This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on how creativity can inspire in challenging times.
RoseLee Goldberg has a long track record of extending open-ended invitations to visual artists who have never before created a performance. “‘What if you went live, what would happen?’” said Goldberg, the founding director and chief curator of the commissioning organization Performa, of how she plants a seed with artists. “‘You have no idea when you get started where it’s going to end up.’”
Established in New York in 2004, Performa inaugurated the following year the only worldwide biennial focused exclusively on performance — helping to redefine how the medium is created, experienced and preserved, and precipitating a broad embrace of performance within museums. Over the last two decades, Performa has commissioned new live works by 155 artists, more than a third of whom — including Julie Mehretu, Barbara Kruger, Marcel Dzama and Tschabalala Self — had never before taken the leap of translating their visual ideas into real time and space.
From Nov. 1 to 23, the Performa Biennial returns to New York with events rolling out across the city and eight new commissions by women, three of them presenting live performance for the first time. “I always say Performa is 100 percent risk and 100 percent trust for all of us,” Goldberg said.
Goldberg, who recently updated a fourth edition of her seminal book, “Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present” — which was first published in 1979 and traces the history of performance in 20th-century art — said that Performa had demonstrated “a wonderful way of bringing the museum to life” and “provided access to the artist’s thinking in a very different way.”
Often, the challenge and realization of a first performance has had a transformative effect on an artist’s practice.
Adam Pendleton — the multidisciplinary artist whose current exhibition, “Love, Queen,” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., includes his signature gestural paintings that incorporate text — was barely in his 20s when Goldberg approached him with her “what if” proposition.
At the time, Pendleton was working with text from writers like Adrienne Rich and Toni Morrison, and was interested in somehow enlivening the viewer’s encounter with his paintings but felt that performance was “outside of my immediate toolbox as an artist,” he said in a phone interview. Goldberg’s invitation “was the first time that a curator in an organization took a big bet on me.”
For his ambitious 2007 Performa commission, Pendleton staged a revival meeting, with himself as a preacher weaving language and accompanied by a chorus of 30 gospel singers. “It was just a completely infectious experience that, to date, has emanated my work with a deep sense of the performative,” said Pendleton, now 41. In 2021, he took another big swing by building 60-foot-tall scaffolding in the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium to display a collage of his paintings, moving images and soundscapes. “Even in the way in which I approach my painting practice, it’s always this question of, ‘How do I use my body to wield the medium forward?’” he said.
Performance is embedded in “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” a retrospective by the multimedia artist on view through Jan. 20 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Johnson inserted a stage on the rotunda floor and a piano inside his monumental gridded installation at the top of the museum’s spiral for a program of readings and musical performances by others.
Johnson, 48, first tackled live performance in his reinterpretation of Amiri Baraka’s 1964 “Dutchman” — a one-act play in which a white woman stabs a Black man on a New York subway — at the Russian and Turkish Baths in the East Village for his 2013 Performa commission. That experience not only led the artist to direct “Native Son” in 2019, his debut feature-length narrative film, but “also made me recognize that the success that I had had as an artist gave me opportunities to create stages for other kinds of creative voices,” said Johnson, who is now the board chair of Performa, in a phone interview.
In celebration of the Performa Biennial’s 20th anniversary, Johnson reprised “Dutchman” in September at the baths. “The world that we’re currently occupying gives the opportunity to see the material through different eyes,” Johnson said.
Goldberg and her team are often inspired to work with artists who may be new to performance but have a built-in theatricality and boldness to their work. Such was the case with Tau Lewis — at 31, the youngest artist commissioned by Performa this year — who uses found objects to make sculptures that evoke colossal masks and fantastical otherworldly figures.
For her debut performance, titled “No one ascends from the underworld unmarked” (from Nov. 6 to 8 at the Harlem Parish), Lewis is orchestrating the ancient Sumerian tale of the goddess Inanna’s descent through seven gates to the underworld to visit her sister, queen of the dead. Several of Lewis’s regal, life-size sculptures will serve as the primary actors, to be moved on wheels like chess pieces by dancers amid a mythic soundscape of storytelling and song written with her musical collaborator, Lyra Pramuk.
The hardest part for Lewis in the process has been letting go of her own attachment to the control and predictability of working with her hands. “It’s been challenging to wrap my head around,” she said in a video interview. “But once this idea had formed, we decided it needed to be 200 percent full-on joy, otherwise we’re doing something wrong.” Already, Lewis is thinking about how to adapt the piece for upcoming museum shows in Denmark and Scotland.
Live performance was something Camille Henrot had strictly avoided. The French-born artist, who is based in New York, started her career in video and now also works across sculpture, installation and painting. “It felt to me that performance was just a brutal confrontation with the reality of space and time,” said Henrot, 47, who uses filmmaking tools to control close-ups, angles and the speed of time. “But I was seduced by RoseLee’s personality and the prospect of working with a team of friends.”
For her upcoming Performa commission, Henrot collaborated with Estelle Hoy, a writer, and Sandra Berrebi, a costume designer, to conceive an operatic tragicomedy about social classes in New York that draws on the slapstick of cartoons and the stock characters of commedia dell’arte. (Originally scheduled for November, the piece will premiere in 2026, a shifting timeline not unusual in the commissioning process, especially for artists new to performance.)
“Now I see what it is to work with actors, how incredibly flexible and funny and creative they are, and also to write for them,” said Henrot, in a video interview, adding that she was open to exploring such collaborations again.
The filmmaker Diane Severin Nguyen, 34, said her new Performa commission will be the first time she has worked without the mediation of “a camera between me and a person.” From Nov. 2 to 4 at BRIC in Brooklyn, Nguyen is set to stage a live event in the format of a televised protest concert, with performers acting like pop legends singing Vietnam War-era songs and bantering onstage.
The music of artists like Joan Baez, Black Sabbath and Jimi Hendrix “was a call to action, there was a collectivist messaging in it,” said Nguyen, who was born in California to parents who were refugees from Vietnam. “If there’s nostalgia, what else does it mean now? It might show us something.”
In August, Nguyen was beginning rehearsals at a club on Lafayette Street with about a dozen amateur performers she found on Instagram and YouTube. She had them trade off stanzas of “Superstar,” made famous by the Carpenters, and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” in a kind of rotating karaoke exercise, with each performer taking the microphone with a distinct charisma and emphasis.
“I love rehearsals,” said Goldberg, who had dropped in to check on how things were progressing. “How many times do you get the chance to watch a piece grow? You can’t watch somebody painting all day.”
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