by Contemporary Cruising |

By Coco Fusco

The State of Detention: Performance, Politics, and the Cuban Public

The detention of Cuban artist Tania Bruguera and the Cuban government’s actions to prevent her performance from taking place in Havana’s Revolutionary Plaza have made international news headlines in the past week. Public outrage about the censorship of the performance and concerns about Bruguera’s whereabouts have circulated in social media outside Cuba, but little in depth consideration of the context and implications of the performance has been available in English.

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by Contemporary Cruising |

By Claire Bishop

THIS SEEMS TO BE THE YEAR that dance went discursive. The possibilities and limitations of this shift marked the two most influential performance experiences I had in 2014. The first was Ralph Lemon’s Value Talks at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a yearlong series of discussions and performances, and the second was Boris Charmatz’s expo zéro in its two-day iteration at Berliner Festspiele in July. And, sigh, full disclosure: I was partially involved in both projects, as one of a lineup of invited participants.

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by Contemporary Cruising |

Oktophonie by Karlheinz Stockhausen/ Rikrit Tiravanija at Park Avenue Armory
By Anthony Tommasini

Karlheinz Stockhausen, the avant-garde German composer who died in 2007, is on a roll at, of all places, the Park Avenue Armory, a building dedicated in 1880 as the headquarters of New York’s Seventh Regiment, a volunteer outfit that catered to the city’s silk-stocking set.

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by Contemporary Cruising |

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer on Ryan Trecartin

There is nothing else in today’s art world even remotely like Ryan Trecartin’s videos. Copying and pasting a crazy collage of dialects and accents, the protagonists—so many young, sexually ambiguous, wig-wearing and face-painted chatterboxes—deliver compu-pop poetry about their chronic over-existence. It’s a sci-fi theater of the absurd for our manically paced YouTube era, a singular vision created by Trecartin in collaboration with his creative partner, Lizzie Fitch.

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