March 23 to May 19, 2012
10 Greene Street, 2nd Floor, between Grand and Canal streets
New York City, 646-370-3877

The 24 Cibachrome prints on view at Third Streaming feature the same angled shots of the Los Angeles Federal Building, the surrounding sky, grass, trees and nothing more.  They were taken during the filming of Mary Ellen Carroll’s 24-hour, two-screen film Federal (2003) with shots of the same building, viewed from the front and back, over the course of the same day. (The film was screened at the Museum of the Moving Image on March 24th/25th in conjunction with this show.)  Even without the extensive bureaucratic background information, including paperwork about the year-long process of her obtaining permission to film — also on view, practically a conceptual work in itself — the repetitive images of the structure reveal solid formal geometrics that immediately illicit thoughts of power, government, access, surveillance and barriers.

It is significant that Carroll, who is not an Angelino (she was born in Illinois and lives and works in New York and Houston), chose L.A. as backdrop for this concept, as well as for her Kruder and Dorfmeister series (1999-2000), also on display.  The latter is a collection of small black and white photographs of L.A. public libraries that recalls Ed Ruscha’s Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963) except that Carroll moves in a different direction from Ruscha, as instead of ubiquity, “specifics of place and connotations of Los Angeles,” to quote the press release, are central to the work. In both L.A. series here Carroll is seen capitalizing on the outsider’s image of this city as sunny, superficial, and unencumbered by the constraints of history—a land of freedom and reinvention. In one work, by highlighting dull locations that could be Anywhere, U.S.A., and in the other by providing a strict reminder of government power and surveillance, the idea was to create a jarring sense of dislocation between perceptions of L.A. as a special place and realities of American public life everywhere.

I grew up on the Westside of Los Angeles, but that was during the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots, the O.J. Simpson trial, and with a citizen’s general knowledge of bad police behavior (profiling, hogtying) as well as the massive California prison industrial complex.  So to my particular set of eyes, the prints from Federal make a strong yet strangely familiar impact, absent any intentional irony or contrast. They look naked. The Kruder and Dorfmeister series of libraries also shows the Los Angeles that I know. The small black and white images of the fronts of these mostly one-story buildings immediately conjure memories of dusty stacks and microfilm machines, elderly librarians and mild, sunny afternoons. Formally, the small buildings resemble each other more than they differ, creating a repetition in the series of small prints that highlights a contented, perhaps by now outdated, brand of American boredom in the isolated West.

What’s interesting is that even though the Federal building is structurally the opposite of these local libraries, and despite the red tape involved in getting access to film it, there is also a strong element of everyday-ness involved necessarily in the building’s form and what it represents. This is the place you go to get a passport, a building you might drive past daily without ever actively thinking about it; it blends into the fabric of every commuter’s life. But the Federal building, in Carroll’s work, is also like the Empire State Building as featured in Andy Warhol’s 8-hour Empire (1964). Both are symbolic, meant to illicit different things through intensive viewing: for Warhol, the iconic piece of architecture is itself a celebrity, and for Carroll, the political structure embodies the departments it houses, including the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security and LAPD. That viewers are taking the time to look back at these agencies is an intentionally subversive conceptual layer — about as politically effectual as attacking an iceberg with a toothpick, but an excellent lesson in witnessing reality, and done with great visual style.

The post Specifics of Place and Realities Everywhere: Mary Ellen Carroll at Third Streaming appeared first on artcritical.

Carolee Schneemann: Within and Beyond the Premises at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, January 27 to April 1, 2012

In 1961, Carolee Schneemann moved to New York City after completing her MFA at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. It’s well known that she was a part of the experimental avant garde in the city: creating performances at Judson Dance Theater, participating at Andy Warhol’s Factory and Claes Oldenburg’s Store, and collaborating with Robert Morris and others on works that expanded her painting practice within and beyond its materiality. But rural Illinois where she studied painting—and the small town where she grew up, and New Paltz, NY where she settled in 1965 — couldn’t be further from that reality. Landscape exists in these places; is these places.

Champaign is in the middle of nowhere. It seems flat forever with nothing to look at but horizon and sky, except for, these days, some eccentric University architecture—charming old round barns, a fascist-looking football stadium, a basketball arena that touched down from outer space in the 1970s. This quiet University town was, to me, the perfect frame for Schneemann’s retrospective, allowing reflection on what was already alive in the artist before New York and contemporary misunderstandings about her. Under an endless, quiet sky it feels natural to contemplate body as activated presence; nature as the essential connection to self; and emotions, even rage, as spacious, possible, fruitful.

The retrospective, which closes at the Krannert Art Museum on April 1, originated at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. The current iteration was created in partnership with the Henry Art Gallery of Washington, and will hopefully travel throughout the country. Unfortunately however, according to Kathleen Harleman, Director at the Krannert, they are having trouble getting the show to certain locations due to the nature of the work. That seems incredible. Even though the internet exists, somehow a formal masterpiece like Fuses (1964-67)—which is a painted film, or a filmic-painting, exploring materiality and abstraction in both mediums, and including sexual sensation and fluid, female emotion as its content—can still frighten and offend. As Schneemann read during her performance of Interior Scroll in 1975, “there are certain films/we cannot look at/the personal clutter/the persistence of feelings/the hand-touch sensibility/the diaristic indulgence/the painterly mess/the dense gestalt/the primitive techniques.”

The Krannert version of the show includes the addition of the charming photo collage Schneemann, Tenney and Kitch: The Illinois Years (1959-60), which is a visual diary of the start of Schneemann’s domestic life with the composer James Tenney, her partner for 13 years, and Kitch their cat.  Another difference with the Dorsky’s presentation of the show is the greater emphasis placed on the artist’s film works. Instead of showing these on small monitors, Fuses, Meat Joy (1964-2010), and Precarious (2009) were projected on big screens in room-sized viewing enclaves. Precarious was actually projected around viewers onto four walls in a room, with a fifth smaller moving-image projection traveling slowly, overlapping in diagonal across the back wall. I’d seen pieces of Fuses on Youtube years ago, and Meat Joy on a monitor at P.P.O.W. in Chelsea during Schneemann’s last New York solo show, but the difference in seeing these pieces projected in their entirety on a big screen is enormous.

Fuses, a 35 mm, silent, color film is 29 minutes and 51 seconds long; flickers of light, Schneemann’s figure silhouetted against an ocean shoreline, her cat’s gaze, and scenes of Tenney driving in the country are cut in with shots of the couple making love. Some frames are upside down. All are painted, scratched, baked, cut and put back together to create a textured flow that looks at times the way an orgasm might feel. It’s impossible to say the work is not explicit, as it certainly shows everything, but Fuses is far from a narrative depiction of sex, and the images are tender and natural — a different creature entirely than the abusive images that dominate in the not-so-underground pornography industry. I actually believe that it should be distressing to women that people are or could be (especially people in positions of power to show this work) offended by Fuses. What that says to me is that because of fear and politics, a woman’s ownership of her own image, and her own joy — emotion, life, and formal filmmaking technique are inseparable here — is still unacceptable to many. This work should be much more widely known, shown, and studied.

Before she was making films, Schneemann was a painter who was already trying to find ways off of the canvas, as early as 1960 calling painting her “beloved corpse.” Some of my favorite of her works are the Rauschenberg-like combines that she made by attaching wire, broken glass, plaster and found photos to her canvases. In the front room is a series of paintings and etchings, including semi-abstract landscapes, still lifes, and life drawings that vary from each other only slightly, as well as the larger, built-out combine Sir Henry Francis Taylor (1961). This work includes a found photo of a nude woman seen from behind, broken glass and wood, and a small, weathered map of Illinois. There is a sense of expansion inward and also of pushing away energetically from the traditional means of expression. It looks as if the objects originated from the canvas themselves and just had to get out. Schneemann carried her impulse away from traditional painting farther, and more expertly than most, and yet she was somehow capable of aesthetic continuity between her own body, disparate objects, and paint.

Perhaps this is because of the artist’s attention to her own subconscious, to her dreams and desires, and to the places these natural impulses lead her. The film Meat Joy, which documents a performance of the fabulously disgusting event at Judson Church in 1964 (it was also performed in Paris and London to predictably different responses from audiences), attempts to reach heights of ecstatic sensuality. The soundtrack of the film is made up of sounds, mostly French conversations, from the streets of Paris, but it also includes Schneemann’s voice repeating a sentence in English to someone at least three times during the 10 minute, 34 second film: “I want to show the space between desire and experience,” she says.

In this case, her expression of desire in a pure form took the embodied shape of young men and women wearing very little, eventually covered with raw fish, chickens, and sausages. Participants rolled around together on the church floor, dismembering the carcasses, rubbing guts into each other’s flesh, acting out, and it seems experiencing, ecstatic states. On film, the scene can’t help but look a bit absurd after all these years, which is partially due to the nature of performance documentation versus a film created for its own sake like Fuses, or the photos that make up Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963), which was performed specifically and only for the camera.  But it’s also because there’s not much room in today’s adult experience for unabashed ecstasy, so being a witness to it becomes unfamiliar and embarrassing. I can’t help thinking that Meat Joy, as mystical rite and energetic force, was necessarily experiential; on film it lives as a purely visual, yet nonetheless powerful icon.

Iconic works abound in this retrospective, including Up to and Including Her Limits (1973-76), which explores the mark as remnant of trancelike, painterly action, and photos from Interior Scroll, the performance during which a nude Schneemann removed a folded piece of paper from her vagina and then read aloud the letter she had printed upon it. Also present, however, are later pieces that continue to respond to themes from earlier years. Positioned next to each other are Terminal Velocity (2001) and Snows (1967), both of which express a different kind of desire: to somehow respond to unfathomable current events, and to visually express the depths of pain and rage stemming from inhumane political acts.

Terminal Velocity is an elegy to the men and women who fell from windows of the World Trace Center on 9/11. Schneemann took images of these people, mid-fall, that she found in newspapers, and successively zoomed in to enlarge each image. Across the top of a grid, each figure is featured in his or her smallest size; each picture is then enlarged progressively in photos that line up, smallest to largest, from the top to the bottom of each column of the grid. The effect is haunting; it looks as if each subject is in motion, still falling, as his or her image stays captured forever in horrific limbo. Snows is a response to the atrocities of the Vietnam war: the video shows a performance in which the film Viet-Flakes, made up of re-filmed photos of Vietnam, cycled behind slowly moving performers with white make-up on their faces. Schneemann culled the images from foreign sources, as they were suppressed in U.S. media outlets. Audience movement affected the speed of the image and sound transitions in Viet-Flakes, a complex technology (though now common, used then for the first time), creating non-optional participation. Experimental acuity and the ability to combine organic with technical media played a part in the balance of the piece, which is somehow both pure political action and pure formal mastery—which is pure Schneemann.

The post Dreams and Desires from the Middle of Nowhere: Carolee Schneemann in Illinois appeared first on artcritical.

February 10 to March 17, 2012
534 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 421-3292

The beauty of performance—or its weakness, if your perspective is financial— is that, in its most pure form, it is as an artwork in time, divorced from objects, fleeting. There is sometimes, in special instances, a greater sense of recognizable aliveness, or beingness imbued in participation or presence. Historical accounts of performances, in this case Happenings, are exciting as stories themselves, as art world mythologies. But recreation is not art; I say this despite recent pushes to have works live forever. To me, the majority of straight re-performances (as if performance art were repertory theater!) recall Cindy Sherman’s intentionally plastic-looking face, in fairly recent work, mimicking surgical attempts to recreate youth. Try as some might to slow down the inevitable, humans just don’t live forever. Neither do performances.

Paintings and sculptures, however, last. So do photographs and films. “Happenings: New York, 1958-1963”, now at The Pace Gallery, is effective and interesting in its multi-room layout because it is first a photo and art object show, and second, through these objects mostly, an historical accounting of the live visual art scene in Provincetown and New York in that period. Five photographers – chiefly Robert R. McElroy, but also Fred McDarrah, Martha Holmes, John Cohen and I.C. (Chuck) Rappaport – captured events by Jim Dine, Simone Forti, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, Carolee Schneemann, and Robert Whitman. The “Happenings” artists were also working in tangible media alongside and in conjunction with performance. Viewed together, the photographs, art objects, multimedia and ephemera develop a convincing storyline in this show about the time of the first Happenings as new, free, special, raw, and developed, without agenda, for the existential sake of its participants.

Schneemann’s Quarry Transposed (1960), a mixed media assemblage —painted wood, a broken red glass goblet dangling from wire, a photograph of a woman, and messily hammered in nails—creates more atmosphere than photographs and wall text ever could alone. Specifically, this piece is arranged in the gallery to animate the artist’s Newspaper Event at Judson Church in 1962, though one could argue that the memory of the event and the object actually enliven each other. Glued to the wall behind the assemblage and photographs is a series of New York Times pages from 2012, there as if to remind us of the tactile quality of newsprint. The affect is aesthetically successful from far, but stories about current events are distracting in this context, and they make the installation feel more superficial than it should.

Certain nitpicky design details aside, “Happenings” is a good example of the ever-increasing ability of private interests to mount successful museum-style shows. It is to curator Mildred L. Glimcher’s credit that the show does not rely too heavily on video, which is sparingly installed no more than one monitor per room, some of which are silent.  The show also successfully avoids the question of re-performance all together, and doesn’t attempt to sincerely recreate original spaces. We might have walked into slick versions of Kaprow’s Words (1962) or Oldenburg’s Sports (1962), for example. Instead, visitors glimpse the originals through signed photographic prints by Robert McElroy. In the photograph of Sports, Pat Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, and the artist roll around on the gallery floor in sweat suits and with painted faces amid a mess of what looks like packing material, linens, and plastic bags. Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain and Richard Bellamy stand aside and look on, in suits, from the audience.

From major pieces like Grooms’s Painting from ‘A Play Called Fire’ (1958), which is on loan from the Greenville County Museum of Art, to ephemera like Kaprow’s Poster for ‘Apple Shrine’ (1960), there is a surprisingly lot to admire in work that was ostensibly done at the service of an ephemeral event. Handmade, lasting, and beautiful, the work makes one wonder if it weren’t actually the other way around. Whitman’s Inside Out (1963), also helps to elicit this sentiment. The artist filmed a meeting of his friends talking and smoking around a table; the grainy black and white images are projected on four walls and a ceiling in a private room, with a sound loop the artist added in 2009.  Surely the meeting was interesting for the participants at the time, but is there any reality that doesn’t look better in retrospect, captured through the keen eye of an artist? Pace is correct to celebrate not just the history of performance events, but the things and images that were left behind.

The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph of the same title, by Mildred L. Glimcher, published by Monacelli Press at $65. 320pp, many reproductions, ISBN: 978-1-58093-307-0

The post Time Regained: The “Happenings” Show at Pace appeared first on artcritical.

The Fluxus Weekend probably would have been enough. (Highlights from this tightly focused, historically themed mini-festival within Performa11 include a brand new film by Jonas Mekas called Fluxus Cabaret, complied from archival footage of Fluxus-related performances, and a day with Alison Knowles, founding member of the movement, who will perform with collaborators amid a sound installation in an empty storefront space.) But Performa has never been about “enough” or “tightly focused” — the biennial in its entirety is a well-marketed orgy of cross-disciplinary performances that have in common certain calendar dates, New York City, and an institutional stamp of approval. That said, the sense of urgency Performa creates around live or time-based work in “visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, graphic design, and the culinary arts” can be exciting —it just takes a bit of planning.

In past years I ventured out to more Performa shows than I could really fully engage with wholeheartedly because I believed that this biennial might possibly present a coherent vision of international contemporary performance as a whole. Actually, the fact that there is no cohesive whole in the art world, let alone across all these disparate disciplines, means that self-segregation persists despite, or perhaps because of, attempts at inclusiveness. Instead of a wide view of performance trends, the real value in a festival of this size is the opportunity to see shows that might not have come into existence were it not for Performa funding, and a marketing machine that benefits smaller works that would have been happening, more quietly, anyway. More precise editing and a more focused curatorial vision could conceivably cross boundaries between the aforementioned disciplines to make select contemporary trends across say food, architecture and visual art visible, but you can’t have it both ways, and director RoseLee Goldberg is truly attempting to create and to write the definitive history of performance. The result is New York time based art and performance on steroids.

As if this weren’t enough, even with all this inclusiveness, each week of the biennial there are important shows to see that don’t fall under the Performa11 heading, such as Maria Hassabi’s SHOW at The Kitchen, Reusuable Parts/Endless Love by Ryan Kelly and Brennan Gerard at Danspace, and John Jasperse’s Canyon at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. There are various reasons why these particular pieces didn’t get included in Performa this time around, some of them more political than others, but it’s worth noting that there is really nothing differentiating the actual experience of these works from Performa11. Two years ago, the audience at Tere O’Connor’s non-Performa09 related Wrought Iron Fog at New York Live Arts (then still called Dance Theater Workshop) was the same audience that was out every night at Performa09 events. The borders of this festival are particularly porous.

As I mentioned, Fluxus is an historical reference point for the biennial, but so is Russian Constructivism. The stated overarching curatorial themes, which are supposedly intertwined with the historical themes, are “Language, Translation and Misinformation; The Voice; The Politics of Speech; and the Animation of Modern Sculpture.” These are all fascinating, and extremely large topics and one can only hope that they will play out in clear and interesting ways in many of the pieces on view. The performances range from Commissions, which are the most “Performa” of the works since the institution funds them and the biennial is the impetus for their creation, to Premiers (first showings of experimental works), Projects (everything else performed live), Long Term Exhibitions, and the Film Program. There’s also the Fluxus Weekend, Performa Comedy, Performa Radio, Performa TV, Performa Magazine, and Performa After Hours.

I wish there was also a Performa11 app for my phone. In lieu of that, I’ve handmade a short list of the shows for the second half of the three week biennial that I’ll be seeing or that I would be seeing if I could be in two or three places at once. See the full listing of shows at Performa’s website, where you can sort your choices by interest, day, time, neighborhood, and price.

Maria Petschnig see-saw, seen-sawn

• Thursday, November 10, 7:30 pm — 8:30 pm

Austrian Cultural Forum, Free

Jack Ferver with Michelle Mola Me, Michelle

• Thursday, November 10, 8:00 pm — 9:00 pm, Friday, November 11, 8:00 pm — 9:00 pm, Saturday, November 12, 8:00 pm — 9:00 pm

Museum of Arts and Design
$18 / $15 MAD members and students

Ragnar Kjartansson and Davíd ?ór Jónsson Artist Class: On Music and Forgiveness

• Friday, November 11, 3:00 pm — 4:00 pm

Performa Hub
$10 / 8 Student

Shirin Neshat OverRuled

• Friday, November 11, 8:00 pm — 9:30 pm
• Saturday, November 12, 5:00 pm — 6:30 pm
• Saturday, November 12, 8:00 pm — 9:30 pm

Cedar Lake, $35 General, $35 to $100 Opening Night

Jonas Mekas Fluxus Cabaret

• Saturday, November 12, 6:00 pm — 7:30 pm

Anthology Film Archives, Tickets $9 / $7 students/seniors / $6 AFA Members

Alison Knowles in collaboration with Jessica Higgins and Joshua Selman Beans All Day

• Saturday, November 12, 12:00 pm — 6:00 pm

Forever & Today, Inc. storefront space, Free

Trajal Harrell Antigone Jr.

• Sunday, November 13, 6:00 pm — 7:29 pm
• Sunday, November 13, 7:30 pm — 9:00 pm

Third Streaming, $11

Liz Magic Laser I Feel Your Pain

• Sunday, November 13, 8:00 pm — 9:00 pm
• Monday, November 14, 8:00 pm — 9:00 pm

The SVA Theatre, Free with reservation

Mika Rottenberg and Jon Kessler SEVEN

• Thursday, November 3- November 19^th, various days (see Performa Calendar) , 6:00 pm — 8:00 pm

Nicole Klagsbrun Project Space, Free.

Proposed curriculum on contemporary art and performance: Dennis Oppenheim and the art of survival, Day 17

• Thursday, November 17, 1:00 pm — 6:00 pm

Performa Hub, Free with reservation

Pablo Helguera The Well-Tempered Exposition, Book One, Part II

• Friday, November 18, 7:00 pm — 8:00 pm

Location One

Robert Ashley That Morning Thing

• Saturday, November 19, 8:00 pm — 9:30 pm, Sunday, November 20, 3:00 pm — 4:30 pm and 8:00 pm — 9:30 pm, Monday, November 21, 8:00 pm — 9:30 pm

The Kitchen, $30

The post Well-Marketed Orgy: Performa 11, Including Fluxus Weekend appeared first on artcritical.

483 Driggs Avenue, Williamsburg
Performances: Saturdays September 1o, 17 and 24, 2011
4:30, 5:30 and 6:30pm (tickets $15)
extentended: Sunday, September 25, 6:30 & 7:30pm

People gathered in the bleak concrete backyard of the Black and White Gallery, chatting in groups, milling about. “The Whitebox Project,” Noémie Lafrance’s performance piece, had already been described as being influenced by flash mobs, so everyone knew what was about to happen. Still, we stood and talked to one another in anticipation. The volume of human voices speaking out loud in the roofless room started to escalate unnaturally, to the point where to continue a conversation, you practically had to shout. Then the volume dropped drastically, and performers emerged from the mass of people, starting to make simple patterns of movement along the floors and walls.

Eventually, about 20 dancers revealed themselves to be a part of the piece, and proceeded to work their way through just about every existing postmodern dance reference. They walked, ran, talked, shouted, kicked, shimmied, sat down, stood up, laid down, and even created some strange cheerleader-like formations of movement and chanting. None of the sequences lasted too long—some of the performers undressed within the mob of people, a trope that didn’t shock and wasn’t tender or powerful, but did make me feel sorry for the dancers participating in the pretentious nod to vulnerability. They put their clothes back on; they herded us the way my parents’ border collie used to, running in circles around us a little too close for comfort, forcing a shift in location. They also encouraged us to join in and participate in the simple physical motions. I noticed one young woman who happily followed along with the Simon Says-like instructions from the score; most resisted.

At the post-show talk with the audience that comes at the end of every performance, and is actually a part of the piece, my fears about the breadth of the organizing concept for the project were confirmed. Underlying the somewhat interactive though hardly coercive gathering was a real desire to get the audience to dance. Lafrance and her dancers talked about the idea that once you “break the boundaries between audience and performer” or “challenge the conventions of the proscenium stage,” then the result will be a kind of physical participation by audience members—a democratization of the space whose perfect expression is the erasing of the distinction between performer and viewer. After over 60 years of this kind of thinking about the destabilization of theatrical conventions, including a popular resurgence in the 1990s, we’ve already had a backlash against it. Theorists have weighed in. Jacques Rancière pointed out, and I tend to agree, that there is nothing inherently wrong with recognizing the distinction between the roles of viewer and performer. What is wrong, he asserted in his book The Emancipation of the Spectator, is to assume that one role is less free, less powerful, or less interesting than another.

As any critic will tell you, the experience of the viewer is always active—to initiate thought, to respond, and to feel are not verbs we should dismiss as non-participatory. Why, then, should viewers dance? And why should they be asked to verbally respond to the performance after the piece, in order to influence its future iterations?  My problem with the concept of the piece—despite its often striking visuals and a few lovely experiential moments in space—can’t be removed from a general frustration with our culture of affirmation. We assume that we can judge success by how many people have jumped on in support and participation, and longwinded, inane comments are dutifully welcomed, as if they embody democracy itself. This kind of climate assures that no one gets heard; there’s a jumble of opinion, very little thought, and an overall lowering of the bar because of too much awareness of audience diversity and limitations. Ironically, in this piece, attempts to draw out active participation and response take away the true power of an audience member to have his or her own natural reaction to the visual material. I never liked to be talked down to as a child and I don’t appreciate it much now; if you’re giving viewers something to look at, step back and believe in their ability to see.

The post How Active Need A Viewer Be? Noémie Lafrance at Black & White appeared first on artcritical.

June 30 – October 9, 2011
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York City, 212 570 3600

Xavier Cha’s “Body Drama” may take up the entire lobby gallery space at the Whitney Museum, but it is a small work, expertly pointed in concept. Cha distills contemporary experience into a single note about incompleteness, using the most obvious “problem” of today’s performance—the essential dissonance between video and liveness—as a starting point. Instead of trying to solve the clash, Cha highlights it, shaking up oil and water in order to mimic the vantage point of an individual in the midst of contemporary art and the greater world, conglomerates impossible to see as a whole, to fully know or even think you know.

Without belaboring the point, Cha uses simple techniques to point out a very current strain of emptiness and isolation, born and bred in the information age. Every hour on the hour, an actor steps into the gallery space with a video camera strapped into a harness that is secured around his or her waist. The “SnorriCam,” a device commonly used in horror films, is attached to a short rod that positions its eye to squarely frame the actor’s face. The camera films the actor emote for 20 minutes; museum visitors can see the live action, but there is no live feed to compare one’s view to the image captured by the camera. The most noticeable thing about the live performance portion of this piece is the fact that although the actors, in turn, each work hard to express the psychological terror of being alone in an unknowable place—Cha’s direction to them—there is little to no actual emotional content resulting from their efforts. Stripped of story, distanced by the camera device strapped on, and sanitized as intellectual content, the acting itself does not compel its audience to connect to the performer in the way we are generally intended to in the theater.

Twenty minutes after each hour, a museum employee walks into the space, turns off the camera attached to the actor, and they both exit the room. At the same moment, a video appears on an island of a wall in the center of the space. It’s almost impossible not to be immediately distracted by the video and miss the actor’s exit. Such seamlessness in choreographing attention is surprising in this context, and intriguing. On the screen, we see taped footage of a different actor in the gallery. This actor is not present, but with access to the filmed footage, we sometimes catch glimpses in the background of viewers who did see the particular live performance on different day in the same room this summer. After the transition, the work loses steam. It’s more difficult to watch an extended portion of overacting on video out of context, than it is to sit through the same thing live. But this conceptually grounded performance piece is about the transitions—each section feels less than enough, leaving a viewer wanting.

In Trisha Brown’s solo “Homemade” (1965), the artist moved with an 8mm projector attached to a similar device around her waist that projected, behind her onto the wall, a video (shot by Robert Whitman) of the same movements that she was making during the live performance. The duel images—live and on video— of Brown moving her body parts and attempting to strip the physical actions of associative emotion, conveyed, and still conveys in re-performances, hopefulness for democracy and the possibility of wider, more fully realized individual views. It is fueled with the energy of collaboration across genres and the excitement of newly minted postmodern dance, which liberated the performing body and presented him or her as a complete person. Now, after all the years in between, Cha uses a comparable formal technique to criticize museum visitors’ technology-riddled blindness to their own and others’ inner lives. Distance, dissatisfaction, and an inability to connect—that’s the heart of it.

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Just as it was starting to get dark, the limited audience for Paradis was led across the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens into the Cherry Esplanade. We wandered through the wide lawn, lined with cherry trees, until we saw toward the back left—between the last few trees next to the wall separating the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens from the Brooklyn Museum’s parking lot— Michael Dauphinais playing softly on a lone white piano. It was a beautiful image, coming across him there, but the music he was creating live, which was intended to be a quiet and introspective accompaniment to the dance to come, couldn’t really be heard. That’s because the Brooklyn Museum’s First Saturdays event, a well-attended party with a live DJ spinning house music outdoors with plenty of speakers and a loud base, drown him out. When the white-clad dancers emerged against the deep green of the garden, the crowd tried to focus on the performance; one couldn’t help thinking, though, that they were having a whole lot more fun next door.

The choreographer, Yanira Castro, visibly dismayed about the situation, stopped the performance about halfway through: this was the right decision. The work might or might not have been successful without the sonic interruption—there was a confusing bit of audience interaction that at certain points felt forced, or over-acted, but one can’t be sure this wasn’t due to the dancers’ sense that they had to compete for our attention. Once they made their way in lovely leaps, diagonally criss-crossing the esplanade toward the audience, who milled about near the piano, the performers made their way into the crowd and worked individually wrought motions around and in front of each of us. Shayla-Vie Jenkins is such a lovely dancer that when she was near me, it was easy to bring my focus squarely to the moment and the energy of the bodies moving around bodies in the strange, dim light. Others were less engaging. In any case, it isn’t fair to review a work that had to be stopped mid-way through. This was a lesson in the dangers of site-specificity, and the frustrations of bad communication in institutional planning. The flip side, however, is clearly and happily: how bad can any evening in the empty Brooklyn Botanic Gardens ever really be? A bit of nature at dusk, for this city-dweller at least, can never be called a waste of time.

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June 2-4, 8pm. June 5 rain date
1000 Washington Avenue
Brooklyn

For the first time ever in its 100-year history, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden will host site-specific performances on its grounds. At twilight, director/choreographer Yanira Castro and her interdisciplinary arts organization “a canary torsi” will present the three-part piece Paradis in two locations in the garden: the Desert House in the Steinhardt Conservatory and the Cherry Esplanade. Paradis is inspired by the final section of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 film, Notre Musique, and it promises an unusual role for the audience, whose actions will be tracked to generate a specific sound, light and movement environment. It will include live piano by Michael Daupinais and a solo dance performance by Peter Schmitz.

Tickets $20, very limited seating, purchase at dancetheaterworkshop.org or over the phone by calling 212.924.0077

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March 29 – April 9, 2011
450 West 37th Street, east of 10th Avenue,
New York City, (646) 731-3200

Eiko & Koma’s Naked, at Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) through April 9th, is a living installation accompanied, in a neighboring room, by videos of historical performances; it  is the current installment of the three-year Retrospective Project highlighting the 40-year career of this artist duo. The durational performance, which inhabits a small, enclosed, nest-like area where viewers can either sit and stay or browse for a minute and move on, was designed for and originally installed last November in a gallery at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Despite the fact that Eiko & Koma have a long history as dance artists, the piece seems out of place at the destination theatre and dance venue of BAC. Installation in the 6th floor studios is not ideal for the work, which is a pocket of man-made nature more effectively stumbled upon than ticketed and controlled as in traditional theater. But the artists have done their best with this location; the work is free and open to the public any time and reservations are not absolutely necessary. You can enter and leave, at your leisure, a still space where the quiet, subtly painted naked bodies of a husband and wife barely touch, barely move, and yet pack a lifetime of craft, energy, and artistry into thoughtfully designed and extended moments.

Floor to ceiling canvas walls create a break between the entrance to studio 6A and Eiko & Koma’s bodies, which lie on the floor atop a messy swirl of leaves, twigs and black bird feathers. Holes in the canvas walls create little frames you can peer through to see the two of them, seemingly alone in the space. The small holes in the canvas, which itself is pasted with feathers and black marks as if intentionally dirtied by some natural habitat, creates a sense of distance between viewer and performer. Once around the corner and inside the small enclosure with the artists as well as the sometimes fully packed rows of floor and bench seating, this distance is completely gone. The artists’ two bodies were lying on their sides, facing one another, when I first entered. During the time I sat still and watched, there was no real change in their physical location, but there was an ever present tension of muscle, and ever-so-slight twists of each body open, exposing skin stretched tight over ribs, breath lifting bellies. After some time, the bodies closed into hiding, softly quivering fetal positions. The two did not move in unison, but played off of one another, appearing to sense and respond to the slight movements and occasional, always tender touches of their partner. One wonders how much of this action was planned and how much happened in the moment, and, after so many years of moving at glacial speed next to the same person, whether there is really any significant difference between planning and improvisation in their action.

Despite the nakedness of this performance, like Anna Halprin’s approach to nudity, the work is not sexual. The bodies on view are not specifically desexualized, but the actions themselves are already so fallen, closer to being of nature in the nearly dead sense than in the procreative animal sense—a seamless part of the landscape rather than an insertion onto landscape. There is no power struggle between the two bodies or with the bodies and the environment, which feels damp, like a cave; the only acoustics are random drips of water that fall from the ceiling and the rustling of dried leaves that hang in bunches from the overhead lights. Watching this nearly still tableau is unexpectedly riveting: time flies. In the next room, viewers are meant to understand the history of Eiko and Koma’s nakedness and its connection to the natural world, and how their work arrived at this point. Videos on display show works from the last 40 years in which the artists perform with nothing on. This room serves as an unintentional argument for the necessity of live performance—the performance documents, even the video installation that includes an underwater screen showing the couple’s Lament (1985) and Undertow (1987), clearly lack the moment-by-moment power of the living installation.

But the element of continuity and history that the accompanying videos bring into the work is the principal reason that Eiko & Koma are performing this week. Retrospective Project (2009-2012), of which Naked is a part, is designed after the museum-model concept for retrospectives: a visual art formula adapted and applied to performing artists. A large exhibition of the duo’s work will open at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art this summer, accompanied by a comprehensive 288-page monograph published by the Walker Art Center. With living performance artists, the video and ephemera based retrospective is a worthy accompaniment to an opportunity to see the real works, or at least the really interesting and exciting works, which are the new live performances by these artists. This was the case with Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at MoMA and it is certainly true for at least this portion of Eiko & Koma’s tour. Whether or not this model of performance artist as museum object can be sustained after the inevitable absence of the artist him/herself is a question curators will certainly be addressing in coming years as they rush to figure out ways to maintain famous but ephemeral works by canonized 20th-century artistic bodies-as-icons.  For now, at least, Eiko & Koma themselves are on the 6th floor at BAC, laying in a nest of sticks and leaves, slowly moving their aging, breathing bodies with what is transmitted as a feeling of complete acceptance of the viewers’ intimate gaze. If you sit for long enough, you’ll notice that sometimes, they even look back.

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January 13-22, 2011
512 West 19 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 255-5793

In Devotion, Sarah Michelson casts two male actors—James Tyson and Jim Fletcher of the New York City Players—to dance alongside Rebecca Warner, Non Griffiths, Nicole Mannarino and Eleanor Hullihan. Griffiths, now 14-years-old, started dancing for the eminent downtown choreographer when she only 9; Michelson has explored, in the past, ideas about authorship and virtuosity through the “naïve bodies” of preteen girls. In Devotion, which is an epic two-hour, aggressively physical ballet inspired by a piece of text by Richard Maxwell, she creates movements in which highly trained female bodies interact with the literal interpretation and visible exhaustion of male partners. All are put through enormously athletic, relentlessly repeating movement sequences. Tearing apart and re-combining components of ballet with outsized yoga poses and substantial references to Twyla Tharp’s In The Upper Room (including the piece’s Phillip Glass score), Michelson meets the religious content of Maxwell’s text with pure dance—movement riding the line between possible and not.

Michelson herself does not appear onstage in person, but is the subject, with Maxwell, of luminescent portraits by TM Davy that hang high along The Kitchen’s black walls. When I first entered the Chelsea space—which was rotated lengthwise with the high tapered seating removed, fewer but longer rows of chairs lined up against the side wall—the images emerging from pure black background seemed alive, as if the hanging canvases were windows through which one actually saw human beings posed in stillness. Michelson’s voice was also present. It piped into the space over the speakers—alternating with or accompanying musician Pete Drungle’s loud, atmospheric score—as Warner, playing the Narrator, physicalized Maxwell’s personal, colloquial version of the Old and New Testament.

Warner worked her way around the room with a commanding yet neutral presence.  She lunged forward with her upper spine arched and arms outstretched as if they might reach out of even her own skin, tilted from the waist, and spun with one or two arms out. Meanwhile, Michelson read: “Eve settles down and says plainly: We really are simple things. Simple, fearful things.” She continued, “Mary holding babe in the oblivion of no sleep. Let this be ordinary. Let it be away from the current. Let her have her time with her child. Mary, Jesus.” Fletcher played the physically demanding role of Adam—during the second hour he was literally running around the space, catching the Eve as she threw her body repeatedly into his arms. Tyson was Jesus opposite Girffiths’ Mary.

Her white blond hair tied tightly back against nearly translucent young skin, Griffiths has a certain thin frailty that created palpable tension each time she quivered after landing a sharp, reductionist leap. Despite this, she seemed to have enough determination and devotion to the material or some idea of dance and performance, to push through. She was also the perfectly cast Virgin Mother for this work; when she approached Tyson’s figure, the partnering seemed both accidental and necessary for her survival. She almost seemed as if she might fall without him, and yet she shined in a way his Jesus did not, and was not supposed to.

Griffiths changed shoes in front of the audience from sneakers into black dance shoes, and without preciousness or over-intellectualizing, it was clear that this was also a dance about dance: a play with derivative forms reaching back into history yet breaking through convention all the same. Everything, it seems in this piece, is on the line, yet the humans making it are also so clearly real: a rigorous execution of craft that manages not to mask the dancers’ bodies with technique.

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