(",) Re: Has performance art lost its edge?

[selenemicaela]

Thanks for sending that. 
It seems that at least some mail artists also do performance art.

--- In ma-network@yahoogroups.com, "tamarawyndham" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> http://www.villagevoice.com/art/0746,hannaham,78311,13.html
> 
> The Big Clean-Up
> Has performance art lost its edge? Is that a bad thing? A visit to Performa 
> 07.
> by James Hannaham
> November 13th, 2007 12:40 PM
> 
> Adam Pendleton, 26, known primarily as a painter and conceptual artist, paces 
> back and 
> forth on a podium. He's a young, shaven-headed, very handsome black man, 
> nattily 
> dressed in a white sport coat, and he's preaching about language—cribbing 
> from the 
> poetry of John Ashbery, speeches by Larry Kramer, intoning in a voice 
> reminiscent of 
Jack 
> Handy's "Deep Thoughts." He stomps a brightly colored shoe on the podium. 
> Behind 
him, 
> a black gospel choir hums and sways rapturously in its robes, and the 
> accompanying 
band 
> responds to his call, ebbing and flowing with his passionate, if amateur, 
> oratory. 
> Substitute Jesus for Ashbery and change the venue—we're at the cavernous 
> Stephen 
Weiss 
> Studio—and we'd really be in church. This is a seamless, upscale, elegant 
> performance—
> enjoyable, inoffensive, and not especially challenging. It could run on the 
> Upper West 
Side 
> with no difficulty. Is this performance art?
> If you asked RoseLee Goldberg that question, she'd answer with an emphatic 
> yes. The 
> South Africa–born author and art critic is the curator of Performa 07, New 
> York's 
recently 
> minted performance-art biennial, which Pendleton's show is a part of. A 
> month-long 
> festival spread out over 74 city venues—including spaces like BAM and the 
> Zipper, and 
art 
> galleries such as Metro Pictures and White Columns—Performa is a cornucopia 
> stuffed 
full 
> by Goldberg and her team, all without corporate sponsorship. Frustrated by 
> what she 
calls 
> a recent "lull" in performance—"it seemed repetitive, there were too many 
monologues"—
> Goldberg mounted her first Performa two years ago specifically to encourage 
> visual 
artists 
> to take risks with "time-based" work, or what the British now call "live 
> art." The 
> rechristening seems deliberate, as if to cast off a messy, inappropriate past.
> 
> In fact, Goldberg's idea was never to revisit the gritty, low-budget 
> operations of the sort 
> that made performance art famous, the type that proliferated in the East 
> Village during 
the 
> '80s at P.S. 122 and ABC No Rio, making New York the center of the 
> performance world. 
> Instead, Goldberg envisioned linking street-wise experimental venues with the 
> establishment. "There wasn't a level between the Kitchen and BAM," she says, 
> explaining 
> Performa's mission.
> 
> Back in the day, most performance artists wouldn't have dreamed of the high 
> gloss that 
> BAM has come to represent. Performance used to mean getting naked, chanting 
> dirty 
> words, smearing chocolate all over yourself, talking about homosexuality, and 
> thumbing 
> your nose at Ronald Reagan. In short, it meant the NEA Four, a group of 
> performance 
> artists who sued the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 because they'd 
> been 
> defunded for the "indecent" content of their work. Karen Finley's act became 
> national 
news 
> after she and her 1986 performance piece Yams Up My Granny's Ass received a 
> riveting 
> profile from C. Carr in the Voice. During the act, Finley, exorcising the 
> spirit of abuse, 
> smeared canned yams all over her butt and squealed profane 
> words—inadvertently 
making 
> a scapegoat of herself, exposing the nation's rabid aversion to female public 
> indecency, 
> and sparking a controversy that eventually blew up in the Supreme Court.
> 
> While the other three of the NEA Four were quietly awarded compensatory money 
> in 
1993, 
> and the organization ceased funding individual artists, the case National 
> Endowment for 
> the Arts vs. Finley wasn't decided by the Supreme Court until 1998. In that 
> ruling, the 
> court determined that Congress hadn't violated the First Amendment by 
> refusing 
> government funds to work it considered offensive to "general standards of 
> decency and 
> respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public." The 
> decision was 8-1, 
> with David Souter the lone voice of dissent.
> 
> No yams, raw or otherwise, are likely to crop up at Performa 07 (which runs 
> through 
> November 20). But don't blame the biennial alone for performance's newly 
> glossy edges: 
> Something's clearly in the air, especially in the theater-y and dance-ish 
> wings of 
> performance. The Wooster Group, renowned for fragmenting and juxtaposing high 
> and 
> low art, has staged a tech-savvy Hamlet at the Public Theater; John Fleck, 
> another of the 
> NEA Four, has become a TV character actor; a third, Holly Hughes, teaches 
> performance 
at 
> the University of Michigan. Similarly, performance group Elevator Repair 
> Service (this 
> writer's former cohorts) have generated glowing reviews for their 
> six-and-a-half-hour 
> production Gatz—which features every last word from The Great Gatsby—while 
Radiohole, 
> a drunken party that occasionally erupts into theater, is riffing on 
> Moby-Dick. Dance/
film 
> pioneer Yvonne Rainer has created a piece for Performa that revisits the 1913 
performance 
> of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Dedicated iconoclasts haven't cozied up to 
> highbrow 
culture 
> this way since Rasputin charmed the czar. The commissioned piece that 
> Goldberg 
> describes as "my dream of what Performa can be" is Cast No Shadow, a 
> stunning, 
precise 
> dance/video piece by British filmmaker Isaac Julien and choreographer Russell 
> Maliphant 
> that explores three different voyages, including the journey of Matthew 
> Henson, the first 
> black man to reach the North Pole. Fascinating to watch and technically 
> seamless, the 
> performance is beyond chic—it makes some of BAM's regular programming look 
> cheap.
> 
> According to Mark Russell, former artistic director of P.S. 122, the issue 
> isn't just that 
> these artists have become established, or cowed by legal battles over 
> censorship and 
> indecency, but that younger artists are engaged with too many modern problems 
> to 
spend 
> time excavating the past. "This generation doesn't even remember who the NEA 
> Four are
—
> or were. Their struggles are not so much about sexual or gender 
> transgression; they're 
> about living in an overmediated, consumerist world. What [older artists] 
> considered 
> outrageous or political is not as outrageous now—we have The L Word."
> 
> Furthermore, the confrontational, shocking style of '80s performance art was 
> of a piece 
> with the political tenor of the decade: Many activist groups had artists as 
> members, 
people 
> who used performance to further leftist causes. Queer Nation staged kiss-ins, 
> ACT-UP 
> organized die-ins. And in terms of in-your-face rhetoric, there wasn't much 
> further one 
> could go than Finley's food-wearing or Ron Athey's BDSM blood rituals without 
attracting 
> the attention of the NYPD. But nowadays, you're more likely to see a hipster 
> in a T-shirt 
> reading "Where Is the Outrage?" than expressing actual outrage. Many artists 
> have 
adopted 
> a subtle approach to social targets. Russell describes a piece by Canadian 
> writer/artist 
> Darren O'Donnell in which he visits random strangers' houses along with 10 
> friends as 
> part of a project he calls Social Acupuncture. As Russell suggests, younger 
> live-art 
> practitioners have recognized that the social fabric itself—once galvanized 
> around AIDS, 
> and occasionally gathering force online—needs some rehabilitation.
> 
> While Goldberg's mission to get visual artists involved in performance again 
> is an 
exciting 
> one, it's also risky, and some of the work falls flat. Nathalie Djurberg's 
> Untitled (Working 
> Title Kids & Dogs) pits a group of grotesque claymation figures of color 
> against an army 
of 
> street dogs, senselessly mocking the violent conflicts of Third World people 
> from a 
> position of privilege. While less infuriating, some of the other work 
> appearing at 
Performa 
> focuses on the ordinary and attempts to restore intimacy to modern life, at 
> the expense 
of 
> artistic bite. Turkish artist Serkan Özkaya's Bring Me the Head Of. . . 
> consists of a dish 
> prepared by a chef at Freeman's restaurant in the shape of a teddy bear's 
> head, for sale 
as 
> a work of art. Christian Jankowski invites spectators to his roof at 10 a.m. 
> to watch him 
> exercise. And in David McKenzie's I'll Be There, the artist sits on a bench 
> and waits for 
> people to talk to him, a project so passive and modest it might make you wax 
> nostalgic 
for 
> a performance artist like Mimi Goese, who sang in a rock band and walked on 
> broken 
> glass.
>