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?”