Roselee Goldberg
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TRENDS // SNEAK PEEKS // NEWSMAKERS // PORTFOLIO NEWSMAKER ROSELEE GOLDBERG IN THE 10 YEARS SINCE Goldberg founded Vezzoli with David Hallberg, Erika Vogt, and working with apprentices to create what the Performa biennial, performance art has Robin Rhode, Oscar Murillo, and others. we know now as static paintings or sculptures. moved swiftly into the establishment as Imagine the studios of the time those great museums, universities, and even art Sara roffino: Why was the Renaissance narrative paintings and classical themes fairs are now regularly creating dedicated chosen as the theme for this year’s Performa? were painted! Models of all ages from differ- spaces and programs for the genre. However, roSeLee GoLdberG: It was a period ent classes mingling in a bustling studio when artists were actively engaged in live workshop—it had to be a very theatrical place. performance has been an integral part of performance. It could be thought of as part With this year’s Performa, I wanted to show artists’ practice for hundreds of years—a fact of their job description in the courts and that live performance was integral to the underscored by a focus on the Renaissance in palaces of the aristocracy whom they served. artist’s experience in the Renaissance this year’s edition, taking place November 1 Artists moved between creating paintings and beyond. It is not a recent phenomenon. through 22 at venues throughout New and pageants, designing spectacles to Sr: How do you develop the themes for KRISTINE LARSEN KRISTINE York City and featuring work by Francesco celebrate a royal visit or a triumphant battle, each biennial? BLOUINARTINFO.COM NOVEMBER 2015 MODERN PAINTERS 23 PORTFOLIO // TRENDS // SNEAK PEEKS // NEWSMAKERS NEWSMAKER rG: One of the reasons I started Performa was to make the history of performance widely known, and to integrate that history into the history of art as we know it. Even though my book [Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present] was published in in shaping 20th-century art, it took the crea- tion of Performa to get the attention of a larger public—the critics as well as academics and curators. With the intention of uncovering this history, each biennial is anchored in a historical theme that we start researching two years in advance. We pull together a selection of texts that are bound in a reader, much as I do for my students at New York University, and we provide these readers for the artists, writers, curators, our staff, and anyone interested in getting to know the details of the particular historical period. We begin by reaching out to scholars and Leonardo da Vinci are performance artists. museum used to be a quiet, FROM TOP: Jesper Just They are certainly not performance artists, contemplative experience; A performance Princeton, who in turn put us in touch with a though aspects of their work have involved it was a place to study, still from True Love really interesting group of Renaissance performance. By the way, I rarely use the to be left alone, removed Is Yet to Come, a 2005 Performa scholars, including Alexander Nagel, Rebecca term “performance artist” to describe artists, from the street. But the commission. Zorach, and Pamela Smith. Much to my except in the broadest sense, to describe a museum of today is a Liz Magic Laser surprise and delight, I discovered a generation history. Rather, I follow the work of those bustling cultural palace, A performance of art historians who are looking at the artists who use “the live” as one medium with large spaces set aside still from I Feel Your Pain, commis- Renaissance through a lens of contemporary among many for expressing their ideas. Visual for crowds and events, sioned by the art, much in the way that we approach the artists throughout the 20th century have and some now also have biennial in 2011. done so—Andy dedicated performance Warhol, Robert spaces. The effect of this heightened attention Rauschenberg, Yves from academics and museums is that Klein, Yoko Ono, people can build a bank of references, they Vito Acconci, Joan can compare one with the other, they are Jonas, Mike Kelley, acquiring knowledge and entering into a very to name a few since contemporary conversation about media and the 1960s—and many engagement, narrative versus abstraction, contemporary artists time and space. We will see more and more today use performance museum-quality performance because among a range of the setting demands it, because curators media. Very few are becoming more effective producers, and artists use the term to because audiences will be expecting it. describe themselves, Sr: As museums are under increasing pressure either. Tino Sehgal to present sensational experiences, performance does not call himself a becomes more vulnerable to becoming spectacle. performance artist— How do you deal with this? no way! rG: So much of the art of the past two decades Sr: Much has has had a spectacular aesthetic, dazzling historical precedent to today’s performance. changed since Performa started. Marina surfaces of color, brilliant imagery, surround It’s been an extraordinary process of discovery. Abramovic´ ’s The Artist Is Present, in 2010, sound—which has as much to do with new I should point out that the artists whom we for instance, brought a lot of critical attention technology as with the highly tuned media ERFORMA commission for the biennial are not expected to the form, while museums and universities world that we live in. Think of the pristine P to respond directly to this historical anchor, are integrating it into their programs. vitrines of Jeff Wall, Matthew Barney’s although quite a few of them do. Has this popularity and institutionalization Sr: You’ve said that many artists who are affected performance? installations of Pierre Huyghe or Pipilotti thought of as painters or photographers or rG: It has brought more attention to Rist, and the recent mega-installations AULACOURT AND sculptors are actually performance artists. performance and created an avid audience of Paul McCarthy or Kara Walker. It is not P Can you explain this? who enjoy the experience of being up close at all surprising if performance of the same rG: With all due respect to the New York and personal to the artist, being able to era carries the same boldness of aesthetic, Times, I was misquoted as saying that turn to others in the room to discuss and the same richness of imagemaking, the same Jackson Pollock, Cindy Sherman, and argue their take on the work. Going to a desire to seduce and overwhelm. Performance IMAGES: BOTH 24 MODERN PAINTERS NOVEMBER 2015 BLOUINARTINFO.COM FILM can also be minimal, small in scale, conceptual: a simple conversation with a passerby on a bench in Harlem, as LEARNING TO LOVE CLICHE in a work by Dave McKenzie for Performa 09. Even with all Rick Alverson’s uncomfortable entertainment the museums and galleries now presenting performance, Performa provides the critical context for examining “FOR ALL INTENTS these changes and shifts in scale, aesthetic, content. We’re sure it will be put in that box,” director Rick Alverson says over the phone also focused on educating curators and writers to look at from his home in Virginia. Entertainment, which opens in New York this broad spectrum, this complex history, so that we can all on November 13, stars Gregg Turkington—known for his two-decade-plus make better sense of the range of material being made. stint as the comic persona Neil Hamburger—and the only laughs the Sr: Performance is ephemeral and time-based, yet it’s often transmitted via the Internet and social media. What is the potential in that respect? inserting Turkington’s character into a road-trip narrative (not unlike rG: There’s no question that performance is ideal for that of 1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop), a concept that was eventually online exhibition. Performance is by nature in motion; it abandoned (“We didn’t have any interest in a promotional vehicle for is visually powerful and inventive, and can have impact a comic character,” the director says). Alverson and Turkington have on the smallest iPhone screen. It is integral to our a shared aversion to narrative clichés, a disgust with metaphors and programming, and we’re constantly in conversation with symbolism and easy digestion. But at the same time, Alverson admits, Performa artists about various ways that they might those occasionally tired things are what constitute a shared cinematic use the Internet, but always in such a way that it has a language. Counterintuitively, director and actor embraced loaded clichés as raw material: a set of access points for the viewer that, begun a commissioning program, About Time, that deals Alverson says with a laugh, is “essentially a trap.” So in Entertainment more to come. Performa’s material is ideal for Instagram, the California desert, occasionally accompanied by a scatologically for recycling the imagery of performance in hundreds obsessed mime named Eddie (played by Tye Sheridan), who serves as his of ways. It allows instant participation from everybody. opening act. When our antihero is not performing, he’s sitting in his hotel Sr: Is there a risk with that potential? room crying into his daughter’s voice mail. The slowness and repetition rG: We can’t stop the speed of new technologies; the avant- of the scenes, with little narrative closure in sight, generates a certain garde of technology is irresistible to the avant-garde of amount of fatigue for the viewer, as Alverson takes a familiar premise—a man in search of something in the desert—and pushes it as far as it can go.