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

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

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.