subject: Performa 11 Poor Players To The Stage By Emily Nathan [print this page] Performa founding director RoseLee Goldberg claims that Russian Constructivism is the thematic point of departure for this years edition, Performa 11, Nov. 1-21, 2011. To contextualize that history and to anchor the event, Goldberg has collaborated with Moscows Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in curating 33 Fragments of Russian Performance, an enthralling archival exhibition featuring documentation of Russian performance from the avant-garde 20s through the present, installed in the old classrooms of the Performa Hub on Prince Street through Nov. 23, 2011.
Judging the 100-some events and commissions that comprise Performa 11 by 33 Fragments, though, ultimately leads to one question: has performance art lost its way? Under the direction of Garage curator Yulia Askenova, the exhibition is intelligently organized by topic and chronology, with articulate wall-texts that provide social, political and historical context for each performance archive, photograph or video; by turns hilarious, provocative and shocking, it stands as a testament to what artists have historically sought through and found in the medium of performance: a free space for expression and liberation from systemic oppression.
From the practicality of Constructivist theater, which united the world of art and life, to the Futurist poets, who painted their bodies and faces like canvases and took to the streets, provoking reactions from a generally apathetic and resigned public, to the Blue Blouse Theater Group, which produced vaudevillian spectacles that were accessible to an uneducated audience, performance has traditionally served as a tool of resistance. But what are we fighting for, or against, now? In Performa 11, most of the commissions bring us right back into the conventional institutions -- the gallery or the theater -- that performance was pioneered to eschew, and they frequently fall back on conventional devices: sets, actors, scripts. What is unclear is exactly what performance art is supposed to be and do, and how it differs, or should differ, from theater.
Over at the velvet-curtained Abrons Art Center in the Lower East Side on Nov. 9, British artist Simon Fujiwara (b. 1982), known for weaving fantasy and biography into installations that blur the line between fact and fiction, presented The Boy Who Cried Wolf, a 90-minute, three-act play performed on a rotating stage. Beautifully produced with elaborate sets, props and rehearsed lighting, the piece starred Fujiwara as himself, his best friend as his best friend and a young actor as a young actor playing a young Simon, in a series of meta-vignettes that slipped in and out of the real-time present and re-enactments of moments from Fujiwaras past -- his encounter with the painting that made him want to be an artist, for example.
Using Brechtian methods to puncture the divide between audience and action (frequently, Fujiwara addressed us directly), actor and character, The Boy Who Cried Wolf conflated and confused true and false, jumping back and forth between embellished memories and a dubious here-and-now. Fujiwara thus set his audience up to be suspicious of everything he said, and opened a window onto the fictions inherent in the process of performance. In the end, though, I was left wondering, wasnt that a play?
This question has haunted a number of the biennials most anticipated events, though theater, strangely enough, is perhaps the only art form not included in Performas description of itself. (It is billed, rather, as breaking down the boundaries between visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, graphic design, and the culinary arts.) On Nov. 11 at Cedar Lake on 26th Street, Iranian artist Shirin Neshat staged a mock trial titled Overruled.
