When RoseLee Goldberg first published Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, in 1979, she opened the doors for the scholarly study of this medium. Thirty-two years later, Performance Art was in its third edition, with a new chapter dealing with “The First Decade of the New Century 2001-2010.” Importantly, this decade included the advent of Goldberg’s groundbreaking performance biennial – Performa – which began in 2004, and which will see its eighth edition this year. Her latest publication, Performance Now: Live Art for the 21st Century (August 2018) is devoted exclusively to performance since 2000. Departing from her previous monograph, which ruminates on the processes and history of performance art, Performance Now dives into the political and social implications of its contemporary manifestations.

Performance Now is divided into six chapters: “Performance as Visual Art,” “Word Citizenship: Performance as a Global Language,” “Radical Action: On Performance and Politics,” “Dance After Choreography,” “Off stage: New Theatre,” and “Performing Architecture.” The table of contents which outlines these chapters features an image of Pussy Riot in Moscow in 2012 – a powerful, colorful image that sets the tone for the book. Goldberg’s mission is clear: she articulately and concisely investigates how performance “mak[es] us more alert” in a globalized, politicized, “endlessly shifting” society (11). After a brief introductory section, Goldberg follows the same structure in each chapter: an explanation of themes and trends related to its topic, followed by about 50 examples of artists illustrating those ideas, all from the past two decades. Because each section is distinctly separate from those before and after, and they are neither alphabetical nor chronological in their ordering, the sequence of the chapters seems primarily a matter of aesthetic. As almost every page of the book has at least one (usually color) illustration, it would seem to be an image-led arrangement.

Goldberg’s text reads like a call to arms to consider performance in relation to institutions as much as to individuals. Once an outsider art form, Goldberg explains how post-2000 performance art became “increasingly dense with content, and demanded close attention on the part of viewers, [making] the argument that performance was difficult to incorporate into contemporary art history or into the collection of a museum because of its ephemeral nature… irrelevant” (17). With the book’s comprehensive chapter entries, Performance Now acts a record to legitimize performance – helped along not only by Goldberg’s status as an expert, but also from the thorough documentation of performance in the almost-two-hundred pages of example artists and performances (many of which are from various iterations of Performa).

Chapter three (“Radical Action”) stood out as particularly timely. Dealing with themes of war, social media, identity, and capitalism, Goldberg beautifully describes the importance of performance as a way to protest, process, and connect. Earlier in the book she describes performance as “both a way out and a way in,” a claim that fully comes to life as Goldberg describes the “urgent appeals to upend history, to change situations from negative to positive… to imagine reconciliation, to create poetic spaces for personal visions, cultures and rituals” (73, 112-113). Performance, this book says, can bridge outside and in, working from outside systems to make changes, and getting inside institutions to spread a message.

Despite the scope of this undertaking to show the immediate power of live art, Goldberg never lets it get away from her. In elegant, jargon-free prose, Performance Now remains accessible to anyone with a light background in performance wanting to know more, although with the absence of the history of the medium (covered so well in her earlier monograph) it should be admitted that readers with no background on the subject may feel a little lost at times. However, the energy of Goldberg’s text certainly comes across no matter what level of previous familiarity with the material.

My biggest surprise with this book was the lack of a conclusion. The same, however, is true in the earlier study, and it would seem in both instances to be a strategic commentary on the ever-shifting nature of performance as a medium, which remains responsive to its time and place. To write a conclusion would perhaps be reductive, boxing in a form which has always crossed boundaries. Thus, by giving us performance now, Goldberg leaves us tantalized, imagining the range of possibilities of what might come next.

RoseLee Goldberg. Performance Now: Live Art for the 21st Century. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018) ISBN: 9780500021255. 272 pages, 260 illustrations, $45

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Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art

Grey Art Gallery, NYU
September 10 to December 7, 2013
100 Washington Square East
New York City, 212-998-6780

Part two of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art will open November 14 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and will remain on view until March 9, 2014.

The ambitious two-part survey Radical Presence, originally organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, is a thrilling endeavor.  The exhibition showcases 50 years of performance by black artists, with two dozen artists featured in the first installment on view at Grey Art Gallery.  According to the gallery’s director Lynn Gumpert, this portion of the show will be the more historical of the two, with a selection of contemporary works to open at the Studio Museum in Harlem next month.  It was inspiring to see a show entirely devoted to black artists in performance, one which exhibits Cassel Oliver’s deep investment in tracing a historical lineage for artists of color outside the modernist fabric of aesthetic judgments or the strategies of production central to postmodern cultural critique. The exhibition will be accompanied by more than a dozen live performances during its run. However, it is the historical evidence of these works—the document, the artifact, the object—which are central to the installation, forming a new heredity of black performance rooted in the subjective experience of viewing.

Cassel Oliver’s mission to find historical precedents (ie generational links) for artists of color is readable through her installation, which places canonized performances (Adrian Piper and David Hammons) next to lesser known ones.  Radical Presence presents black performance art not as an extension of theater—a medium rooted in visual passivity—but rather in terms of body art practices that illustrate questions of racial difference by actually enacting this difference through its relationship to the body of the viewer.  One such artist is the brilliant Pope.L, whose work Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000) occupies a prominent place in the exhibition.  The installation consists of a toilet mounted on a 10-foot tower where Pope.L originally sat for several days, dressed in a jockstrap and caked in flour, reading pages from the Wall Street Journal before consuming and eventually purging them.  The wall text quotes the artist who writes, “I am a fisherman of social absurdity, if you will…. My focus is to politicize disenfranchisement … to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from.”  His crawl pieces, a project he began in the 1970s, also display the politics of embodiment and social history.  For The Great White Way, Pope.L crawled down 22 miles of Broadway in New York, making himself horizontal against the pavement amidst a capitalist jungle of high-rises and industry.  For this work he donned a capeless superman costume—an appropriated illusion of (white) strength, historically unavailable to him.  These works engage a cross-cultural conversation: why is it that we conceive of whiteness as somehow separate from blackness when one relies on the other for signification?  Rather than seeing either culture as “authentic” or segregated, Pope.L’s work performs the ways in which binary social structures are in fact deeply imbricated in one another.

Coco Fusco is another artist interested in our preconceptions of “the other.”  She is perhaps most well-known for her 1992 collaboration with Guillermo Gomez-Peña in The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–1994), which traveled widely and remains the archetype for contemporary questions of colonization, the aesthetic of primitivism and the very function of the museum.  Fusco’s Sightings Photo Series from 2004 continues her examination of the role and responsibility of the viewer.  The work came out of her video project In her video a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert (2004) in which Fusco weaves together archival video and staged surveillance footage of the FBI search for Angela Davis.  In a portion of the video Fusco narrates “Some women began to fear that an afro had become a one-way ticket to a holding cell, other women decided to put on afro wigs to pass for black.”  During the FBI search, hundreds of black women were wrongly detained or arrested before Davis herself was brought to trial.  What then does it mean when white women appropriate this righteous black aesthetic without any potential for misidentification and thus no actual bodily risk?  This notion of “passing” is something that Adrian Piper commented on extensively early on in her career—a question that is rooted in the experience of the seer as opposed to that of the subject.

Benjamin Patterson’s 1962 work Pond is on display as a series of instructions for performers to produce an indeterminate work.  The open action is guided by a grid designed by Patterson, as well as a number of wind-up frogs that direct the participant’s movements.  In the exhibition catalog Cassel Oliver notes that it was actually an investigation into Patterson’s career that prompted her to begin researching work for Radical Presence.  Patterson, a classically trained musician, was one of the founding members of Fluxus yet remained largely absent from canonical discourse, that is, up until Cassel Oliver organized his retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The Fluxus preoccupations with destabilizing hierarchies through chance operations and the group’s emphasis on the phenomenological (and thus subjective) experience of the viewer is very much in line with the more provocative works in Radical Presence.

The artist Rammellzee (1960-2010) also comes from a musical background.  Known for his elaborate performance costumes and narratives, he became famous in the 1980s New York underground through his freestyle rapping and graffiti tags in the subway.  A photograph on display at Grey Art Gallery features a selection of his elaborate costumes, as the original garments were installed as part of the exhibition in Houston.  Also on view is his 1979 document, Iconic Treatise on Gothic Futurism.  In this treatise, Rammellzee speaks to the political power of language, in particular letters, which, when separated from their narrative function can become powerful weapons that work in opposition to what he calls “counterfeit linguistic systems.”  He was directly inspired by monastic traditions and illuminated manuscripts, in which letters serve both a literary and formal function.  Interestingly, the wall text glossed over Rammellzee’s sci-fi, urban shaman persona; like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, he began as an artist by using the city’s walls as his drawing board.

The art historian and performance art theorist Amelia Jones notes the power of body art, as enacted by the non-normative subject, to expose the naturalized exclusionism in modern art history.  The works in Radical Presence hinge on elements of social construction, intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and the idiosyncratic relationship between seer and seen. This is art that challenges not only the structure of the art institution, but also makes an indelible impact on the social structures beyond the gallery’s walls: Radical, indeed.

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The Jewish Museum

May 10 to Sept 29, 2013
1109 5th Avenue
New York City, (212) 423-3200

JACK GOLDSTEIN x 10,000 speaks to the high voltage intensity that one artist can generate over the course of a lifetime. The exhibition at The Jewish Museum arrives by way of the Orange County Museum of Art in California where the show opened last year as the first American retrospective for the Canadian-born Jack Goldstein (1945-2003). Works featured include Goldstein’s infamous short 16mm films from the 1970s, experimental soundscapes on vinyl, epic 1980s paintings of dynamic weather, and his final philosophical writings exhibited in seventeen bound volumes.

In Goldstein’s performance-based 16mm films, such as A Glass of Milk (1972) and Some Plates (1972), we witness the artist first coming to terms with the kinetic dynamism of still life objects. These early films, along with four others, are projected onto a wall for forty minutes on a continuous loop. With the help of a charismatic projector, Goldstein’s films are bewitchingly charming, resembling a middle school reenactment of Isaac Newton’s first Law: an object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. In A Glass of Milk, for over four minutes, a fisted hand rhythmically pounds against a table upon which there sits a vulnerable glass of milk. Similarly, in Some Plates, a precarious stack of plates is as motionless as a still life on a table, until an outside force (the artist) enters. In the background behind the plates, a pair of legs begins to stubbornly stomp and jump. After about three minutes of stomping, the stack of plates, like the glass of milk, crashes, as we expected it to. Although these films are, to put it bluntly, experiments, Goldstein successfully captures the integrity of his objects as they act alongside and against the artist as force, or outside agent.

In A Spotlight, another film made the same year, Goldstein takes his place among his objects, challenging his own endurance over the course of eight minutes, running back and forth trying to escape the spotlight that pursues him. In one sense, Goldstein’s stomping, pounding, and fleeing can be understood as the common, eccentric gestures of a frustrated artist. As early experiments, these films exhibit one of Goldstein’s life-long, humbling preoccupations: How to breathe life into the still life?  It is Goldstein’s sensibility, his way of regarding the stack of plates, the glass of milk, or himself, that comes across as the main subject of the film work. At times, this sensibility carries with it Baldessari-like inflections of Cal Arts humor, but ultimately, what sets Goldstein apart is his sense of profound disappointment as he perpetually discovers objects, like characters, will and do endure, with, or without us—like Samuel Beckett’s characters, they go on.

The experience of the silent films is complimented by the overlay of Goldstein’s sound effects records compiled from Hollywood audio archives. In Two Cats Wrestling (1976) the distinct and disorienting sounds of cats fighting can be heard throughout the exhibition via overhead speakers. Among Goldstein’s Suite of 9 Records with Sound Effects (1976) the purple 45rpm, The Tornado, is simultaneously the least intrusive as well as the most haunting. As a soundscape, The Tornado’s howling winds successfully foregrounds the foreboding, moods one might experience alongside the artist’s later paintings made in New York during the 1980s, visible in an adjacent room.

Goldstein’s depictions of lightening storms, meteor showers, and volcanic eruptions, airbrushed to perfection by his assistants may strike a viewer initially as out of place. In their celestial aspirations, they appear overtly ambitious, especially in comparison to the memorable Mickey Mouse simplicity of a film like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975), a three minute portrait of the company’s famous roaring lion head logo. Given the heavily emphasized LA art context of the show (pop red and yellow painted gallery walls), these New York paintings appear especially strange, and saturnine with their high-contrast explosions, stormy weather, and apocalyptic undertones. The scale and High Definition-like quality of Goldstein’s appropriated nature scenes boasts in his untitled works a commercial presence in so far as they appear pristine, as well as pricey. What is fascinating to me is that they complicate, and contextualize how the commercially vibrant art world of the 1980s existed alongside the intellectual ambitions of the so-called Pictures Generation of the late 1970s. Within Goldstein’s oeuvre, the later paintings share in common with the earlier films the urge to add energy, momentum, and a sense of kineticism to the still life. Not unlike the final philosophical texts Goldstein was composing toward the end of his life, these darker works depict the torpor of being alongside the drama of exile.

Consistently across mediums, Goldstein uses found images, sounds, pets, and texts in order to interrogate the cosmic fact that our fragility, like the stack of plates, is our livelihood, our vitality. Perhaps that is what the 10,000 of the retrospective’s title speaks to. Ten thousand is a quantitative measure of Goldstein’s capacity, his wattage, so to speak. Or, perhaps 10,000 suggests the number of times, turns, and transformations it took for Goldstein to make the final artistic leap–as he did in his last film, The Jump (1978) moving from incandescence to something else. For the artist who seldom signed his paintings, that, it seems, would be Goldstein’s signature: trademarked transubstantiation, the movement from light into pictures and then from pictures into ether.

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June 19 to August 4, 2013
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue, between 66th and 67th Street
New York City, 212-616-3930

Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy: Reble Dabble Babble

June 20 to July 26, 2013
Hauser & Wirth
511 West 18th Street
New York City, 212-790-3900

Life Cast

May 10 to July 26, 2013
Hauser & Wirth
32 East 69th Street
New York City, 212-794-4970

Stepping into Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory, currently hosting Paul McCarthy’s multimedia installation WS, feels a little like falling headfirst into a terrarium. That is, if the terrarium has vaguely pornographic, quasi-violent, and definitely not-safe-for-the-kids videos projected on its sides.  WS, which stands for “White Snow,” is loosely based on the story of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Actually, it might be more accurate to say that WS takes liberties with that story. McCarthy’s version, for example, expands the cast to include nine dwarves (some of whom appear to top six feet), three Prince Charmings (compulsive masturbators, one and all, if the video evidence is to be believed), and three Snow Whites. And then there is Walt Paul, a paternal(istic) figure, obviously evoking Walt Disney and subtly suggesting Hitler (it’s the mustache), who either presides over or is subject to the mayhem unleashed during what appears to be a fairly traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

Oh, and then there is you. Whatever else the show is about, one of its most accessible pleasures is the chance to watch other visitors observing the spectacle. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, people ringed the cavernous space, positioned around a platform holding up the half-magical, half-infernal forest that is simultaneously the show’s physical centerpiece and the set used for filming much of the screened footage. These spectators’ attention was split between the screens on either side of the forest and the faces of the other spectators. (Were cameras permitted inside, WS would likely produce some compelling YouTube reaction videos.)

A less stationary delight of the show is the chance to look around its many nooks and crannies. That forest, with its nuclear-neon foliage and flora, its scatological trees, and the three-quarters scale house concealed in its middle—a replica of McCarthy’s childhood home—demands exploration. Within the house, you will find a Christmas tree, birthday streamers, bottles of liquor in various stages of consumption, a spent container of Hershey’s chocolate syrup, and a nearly-exhausted Heinz ketchup squeeze-bottle. (The last two of these have been frequently deployed as material in McCarthy’s work.) There are also various recognizable Disney figurines scattered around the house—a Snow White with a dwarf, a Bambi, and a Prince Charming riding his horse.

The feel-good Americana of all that Disney detritus is juxtaposed with two disconcertingly accurate bodies: The artist himself and White Snow, stripped naked, apparently dead, and covered in what at first glance seems to be blood and excrement, but is actually the aforementioned ketchup and chocolate. (A series of life casts, four of Elyse Poppers, the actress playing the main White Snow in WS, and one of the artist, are currently on view at Hauser & Wirth’s uptown space.) What it all means is well nigh impossible to say. And, at seven hours, it would be difficult to absorb WS in a single seating. It is generally agreed that McCarthy confronts the falsely feel-good pieties of American myths, that he takes on viscerally recognizable symbols and upends them by splattering them with a variety of (bodily) fluids. WS, his largest installation and most ambitious project to date, unfolds with the madcap logic of dreams, and every little bit of content is overdetermined. This is a convulsive form of Surrealism, which, of course, has a certain kind of beauty. That’s the thing about McCarthy. No matter how gross his work—and this is an artist who has never shied away from the grotesque—no matter how disconcerting, how disorienting, there is nonetheless something appealing about his aesthetic, with its visual pungency and sense of humor.

McCarthy’s fairy-tale world is tethered to reality by its references to history: The artist’s childhood, with the inclusion of the house in which he was raised; art history, particularly the rise of performance art, of which McCarthy has been both a student and a teacher; American history and its embrace of kitsch and myth. Striking an odd but effective balance between authentic and contrived, WS has more in common with a reality show than lived reality. Which is to say, if “Snow White” is the partial basis of so many looking-for-love shows, then WS is the looking-for-love show amped up to absurdity.

WS confines its most pornographic bits to the periphery, with the most sexually explicit material playing in rooms off to the sides of Drill Hall. (One of these rooms is also the site of some eerily beautiful footage, tracking White Snow and Walt Paul as they wander, Adam-and-Eve-like, through their polluted Eden.) But it is the most prominent feature of McCarthy’s Rebel Dabble Babble, a collaboration with his son Damon (who also co-directed, co-produced, and cast WS) on view at Hauser & Wirth’s mammoth Chelsea gallery. The exhibit consists of a full-scale two-story house, which visitors may enter, and a facsimile of the living-room staircase from the home of Jim Stark, aka the “Rebel Without a Cause,” from the eponymous 1955 film.  Around these are several video projections, most of which are quite pornographic. Disorienting and unnerving, the show is a reimagining of the psychosexual drama that was said to unfold between the film’s director Nicholas Ray and his young stars, James Dean and Natalie Wood. Like WS, Rebel Dabble Babble relies on our recognition of the building blocks of familiar American narratives. Both exhibitions undo the familiarity of those narratives, folding them over and over on themselves, until they become hallucinatory, at once a joke and something deadly serious, demanding that we tell the story ourselves.

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