NYU Humanities Council Faculty Workshops
Redefining Performance Round-Table

Archive 2004-2005

EVENTS: FALL 2004

ROUND-TABLE #1: REDEFINING PERFORMANCE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Introduction: Archiving the Ephemeral
Thursday October 21, 6-8pm
Presentations by RoseLee Goldberg (Visual Art Performance),
Location: NYU Law School. Furman Hall, Room 110, 245 Sullivan
Street ( South of Washington Square Park)

Participants [Total Attendance: 11]

Presentation: 100 Years of Performance Art [Powerpoint/ Video]by RoseLee Goldberg, Associate Adjunct Professor, NYU and Founding Director, PERFORMA

Moderator: RoseLee Goldberg

PARTICIPANTS

NYU Professors

  1. Tom Bender, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
  2. Andre Lepecki, Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts
  3. Tavia N’yongo, Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts
  4. Bruce Altshuler, Director, Program in Museum Studies, Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Graduate Students

  1. Rachel Bowditch, Graduate Student Coordinator, PhD Candidate Performance Studies
  2. Ayanna Williams,  MA in Performance Studies
  3. Joe Shahadi, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies
  4. Jonathan Berger, MA, Steinhardt School of Education
  5. Anthony Clune, undergraduate, Steinhardt School of Education

Attendees from other Institutions

  1. John Reijchman, Professor, Columbia University
  2. Wiebke Arke, Performa Intern from Humboldt University, Berlin.

Themes: The discussion on ephemerality and the archive was led by RoseLee Goldberg who insists, in Performance Anxiety an editorial in Artforum, that performance historians need to 'read' documentation of performance (photograph, video, film), much as art historians read images of paintings, for clues as to iconography, time frame, formal developments. Such documentation can provide even more information than a one-time viewing of a performance.  RoseLee Goldberg contends that for too long, 'emphemerality' has been used as an excuse for ignoring the impact and influence of performance in the history of twentieth century art.  "For the artwork that leaves nothing or little behind we lack the kind of shorthand taken for granted in discussions of the 'solid arts.'"

 In the Ontology of Performance, Peggy Phelan argues that performance exists only in the present, transforming and becoming something else when it transfers into documentation and the archive. How then do we archive and capture performance? In Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor distinguishes between the archive, [the document, the photograph, and the traces of a performance that remain] and the repertoire, the ephemeral acts that are transmitted through practice and action, passed on from generation to generation through acts of transfer.  She elaborated on the following key points:

ROUNDTABLE 2: DANCE AND POLITICS: WHAT REALLY MATTERS.
Thursday, December 2nd 6-8pm
Moderated by Andre Lepecki
Invited Guests: Ralph Lemon (Choreographer) and Sarah Mitchelson (Choreographer/ Dancer)

Gallatin Dean's Conference Room 6th Floor, 715 Broadway.

[Total Attendance: 24]

Guest Artists: Ralph Lemon and Sarah Michelson

Artist Bios

Ralph Lemon

Cross Performance Inc., founded in 1985 by choreographer/director Ralph Lemon, is dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. Lemon works in collaboration with dancers, musicians, composers, media artists, writers, visual artists and actors. Projects are interrelated in their references to Ralph Lemon's choreographic history and their potential for stretching traditional boundaries of dance. While Lemon is the catalyst for these projects, each collaborator contributes his or her knowledge and experience of what is possible in their media along with their creative vision and spirit. Recent Cross Performance projects include works for the stage, published books, visual art installations, and media projects in video, film, DVD and for the Internet.

Sarah Michelson

Choreographer Sarah Michelson transforms performance spaces in the most extraordinary ways. For Part I of Shadowmann at the Kitchen, she spun the large black-box theater around so that the traditional arrangement of audience and performance was reversed. Bleachers were set up onstage, and the tall entrance doors provided the back wall. At the beginning of the performance, lights went up instead of down, the doors to the Kitchen swung open instead of shut, and all the way, across the street, two spotlit dancers in bright yellow tunics walked in unison down three steps of the building opposite and danced, in small side-to-side motions, into the performance space itself.

The Manchester-born and-bred Michelson and her dancers Parker Lutz, Mike Iveson, Tanya Uhlmann, Greg Zuccolo, Jennifer Howard, and Paige Martin are ensemble players attuned to one another's body shapes, movement styles, and breathing patterns. Their quite different abilities give the work a fantastic homemade quality, as though a group of friends had set up an impromptu concert in Hanna Schygulla's studio apartment at three in the morning. Talking, whether to each other or to themselves, sometimes in German (the work was conceived in Germany while they were on tour), the dancers appear to be improvising when in fact they are not.

Moderator: Andre Lepecki, Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts

Participants

NYU Professors

  1. RoseLee Goldberg, Steinhardt School of Education
  2. Tom Bender, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
  3. Carol Martin, Tisch School of the Arts
  4. Barbara Rose Haum, School of Arts and Sciences
  5. Lynn Gumpert, Director of Gray Gallery
  6. Nancy Regaldo, French Department
  7. Julie Malnig, Gallatin School of Individualized Study
  8. Sharon Friedman, Gallatin School of Individualized Study

Graduate Students

  1. Rachel Bowditch, Graduate Student Coordinator, PhD Candidate Performance Studies
  2. Ayanna Williams,  MA in Performance Studies
  3. Joe Shahadi, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies
  4. Beth Kurkjian, PhD Candidate, Performance Studies
  5. Leigh Keiser, MA in Performance Studies
  6. Jonathan Berger, MA Steinhardt School of Education
  7. Anthony Clune, undergraduate, Steinhardt School of Education
  8. Victoria Anderson, PhD Candidate, Performance Studies
  9. Aaron Glass, PhD Candidate, Anthropology
  10. Jenn Joy, PhD Candidate, Performance Studies
  11. Gillian Lipton, PhD Candidate, Performance Studies

Attendees from other Institutions

  1. Jessica O’Grady Marsh, independent artist
  2. Katherine Profeta, independent artist
  3. Wiebke Arke, Performa Intern

Themes:

The aim of the session, Dance & Politics: What Really Matters moderated by Andre Lepecki was to bring together various choreographers to shed a light on current perspectives in contemporary dance reflecting on the past, present and future. Involving an interdisciplinary gathering of faculty and graduate students from NYU and invited guests, it is our intention to explore new forms and definitions of performance in contemporary art and culture.

Main Points/Questions/Issues Raised:

ROUNDTABLE 3: NEW DEFINITIONS/ NEW DIRECTIONS: Performance Art in China  and the Americas

FEBRUARY 28TH, 2005 [6PM-8PM.]

Location: Gallatin Dean’s Conference Room, 715 Broadway, 6th Floor

Total Attendance: 22

Guest Artists: Coco Fusco and Barbara Pollack

Coco Fusco

Coco Fusco has performed, lectured, exhibited and been a curator throughout North and South America, Europe, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Korea and Japan. She is the author of English is Broken Here, (The New Press, 1995), The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (Routledge/inIVA, 2001) and the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (Routledge, 1999). Her writings have appeared in a wide variety of publications and anthologies.
Fusco's performances and videos have been included in the Whitney Biennial, the Sydney Biennale, the Johannesburg Biennial, the Kwangju Biennale, the London International Theatre Festival, and the National Review of Live Art. Her latest video installation, Els Segadors, will premiere in December at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen as part of the Unpacking Europe exhibition sponsored by Rotterdam European Cultural Capital 2001. She is currently curating a comprehensive exhibition on racial taxonomy in American photography for the International Center for Photography that will open at the end of next year. She is Director of Graduate Studies for the Visual Arts Program at Columbia University, New York.

Barbara Pollack

Barbara Pollack, artist and critic, has written extensively on new Chinese art, video and photography for the New York Times, Art in America and Art News. 

Moderator: RoseLee Goldberg

Participants

NYU Professors

  1. Tom Bender, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
  2. Andre Lepecki, Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts
  3. Carol Martin, Tisch School of the Arts
  4. Lynn Gumpert, Director of Gray Art Gallery
  5. Bruce Altshuler, Director, Program in Museum Studies, Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
  6. Sharon Friedman, Gallatin School of Individualized Study
Graduate Students
  1. Rachel Bowditch, Graduate Student Coordinator, PhD Candidate Performance Studies
  2. Ayanna Williams,  MA in Performance Studies
  3. Joe Shahadi, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies
  4. Beth Kurkjian, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies
  5. Anthony Clune, undergraduate, Steinhardt School of Education
  6. Jenn Joy, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies
  7. Victoria Anderson, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies
  8. Eleonora Fabiao, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies
Attendees from other Institutions
  1. Dieta Sixt, Goethe Institute
  2. Eileen Cohen, Independent curator and collector
  3. Michael Cohen
  4. Paula Court, photographer
  5. Meredith Palmer, independent Curator
  6. Ingrid Dudek

Themes:

Barbara Pollock introduced a discussion on the rise of performance art as a critical medium in the Chinese art scene since the early 1990s. Beginning in the East Village in Beijing  (named after its New York counterpart), powerful and provocative performances by artists and musicians, Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Zhu Ming, XuSan and Zho Zhou among others, quickly created an energetic scene which drew many to this dilapidated part of town, and just as quickly, the police, who shut down activities in 1994. But it was a seminal beginning for the Chinese avant-garde art, bringing international focus to fast-paced cultural and political transformation. Performance, in the form of photography, video, film and sculpture, continues to provide the energetic drive for an upcoming generation of artists. Barbara Pollack presented a slide show of a genealogy of Chinese performance art of the Beijing Factory District [China’s Soho] from 1979 to the present. 

Coco Fusco, performance artist and author of English is Broken Here and The Bodies that Were Not Ours and editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, introduced a critical lens through which to consider contemporary performance art in the Americas as well as her own performance and video material. By placing the Chinese avant-garde next to the avant-garde of the Americas, we debated ways in which performance takes on different configurations in response to political and cultural context. Form and content can be seen as forging an aesthetic for contemporary performance.

EVENTS: SPRING 2005

SESSION 4: CITY IN MOTION: Forced Entertainment, Tribute in Light and Burning Man.

APRIL 6TH, 2005 [6PM-8PM.]

Location: Gallatin Dean’s Conference Room, 715 Broadway, 6th Floor

Total Attendance: 22

Guest Artists: Julian LaVerdiere and Tim Etchells, Forced Entertainment

Tim Etchells is an artist, director and writer best known for his work with
the Sheffield, UK-based performance ensemble Forced Entertainment. Formed in 1984, the group's projects span diverse media and contexts. Etchells himself has made works in text, photography, video, performance, installation,
exhibition and digital and broadcast media. He has also collaborated with a wide range of other artists, choreographers and writers including, Hugo Glendinning, Asta Groting, Franko B and Wendy Houston. Since the mid-80s
Etchells has developed a unique voice in writing for and about performance. His published work includes Certain Fragments (Routledge 1999), a collection of writings for and about contemporary performance as well as fiction
ranging from The Dream Dictionary (for the Modern Dreamer), an indispensable guide for modern dreamers everywhere (Duckworths 2001) to Endland Stories, a brutal and comical collection of short fiction (Pulp Books, 1999). Recent performances from Forced Entertainment include "The Travels" and "Instructions for Forgetting", which blur the borders between performance, video and essay, the absurd theatrical black comedy "First Night" and the deconstructed ironic rock spectacle "Bloody Mess".

The Forced Entertainment website be found at
http://www.forcedentertainment.com.

Julian LaVerdiere was born in 1971 and raised in New York City. He earned a BFA from The Cooper Union in New York and a MFA in sculpture from Yale University. He is a founding member of the production-design collective BigRoom LLC, which has received international acclaim for its innovative approach to commercial production design. In 1999, LaVerdiere had his first New York solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery. He has since had solo shows at No-Limits Gallery in Milan, Italy, Ever-Green Gallery in Geneva, Switzerland and the Lehman Maupin Gallery in New York, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the United States and Europe. In 2000, his work was prominently featured in Greater New York, an exhibition at PS1-Moma, Long Island City, New York. In the same year, while developing Bioluminescent Beacon (a public art project with Creative Time), he was granted studio residencies at both the American Museum of Natural History and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Studio Program on the 91st floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
In 2001 and 2002, LaVerdiere worked with fellow-artist Paul Myoda, three architects, Creative Time and the Municipal Arts Society to create Tribute in Light, the temporary light memorial to the victims of September 11th, 2001. This public artwork has subsequently been selected to become an annual addition to the WTC Memorial.  In 2003, LaVerdiere had his first solo museum exhibitions at the Museums of Contemporary Art in Miami and Cleveland, and his work is included in the permanent collections of PS1-Moma, New York, MOCA, Miami, Museu Nacional de Historia Nattural, Portugal and the Library of Congress, DC, as well as a number of major private collections. LaVerdiere has received awards and grants for both individual and public art collaborations. In 2000, LaVerdiere and Creative Time received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Warhol Foundation grant for the Bioluminescent Beacon. In 2002, he received the first Annual Cooper Union Urban Visionaries Award. In 2003, he and his fellow Tribute in Light collaborators received the Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Arts Society. In 2004, he received a NYC Percent for Art grant to make a piece for FDNY Engine Company #277, which is to be installed in 2006. Employing a pastiche of symbols, signs and themes from the past and the present, LaVerdiere draws attention to pivotal moments and events that serve as historic harbingers of coming change and paradigm shifts. LaVerdiere lives and works in New York City and is represented by Lehmann Maupin Gallery.

Graduate Student Presentation by Rachel Bowditch.

Republic of the Imagination: Staging the Avant-Garde in the Black Rock Desert.

PowerPoint presentation of the Installation Art, Interactive Art and Performance of Burning Man.

Moderator: RoseLee Goldberg

Participants

NYU Professors
  1. Tom Bender, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
  2. Andre Lepecki, Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts
  3. Julie Malnig, Gallatin School of Individualized Study
  4. Lauren Raiken, Chair of Gallatin
  5. Sharon Friedman, Gallatin School of Individualized Study
Graduate Students
  1. Rachel Bowditch, Graduate Student Coordinator, PhD Candidate Performance Studies
  2. Ayanna Williams,  MA in Performance Studies
  3. Joe Shahadi, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies
  4. Victoria Anderson, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies
  5. Beth Kurkjian, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies
  6. Jenn Joy, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies
  7. Jasmin T. Tsou, student in Steinhardt School of Education
Attendees from other Institutions
  1. Graham Parker
  2. Ina Howard, The Yes Men
  3. Juliana Clark, Performa Intern
  4. Vlatka Horvat, friend of Tim Etchells
  5. Sara Jane Bailer, friend of Tim Etchells
  6. Ariana Bernstein, friend of Tim Etchells
  7. Anne Barlow, friend of Tim Etchells
  8. Dieta Sixt, Goethe Institute

Themes:

Julian LaVerdiere, co-designer of Tribute of Light, the World Trade Center Memorial discusses the genesis of the project and his current work inspired by asymmetrical warfare and historical symbols and monuments of power, such as the light domes of Albert Speer and the Statue of Liberty and the ruins of civilization.  He is exploring the idea of erasing historical space in order to rewrite a modern narrative.

Tim Etchells, Forced Entertainment

In Sheffield, North England- Forced Entertainment built a replica of the city with lights, a ghostly double of the city.  Forced Entertainment  works across a range of media, starting with theatre and performance, but going also into gallery and installation. By using text from many places, the work requires an active spectatorship.  The work hopes to make connections between things that are not necessarily connected, focusing on the situation of theatre and the situation of performance.  I.e. the expectations of viewers bring in to a room; how the watchers form a temporary community; what will take, what won’t …the social negotiations of meaning; live negotiations between performers, audience, viewer or spectator with visual art.
The project “Ground Plans for Paradise” involved one thousand buildings crudely made with windows made out of wood and glued together.  The piece was a map and model of the city as space for reimaging yourself and your life.  Another city project occurred on a bus, which toured around Sheffield for one week. The audience entered the bus, which was a guided tour of the city, containing no facts, but much misinformation, claiming the areas in personal ways and renaming of spaces in the city.  Intervention of performance was to layer city with playful, poetic commentary. The piece played with possibility of fiction of text and how city could drag you in different directions.

Rachel Bowditch, Republic of the Imagination: Staging the Avant-Garde in the Black Rock Desert.

By analyzing the phenomenon of Burning Man through the lens of globalization as a political utopian performance, Burning Man is creating new paradigms for the direction of performance, installation art, technology, community and ritual in the twenty-first century. Burning Man is one of the most complex, highly sophisticated and imaginative alternative utopian societies at the turn of the century, creating an oasis apart from the vortex of capitalism and the commodity. The close examination of utopian models of real and imagined communities throughout history reveals the current social need to create alternative societies within the contemporary dominant culture of globalization. By analyzing Burning Man’s financial reports, their “gift economy” and civic volunteerism, we see a staged rehearsal of a consumer-free society as a political performance that proposes a new alternative way of living full of impossibility, contradictions and ambiguities. In 1986, founder Larry Harvey staged an impromptu therapeutic burning of a makeshift wooden man on Baker Beach in San Francisco. Over nineteen years Burning Man has evolved from a personal healing ritual into an ephemeral city of thirty-five thousand citizens. From this minute, personal performance spontaneously erupted one of the most significant and creatively radical utopian movements of the late twentieth, early twenty-first century.

SESSION 5: NOT FOR SALE: NEW MEDIA AND SOUND

APRIL 21ST, 2005 6:30PM – 8PM. STEINHARDT SCHOOL OF ED. AUDITORIUM.

OPEN TO THE NYU COMMUNITY. Audience of 150 with standing room only.

Diverse group of students from Steinhardt School of Education, Gallatin, Tisch School of the Artists, NYU professors, scholars, artists and critics

Guest Artist Panelists:

Christoph Cox, Philosopher and Critic

Ron Kuivila, Artist and Composer

Elizabeth LeCompte, Theatre Director of the Wooster Group

Christian Marclay, Sound Artist

Respondent:

David Ross, President of Artist Pension Trust and Independent Curator

Moderator: RoseLee Goldberg, Associate Adjunct Professor, NYU and Founding Director, PERFORMA

April 21, 2005 6:30 - 8 PM. Reception to follow
Einstein Auditorium, New York University
34 Stuyvesant Street, NYC
Between 3rd and 2nd Avenue at 9th Street
Free

Themes:
Not for Sale: New Media and Sound discussed how artists today use new media and sound to inform their works. What kind of a role does integration of media and technology play in creating new forms of artistic production? How does innovation in technological tools impact the landscape of performance and visual arts history? A distinguished panel of artists, critics and curators discussed the history of new media as it relates to research, development and presentations of visual arts performance.

As the third installment in the PERFORMAS NOT FOR SALE series, NOT FOR SALE: New Media and Sound was an in-depth view into contemporary developments in performance. In conjunction with New York University’s Department of Art and Art Professions and Humanities Council, PERFORMA presented NOT FOR SALE: New Media and Sound as a dynamic continuation of the discussion on performance and its relationship to the museum, gallery, and collector, which has begun last April with Not for Sale: Conserving and Collecting Ephemeral Artwork in the 21st Century. Panelists Chrissie Iles, Robert Storr and Joan Jonas elaborated on the paradox of capturing radical and ephemeral ideas for historical record as well as a broader debate regarding how museums and galleries conserve this work. In November, Not For Sale: Artists View featured panelist Marina Abramovic, Tania Bruguera, Klaus Ottmann, and Debra Singer, who actively discussed the changing role of the modern museum as lively cultural center shaping artists ideas about performance.

ABOUT PERFORMA
PERFORMA is a non-profit interdisciplinary arts organization founded to commission and present new performance work in the visual arts. Drawing upon the rich history of performance in New York City, PERFORMA will provide a vibrant context to expand the possibilities and accessibility of live performance for artists and audiences. PERFORMA’s mission is based on the conviction that live art is a vital form that reflects political, artistic, and social issues of our times. PERFORMA is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).

RoseLee Goldberg, Founding Director and Curator, is an art historian, critic and curator who pioneered the study of performance art with her seminal book Performance Art from Futurism to the Present. A former curator at the Kitchen in New York, Ms. Goldberg, Associate Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Art, has taught at New York University since 1987.

ABOUT PANELISTS

Christoph Cox
Through his ongoing engagement with contemporary music, the visual arts,
and philosophy, Christoph Cox has become a leading contributor to the development of a platform from which the relationship between sound and the visual arts can be assessed. Cox currently teaches philosophy and contemporary music at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA and frequently contributes to several magazines and journals, including Artforum, and The Wire.  Cox is an editor at Cabinet magazine and co-curator of Cabinet's sound art CD series. He is the author of Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation. (University of California, 1999) and co-editor of the newly published Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. (Continuum, 2004).

Christian Marclay
A New York-based visual artist and composer, Marclay’s work explores the juxtaposition between sound recording, photography, video and film. Born in California and raised in Geneva (Switzerland), he studied sculpture at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and at Cooper Union in New York. As performer and sound artist, Christian Marclay has been experimenting, composing and performing with phonograph records and turntables since 1979 to create his unique "theater of found sound." A dadaist DJ and filmmaker his installations and video / film collages display provocative musical and visual landscapes and have been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art New York, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou Paris, Kunsthaus Zurich, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Ron Kuivila
Ron Kuivila is an artist and composer who pioneered the use of ultrasound and sound sampling in live performance. More of his recent pieces have explored compositional algorithms, speech synthesis and high voltage phenomena. Kuivila has collaborated with composers, artists, and choreographers including Anthony Braxton, Rudy Burckhardt, Nikolas Collins, Merce Cunningham, Hugh Davies, Douglas Dunn, Susan Foster, and Larry Johnson. He has performed and exhibited installations throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Kuivila is a Professor of Musicology at Wesleyan University and has curated Rock's Role (After Ryoanji) at Art in General in 2004, a group exhibition of sound works by artists responding to John Cage's musical transliterations of the famed Japanese Zen rock garden, Ryoanji.

Elizabeth LeCompte
As a founding member and acting theater director of the New York City performance company The Wooster Group, Elizabeth LeCompte has been identified as an important force in the development of the new theater for the 21st Century. Through her careful use of audio, video, dialogue, and set design, LeCompte has offered audiences deconstructed views of several popular plays.  For her work in directing, LeCompte has been the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Performing Arts Journal’s MacArthur Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement, and the Village Voice’s OBIE Award for 15 years of sustained excellence.

David Ross
President of Artist Pension Trust, David A. Ross has more than 30 years experience as an art museum professional and has served as director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Noted for his work with emerging artists and new media, Mr. Ross has been involved in the organization and jurying process of major international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, Documenta and The Carnegie International.

 

 


 

 

 

Return Home Page