February 2012
8 posts
4 tags
2 tags
33 Fragments of Russian Performance
By Yulia Aksenova and Anya Harrison
As part of Performa 11’s official program, 33 Fragments of Russian Performance (November 2-21, 2011) was a joint project organized by Garage Center for Contemporary Culture and Perfoma. The exhibition, housed at the Performa Hub on Mott Street, offered a foundation for one of the curatorial premises of this year’s edition, Russian Constructivism. Taking the...
4 tags
Wim Wenders' Pina and the Rhythm of Loss
By Jennifer Piejko
Pina is filmmaker Wim Wenders’ eulogy to German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch (1940-2009), and what will be for many a bittersweet introduction to her revolutionary work. Spending a lifetime interpreting and expanding the definitions of modern dance, her visionary incorporation of theater into her practice of German Expressionist dance left Wenders and her company...
3 tags
6 tags
Performa Interview: Mike Kelley and Lee Ranaldo
Interview: Mike Kelley and Lee Ranaldo
Moderated by Mark Beasley
2009
Mark Beasley (MB): In 1977 the composer and writer R. Murray Schafer described “noise” as any unwanted or unmusical sound. What do the terms “noise” and “experimental music” mean to both of you?
Mike Kelley (MK): I’ve always thought of experimental music as music where the outcome isn’t predetermined. Like in a scientific...
4 tags
Mike Kelley (1954-2012)
Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32, Plus, a Performa Commission, 2009. Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of Performa.
January 2012
6 posts
4 tags
RoseLee Goldberg: the Taj Mahal, a Rickshaw Ride...
India is wonderful and intense. Rushing through a sea of people, oxen, three wheeler “taxis” carrying eight or ten under tag rag and torn canopies, monkeys, donkey drawn carts, trucks, buses made of paper thin tin and covered in colorful writing and draped with bands of shriveled flowers, milk containers, gas carriers, families of four on mopeds, families of friends on foot, some...
4 tags
Greil Marcus on Malcolm McLaren
November 21, 2011
The Bowery Ballroom
Performa 11 Grand Finale and The Malcolm Award
Malcolm McLaren was one of the few people I’ve met who left the world different than he found it.
He was an unregenerate, old-time modernist—part of the modernist project, going back to David and Courbet, forward through Malevitch and Hannah Höch—of revolt against the face that power, that organized...
4 tags
Not Fluxus: An Interview with John Miller and Tony...
Sydney Stutterheim: So John, let’s start with you – do you consider yourself to be a Fluxus artist?
John Miller: No.
SS: No?
JM: No. And in fact, I didn’t even know that the event was titled Fluxus performance until after I got the announcement. It was put together in a very loose way, but it was also put together by people we are friendly with, so we weren’t invited on the basis of...
4 tags
Part 2 of Performa Magazine's Interview with iona...
iona rozeal brown: So I also feel like a lot of what struck me about early imagery of geisha was that they are children. They are all children. If you look at the turn of the century photos of geisha, you can tell that no one cared about them.
I think that women who are brought up to follow a protocol, and who don’t have any early childhood trauma feel like they have the ability to look down...
RoseLee Goldberg, History x2: Clifford Owens
Text by RoseLee Goldberg
With Anthology, his current exhibition at MoMA PS1, Clifford Owens invited twenty-six artists to provide him with written scores for performances. The result: twice as many works as those listed. This “two for one” model—the artist’s proposal, and Owens’s interpretation of it—in some cases doubled the emotional content as well as the aesthetic layers of the original,...
December 2011
5 posts
A Vertical One-Night Performa
On December 1st Performa produced a vertical one-night Performa for the 10th anniversary celebration for Art Basel Miami Beach at the New World Symphony in Miami Beach. This site-specific event in the new Frank Gehry-designed building took place over three floors and included performances by Performa biennial artists including iona rozeal brown (Performa 11), Reggie Watts (Performa 11), Bedwyr...
5 tags
Anti-Artist talks curated by ArteEast - Performa...
By Barrak Alzaid
In the series Anti-Artist talks curated by ArteEast for Performa, I invited artists to explore a theme tangential to their own work in an attempt to dismantle the predominance and formulaic structure of the conventional artist talk.
Set in a classroom of the Performa Hub, each performance-lecture relied on the immediacy of the audience, and our presence in a space of learning to...
3 tags
Shirin Neshat’s "OverRuled" - Performa Magazine...
By Barrak Alzaid
At the onset of Shirin Neshat’s OverRuled, the audience is hailed as witness to a trial by a command to rise before the court. Our complicity in the action that unfolds deepens as two men and two women emerge from the audience and offer themselves to be tried at a proceeding that purports not to punish, but to redeem.
Set within a triptych comprised of two arms of uniform clad...
5 tags
Wu Tsang "Full Body Quotation" - Performa Magazine...
By Lumi Tan
On November 21, the scene at the New Museum’s Skyroom was familiar, but not entirely expected, as the entry into an early evening performance. Booming dance music by TOTAL FREEDOM was played, free liquor was served, and there was no perceptible “performance” for quite some time. The majority of the room filled up with those happy to drink, chat over the music, and mill around for over...
4 tags
Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle: "A Guiding Light...
By Katy Diamond Hamer
A Guiding Light (Part II), a film by Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle was recently screened on the occasion of Performa 11. First shown last year at the Cooper Union Theater, this second screening took place in a crowded classroom on the second floor of the Performa Hub, and was accompanied by Gillick, Vidokle and Gao Shiming, curator of the Shanghai Biennial in China who...
November 2011
61 posts
5 tags
Justin Vivian Bond "The Fall of The House of...
By Ryan Tracy
A piano waits in the center of the room, keyboard open, with a score to Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Climb Every Mountain” quietly mounted on its front. Standing against a wall, a bookshelf is home to volumes by Lillian Hellman, James Purdy, Joan Didion, and Jean Genet; biographies of the jazz singer Anita O’Day, Francis Bacon and Fellini; tomes covering astrology and Weimar...
5 tags
WatchOn Saturday, November 5, Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui invited 16 musicians and sound artists including Anti-Pop Consortium, Uriel Barthelemi, Jonathan Butcher, Mira Calix, DJ Spooky, Lukas Ligeti, Robert Lowe, Raz Mesinai, Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori, Sara Parkins, Elliott Sharp, Zafer Tawil and Georges Ziadeh to interpret elements of the world’s largest collection of Classical Arab music. The above...
4 tags
Synchronized Swimming and the AIDS Crisis:...
By Lindsay C. Harris
Amongst faint smells of chlorine and harsh red lights, 12 women with minimal Day-of-the-Dead-like makeup floated in a circle around a large, bloated figure with a long white cape descending deep into the dark water. Low thuds and chants began to play, as the swimmers dipped and flipped their way to the center.
This ambitious performance, Ilulwane, by young South African...
4 tags
Ragnar Kjartansson’s "Bliss" - Performa Magazine...
By Alexander Ferrando
A twelve-hour long repetition of an excerpt from the final act of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro sounds disagreeable, or so one might think. Replete with a full orchestra, operatic singers in Baroque costumes, namely the great Icelandic tenor Kristján Jóhannsson, Ragnar Kjartansson’s Bliss quite extraordinarily incorporated all its parts to create one engrossing situation...
5 tags
Robert Ashley’s opera "That Morning Thing" -...
By Ceci Moss
Robert Ashley’s opera That Morning Thing is a rumination on spoken language. Split into three acts and an epilogue, the first piece “Frogs” sets the tone by motioning toward the inevitable misunderstandings and inconsistencies of language. The composition is introduced by audio of various frog species croaking, most likely sampled from scientific recordings, which then gives way to...
6 tags
Guy Maddin's "Tales from the Gimli Hospital:...
By Alexander Ferrando
Beginning with a grandmother in vaguely Old World dress who recounts to her grandchildren an equally Old World tale of peril and fantasy, Guy Maddin’s Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed is a beautiful and rousing reworking of the Canadian filmmaker’s 1988 feature-length debut. For his Performa Commission, the first given to a filmmaker, Maddin worked with composer...
6 tags
"All that scratching is making me itch!"
Malcolm McLaren, “Buffalo Gals,” 1982. The first ever Malcolm McLaren awards will take place tonight for the Performa 11 Grand Finale, with an award designed by Marc Newson and presented by Lou Reed and Greil Marcus.
4 tags
4 tags
Hennessey Youngman's 98% Guaranteed Formula for...
ART THOUGHTZ: How To Be A Successful Artist from Hennessy Youngman. Youngman performs tonight (November 20) as part of Performa Ha! at Ha! Comedy Club, NYC. 9 pm.
6 tags
Club Nutz: Pioneering Trance-like Comedy in Tiny...
By Johnny Misheff
Let’s break down the title of Scott and Tyson Reeder’s ongoing comedy experience, Club Nutz, for a minute. The ‘Club’ connotes the obvious: a group of people gathering with a common purpose. The ‘Nutz’ smacks of whimsy, a promise of some sort of amusement. But is Club Nutz just a comedy club? Hardly. It’s a workshop, a convention center,...
6 tags
Curator Mark Beasley speaks to Robert Ashley about...
A remounting of Robert Ashley’s legendary opera, That Morning Thing (1967) premiers tonight as part of Performa. That Morning Thing was performed only three times in the late 1960s, but it acquired its reputation through rumor and the famous recordings of two sections, Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon and She Was A Visitor (on Lovely Music). In three distinct acts plus epilogue, the...
4 tags
5 tags
6 tags
8 tags
"My dream had always been to save up my little...
Attendants, from battle of yestermore
Interview by Damien Davis
iona rozeal brown’s live performance, battle of yestermore includes a wide range of influences including myth-based genres like Kabuki and Noh theater, as well as the “vogueing” made famous in the Harlem ballroom scene of the 1960s. This Performa commission will feature performances by vogueing legends such as Benny and...
5 tags
"Our real art is our interaction with the world,”...
By Alexander Cavaluzzo
To kick off Performa’s 52 Hours of Fluxus this past weekend, performance artist Bibbe Hansen gave a lecture and performance on her father, the Fluxus artist Al Hansen. Hosted in the intimate Golden Gallery on Elizabeth Street, Hansen began her presentation by giving an overview of Al Hansen’s life and work, relaying his time as a paratrooper in World War II, his struggles...
4 tags
4 tags
Highlights from Rashaad Newsome's Rap Battle "The...
Highlights from The Tournament from RASHAAD NEWSOME on Vimeo. Read the Performa Magazine review by Andrea Hill, Betina Bethlem and Serena Qiu here.
6 tags
6 tags
6 tags
“Being alive is the bane of my existence” Jack...
By Lumi Tan
When taking up the mythic role of Cleopatra, just learning of her lover and political ally Antony’s suicide, dramatic statements are a must: “Being alive is the bane of my existence” “I want to die…I’m bored, tell me a story” “Fucking Octavian! Fucking Herod!” Jack Ferver, the charismatic dancer and choreographer, enacted the role with relish in Me, Michelle, on Saturday night at the...
5 tags
The Eyes of Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand’s first ever TV interview with CBS’s Mike Wallace reveals her political philosophy that among other things, the state and economics should remain separate. It is this scene that provided inspiration for Dennis McNulty’s Performa project The Eyes of Ayn Rand, that explores the rupture of Communist Russia.
Dennis McNulty, The Eyes of Ayn Rand
6 tags
Liutauras Psibilskis on the "Ginger Island...
Ginger Island
Liutauras Psibilskis interviewed by Summer Guthery
On the occasion of his curated events comprising the Ginger Island Project, independent curator and writer Liutauras Psibilskis had an email conversation with Summer Guthery about the unfolding lecture, exhibitions at Emily Harvey Foundation and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and sound performance at pop-up venue, Red...
6 tags
Ming Wong's "Persona Performa" - Review
Film still from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, 1966
By Andrea Hill
Astoria was home to filmmaking in America during the pre-Hollywood era when hundreds of silent films were produced during the turn of the century. It’s fitting then, that Ming Wong’s homage to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona occupied nearly every square inch of the American Museum of the Moving Image’s lobby, which sits on the former site of...
4 tags
Simon Fujiwara's "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" - Review
By Nicola Trezzi
As obvious as it seems nowadays, the conception of an artwork that is multilayered, open to possible critiques, not boring and fun is almost a mission impossible. Everything has been done and therefore artists are competing to see who is the most intellectual, the most refined, and the most full of references.
When it comes to Simon Fujiwara all these questions become poignant....
4 tags
"As long as that everyday object doesn't serve an...
Want more deep thoughts on art-making? Hennessey Youngman performs Sunday November 20 at Performa Ha!
3 tags
Shelly Nadashi's "Refrigerating Apparatus" -...
By Katy Diamond Hamer
Seated in the front row of an old classroom over the weekend at the Performa Hub, I waited patiently for artist Shelly Nadashi to begin Refrigerating Apparatus. Each chair in the audience was occupied and shortly past 6:00 pm the artist arrived and walked slowly into the room wearing a floral robe, white sweatpants, a black wig with an unkempt ponytail and maroon Adidas...
6 tags
WatchDid you miss Tyler Ashley and the SARAHS’ Half-Mythical, Half-Legendary Americanism in Times Square last week? There’s one more chance to view this epic piece today on the High Line at 5:30! Constructivist calisthenics at their finest.
6 tags
Nathaniel Mellors on Trying to "Not Make Work Like...
British artist and musician Nathaniel Mellors is known for making films and installations that deal with the vicissitudes of language through absurdist scripts, psychedelic theatre, film, video, performance, collage, and sculpture. His Performa premiere of Ourhouse (November 16 and 17) is a surreal six-part video series that combines sculpture, language, and power dynamics in an upper-class home....