A taut curiosity ran through the crowd on opening night of Clifford Owens’s show at David Kordansky. Probably because Owens is known as a boundary-pushing performer, happy to break the fourth wall. In one notorious piece, during his exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2011, he groped and kissed people in the audience.
That controversial work followed a “score” by Kara Walker, one of 26 Black artists that Owens asked to contribute written or graphical instructions for a performance series he called “Anthology.” Walker’s score began, “French kiss an audience member.” He stopped before the next part: “Force them against a wall and demand sex.” Walker has said she intended the score only as a provocative hypothetical. But Owens took it there.
Three pieces were scheduled for the opening night of the Kordansky show, a 20-year survey of performances and performance documents curated by Jay Gorney and cheekily titled “I’m New Here.” Each, in its way, involved the viewers — forced them either to respond, or decide not to.
But Owens, 54, older and perhaps wiser, has found ways to transgress other than violating people’s personal space. The night’s first performance dealt in mild scatological humor as the artist dipped a finger into a jar of peanut butter and made a come-hither gesture with his dirty digit. (No one took the bait.) In the third, Owens, accompanied by a drummer, recited the lyrics of Bill Callahan’s song “I’m New Here,” pacing through the gallery and yelling in lucky people’s faces.
Self-conscious, toothless, a bit sappy. This is what transgressive performance art looks like now. Owens’s show feels nostalgic for a kind of edginess and shock that’s no longer possible, or desirable. For one thing, over the past 15 years, consent has become more important than an artist’s free expression. For another, it’s hard to be radical when your audience expects it. On the wall is a pair of photographs of Owens in a cloud of white dust (performing an “Anthology” score by Nsenga Knight); he has a mohawk and is wearing black leather as if to say: I am a transgressive artist. One who has looked into the abyss of true violation but ultimately stepped back.
Of course, there are still new performances to come before the show closes.
Performance art has a reputation for flouting taboos, from the bloody spectacles of the Viennese Actionists to the goofy sadomasochism of the contemporary collective Gelatin. At all times, Owens performs the role of a member in this tradition of performance artists, especially Black ones. In practice, this can seem like name-dropping. Many of the drawings and photos on view in the gallery are incoherent without some art-historical context. A suite of six jittery charcoal and graphite drawings from 2005, the gallery text reveals, were made by the innovative performer Joan Jonas, then in her 60s, using tools stuck to Owens’s limbs as he lay prone. Other seemingly unremarkable pieces on view incorporate a drawing by Rashid Johnson (currently the subject of a retrospective at the Guggenheim) and a sculpture fragment from the influential conceptual artist David Hammons.
Owens is also keenly aware of performing as a Black man in America. Namely, that there’s an added vulnerability to certain actions depending on how your body looks. Walker, whose work treats themes of racial and sexual violence, certainly understood this when she gave Owens her script, as if asking why a Black man could perform a degree of aggression in a gallery or museum but not outside it.
But if an artist’s provocations fit neatly into a viewer’s prediction, neither has taken much of a risk. It’s more interesting when Owens turns the problem of spectatorship back on the audience: Why are you here? What do you want? To be shocked, challenged, scandalized? To learn? To gawk? To take?
In the gallery, a billfold etched with the date of the opening, “June 26, 2025,” and apparently stuffed with $20 notes, sits on a small shelf, as if daring you to pocket it. Maybe you’d be arrested. You’d probably be politely but firmly stopped at the door. There’s only one way to find out. But taking the cash seems less important, and less interesting, than stewing over whether or not to risk it.
The opening night’s second performance, titled “Photographs With an Audience (New York City), Redux,” examined viewers’ taste for exhibitionism, delicately but forcefully, through a series of verbal commands. “If you voted for Trump,” Owens said, “stand in front of the camera.” No one did. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t secret MAGA supporters in the room, weighing to themselves the risks and rewards of facing the crowd.
A handful of people did pose for group portraits after Owens called for feminist performance artists, recent graduates, and his current and former students.
In between photos, he riffed, at one point joking that he wasn’t getting naked — this time — and asking what it meant to be vulnerable as a Black man. He called for anyone comfortable enough to take off their clothes to do so. Nobody did. But everyone in the audience probably considered it. That thought experiment was plenty.
Clifford Owens: I’m New Here
Through Aug. 8. David Kordansky Gallery, 520 West 20th Street, Manhattan; 212-390-0079, davidkordanskygallery.com.
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