Category: Performance art

Calendar. 12.05.13.

Photograph by Julio Sanchez
A photograph by Julio González Sánchez. Part of the group show Bolivia Existe, at Momenta Art in New York, in collaboration with Kiosko Galería from Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Opens Friday at 7pm, in Bushwick. (Image courtesy of the artist and Momenta.)

  • NYC: Edward Steichen in the 1920s and 1930s: A Recent Acquisition, at the Whitney Museum. Opens Friday.
  • NYC: Rafaël Rozendaal, Everything You See is in the Past, and Casting a Wide Net: A Cross Generational Exhibition of Media Art, at Postmasters Gallery. Through January 18, in Tribeca.
  • NYC: Charles Burchfield, American Landscapes, at DC Moore Gallery. Through December 21, in Chelsea.
  • NYC: Guts, a group show, at the Abrons Arts Center. Opens this Friday at 6pm, on the Lower East Side.
  • NYC: Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York, at the Interference Archive. Opens Thursday at 7pm, in Gowanus.
  • Miami: Permission To Be Global/Prácticas Globales: Latin American Art from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, at CIFO. Opens this week, in the Wynwood District.
  • Miami: Looking at Process, at the De La Cruz Collection. In the Wynwood District.
  • Miami: 28 Chinese, at the Rubell Family Collection. Opens today, in the Wynwood District.
  • Miami: Tracey Emin: Angel Without You, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Opens today, in North Miami.
  • L.A.: Hammer Conversations: Diana Nyad and Catherine Opie, at the Hammer Museum. Today, in Westwood.
  • Plus: Tickets are now on sale for Martin Creed’s Work No. 1020 at The Kitchen in NYC. Performances run from December 12 to 14.
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Photo Diary: Perform Chinatown, in L.A.


Box heads during a performance by Lucas Murgida at Perform Chinatown.


Finishing School’s interactive megaphones.


No idea who the performer is, but I dig this audience member’s dapper Wonder Woman ensemble.

Because I was eating burritos with my homegirl Vidalia and because I was combing the 99 cent stores of East L.A. for a porcelain mermaid and because I’m going through a period of abject slackerdom, I arrived seriously late to Perform Chinatown, a mini-performance festival, missing just about everything. Therefore I’m in no position to judge if anything was ‘good.’ I did, however, manage to snap a few pics. Including my head-of-a-pin-size portrait of Karen Finley (after the jump).

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Why everyone should see the Pageant of the Masters once.

My latest at KCET Artbound, on one of O.C.’s more long running and amazing-surreal traditions: the Pageant of the Masters, a series of tableaux vivants that are all about art.

Above, Pageant members and volunteers stage Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii. (Image courtesy of Pageant of the Masters.)

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Last chance: Liz Magic Laser at Derek Eller Gallery in NYC.


A still from I Feel Your Pain, video documentation of a performance piece from last fall. (Image courtesy of the artist and Derek Eller Gallery.)

A man and a woman kiss. They drown each other in flattery. They tell each other that they’re “the one.” They say no one understands. This may sound like the purplest of purple prose scenarios. (And it is.) But it’s actually a live performance that employs the transcript of a Sarah Palin interview by Glenn Beck as its script. Instead of Beck and Palin in the lead roles, however, it’s a couple of young lovers. The words may be the same, but the actions aren’t. It’s grody-fascinating to watch.

For the performance piece, I Feel Your Pain, Liz Magic Laser created more than a dozen theatrical shorts out of television news transcripts (staged as part of the Performa festival last year). Steve Kroft’s 60 Minutes interview with Barack Obama in the wake of the Osama Bin Laden assassination becomes a clubby conversation between two bros sipping soda. It was literally nauseating to watch. Not because the actors were bad. Quite the contrary. The performances are all strong (and Annie Fox, shown above, is particularly riveting to watch). It’s all just a reminder of the uncomfortably cozy relationship between politicians and some members of the media.

For a few pieces, like the ones mentioned above, Laser employs a single interview as script. For others, she weaves together similar language from several Q&As into one cohesive story. Interviews and speeches by Mary Landrieu, Christine O’Donnell and George W. Bush are spliced together into a single work that addresses culpability. It is a riveting work of political theater. Literally. (Though I could have done without the mime-clown character — I mean, why???? — that Laser introduces in a few of the pieces.)

You can catch video of the project at the Derek Eller Gallery through this Saturday, April 21. If you’re a political or media junkie, this represents an intriguing, outrage-inducing intersection. Find the screening times here. And yes, it’s worth it to sit through them all…

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Artist’s Choice: The best YouTube instructional videos devoted to art-making.


Creating push-pull a la Hans Hoffman.


How to Jackson Pollock your bedroom while listening to metal.


Glitter poufs. That is all.


Should you sell your art on e-Bay? Or should you listen to that Pink Floyd album one more time?

This is the first post in what will hopefully be a long-running series called “Artist’s Choice.” In which a guest “curator” is invited to share their favorite bizarre/weird/hilarious/absurd YouTube videos. Kicking off the first round is painter Franck de Las Mercedes, who comes through (with flying colors), with a selection of YouTube instructional videos devoted entirely to art.

Thank you, Franck! Now I know what to do with those tired bedrooms walls…

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Photo Diary: Roof Piece, restaged.

In 1971, Trisha Brown gathered nine dancers dressed in red and scattered them across rooftops in lower Manhattan. For half an hour, the dancers — all of whom stood blocks apart — relayed a series of movements to each other, in the dance world’s version of the game of telephone. The work, called Roof Piece, was staged several times during the early 1970s, but had not been performed in its original rooftop context since 1973.

Last night, Brown’s dance company restaged the piece in the vicinity of the High Line Park on Manhattan’s west side, on the rooftops of office buildings, butchers and trendy restaurants. The weather, initially, did not cooperate. (An end-of-the-world thunder shower — complete with lightning — left all of us spectators huddling under the Standard Hotel shortly before the show was supposed to begin.) But once things cleared, everyoe took their positions. Ironically, the steely skies made a perfect backdrop to the bright red outfits worn by the performers.

There was something beautifully zen/tai chi about the whole exercise, with one dancer’s gesture inspiring another’s and then another’s, over several square blocks, in a rippling chain reaction. If you have a chance, there are still three more performances over the course of the weekend (and they’re free). Find the schedule here. For a good take on the original performance, see this write-up by photographer Babbette Mangolte.

All photos by C-M.

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Walk the Walk: Kate Gilmore in Bryant Park.


Seven ladies, seven yellow dress, one yellow cube. (Photos by C-M.)

I spent some quality time in Bryant Park taking in Kate Gilmore‘s latest performance piece, Walk the Walk. The bright splash of yellow at the edge of the park was a visual spectacle — especially on a grey day like yesterday. But the ladies looked bored and tired and cold, and, as a result, I felt much the same way after a while.

Find the New York Times review here. Video after the jump. The show runs through Friday at 6:30pm.

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Cinco de Mayo at Secret Project Robot in Brooklyn.

Spent last night at Secret Project Robot in Brooklyn watching some inter-gender lucha libre — complete with an intermission performance of the Mexican hat dance and a Pee Wee Herman-inspired rendition of Tequila. I also voted in the guacamole contest. A note to whomever made guacamole #1: Never, under any circumstances, or for any reason, must you put curry powder in guacamole. I believe that this is governed by the Geneva Convention. Look it up.

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