Contemporary Cruising

by Contemporary Cruising |April 18, 2018 1:53 pm

Katherine Chan on MascallDance Society’s new production “OW

“OW”: How does it feel and what does it look like?
Founder and Artistic Director of MascallDance Society, Jennifer Mascall has been an
investigator of movement for over 45 years. A conceptual creative, her choreography
resembles a creator designing a new world. When she manipulates space, the changes
affect the movement of bodies, which then influence sound. While attuned to bodily
movement, the artistic director also works consciously with the space in-between.
Approaching MascallDance’s 30th Anniversary, Mascall continues her investigation of
sound and dance with the new performance “OW”, premiering in July. Her inquisitive
career-long quest bleeds into this latest creation: “OW” anticipates a relentless search and
expansion of possibilities in the many worlds sound and movement could create together,
with each element examined in the choreography.

by Contemporary Cruising |January 25, 2018 3:02 pm

Joy Harris for Contemporarycruising.com
performance art VS performing arts

Performance art, as formalized by artists in New York City in the 1970’s, largely explored how the body, normally used as an instrument in canvas painting and sculpture, could be seen as a material, an instrument, and a work of art in and of itself. Its differences between the performing arts were subtle in many ways, especially when seen alongside choreographers and musicians who were working in NYC at the same time.

Choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown Buy Lucipro Cipro , for example, were interested in the deconstruction of formalized dance practices from Balanchine’s New York City Ballet to American modern choreographers like Martha Graham. Rainer and Brown wanted to explore movement outside the standard technique – rehearsal – performance cycle and find moments where natural body movements, improvisation, and informality shed light on how our common, natural bodies might unite us in both public and private environments.

Composers Phillips Glass and John Cage were interested in a type of collaboration that fell outside typical compositional methods. Phillip Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach,” a 5-hour opera, included installation, movers, musicians, and singers, was compositionally based on sketches and storyboards, and lacked narrative. Composer John Cage, who regularly wrote music for choreographers Merce Cunningham and David Tudor, taught an “Experimental Composition” class at the New School. These classes, which have been since considered “Happenings,” included performance artist Allan Kaprow and helped to influence Fluxus.

Performance artists were also trying to break free from traditional discipline and technique, but I believe their work was different than Rainer, Brown, Glass, and Cage. Performance artists were more concerned with exploration than they were a final dance or opera. Their final product was not something that could be replicated via dance notation or a score. It could not even be accurately documented through photography or video. It was an action that existed in a moment and then evaporated. It was a work of art – strictly in the present tense – that had not really existed before.

Performance art’s ephemerality was epitomized by Marina Abramovic’s “Seven Easy Pieces” at the Guggenheim New York City in 2005. Though the show recreated historic works by innovators like Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane, and Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic simply created a copy of something that was long past, thus losing its temporal and environmental context and ultimate poignancy. Instead of works being viewed in small, sparsely attended galleries, they were seen in a large institutionalized space. Instead of works being performed by all types of bodies, they were all seen on Abramovic’s. That is to say, though the actions could be mimicked, they could not exist in their true form again.

If the original choreography of the 19th century ballet “Swan Lake” by Marius Petipa and the score and libretto of 18th century opera “Orfeo and Euridice” by Christoph Gluck are still being used in existing theatres, then the difference between performance art and the performing arts is that works by Nauman, Beuys, and others cannot be recreated. And though you might consider them “lost,” because of this, their influence on contemporary artists is uncontestable. Valie Export, and “Tap and Touch Cinema,” for example, continues to influence artists who are concerned with voyeurism and participation.

As it has evolved, performance art continues to have a relationship with music, dance, and other performing arts. Artist and former dancer Tino Seghal finds movement indispensable to his works, as seen in “These Associations” performed at the Tate Modern in 2012. Janice Kerbel and her operatic work, “DOUG” was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 2015. But other artists, like Adrian Piper, do not use performing arts disciplines in her works at all. And yet, all can be considered performance artists. So, what does this mean?

Performance art has the capacity to include all types of collaborators, influencers, and technicians in order to create structured and/or improvisational works that have a unique temporal quality, one where specific actions are pushed into the world – seen or unseen – never to be experienced in the same way again. This is in contrast to the definability and recreation inherent in the performing arts. And though the two forms overlap in significant ways, it is important to consider them differently. When seeing performance art we must temper our expectations. We must embrace what might be seen as mistakes or foibles as evolutions of a process. We must reimagine the beautiful. We must connect what seems irreconcilable. This is what makes performance art both difficult and breathtaking, absurd and perfectly reasonable.

by Contemporary Cruising |January 12, 2018 9:47 am

Helen Shaw On Performa 17, NEW YORK

As long as I’ve been going to Performa, I’ve been grumbling about Performa. The framing is usually impossibly broad, the quantity of work overwhelming, and the caliber so varied that the bad stuff can sometimes argue against the excitement of live performance. Yet the biennial is a major, influential event, and—in our Instagram-ready, market-oriented art environment—its shambolic quality can also be refreshing.

RoseLee Goldberg, the great advocate for and historian of performance art, founded Performa in 2004. With its first edition, which took place the following year, she accelerated the changes she had already effected in the art world. In her pioneering 1979 book Performance Art, Goldberg expressed worry that live performance was being ignored by the art establishment and that efforts to archive it were inadequate; today, virtually every institution in the country that shows contemporary art has robust performance programming. Now, in this live-art-friendly world, Goldberg and her fellow Performa curators have had to make their presence felt with sheer volume. Performa 17 was less an exhibition than an avalanche: nearly four dozen artists participated, their work organized according to curatorial rubrics ranging from the geographic (African art, South African art, Estonian art) to the thematic (works dealing with architecture) to the historic (the legacy of Dada served as an occasional reference point). Many works fell outside even the capacious organizational categories. Case in point: the first scheduled piece was a crystal-healing workshop.

One performance, though, snapped the whole project into focus for me. Estonian artist Anu Vahtra’s Open House Closing was a short walking tour of SoHo’s cast-iron district that emphasized its many vacant buildings, their histories, and the forces that now keep them empty. Most of Vahtra’s tour was factual—she told us that one storefront, unoccupied for years, rents for $143,000 a month—though she sometimes slewed off into fantasy with arch descriptions of building trash and traffic cones as “installations.” Vahtra used a portable digital projector to cast archival images of the anarchic artistic haven of SoHo in the 1960s and ’70s. The creativity and fellowship that had flourished there is of course long gone. Money is hollowing the city out. So during Performa, every pop-up venue, every sidewalk crowded with audience members queuing for a performance, and even the roving Barbara Kruger bus could be considered a little DIY victory against the blandification of New York. The biennial seemed intent on reclaiming space: it sprawled across the city, spanning from its headquarters on Broadway to a skatepark in Brooklyn to a church in Harlem. A Barbara Kruger billboard stood over the High Line, and Zanele Muholi’s gorgeous black-and-white portraits, shown on digital screens, stared serenely down at Times Square.

Kruger was essentially Performa 17’s brander-in-chief. All the printed programs displayed her hallmark graphic style: white Futura type on a red field. The biennial’s headquarters (a temporary venue, housed in a SoHo storefont, that served as a meeting point, information booth, bookshop, and event site) had been painted red and white. Her signs were everywhere you turned. The High Line billboard read, know nothing. believe anything. forget everything. The Brooklyn skate park was plastered with signs that said things like, plenty should be enough. In what was billed as her first performance in years—Untitled (The Drop)—Kruger opened a pop-up store selling not only Kruger-stamped merch but also the experience of standing in line (price: $5). Yet there was something antithetical about Kruger’s central position in Performa. Her text artworks are defined by their immediacy. While they demand that the reader/viewer think (whose justice?), they don’t take more than that suspended moment to absorb. Duration, which is the meat of performance, isn’t part of them.

But, then, one of Goldberg’s most impressive strategies is to persuade non-performance-oriented artists to step into the medium. This lends the biennial its star power, but also some of its weird weightlessness, since pieces by these relative newcomers can seem callow. Kruger is a master of spectacular cool, yet the pop-up store was a pretty simple critique of the art-world directive to “sell, sell, sell,” and even its flirtation with hypocrisy lacked bite. Similarly, writer and photographer Teju Cole’s Black Paper fell precipitously into art-student cliché. For the performance, Cole tucked himself into a bed at the center of the cavernous BKLYN Studio at City Point and pretended to snooze under projections of his photographs on massive sixteen-foot-long panels, as if “dreaming” the images, which ticked by at a rhythm meant to evoke that of the human heart.

A main highlight of the works by more performance-savvy artists was Brian Belott’s People Pie Pool, which, steeped in the Dadaist spirit, boasted competing marching bands, massive destruction (some violins got it in the neck), a drolly hilarious “conversation” that consisted solely of bouncing golf balls, and a series of constantly interrupted professorial talks. The nonsense went on and on, and yet the noise and silliness was, paradoxically, soothing. In the gorgeous The Body Is a House, avant-cabaret star Narcissister danced a series of eerie burlesques while wearing her hallmark plastic mannequin-face mask. Indeed, choreography-minded artists handled the biennial’s interdisciplinary nature with the most grace. Kelly Nipper, for instance, presented a haunting work, Terre Mécanique, that she made in collaboration with the Self-Assembly Lab, the new technologies research institution at MIT. As dancers writhed in black balaclavas—one, wearing a black-crepe dress, spun and spun like Loie Fuller—a scientist presided over a gigantic witch’s cauldron full of pale green goo, into which a programmable needle-arm extruded liquid rubber that eventually hardened into a flexible net. The piece was clever but chilling: the dancers were ultimately less compelling than the bizarre machine, and the audience’s interest in their actions seemed to fade as they beheld the great god Technology.

In general, however, resisting the forces of dehumanization is what Performa does best. By the third week, the biennial’s headquarters was a homey mess. On the final Friday of the exhibition’s run, people hung out on its wide bleachers all afternoon, sometimes napping or checking phones. A Yoko Ono Wish Tree sat ignored in a corner. A talk in which a curator showed images of Performas past on her laptop slowed momentarily: “I’m just so tired!” she said, rubbing her face. One table was full of potluck dishes. While Performa 17’s haphazardness at times seemed wrongheaded—the curatorial gatekeeping was simply not strict enough—there was an argument hidden in the overabundance. The mess and the potluck spread and the repurposed storefronts and the badly organized lines of people formed their own logic. As Vahtra showed us in her walking tour, New York can be so empty. Performa fills it back up.

by Contemporary Cruising |December 18, 2017 5:47 pm

Sink by Keith Hennessy, San Francisco, 2017
Text by David E. Moreno

“Capitalism excels at innovation but fails at maintenance.”

There is something queer about “Sink”, a political purge in heels, a ritualized communal healing, a street-smart shamanic journey. Something remarkable about how its vague threads, three distinct segments, loosely join together as a substantial art-performance and theater experience.

There is something sophisticated in its thrift-shop aesthetic, primitive hand-drawn program cover–a boat sinking, smoke curls coming out of the boat’s funnel, child-like waves crashing, and crescent moon that conspicuously hangs in the obvious place where such a rendering should go, and, the painted splattered and torn hardware tarps that function as stage curtains for the first segment. What magically holds these mystical spinning plates and topical issues into both reality and wonder is its creator, Keith Hennessy. Few performing artists embody their written and improvised narratives as transparently as Hennessy. Few could ask the big questions as sincerely, making their query sound like inspired solutions. Fewer still, as dancers approaching their 60s, have the exuberance, fluidity, and endurance to pounce, prance and jog around on pogo stilts eight feet above the audience seated on the floor, his face and head wrapped with plastic vines like an Amazon rainforest headdress, wearing a rainbow corset made from Maypole ribbons (Jack Davis, costumer.) And, no one serves their grandmother’s hot toddy recipe out of a thermos to the audience in paper cups preshow. No one.

The brilliance about veteran performance artist Hennessey is that he lacks pretention. He is as present and honest serving hot toddies as he is wearing a fur babushka and fur coat while chanting a lament for all the cities and places around the world that have been shot down by gun violence, “Paris, Orlando, New York, Istanbul, Las Vegas…” Effortlessly he moves half the audience on stage into life jackets, (a segment of an opera he is collaborating with artist/activist Ai Weiwei for a performance in Greece,) giving them the lyrics and tune they must sing to the audience still in bleachers. Before long the audience is singing, “Fuck you” back and forth as Hennessey conducts, telling us when to sing like hip-hop and when to embellish with operatic intensity. “Sink” is unsinkable, heavy in content and reality, buoyantly hopeful in its alchemy.

(“Sink” is one of four works linked through the project “freedom?” )

by Contemporary Cruising |October 29, 2017 7:00 pm

New Noveta BY SAIM DEMIRCAN
Could this viscerality, this hysteria, be political?

Sometimes I get fixated on a performance. Deep down I think it’s because I’m a fan of the live experience itself, and like any fan, I get riled by the object of my affection as much as I cherish it. I imagine this enthusiasm for ‘liveness’ derives from my teenage years spent going to gigs, being part of a shared social event, waiting to receive that adrenaline rush that occurs once the music starts.

by Contemporary Cruising |August 16, 2017 10:47 am

Encounters In-Situ
Tino Sehgal at Foundation Beyeler
By Dorian Batycka

From May until November, the artist Tino Sehgal will be presenting a series of six artworks, what he calls “constructed situations,” at the Foundation Beyeler in the picturesque Swiss city of Basel. The starting point for the exhibition is a work acquired by the institution in 2015 entitled This You (2006), the only one of Sehgal’s works intended to be staged outdoors. The work consists of a single performer—or “interpreter” as Sehgal calls them—who confidently serenades passersby with a recognizable pop song, after which the interpreter announces the name of the artist and the title of the piece. This You is installed in the blossoming Berowerpark area on the museum’s grounds in the Basel suburb of Riehen, overlooking sweeping vistas of corn fields and vines covering the Tüllinger Hills. Above all, This You brings into focus the idea of the park as a place where social interaction takes place, the substance of which becomes a series of performative interactions expanding the traditional notion of an artwork beyond something immovable, silent or fixed.

Once inside the museum, purpose built by acclaimed architect Renzo Piano in 1997, one of Sehgal’s most intimate and sensuous works, Kiss (2002), is on display alongside a sculpture by Constantin Brancusi entitled L’Oiseau (1923/1947), a work selected from the Foundation Beyeler’s collection purposefully by Sehgal. Its placement alongside the Brancusi—a sculpture referencing movement—is both thoughtful and well placed. In Kiss, two performers are immersed in an ongoing frolic of blissful intimacy. The cavorting couple move in slow sequences—fully clothed fondling and petting each other intimately—seemingly unaware of those around them, thereby creating a discernible distance between them and the audience. Unlike most of Sehgal’s other works, such as the work installed outside, Kiss requires no audience input whatsoever, it’s completely self-contained, internally immersive, languid and erotic. I saw it as an homage not just to Brancusi but also to other artists from art history as well, notable among them Gustav Klimt, the Austrian Symbolist painter who became iconic for depicting the immersive language of embrace in a work on canvas bearing the same title.

The intricate choreography of Kiss thereby becomes like a garden of amorous relations in the museum. It’s one of Sehgal’s most pioneering works, rousing a libidinous sense of desire in the viewer, effectively transforming the Foundation Beyeler into a kind of temporary erogenous zone. Expressively, this quality—acute in Kiss more so than the artist’s other works—unleashes a seductive force into the Beyeler like a potently strong aphrodisiac. And it is in this context that the show—and Sehgal’s works in general—become genuinely experiential, transgressing the idea of spectatorship and the cult of the object as it has spread across centuries of art history.

Tino Sehgal continues at Foundation Beyeler (Baselstrasse 101, 4125 Basel, Switzerland) through November 12.

Editor’s note: The author’s lodging and travel expenses were paid for in-part by Foundation Beyeler arranged by Goldmann Public Relations.

by Contemporary Cruising |July 20, 2017 12:00 am

Alex Baczynski-Jenkins
INTERVIEW BY KATHY NOBLE

Creating fragmentary choreographies that take movement from everyday life, the British-Polish artist generates a non-normative space of intimate estrangement—a space of friendship, desire and queer alliance.

Did you train as an artist or a choreographer? How did that evolve?

I took part in a pilot project at the Universitat Der Kunste in Berlin, which was an experiment in working with an expanded choreographic practice. I was later invited to Beirut to participate in the Home Works Program at Ashkal Alwan; it was focused on performative practices that year, which really influenced my work. Now my practice is in both gallery and theatre contexts.

What did you make in Beirut?

I was living on the seafront at the Corniche. It’s a favorite place for people to roller blade, so I began to do that. Alongside this, I was reading Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, which is very choreographic and speaks to the spatial arrangement of relations and the possibility of setting things, and each other, in motion. In the end, I developed a choreography for roller blades during which the performers would recite poetry to one another.

Was that the work you showed at the Swiss Institute?

Yes, although there have been several iterations. I often take mundane queer activities or social choreographies and develop a work from them. I work by finding affinities between things, materials that I place in dialogue with each other to produce a slippage. This also happens in collaboration with the performers—I’ll approach them with some materials and structures to which they in turn answer. I always observe the spaces in between, the relational and how that allows you to make a space together—a space of friendship, desire and queer alliance.

Who are the performers you work with? Are they dancers? Friends?

It’s a combination. I generally meet people through friends or chance encounters. Serendipity. In viewing the work, there is a sense of watching friends being together.

Are there particular artists or choreographers who have influenced you?

Aside from the explicit poetry references, Felix Gonzalez-Torres has influenced elements of this, such as “clocking” each other in Us Swerve, while Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) influenced the gesture of painting nails blue.

Gonzalez-Torres dealt with potent ideas of queer activism in a very poetic and pleasurable way, breaking complex ideas down to simple, beautiful gestures. Your approach to these references feels akin to this.

Absolutely. I relate to his way of working by zooming in on and de-synchronising simple, found materials that manifest a certain affect and its politics. In my work these are gestures, movements and spoken word. This procedure can result in more minimal work, for example Federico (2015), which is an 8-minute choreography just for the hands, in which two performers touch each other’s fingers in various constellations. Or it can lead to more composite choreographies in which I stage a dialogue between various sources.
For example the work I presented in London for Block Universe was constructed around two sources. The first came from being in conversation with artist Andrew Hardwidge, who was also a performer in this work. He introduced me to an entry in Pascale’s Pensées, where the King dances to distract himself from sadness. Pascal was writing about Louis XIV, who set up dance as a discipline in the Western tradition. We put this in relation to Throbbing Gristle’s “Discipline.” Genesis P-Orridge’s raw, unruly wildness was relearned as a piece of choreography, thereby making a discipline out of it and working with that tautology and absurdity. I like things that reflect upon subjectivity and the medium of choreography itself—choreography in equal parts as discipline and as an escape from discipline.

How do you feel about the performances being translated to a gallery setting? There’s a kind of voyeurism that occurs, where one set of people is performing, another is looking, and there is no demarcation between stage and audience.

The voyeurism of witnessing intimacy is interesting to me. I’m interested in the audience “being with” an intimate situation, one that is not necessarily being performed for you, but is occurring in the same space. I am trying to bring attention to the materiality of movement, gesture and affect, which often occurs through repetition. It’s not about objectifying the performers, but trying to visualize the materiality of relations.

The emotional matter that occurs between the performers is the “object.” This “object” is the stuff that lives in-between the systems, structures and languages we use to communicate, which I guess you could describe as affects.

These affects are the materials of the work, while the choreographic montage is a catalyst for an experience. For my exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, I wanted to work with various modes of time, so the exhibition unfolds through “episodes” and “fugues.” The episodes will occur every two weeks, while between these are fugues, where we zoom in on specific moments from the previous episode and extend, re-distribute and diffract them. There will also be periods when the gallery is closed while we rehearse, so the space becomes a production house, too. It’s quite a complex structure, and everyone will have a different experience of the work.

What are the ideas behind the work?

The work is about the overlaps of desire, distraction and nothingness, whether it be the of“doing nothing” that happens in friendship and love, or the sense of nothingness that accompanies alienation and experiences of finitude, detachment, loss. It’s important for me that it’s always fragmentary, that there is resistance to complete representation. There is a group of eight performers who will appear in different constellations in each episode, using found social choreographies and cinematic, literary or dance and art historical references to create affinities across social practices, art forms and time. For example,“cutting shapes” from House music, or handshake choreography as a form of greeting between the performers. Throughout the work, there are different gestures of holding yourself—gestures that you use without thinking—for example, the way you’re folding your arms now and then touching your face—but which I’ll isolate and turn into a structured choreography.

The meaning of human gesture is fascinating to me. The structures and systems we exist in only allow us certain modes of behaving, which can feel very repressive. As much as you are dealing with a queer identity politic, there is also much that seems to address the broader structural systems we inhabit and the codes of behavior they enforce.

Yes, absolutely. I work with gestures and structures that are symptomatic. I choreograph ways of spending time together that are at once concrete and abstracted, so that they reflect on more base structures through which desire and subjectivity are mediated. I want to give space to the excesses and lacks in meaning. I don’t think the work is as much for a queer identity politic as for queer politics of dis-identification, which is about Othering, about being in the non-normative spaces of intimate estrangement.

It’s frustrating that these spaces are non-normative, seeing as they’re so often about relating to people freely. Of course, the concept of “freedom” has long been used to politically defend institutionalized misogyny, racism and homophobia. Especially now, everything that has lurked under the surface is leaking out, and so the spaces in which we relate to one another are becoming more binary, more polarized. There’s no space between the “normative” and the “non-normative.”

I think “non-normative” is exactly about spaces that don’t operate through exclusion, but rather create a vulnerable commons which resist structures of hegemony and exclusion. One of the main means of disciplining now is the production of subjectivity and particular kinds of relations. Affect is now capital. What I’m interested in is working out the paradoxes of that complexity. The question is, how does one make hopeful work now?