Not long ago, we were honored to meet some of Brooklyn, NY’s premiere competitive dancers and experts in the Flex style. We spent a few hours with the crew—learning about the style and watching some fantastic moves—and their remarkable talents were mesmerizing….
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by Natasha Tauber Whether performing at the annual invocation of Edward Gorey on Halloween, creating a ’60s spy film (complete with a femme fatale) or working with the Japan…
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By claiming public spaces for artistic enrichment, New York City’s non-profit arts organization BOFFO continues to create ambitious participatory art projects. Their mission encourages engagement with works stemming from collaborations between communities and artists, both emerging and established. And, to top if…
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Growing up wearing hand-me-downs during the Great Depression, Liberace’s rise to stardom can in some ways be measured by his outfits. From the purchase of his first set of tails to electric costumes adorned in 4,000 light bulbs, Liberace stood alone on a…
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An exploration of the relationship between artist and audience
Two years ago Maria Abramović wowed an array of visitors at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art with her emotionally engaging, 736-hour staring contest, “The Artist Is Present.” This powerful display of human connectivity caused a major shift in the conventional outlook on performance art. Now, at London’s Tate Modern, artist Tino Sehgal is continuing to explore creative interaction with his new live art installation in the museum’s massive Turbine Hall as this year’s annual Unilever commission.
Sehgal’s work lures museum-goers into running around one end of the hall and then the other, as spectators watch from the bridge and balconies above. Whether demonstrating that in our digitally hermitic worlds we still seek tangible interaction or just adding an artistic twist to the stillness of museums, like Abromović’s, his message is as magically engaging to participants as it is to observers. From above, the whirlwind of people running below in random formation feels a little bit like a Van Gogh painting brought to life. Down in the hall, you feel a strange surge of buoyant energy circling around you as people waggishly run by.
Sehgal’s installation is accented by a host of revolving exhibitions on display for 15 weeks in The Tanks, the museum’s underground chambers recently renovated by architects Herzog + de Meuron. An area dedicated to “art in action,” on our visit we wandered into interdisciplinary artist Sung Hwan Kim’s two-room video installation that befuddles you with a two-way mirror, before being even further entranced by Lis Rhodes “Light Music” installation—a work originally conceived in 1975 in which two projectors at either end of the room create a fanning strobe effect as the horizontal shadows fluctuate in size. Standing between them turns you into an active puppet-shadow.
For the full line-up of live art running through the end of October 2012, check out The Tate Modern online.
Collective memories of China’s Great Famine reinterpreted for the stage
Two years after Memory I, famed documentarian Wu Wenguang and choreographer Wen Hui are back with a new performance that challenges the boundaries of art to reconnect people to a disappearing past.
In the summer of 2009, the pair began work on a documentary film project to chronicle the events that took place during the “Great Chinese Famine” between 1959-1961. By the summer of 2010, they had 21 people participating in the “Folk Memory Project”, and in the last two years they’ve recruited more than 40 participants—mainly film and dance students—for the second installment, Memory II: Hunger. They set out to visit the countryside and collect memories of living witnesses of the famine, one of the darkest periods of Chinese history that unfortunately has remained an empty page in modern history handbooks. More than 500 interviews recount the memories of grandparents and elders in 14 provinces and 67 villages and with the project Wu and Wen have created a visual encounter with ancestral roots and family recollections that has seldom been presented.
The five-hour multimedia stage performance spans recorded videos, photos, dance and acting. The stream of memory flows from the actors’ words and movement and the action on the screen, through the interviewers as firsthand witnesses to the audience. They pull onlookers into deep contact with memory, recalled feelings and experiences of the past.
During the rehearsals of Memory II, we had the chance to meet and talk to Wu Wenguang and Wen to learn more about the project.
At the very beginning, Wen Hui wanted to recall some memories of the time when she was young and she started dancing. Her first encounter with dance was during the Cultural Revolution: her very own experience and her growth is linked to that wave of red culture. The first and most well-known ballets were about revolutionary culture. At the beginning, it was more a reflection on personal memories. When we started doing interviews, we never limited our focus to the Cultural Revolution and the Great Famine.
The eldest we met were not necessarily talking about a specific topic or period, they were telling us about their more vivid experiences. These two phases of Chinese history became secondary topics that we present in our performance, the core of which is memory. That’s also a reason why Memory, or the Folk Memory Project, is an ongoing process that doesn’t end in a performance. We hope we can develop and shape the project through the difficulties we encounter.
Before we used to work on art pieces in which the performance was the ultimate goal, but Memory II is a social project. Dance, documentaries and other art forms simply became tools. This is something we didn’t plan. We involved so many young people and have been working with them. They go to their villages to seek history, to find an intimate link with the past, to discover their roots. The process of recalling is a process of self-discovery. We did art for so many years and we don’t think that art can change society. Now we probably can’t change the world but at least we can change ourselves. I used to think that I had nothing to do with the countryside, but in China if you go back five generations, everyone is from the countryside. Our approach aims to truly understand the place we all come from, to understand who we are, and this is the most important point.
Being a documentarian means that you don’t get satisfied with the public and the official version. You look for details you usually don’t find. In our history handbooks—the one we use in our performance was published in 2002 but the new one has just changed a few words—30 years of history are told in a single page, in a few lines. We look for what is behind common knowledge, we try to understand how the people really lived.
Memory II: Hunger had its premiere at CCD Workstation in Beijing on 1 May 2012. The next performance is scheduled for 18-19 May during Wiener Festwochen Festival in Vienna.
Four dynamic contemporary American artists
Now in its 76th year, the bi-annual compendium has gathered a new group of 51 contemporary artists to take over the museum through 27 May. While the focus on performance has become a central one in 2012, we found a group of four artists across different mediums—from sculpture, painting, film and living installation—each dynamic in their own right. Here, just a small selection of highlights from our walk through the Whitney Biennial.
The multi-faceted multi-media artist behind the lesbian zine FashionFashion and the “feminist queer artists’ collective” LTTR presents a set of characteristically contemplative wall-mounted sculptures. The conversation around gender identity can grow noisy, but Hardy manages to cut through the chatter with a genuine, thoughtful perspective addressing fashion advertising. Besides her installations, which combine flashy and everyday products, and accessories like hair extensions oddly plucked out of context, Hardy will stage a runway show 20 May.
Turn a corner on the third floor and Dawn Kasper’s lilting voice—along with the whirring of a spinning tennis racket on a motorized stand—carries through the hushed gallery. In the spirit of Marina Abramovic‘s seemingly hot-again performance stylings, the LA-based artist brings her Nomadic Studio Practice Experiment to the Whitney for the duration of the Biennial. Living, working and interacting with museum-goers for three months turns her creative process into a real-time, interactive installation.
The venerable underground filmmaker passed away in September 2011, and the Biennial pays tribute with a series of screenings of his lauded Weather Diaries. In characteristic revelatory fashion, Kuchar’s Hi-8 films document the mundanity and anticipation of his yearly trips to the El Reno motel in “tornado-alley” Oklahoma.
Nicole Eisenman’s installation dominates almost an entire room. The artist’s powerful and introspective portraits are deeply striking, instantly drawing the viewer in for a closer look. The work, which at times appears crude, instead offers deep insight into the human experience through shifting lines, wild expressive characters and a feeling of general chaos combined with melancholy detachment.
Nine artists transform a 150 year old house into a home of site-specific installations
The recently opened Highlight Gallery has added a new project space in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow District, turning a 19th-century home into a venue for sight-specific installations. 3020 Laguna Street in Exitum features a variety of works by nine artists, made entirely from materials found on the condemned premises. From a deconstructed facade to the equally deconstructing performance piece of Jeremiah Barber, the level of intelligent art reaches all corners of the humble dwelling.
Home to many generations in its 150 years of existence, 3020 Laguna Street has been marked for demolition, making it the ideal location for installations like Chris Fraser’s “Outline.” By stripping the walls to their bones, he removes the barrier between outside and in, eliminating a defining factor in what makes a shelter a home.
Also significantly manipulating the structure is Andy Vogt’s “Drawn Out”. By dropping the floorboards and restructuring the joints below, Vogt has rebuilt the flooring exactly as it was to connect two openings. This predetermined path leads to the structure’s exit, in the same way the building’s exit has been predetermined by a date of demolition.
Following the strict rule of using only materials taken from the structure, Yulia Pinkusevich’s “Data Mass Projection” full room installation is made entirely of telephone wires stripped from the house’s walls. The wave-like structure acts like a 3D infographic referencing the constant supply of energy surrounding us at any given moment.
While every area of the house tells a story, Jeremiah Barber’s basement “Dreamburn” performance may draw the most attention. By contrasting a body replica from found paper Barber creates a mirrored image, referencing an out-of-body experience. As the paper body floats above the human one the dream-like state is unexpectedly set ablaze. With Barber just under water in the flooded basement the paper structure is left to burn to nothing, jolting the observer from the dream in a matter of moments.
3020 Laguna Street in Exitum has two more scheduled visiting times left in its short run prior to demolition on 18 and 25 February. Both days the space will be open from 2-7pm. For more information check Highlight Gallery online and for more images of the installations check the gallery below.
The U.S. Open of art: Rauschenberg’s 1966 performance pairing tennis and technology
Think branded interdisciplinary content is a recent phenomenon? In 1966 a unique project was hatched when conceptual artists and Bell Labs engineers collaborated on a series of live installations inside a National Guard Armory in New York City. One of those, “Open Score” by Robert Rauschenberg, pitted artists—including minimalist painter Frank Stella—against each other in a live game of tennis with rackets wired to switch the stage lights on and off and produce an aural musical score. Their movements were projected on large screens by infrared camera, giving the performers and the assembled crowd of 300 a ghoulish glow inside the cavernous armory
By all accounts electrifying, now 45 years later an exhibit at Seventeen gallery in London will showcase Swedish documentary maker Barbro Schultz Lundestam’s reexamination of the seminal moment in conceptual art history. She takes the audience back to those evenings in NYC with the principles involved explaining how they pulled it off and the effect they had on the actors and spectators. Check out a trailer for the 34-minute film here.
The 1997 documentary is also available for sale on DVD, but for those near London, the installation runs through 8 October 2011.
Ping-pong balls and dance in the U.S. debut of a visually arresting performance
On a black stage a singular ping-pong ball triggers four dancers, followed by thousands more balls dropping, rolling and flooding the scene in controlled chaos. This is “Why Patterns.” Making its U.S. debut next week, the performance piece is a collaboration between choreographer Jonah Bokaer and Snarkitecture, a creative studio founded by artist Daniel Arsham and architect Alex Mustonen.
First commissioned by Dance Works Rotterdam, the show draws inspiration from the musical composition by Morton Feldman of the same name. The creative partnership formed after Arsham met Bokaer while stage designing for the late choreographer Merce Cunningham. “We had many interests in common,” says Arsham. “In the case of ‘Why Patterns,’ I proposed the possibility of what we could do with one ball, and with 5,000 balls.” Costumes were redesigned by menswear’s Richard Chai.
With Arsham’s years of experience in stage design, the performance is a logical transition for Snarkitecture’s practice, but with the challenge of creating a lightweight set portable enough for touring. “Working within this, we created something that had a strong visual impact and some very unexpected moments that respond to the movement of the dancers,” says Mustonen.
“Why Patterns” runs from 3-7 August 2011 at the Jacob Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Massachusetts. Tickets are $23.50-$37.50, with special pricing on Friday. Visit Jacob Pillow Dance online to purchase and for more information.
Photos by Snarkitecture
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