Lampert Andrew at PS1

Saturday, September 4th and 11th

Saturday, September 4th @ 3pm:

CONTRACTED CINEMA

JACKA SPADES 2009, 34 minutes, Super 8

Steve Dalachinsky, with the aid of Yuko Otomo and cinematographer Andrew Lampert, is offered the chance to direct his dream film. This is not that, but rather the result of what they shot that day presented in real time as they filmed it. In the end, this is always what the film was supposed to be; what Steve wanted is another story heard on the soundtrack of the images gathered within. “I think I always wanted to be the actor, not the director.” – Steve Dalachinsky from the soundtrack.

AM I FROM BROOKLYN? 2010, 24 minutes, Super 8

A tour-guided journey through a few Brooklyn neighborhoods known and unknown to the filmmaker. First performed at The Poetry Project on April 23, 2010. PLUS…other surprise films! AND…Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo will each read a couple poems! BUT WAIT… a mindboggling short film from the SEE series by Eugene Castle! DON’T FORGET…there will be door prizes! – - – - – -

Saturday, September 11th @ 3pm:

THE OLD WORLD AND THIS ONE, TOO

Today’s show features a few groupings of all new works now seeing the light of the screen. Herein is space and time, approached from numerous angles, encompassing friends, colleagues, ancestors and unknowns. The present doesn’t pause, it moves faster with each blink.

Are These Dance Films?:

BUFFON MOVEMENT ACADEMY (2010, 3.5 minutes, Super 8, music by Louis T. Hardin)

IRINA IN A GROOVE 2010, 6 minutes, Super 8

Caroline & Madeline, Together:

CAROLINE GOLUM AS 2010, 9 minutes, video Caroline Golum auditions to play my great great great great great Aunt in late 1700s. Siberia.

MADELINE QUINN IS 2010, 9 minutes, video Madeline Quinn gets the role of a lifetime, Gunilla, a wicked Swedish warrior with demented desires and a plan for domination.

ETKA & RIFKA: TEENAGERS OF THE OLD WORLD 2010, 12 minutes, 16mm on video Caroline and Madeline star in this all-inclusive attempt to make a student film.

MADELINE VICTORIOUS 2010, 5.5 minutes, video Madeline elaborates upon the circumstances surrounding her arrival in NYC, and much more.

Portraits:

DECONGESTING LEILA 2010, 4 minutes, Super 8 Starring Leila Hekmat. For adults only.

PETERMICHELLEANGELAALAN 2010, 3.5 minutes, Super 8 Precious moments set to music, made sappier.

Destiny:

DOUBLE TROUBLE 2010, approx 12 minutes, X2 Super 8

DOUBLE TROUBLE is the aptly named duo of Andrew Lampert and Fern Silva. Today features the stereo-vision premiere of a brand new double projection piece. Not much else to say.

PLUS… another incredible short film from the SEE series by Eugene Castle! AND… yet more surprises! BUT WAIT…even better door prizes! —— All happening at: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center 22-25 Jackson Ave at the intersection of 46th Ave Long Island City, NY 11101 (718) 784-2084

The Comfort of Strangers
Judith Bernstein, Sylvia Sleigh, Leslie Thornton, Jack Whitten

Curated by Cecilia Alemani

The Comfort of Strangers is an exhibition conceived as a conversation piece, a dialogue between unfamiliar faces and old friends. It is not a thematic show but rather an exhibition constructed as a system of elective affinities and secret sympathies – a gathering of strangers who both comfort and disturb each other.

Focusing on four New York-based artists whose practices extend from the Sixties and Eighties, the exhibition combines unexpected oppositional qualities: figuration with abstraction, monumentality with fragility, reluctance and exuberance.

Borrowing its title from a novel by British writer Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers imagines unusual connections between different art works and distant art worlds, reminding us that New York is a stratified and complex landscape – a much greater universe than we may think.

Executed in the Seventies as an evolution of his early expressionist canvases, Jack Whitten’s (b. 1939) paintings reveal hidden geometrical shapes that emerge from an abstract surface. Realized by layering different strata of acrylic paint, which is then treated with a large squeegee, these works freeze the artist’s physical gestures into molecular forms emanating a lyrical aura.

The lush portraits of 94-year-old Sylvia Sleigh (b. 1916) depict friends and acquaintances of the artist in everyday poses, sitting on chairs, standing in the garden or caught in pensive moments. Reinterpreting traditional portraiture through a saturated palette of flowery colors, Sleigh turns common people into icons of a remote, devoted veneration.

Judith Bernestein’s (b. 1942) large-scale charcoal drawings from the mid-Seventies often intertwine controversial imagery with a political slant. With harsh strokes and aggressive signs, the artist combines mechanics and sexuality to compose intricate diagrams of our desires. The mysterious presences in FIVE PANEL VERTICAL stand as silent witnesses guarding the exhibition.

Leslie Thornton’s lifetime epic Peggy and Fred in Hell, which she started in the mid-Eighties and has only recently finished, is an otherworldly account of the life of two children as told through their imaginary adventures and unsettling adult behaviors. Pervaded by an eerie atmosphere, Peggy and Fred in Hell animates the exhibition with a surreal sound track.

CLICK HERE TO BUY YOUR TICKETS ONLINE TODAY!

The Red Party will take its inspiration from the early years of the Russian Revolution – that fertile period during which artists such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Alexandra Exter committed themselves to calling to action their fellow citizens through avant-garde propositions in all disciplines.

The evening will begin at 7:00 p.m. with a special VIP dinner, featuring food installations and performances, and will transform at 9:00 p.m. into a dance party, with an ongoing series of fashion and music events.

Attire for the evening is RED!

RoseLee was just interviewed by Aleksandra Cuk in Danas, the largest daily newspaper in Belgrade. She was in Belgrade to participate in the symposium Scenography Expanding 2: On Artists / Authors. The entire interview is copied below–enjoy!

June 30, 2010, Danas

Alexandra Cuk (AC): Your book Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present is considered as one of the key books within the education domain regarding performance theory. Its title points out to the long tradition of performance art and to the fact that it is an older discipline than has been thought. Which prejudices still follow performance art?

RoseLee Goldberg (RLG): Most people don’t realize the critical role of performance in shaping the history of art of the 20th century. My book starts with the Futurists in 1909, who launched twentieth-century performance as an essential medium for getting art to a larger public and as a means for responding directly to shifting political, economic, and technological changes in society.  They were the first to declare a multi-disciplinary agenda for the modern artist, and included all media in their landscape of operations – music, dance, architecture, graphics, poetry, fashion, food.  But in fact the history of performance goes back much further in time, to pageants and royal celebrations, fireworks and parades. Artists have always created live performances and we can look to the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, Caravaggio, Bernini amongst many others for wonderful examples.

This lack of understanding has meant that performance has been presented in museums and galleries and at biennials around the world as a kind of sideshow to the history of painting and sculpture, rather than as an inseparable part of art history. For this reason I decided to start Performa (in 2004). I felt it was time that this extraordinary history was more widely known and more fully understood, and I think that Performa is already having an affect on how institutions and the public understand the importance of this material.

AC: You said that the performance art has permanently changed the relationship between the audience and the artist and his or her work. Could you explain in which ways it has been achieved and which characteristics of the art performance have been responsible for it?

RLG: Performance can be thought of as the most direct way for an artist to address the audience. It most cases it sets up a special, one-on-one experience between performer and viewer and this is something that we at Performa think about very carefully in organizing our three- week festival.  We look for ideal spaces for an artist’s work and consider all aspects of the production in combination to provide the optimum experience for the viewer. In many ways I feel it is important to slow down time to give the audience the space to fully absorb the artist’s ideas and sensibilities.  For me it was a kind of reaction to seeing so much media work in galleries and at biennials, and never having enough time to give the work full attention.

AC: What is your assessment of the great performances of Marina Abramovic in her retrospective exhibition The Artist Is Present at MOMA and what are your experiences with this artist? (Did Marina tell you something about the introduction of the performance art to the Yugoslav scene of 1970s and its pioneers?)

RLG: I have known Marina since 1972 and it has been an extraordinary friendship – both personal and professional.  Over the years, she has told me about the Yugoslav scene of the 1970s and we’ve discussed the importance of that early political consciousness and how it has shaped her work over decades.  Possibly the turning point for me was when I spent a week with her in her house in Amsterdam in the mid nineties, and when I finally understood how complete is her desire to change people’s minds, one person at a time.

The Artist is Present is an important exhibition for MoMA – especially the way that the live performances were incorporated into the installation.  There have of course been other retrospective exhibitions of artists whose work involved performance, such as Ana Mendieta, Joan Jonas or Gordon Matta-Clark and there will undoubtedly be more and more of these as many artists who make performance are accorded retrospectives of their careers, but Marina’s show involved people emotionally in the way that only she knows how to do, by inviting the audience to join her on a daily basis. This direct involvement with the artist was a sea change, because it has permanently altered peoples’ ideas of what to expect in a museum.

AC: Performance art was mainly driven by a strong activism during the 1960s. Although it is difficult to speak about the specific trend of this art discipline, are there any characteristics of it which can be ascribed to the performance art of today?

RLG: You are right. Performance in the 60s was driven by a strong activism, which was a reflection of the politics and society and a style of protest that was prevalent at the time. But performance changes as society changes, as time moves forward and intellectual, political, aesthetic and philosophical concerns change shape and shift from day to day, year to year.  Performance in the 80s reflected an interest in multi-culturalism, in AIDS activism and in pop media, and in 90s, we saw a passion for cultures from around the globe, with artists and curators looking to China, Cuba and Russia for the newest material, and now the reach includes Lebanon, the Congo, Egypt, South Africa. All these factors play into what makes performance different this year from last.

AC: How do you see the relation between the performance as a live action and the documentation about it?

RLG: We presented a panel during Performa 07, in November 2007 specifically about this topic, which we called You Didn’t Have to Be There: Performance, Photography, and Contemporary Art. There has long been the argument that the photograph doesn’t count, the documentation doesn’t count, that you really had to be there if you want to understand performance. My answer to that has always been, “Well, I wasn’t at the Battle of Waterloo, either.” There are critical moments in history that changed entire civilizations but that we no longer have access to – and that we certainly don’t have photographs of – yet we don’t presume that we can’t understand them or choose to ignore them for lack of direct experience..  We need to learn to read the pictures, just as art historians ‘read’ the iconography of paintings. Each photograph, video, film, reveals enormous amount about the times in which the work is made.

Some artists have been very aware of the photograph and its ability to communicate ideas through time, and to make sure that their ideas and images remain in history. Photographs of Yves Klein’s Leap Into the Void [1960], or Joseph Beuys’ I Like America and America Likes Me [1974], are extraordinary documents of an artists ideas, value system, beliefs.

AC: What is your position on the relation between the performance and fashion?

RLG: Both stay very close to the present, and respond to the moment, always inventing and changing shape. Both are ephemeral, yet can have long lasting effect and influence.

AC: What will be the key issue of your lecture on the symposium in Belgrade?

RLG: I will be talking about the history of performance and why I created Performa but also about the subject matter of the conference, which includes a discussion of the differences between theater as understood by dramatists and dramaturges and performance as understood by artists.

AC: In your opinion where is the place of the performance art in the art of today?

RLG: With the cultural shifts that we are experiencing in the early years of the 21st century – global politics, new technologies, ever expanding internet possibilities in terms of distribution and dissemination of ideas – performance can be seen as the art form of our times. It is highly ‘interactive’ – which is an important aspect of a kind of total democratization of how art is seen today without the filter of the institution. Thus performance is more exciting and more engaging than ever in the 21st century. It is an important platform for conveying ideas to a much broader public and is also a catalyst in changing the nature of contemporary art museums from places of contemplation and learning to vibrant palaces of culture and action, even changing the nature of the architecture of new museums to accommodate performance activities.

Photo: Marina Abramovic, The House With the Ocean View, 2002. Photo courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery.

We encourage you all to check out Miroku in the Lincoln Center Festival this weekend!

Lincoln Center Festival Presents Miroku

Saburo Teshigawara/KARAS

Friday, July 9­ – Sunday, July 11

Rose Theater
Broadway at 60th Street
Tickets from $30
Link to: http://new.lincolncenter.org/live/index.php/lcf-2010-miroku

“Japanese choreographer and conjurer of visual magic.” —The Guardian (London) on Saburo Teshigawara

Don’t miss the chance to witness Japanese dancer and choreographer Saburo Teshigawara,
returning after rave reviews from his Lincoln Center Festival 2006 performance of Bones in Pages. He makes a rare visit to New York to lead a visceral exploration of movement.

Miroku, a new solo work, illustrates Teshigawara’s deep focus and exceptional range, rapidly shifting from sharp, jagged gestures to liquid fluidity, providing an intimate look into the mind of its masterful creator. Time and again, he proves that his command of space and sculptural sensibility are peerless.

RoseLee just gave a fantastic interview about performance art today to Politika, a newspaper in Belgrade:

Stanko Stemankovic, Politika (SS): Could you tell me more about your organization, Performa?

RoseLee Goldberg, Performa (RLG): I started Performa (in 2004) because I felt it was essential for the extraordinary history of artists performance and its impact on art and culture of the past hundred hears to be more widely known and more fully understood. I designed the Performa biennial (Performa 05 in 2005) in such a way as to provide the optimum viewing experience for the viewer with each event presented in distinct venues determined by the nature of each work. Performa Commissions are crucial to the energy and aspirations of the biennial. By inviting artists – many of whom have not made live work before – to create entirely new work that we would produce with them from scratch, the Commissions have raised the bar and opened entirely new possibilities for artist’s performance in the 21st century.

The Performa biennial is the most visible feature of Performa as an organization, but we also have an inventive and very active educational program and an international touring initiative for many of our Performa Commissions. We also curate exhibitions and performances series for museums and other institutions and consult with them about ways to incorporate performance and performance history into their programs. In many ways, Performa also functions as a “museum without walls” in that we’re researching and archiving the vast history of artists performance, and finding ways to bring the radical material to life and make it accessible and inspiring to contemporary audiences.

SS: What does performance as an art form represent in the 21st century?

RLG: Performance has always been an open-ended art form where artists from different disciplines could experiment with their most radical ideas and always find an audience. In that sense it has been a kind of  avant, avant-garde.  Artists working in performance have been able to respond quickly to the changing political and economic climate, to produce work that draws on several disciplines at once, and that can exist in any format, and be produced in any setting. With the cultural shifts that we are experiencing in the early years of the 21st century – global politics, new technologies, ever expanding internet possibilities in terms of distribution and dissemination of ideas -  performance can be seen as the art form of our times. It is also highly ‘interactive’ – which is an important aspect of a kind of total democratization of how art is seen today without the filter of the institution. Thus performance is more exciting and more engaging than ever in the 21st century. It is an important platform for conveying ideas to a much broader public and is also a catalyst in changing the nature of contemporary art museums from places of contemplation and learning to vibrant palaces of culture and action, even changing the nature of the architecture of new museums to accommodate performance activities.

SS: You said in one interview that a group show is equivalent to a plate of appetizers: lots of little tasters, but never a full meal? Can you explain that, from a performance theorist point of view, of course?

RLG: My comments were in response to the way in which performance has typically been presented as a side show at major international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennial and Documenta and at art fairs. It is always tacked on at the end of a long day of viewing art, which is not a great way to see this work. I also get frustrated by the way that media and time-based work is experienced in galleries or museums – projections in dark rooms and nowhere to sit and no possibility to experience a work uninterrupted. We rarely give such work the full time-span that it demands. I wanted to create a situation where we could slow down time and make it possible to fully absorb an artist’s ideas in the optimum situation. I think it is important as curators that we do everything we can to make each event a special, one-on-one experience. So we created a biennial that would be specifically designed to allow the viewer to see performance with a fresh eye. One could say that Performa is a three-week series of solo shows, night after night.

SS: Your book Performance Art: From Futurism to Present is still considered a corner-stone for performance teaching. It was published in 1979. Can you tell me what has changed since then, good or bad?

RLG: The beat goes on.  Performance changes as society changes, as time moves forward and intellectual, political, aesthetic and philosophical concerns change shape and shift from day to day, year to year. It’s interesting that people have this model in their minds of performance that comes from work of the 60s and 70s – strongly activist, often disturbing and frequently endurance based – and they are surprised to discover that it is very different today than it was then. The 80s interest in multi-culturalism and in pop media, or globalism of the 90s and the far reach of intellectual inquiry into Africa and China and Lebanon that is so prevalent at the moment – all these factors play into what makes performance different this year from last.

SS: Serbian readers would be very interested to know about your work with Marina Abramovic? How was that like?

RLG: I have known Marina since 1972 and it has been an extraordinary friendship – both personal and professional. Possibly the turning point was when I spent a week with her in her house in Amsterdam in the mid nineties, and when I finally understood how complete is her desire to change people’s minds, one person at a time. Even though we knew each other well, she methodically created an environment that was utterly conducive to shifting my perception of her world and of mine and the world in which we live.

SS: What about the idea that conceptual art is an “art of an ideas over product that cannot be bought or sold”? How does that fit in a world where only value of an artistic (or “artistic”) work is the price on it, and the money that could be made from it?

RLG: I remain a purist. I am concerned with the content of an artist’s work and what I learn from my experience and engagement with that material. Of course I understand the realities of making a living and the necessity of patronage – it wasn’t more fun being part of the Medici circle I am sure – and performance somehow plays directly into one’s mind and body and provides a far more direct experience. Above all though, I see performance and the objects that artists make as integral to an artists’ thinking and read their ideas across a broad spectrum.

SS: Are your familiar with performance artists from Serbia? What would be your message for them? What do you expect from a Symposium in Belgrade?

RLG: I was thrilled a couple of  years ago to learn that my book had been translated into Croatian. I am eager to know the people who initiated this book,  to meet artists from Serbia, and to understand the role of performance in the cultural life of the country.

Photo: Christian Tomaszewski and Joanna Malinowska, Mother Earth, Sister Moon, a Performa Commission, 2009. Photo copyright Paula Court.

On the occasion of the opening of 100 YEARS OF PERFORMANCE at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, an exhibition initiated by Performa and co-curated by Performa Director RoseLee Goldberg and PS1 Director Klaus Biesenbach, RoseLee traveled to Russia, where she gave a fantastic interview on “Prime Time TV.”

Click here to watch the interview.

And if you’re in Moscow over the next few months, be sure to check out the show–it’s open until September 26!

Saim Demircan (SD): Do you think there are characteristics of performance specific to the context of a solo show?

RoseLee Goldberg (RLG): Performance is always a  “solo show.”  I can’t imagine trying to go from gallery to gallery, from floor to floor, to see different performances unfolding.  Rather, each performance essentially asks you to spend time with a work, to become immersed in an artist’s ideas, and I think it is important as curators that we do everything we can to make each event a special, one-on-one experience.  I’m very aware, in creating the Performa program, of stopping time, of providing the optimum situation for viewing a work. I often feel that a group show (in any medium) is the equivalent of a plate of appetizers; lots of little tasters but never a full meal.

Starting Performa had a lot to do with providing the ideal environment for viewing performance. At Documenta or the Venice Biennale, I always felt that performance was tacked on to the end of a very long day of looking at art. Someone would say, ‘John Bock’s doing a performance at the far end of the farthest corner of the Giardini…’ (laughs) and that’s the last thing one wanted to do after using up all one’s energy viewing art was to take a long hike to see a performance. So we created a biennial that would be specifically designed to allow the viewer to see performance with a fresh eye, that is one solo show per night, rather than piling one experience on top of another.  We also designated special ‘Performa Hotspots’ (a nearby bar) where everybody could meet afterwards to digest the piece and to talk it through and understand what had just been seen. One could say that Performa is a series of solo shows.

From what you have told me, the John Smith | Solo Show falls into this category of getting to know an artist’s work in all its parts. Whether an emerging,  mid-career or mature artist, one wants to feel that one has spent serious time with an artist’s work and learnt something in the process.

SD: Do you think the nature of performance requires that optimum space for experience?

RLG: Yes, the ‘space’ of performance is critical to the experience.  It’s important to see a work in time and to understand each part. Of course we’re always told that video installations for example are on loops and that when you enter or leave is not an issue, but I don’t ever quite feel that. Take for example the Pierre Huyghe show at Tate Modern a couple of years ago, did you see that?  There were these many beautiful film installations but basically you were late for every screening. Since I already knew all the works in the show, I could follow the course through Pierre’s work, but for a friend who did not know the work at all, it was impossible for her to get involved in any of the pieces without waiting for the start of each film.  Any work that demands that you spend time with it involves thinking very carefully as to how it will be experienced by the viewer.

SD: You already hinted at it with Performa, this ethos of giving an artist a platform for their ‘live’ work.  How important is an artist’s first show or commission?

RLG: A lot of the artists I approach to do commissions have never done performance before yet each has been very intrigued by the idea of moving into ‘live’ work and has come to see the experience as extending and opening up a new direction for their work.  It’s less about it being the first work than it is about the very special context that Performa provides and more about a way of thinking about how we present that material in the context of a biennial.  The artist is being asked to think about their work in completely new ways.  Everything is open, I mean we don’t even start with a given space.  We go out and find the perfect “frame” for the work, which is also the opposite of ‘site-specific.’  We don’t say, ‘Here’s a great big space, why not do something in that’, but rather the other way around; ‘What’s the right space for the piece you have in mind?

SD: Are these working relationships with artists over the period between two Performa biennales?

It’s very much about a relationship, about working with the artist over time.  We put the first biennial together in five months, and now we’re moving into our fourth iteration, so I would say that the timing has been different in each case. Most of the artists tend to move into high gear at the one-year mark even though the seed for the commission might have been planted some time before. I remember seeing Isaac Julien in New York at Shirin Neshat’s production of Logic Of Birds, the first piece that I commissioned and produced in 2001, and saying, “Isaac, you’re next.  I would love to work with you” and by the time we presented his piece, it was 2007. So yes, I think it’s a slow build and a lot of questions are asked on the way. The important thing is to be there for the artist in a very real way.

SD: Does the unpredictable nature of live art affect your approach towards working with an artist?

RLG: The work is unpredictable for many reasons, not least that the artist is venturing into entirely new territory. I think it takes a lot of courage and trust on both sides to proceed. The making of the work is so different from the way an artist usually works, with a finished artwork leaving the artist’s studio and being installed in a gallery or museum.  A live performance is always unpredictable by its very nature and I think that it has to be pretty unnerving for artists who have not worked in performance before. I think the biennial context puts another kind of pressure on the artist because it assumes a large audience and expectations are high.

Looking back over the commissions, each has had a very different genesis. Opening night in 2005 was a work by a young Danish artist Jesper Just, who had never worked live before.  His piece, “True Love is Yet to Come, “ that launched Performa, completely astonished all of us, and the artist himself I would say. It was an extraordinary work that involved projections, a single live performer, live and recorded sound and a complex rigging of computer and specially built stage, none of which Jesper had seen until the night before he opened in New York.  The entire concept had been worked out on his computer and in his mind so he and we were seeing it for the first time in its entirety on opening night.  It was incredibly intense and the level of daring and imagination was remarkable.  But it is exactly this way of stepping into a completely new environment that makes the work at Performa so exciting.  For most of the pieces we are all holding our breath on opening night because we are seeing the work for the first or maybe second time.  It’s not like these pieces have been rehearsed over months the way one would in traditional theatre. There’s a lot of unpredictability but it’s also what keeps the material incredibly fresh and exciting.

SD: In general how receptive are artists who have not done live work before to an element of risk-taking involved in presenting work at Performa?

RLG: Very receptive, and in each case, I would say that the live piece has opened entirely new avenues of work.  The strength of each of the pieces created for Performa has surprised the artists themselves and some have said it was their best work to date.  As an example, Francesco Vezzoli, who was one of the artists to whom I’d said, ‘whenever you’re ready, just let me know’,  told me, “I’m only going to do one performance in my life, and it’s just for Performa and it’s for you.”  Right You Are (If You Think You Are), his one night only performance of the Pirandello play that opened Performa 07, took up the entire Guggenheim Museum and included actors Nathalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Peter Sarsgaard and Anita Ekberg. It was so extraordinary and he was so thrilled by the experience that he’s been doing performances ever since (his latest will be at The Garage in Moscow in June).  When I commissioned Adam Pendleton to create a work for Performa 07, he was 26 years old and I’d only seen him do a single poetry performance in front of some of his paintings for a small group of people in a Chelsea gallery.  His Performa Commission, “The Revival”, was an ambitious work that involved a 30-member gospel choir, poet Leslie Scalapino, a reading by Liam Gillick, music and performance by Jason Moran (an extraordinary jazz pianist and composer), and a startling performance debut by Adam himself. People were on their feet yelling and applauding at the end of the work.  The next day it was on the front page of the Arts section of the New York Times and word about this piece has brought Adam several subsequent commissions.  Another Commission, Omer Fast’s first live performance, Talk Show, for Performa 09, is a riveting work that takes place on a set created to resemble a TV studio, and that involves three different ‘guests’ on three consecutive nights, telling a personal story to six talk show ‘hosts’ (well known actors including Jill Clayburgh, Lili Taylor, Rosie Perez and Tom Noonan), who distort the original story using the form of the ‘broken telephone ’ game.  A new edition, in German, will be performed next week in Berlin. So yes, I would say the risk-taking has opened entirely new areas for these artists, which they continue to explore.

SD: What difficulties are involved in curating the body?

RLG: Given that performance is now such a strong part of the contemporary art museum, and that it will only be more so over the coming years as the public has come to enjoy the full-on involvement that performance provides, there will be a greater demand for specialized curatorial departments in this area.  This expanding interest calls for a new kind of curatorial knowledge and expertise, which in turn demands a new kind of art history and curatorial training.  How many histories – dance, film, music — do you need to understand in order to curate performance? Which curators will be helpful to thinking through all the elements of production with an artist?  What kind of spaces are needed for performance?  In all senses we are looking at an entirely fresh and fertile field for historians and for curators, because producing this work involves new set of skills.  You are literally straddling the producer and curator roles and the fine arts and performing arts models and incorporating each artist’s very different needs and aesthetics into the production and presentation of a work.  There are many, many layers that go into presenting performance, lighting and sound design, as well as stages and props, even informing and educating the museum guards or audiences about the roles they might play. A curator new to performance would find these many aspects overwhelming. Curating performance is a highly specialised area that is only now coming into its own.

This interview is published in Solo Show, a publication compiled and edited by the Curating Contemporary Art MA students at the Royal College of Art in London (2010)
ISBN 978-907342-05-9

Image: Isaac Julien and Russell Maliphant, Cast No Shadow, a Performa Commission, 2007. Photo by Johann Piersson, courtesy of Sadler’s Wells.

Nick Hallett and Zach Layton to present.  New music to be premiered alongside lectures, workshops, and film screenings.  Notable presentations include a performance of Anthony Braxton’s new opera Trillium E on June 19, a rare performance of Pauline Oliveros’s eight-handed piano work “Gathering Together” on an evening of keyboard music on June 12, and the New York premiere of two works by French electro-acoustic pioneer Luc Ferrari on June 18.

Performa 09 artist Joan Jonas will present a re-performance of her extraordinary 1969 piece Mirror Piece I, as well as participate in a symposium, as part of this terrific-looking two-day program at the Guggenheim:

Thinking Performance at the Guggenheim

Five years after the groundbreaking (Re)Presenting Performance symposium, held at the Guggenheim Museum in April 2005, artists, curators, and theorists gather to discuss issues manifested in recent performance-based work mounted at the Guggenheim. Referencing topics pertaining to site specificity, live action, the place of memory, and the role of the document, these focused presentations provide an opportunity to think deeply about specific practices in contemporary art. As part of the symposium, and on the occasion of the exhibition Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Joan Jonas will re-present her seminal 1969 performance Mirror Piece I, newly expanded specifically for the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda.

Featured speakers include: Marina Abramovic, Claire Bishop, Jennifer Blessing, Chrissie Iles, Joan Jonas, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Susan Philipsz, Rebecca Schneider, Nancy Spector, and Nat Trotman.

Thursday, June 17, 8 pm — Mirror Piece I: Reconfigured by Joan Jonas followed by a post-performance conversation with Chrissie Iles.

Friday, June 18, 2 pm — Symposium

$30, $20 members, $10 students (each ticket includes admission to the performance and the symposium)
Box Office: 212 423 3587

Image: Joan Jonas, Mirror Piece I, 1969.