. I don’t want the nuance in her movement-based fantasy shape changing to be lost in translation: words such as “masculine” and “feminine” are finite but the expression of self and other in the body is not. She and her dancers tried on movements like they were costumes, playing openly and with varying degrees of success, with the fluidity between dance and entertainment forms, genders, and the physical expressions of various living species. Experiments in shapeshifting, indeed.

To read this review on the Brooklyn Rail website: HERE

Staging Action at MoMA, Review published in the Rail

Staging Action: Performance in Photography Since 1960

by Patricia Milder

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART | JANUARY 28 – MAY 9, 2011

Staging Action: Performance in Photography Since 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art, which features still images of artists performing specifically for the camera, proffers a conservative position with regard to categories of photographic performance documents, which have traditionally been seen as either “documentary” (records of live actions and events) or “theatrical” (performed for the camera). These categories have been uprooted in recent years by art historians and critics, and even by MoMA, which, with its highly visible performance exhibition series and growing collection of performance works in all forms, has a stake in the more contemporary idea that even “documentary” performance photos have art-object quality. Not so, however, in the photography department. The curators (Roxana Marcoci and associate Eva Respini) seem more concerned with presenting only the theatrical variety as a form of art photography.

Laurel Nakadate. “Lucky Tiger #151” (2009). Chromogenic color print with ink fingerprints. 4 × 6”. Courtesy of MoMA.

The inclusion of such works as “Untitled” (1980), by Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, a double self-portrait in matching red wigs and black suits, reminds me of the criticism RoseLee Goldberg caught back when she included Sherman in her history of performance art; now the photographer’s works are a secure part of the performance art canon without ever having been performed live, and it seems that any photographer who presents his or her visage for the camera can be considered a performer. Lee Friedlander—a photographer whom no one would call a performance artist—is included with a piece called “Tokyo, Japan,” (1994), which shows the artist standing against a white wall with a square of light, presumably from an open window, falling across his face. As with many works in the show, this piece expresses the performative potential of photography, in which the lens and, by implication, we the viewers, are the only audience. It’s a beautiful, meditative image, but had it been in any other show, I would have never imagined it a work of performance art or even a document of a performance. In this context, I suppose I can imagine the man creating the image, the heat of the light on his closed eyes, and perhaps even the time he waited for the shifting natural light to hit just the right location for an ideal shot.

Like the Friedlander, Laurel Nakadate’s “Lucky Tiger” (2009) series and Lorna Simpson’s “May, June, July, August ’57/’09” (2009), which hang next to one another, are also works I would have never expected to find in a show about performance photography. Both play with the conventions of the pin-up and the snapshot, examining them (and women) as objects. Nakadate, in a swimsuit, strikes semi-provocative but mostly coolly staged poses in photos whose surfaces are smeared by the inky black thumbprints of men the artist found on Craigslist. Simpson acts out scenes from vintage black-and-white photos of women in their homes, juxtaposing her new photos with the older ones. These works are as much about images—how they live, how they can be recreated, and how they create meaning—as they are about women. That these contemporary artists’ performances take place only in the realm of images feels like an appropriate, intentional comment, considering the very real fact that human relations are increasingly virtual.

The works in this show by artists actually known for live performance fall into the traditionally understood category of “theatrical” performance documentation—Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Ana Mendieta, and the Viennese Actionists make appearances with work of this kind. However, a photograph of an action by one of these artists that did include a live audience is now, by many accounts, also considered to be an art object in itself. Why were no works of this kind included? In his influential essay “The Performativity of Performance Documentation”(PAJ 84, 2006), Philip Auslander concludes that,

The only significant difference between the documentary and theatrical modes of performance documentation is ideological: the assumption that in the former mode, the event is staged primarily for an immediately present audience and that the documentation is a secondary, supplementary record of an event that has its own prior integrity…this belief has little relation to the actual circumstances under which performances are made and documented.

He goes on to say, “this difference between the images has had no consequence in terms of their iconicity and standing in the history of art and performance.”

With this idea in mind, it’s hard to understand how it serves either of the young and open histories of performance or photography (or even the value of MoMA’s performance photography archives, for that matter) to stage a show based on such conservative ideas. Underlying the curators’ bias against live performance documents is, I believe, actually a very old fine-art photography bias: the idea that studio photography is art and documentary photography is something other than art. The show would have been much more exciting and interesting had it acknowledged or even questioned the confusing but relevant philosophical relationship between traditionally understood categories of photography of performance, instead of propagating old delineations. Auslander asked a question back in 2006 that, if considered even in the slightest, would have added some light to Staging Action: “At the phenomenal level, there is not necessarily any intrinsic way of determining whether a particular performance image is documentary or theatrical. And even if one does know, precisely what difference does that knowledge make?”

Interview with Christopher Knight / The Brooklyn Rail

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, Rail Managing Art Editor Patricia Milder met longtime Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight for a late-November outdoor lunch on Ventura Boulevard, over which they discussed his life and work.

Patricia Milder (Rail): In Dave Hickey’s introduction to your book of collected criticism, he brushes over what happens in your life on the East Coast and starts with L.A.

Christopher Knight: That’s because I’ve been trying to forget. [Laughs.]

Rail: Well, he does mention that you went to school in New York state. Where was that?


Knight: State University at Binghamton. I did my masters and doctorate coursework there. I did everything but my dissertation and then I fled.

Rail: You didn’t want to be an art historian?

Knight: Well, I was planning on it. I had lined up a Guggenheim research grant and I was writing my dissertation on Robert Smithson. I thought I knew what I was going to be doing for the next year or so, but in March I got a phone call from a friend in L.A. at the County Museum, who said there was a curatorial job open in La Jolla and that I should apply for it. She said, “You’ve never been to California and never been to L.A. At least if you apply for the job they will probably bring you out for an interview.” And I thought, “There’s a good idea,” since there was, you know, 30 feet of snow in upstate New York at the time. So sure enough I applied, they brought me out for an interview, I got off the plane at LAX and thought, “Wow. I’m home.”

Rail: Where did you actually grow up? And did you have an interest in art as a child?

Knight: No, that happened during my senior year in high school. I grew up in a very small town in the Berkshires.

Rail: Must have been beautiful there.

Knight: It’s a great place to be from, near Great Barrington. There was just no reason to know about art there. But I had a really great French teacher in high school, and she organized an outing to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. We went to look at French painting and then have lunch at a French restaurant, and the whole day was to be spoken in French. That didn’t happen. But Friday was always French culture day. She had these big reproductions of French paintings that she would use like flashcards that she would hold up and we had to memorize artist, title, date, and style. Everyone in class hated it but me. I thought this was, like, totally cool. So when I went to the Clark I was like, “Well, look at that, there are the actual paintings, not reproductions.” And that was what got me interested.

Rail: So when you eventually arrived in Los Angeles, you took the job, but you didn’t stay at the La Jolla museum for very long.

Knight: Three years. I got out of the museum business when the director asked me to participate in a kickback scheme from a commercial gallery. Not for personal gain, but he was going to buy this very expensive and completely inappropriate work for the museum because the dealer was going to give him a kickback from the commission, which he was going to use to fund the curatorial travel budget. “No,” I thought, “you’re not doing that”—so I went to the president of the board and she thought it was the funniest thing she had ever heard. So I quit.

Rail: And then you got the job at the Herald Examiner?

Knight: As we call it, the late, lamented Herald Examiner, which was a totally great place for about 10 years. After I had left La Jolla and had come up to L.A., I wrote a couple of gallery reviews for Artforum and stuff like that, but I had no thought of being a critic and I knew nothing about journalism, that’s for sure. Literally, I got a phone call one day from an editor at the Herald saying he was looking for freelancers, that someone had given them my name, and would I be interested in trying out some things. I said sure, and then he said, “Can you send me clips of stuff you’ve done in newspapers?” I said, “No. I can send you clip.” I’d written one piece for the San Diego Reader, which was the weekly alternative paper. It’s the first essay in the book, “Miss Piggy and the ‘Pieta.’” Later, he told me that when they read that, they knew they were going to hire me.

Rail: That essay is surprisingly mature and developed for a first piece.

Knight: Thanks, and it still seems weirdly relevant, much to my horror.

Rail: Yes, and threads that you continue throughout your career are already visible in it, as if you already knew what was important to you or what needed to be said.

Knight: Well, I’ve always been interested in pop culture. Also, I subscribe to the Baby Duck Theory, which is that the moment that you come into art and become conscious of it, you get imprinted with whatever is happening at that time. So for me that was around 1968: it’s Pop, Minimal, conceptual, early video. That’s where I got imprinted.

Rail: So were you writing weekly for the Examiner?

Knight: More like twice a week, which was a great way to get into it. When people ask me, “How do you learn to write about art?” I always say that the only way to learn is by doing it a lot, over and over and over. You either learn it, or you don’t. It’s also a great way to make a fool of yourself in public, which is very, very useful and important. So I do that a lot. It breeds humility. Those mornings when you wake up and think, “Well, if I got in my car right now, how many houses could I get to and get the paper off the front stoop?”

Rail: You don’t still have those mornings, do you?

Knight: Oh, sure. Although the Internet has interfered.

Rail: Can we talk about L.A. for a little bit? I’m from L.A. and I still love it, but since I’ve lived in New York and become accustomed to this lifestyle where you can do 10 things in one day and see a ton of galleries all at once if you want to, it’s always a challenge, when I’m here in town, to figure out how to see the art. I mean, my parents live in Culver City, which is where so many of the galleries on the Westside are, and I can’t even quite figure out how to get around to all of them in a reasonable way. It’s this completely different style of doing things.

Knight: Well, speaking of Dave Hickey, he once said something about going to L.A. galleries, which is true. He said, “If you spend as much time looking at the show as it took you to drive to the gallery, it’s probably a good show.” On Fridays we do this rotating gallery column, and a couple of years ago I had done the column and I was looking at it in the paper and I thought, “There’s a show in Santa Monica, a show in Culver City, a show in Chinatown, and a show in Pomona. The distance between the gallery in Santa Monica and the gallery in Pomona is 45 miles. If I had started in Chelsea, I would be in Morristown, New Jersey.”

Rail: Well, with Brooklyn galleries I think you run into some of the same problems as in L.A., since they are more spread out. You have destination galleries and you have to know where you’re going.

Knight: The worst for me is going to a destination gallery, which is usually a small place, and you get there, and it’s closed. And there is a sign on the door, you know, “Back at 1:30.” That’s almost the only time I use my business cards from the Times. I slip one under the door, and wait for them to freak out.

Rail: That’s funny. What do you think about Bergamot Station? I just saw the Alberto Burri show there, which was great. I’d never been before to the little museum they have there.

Knight: They do some interesting stuff. I mean, I think the interesting thing about Burri was that even though he was in L.A. a lot of the early years that I lived here, he didn’t exist. He was a complete hermit, he was not part of anything, and he stayed by himself. Actually, he lived up here just off of Mulholland, right in back of David Hockney’s house.

Rail: Hmm, wow.

Knight: Yeah, just a little enclave of foreign painters. Which is weird, that he’s living up here doing these things that no one knows about.

Rail: Except, I’ve heard it said that Robert Rauschenberg was influenced by him, which makes sense. Gagosian has that huge Rauschenberg show up right now, so he’s on my mind.

Knight: Well, speaking of art and popular culture, Rauschenberg is a great example. He decided to become an artist when he went to the Huntington in San Marino and saw Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy.” He was working in a psych hospital in San Diego because he was a conscientious objector, and he took the day off and came up to the Huntington and walked into the English portraiture gallery and there was this painting that he had seen on a tea towel, and he thought, “Oh my God, people make these things,” and that was when he decided to become an artist.

Rail: That’s a good story. I just went to a talk about Rauschenberg by an artist named Gary Nichols, who was an assistant of Rauschenberg’s. It was really interesting because he talked about the art and its creation from the artist’s perspective. It was a great talk, but it made me think about how different the critic’s job and the artist’s job can be. Do you think it’s important to have ideas about what things mean and what things are beyond even the artist’s ideas?

Knight: I think for a critic, the artist’s intent doesn’t really matter. Artist’s intent is important for art historians, but not for critics. I write about art in order to find out what I think.

Rail: About art and also about the context and the culture.

Knight: I’m a big John Dewey-ite. I think pragmatist philosophy is the most coherent approach to art that I’m aware of. The art is the experience, not the object. So that’s what I’m interested in trying to articulate. It’s an imperfect analogy, but I sometimes try to explain it with pottery—ceramics—since that is one of the oldest continuous art forms there is. A pot has a certain kind of a shape, and you can put all kinds of things into it, but you can’t put everything into it because not everything fits. So the shape of the thing, the form that it takes, has a general contour, but what you can put into it is as varied as the people who experience it.

Read the full interview in the Rail Here

Keeping it Realness / The Brooklyn Rail

Keith Hennessy’s Crotch (all the Joseph Beuys references in the world cannot heal the pain, confusion, regret, cruelty, betrayal or trauma…) was a high point of American Realness, Benjamin Pryor’s second annual festival of contemporary performance, which spanned the second weekend in January at the Abrons Arts Center. During his show, Hennessy seemed to evoke the seminal artist’s ancient, strange magic, as if Beuys’s healing essence had been carried through time, fulfilling the promise of his ritualistic performance actions as he intended them: seeds to promote actions by others. I think he traveled through the hot breath of the individuals gathered on stage around the nude, glittered, simultaneously tension- and relief-soaked Hennessy. Ideas such as Beuys’s may lead an independent life, but it’s only through the right artistic catalyst that they can morph into raw performance energy, more deeply sensed than intellectually understood.

Hennessy performed sections of the piece as they were laid out in his score: an audience wandering on stage amid his and Beuys’s symbolic materials, a cleverly edited seven-minute lecture on the history of art, an underwear-clad dance in a Scream mask, and the final close circling in of the audience around him on stage. The night I saw Crotch, Hennessy spoke about previous performances of the piece, the way the audience interacted with it, and how it has changed because of that interaction. The “should he wear underwear or pants for the dance” question, for example, was one he felt all audiences answered the same way. As he took off his pants, he said there was no use in asking, that everyone always said “underwear.” He told us to take care of each other as we came up to the stage for the final section; he wanted to make sure that all could see.

Performance art can just as easily become an object as a painting or sculpture that gets stuck in its own materiality, denying the viewer a “real” experience. Many of the American Realness artists speak directly to the audience, acknowledging both the specific environment and their own artist-roles and imperfections in those roles; they’re attempting to take the performance beyond the materials of construction and into genuine experience. This particular way of becoming more human, of challenging the conventions of performance (specifically in a dance context), is almost overwhelmingly popular among a certain set these days. The technique itself now has the potential to objectify a performance; still, the transformative promise of confessional language remains. Communing directly with an audience has become like executing any formalized technique: some do it more successfully than others.


THEM by Ishmael Houston-Jones at Abrons Arts Center during American Realness. Photo by Ian Douglas, courtesy tbspMGMT.
I’m ambivalent about Ann Liv Young’s mean-girl persona. But her Mermaid Solo is an excellent example of how well-designed naturalism, specifically in the context of sensationalistic sadomasochism, can give viewers an experience of “realness.” At first, she lay calmly in a kiddie pool, naked from the waist up and wearing a large fish tail on her lower half. Before long, courtesy of the tail, the water was out of the pool and onto the audience, who began seated in a circle around Ann Liv the mermaid; some of them were soon huddled by the door or standing with their backs flush to the wall, gripping coats and purses up and away from the fishy water. The energy in the room was as palpable as the energy around Hennessy, if less endearingly humane and community oriented. An odor of dead fish permeated the space. It was nausea inducing, as was the way Young berated her dancers (who were dressed as sailors) for everything that was going “wrong.” But oh how spectators do enjoy the idea that something dangerous, unscripted, or embarrassing might actually transpire. Parts of me actually do admire this woman, an individual who appears free of social responsibility and anxiety, who can and will flop around in a giant fish tail, gnaw on smelly raw fish, let her heavy breasts hang (what must be painfully) free, and still remain so empowered. Still, I find it impossible to like her.

And clearly she prefers it that way: her on-stage persona practically begs for reproach. Others who presented themselves as halfway sincere versions of themselves tried harder to endear the audience to them-playing-them. Miguel Gutierrez’s solo, Heavens What Have I Done, starts as a biographical lecture-performance evocative of French intellectual non-dance from the 1990s, but he quickly lets the piece transform into aggressively sensationalistic, heavily layered physical theater, complete with opera singing and tap dancing. He draws us in, creating a false sense of closeness with overly intimate details about his life—unpacking a suitcase to reveal his sexual recovery book, yoga blocks, and research materials for a future project. And he explains how he doesn’t get the respect he feels he deserves, expressing the frustrations of a mid-career artist who has earned an enormous amount of success, but still feels marginalized.

Through language, including intimate confessions, Gutierrez constructs an institutional and cultural critique. It’s always such a fine line to walk when the subject is ostensibly “me, me, me,” and although we know by now that the personal is political, sometimes the personal seems like it’s just exercising the ego. And yet, it’s still a brave act to get up on stage and reveal oneself with the intention of making art that lives outside of the old rules of dance. That Tarek Halaby titled his performance, “An attempt to understand my socio-political disposition through artistic research on personal identity in relationship to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Part One,” makes clear his intentions—the key words here are research and identity.


Keith Hennessy in Crotch at Abrons Arts Center during the American Realness Festival. Photo by Ian Douglas, courtesy tbspMGMT.
Yes, it matters that Halaby has a political message in this piece. But since he takes a straightforward human rights advocacy position, his formal decisions are more thought provoking. He attempts to make us feel compassion for Palestinians by placing us, at least in our imagination, in positions where we can relate to what it feels like to be them. He wants us to see Palestinians as individual human beings, and so he presents himself as aligned with their struggle: Palestinian himself, utterly, overly relatable. There is nothing polished and performer-like about his timid, charming, but self-deprecating persona (including the fact that he is never entirely believable). That we can’t actually relate to what the Palestinians go through is also clear and merges (not accidentally) to a personal thread running through the piece—his failure to actually make a dance. He’s sophisticated enough not to actually mean he’s failed: the dance he’s made is entirely on trend. Notably, however, Halaby does skip the formalized movement completely, instead interspersing his speech with faintly physicalized enactments of his research, including things he read in books, stories he heard, and personal experiences.

That Halaby is inspired by Gutierrez’s work is no secret. He discusses his relationship with the seasoned choreographer within the first few moments of his monologue, and doesn’t seem to feel the need to distance himself from this influence. He puts himself in a difficult position by doing so, because a retrospective comparison with Gutierrez’s finely calibrated manipulation of the crowd deflates the memory of Halaby’s attempt. His talk of dancing for Gutierrez is, however, effective as a nod (intentional or no) to his own “failure” to make a dance. It is also a helpful reminder that many of the American Realness artists are communicating regularly with each other; as a community, they are working with new techniques for conveying certain choreographic ideas that have become more important to them conceptually than body-based craft alone.

In a co-production with Performance Space 122’s COIL festival, American Realness also included THEM, a piece by the choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones, composer Chris Cochrane, and writer Dennis Cooper, which premiered in 1986 and was revived this fall. There is an unusual urgency in this piece, which is performed by the three artists who conceived it as well as a new group of young male dancers. The subject here—interactions between young gay men—thrums with undertones of street life, rejection, sickness, and trauma. The setting, made clear from the way the dancers dressed to the words Cooper spoke into the microphone, is a time and place where sexual interactions, especially in the gay community, held more danger, a greater tinge of death. Perhaps that’s what wrestling the dead goat on a dirty mattress was about. It was the single most disturbing and morally questionable animal interaction I’ve ever seen on stage, yet there was a certain beauty and necessity about the act. It was desperate and tender in a way that could never translate outside of the context of the piece.

THEM proves that live works can’t be bottled and preserved for eternity. The piece has changed since 1986: the audience is broader, the subject matter references history rather than emergency, the bodies cast in the work are older (in the case of Houston-Jones), and newer (in the case of the young dancers). Live works change; they continue to grow and age the way humans do. If it’s performance unencumbered by traditional conventions—experimental, subversive—then what it is today, it probably won’t be the next time you see it. And there’s something quite beautiful in that idea alone: that there is nothing but the present, replete with glorious failure and the endless potential to do it wrong all over again.

Read original article in the Rail Here