Performance Art Gets Its Biennia

By ROBERTA SMITH - Published: November 4, 2005 (NYtimes)

Performance art may be getting its unruly, influential, shamanistic act together. At the moment, it seems to be the art world's medium of choice. Admired for its purity and subversive spirit, it is ubiquitous in gallery and museum exhibitions, whether on its own or as an active ingredient in video, installation art, sound art and photography. And performance art - also known as performance - is often the ghost in the machine in even the most static of objects; there is hardly a work of art with a scratchable surface that can't be assigned so-called performative aspects.

As of last night, performance art also has a New York biennial to call its own: Performa 05, which has been coaxed into existence on a shoestring and possibly a prayer by RoseLee Goldberg, a veteran historian and curator of performance art. Ms. Goldberg, a South African by birth, grew up torn between dance and painting, resolving the conflict with a doctorate in Bauhaus performance that centered on the artist Oskar Schlemmer, who painted and performed.\

As the founding director and curator, Ms. Goldberg is billing Performa 05 as the city's "first biennial of new visual art performance." The wobbly but vibrant inaugural version will unfold primarily in commercial art galleries and alternative spaces, through Nov. 21.\

The biennial has emerged - without corporate sponsorship or even a sponsoring institution - seemingly out of thin air, hard work and fortuitous timing. The diverse credits on Performa's chartlike schedule also suggest a certain talent for persuading diverse art entities - from the Guggenheim Museum to the Kitchen to the Anthology Film Archives - to stage their own events during Performa 05. One result is lots of margins and no center, a good thing. Performa is also enhanced by (even as it helps bring them into focus) a range of performance works on view at the moment in several unrelated exhibitions around town.\

Artists Space signed on. So did the Swiss Institute; Salon 94; the Paula Cooper Gallery; Jack the Pelican in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; the online radio station free103point9; the artists Christian Marclay and Christian Holstad; and the Yvon Lambert Gallery, which will sponsor a performance and related exhibition by Sislej Xhafa, a New York-based performance artist from Kosovo. The Austrian art collaborative Gelitin will turn Leo Koenig's Chelsea gallery into a giant, live-in copy machine and spend a week open for business around the clock, copying by hand whatever anyone brings in. Thus Performa 05's caldron of curatorial viewpoints will encompass performances, film screenings, symposiums and at least one panel, orchestrated by the artist Pablo Helguera, that will use opera singers and actors to dissect the panel format.\

The phenomenon of performance art dates back at least to World War I and the days of Dada and the Cafe Voltaire in Zurich. Since then, artists have regularly used it to torpedo the status, definition and market value of art, while in many cases capitalizing on their own magnetic stage presences, sonorous voices or good looks in ways that predate modernity if not art.\

The term itself dates from the early 1970's, when it denoted the hodgepodge of nontheatrical events - including happenings - that visual artists, dancers and poets had been staging in New York since the late 1950's. Conveyed then and now primarily through grainy black-and-white photographs or video, the events nonetheless reverberated through the art world, rife as they sometimes were with nudity, bodily fluids, social critique and identity politics.\

The culture wars of the late 1980's, especially the furor over Karen Finley's chocolate-covered feminism, helped push performance art into the mainstream, confirming once more the publicity value of being denounced in the United States Senate. Since then, performance art has influenced music, theater, advertising, sitcoms and reality television. What is "Fear Factor" if not endurance art - performance's hard-core subgenre - with bikinis and more viewers?\

Now, you can get M.F.A.'s, Ph.D.'s and probably tenured teaching posts in performance art, which has also entered the American vernacular. A random sampling of recent articles in The New York Times found the phrase used in reference to news anchors, hood ornaments, a neighborhood bar, American evangelists and Kinky Friedman's campaign for governor of Texas.\

But performance art has been plagued throughout its history by its basic ephemerality. Like choreography or art exhibitions, it is a disappearing art form, even in these days of video and virtual reality. Once it is over, it is gone, and as a result, it tends to be omitted from history. The events in and around Performa 05 constitute a strike against that disappearing.\

Ms. Goldberg has commissioned a few of the works, notably a short opera and first-time live performance effort by the Danish video artist Jesper Just, whose New York debut at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery last fall was one of the standouts of the season. Somewhat more dubiously, she has also commissioned the artist Francis Alys to convert a slow video striptease into an even slower performance. More often, though, she has provided context or connected existing dots, creating with quite a bit of help from her collaborators an unusually rich diagram of performance art's past and present, in which the sublime promises to compensate for the ridiculous.\

Ms. Goldberg's background as a painter may explain her use of the phrase "visual art performance" in the Performa 05 tagline and her conviction that many artists who don't work in live performance should try it. So it was that she commissioned Mr. Just's opera after seeing his poignant video meditations on loneliness, masculinity and popular songs at the Rubenstein gallery in Chelsea. (Two of them are being shown for the duration of Performa, along with "Something to Love," his most recent video.)\

Mr. Just's new piece, "True Love Is Yet to Come," is less an opera than a live music hologram whose restrained use of Eyeliner, a freshly patented computer program, allows real people and holograms to interact. As usual with his work, "True Love" includes the young blond actor Johannes Lilleore, who is present in hologram form. He is joined by Baard Owe, a well-known Norwegian actor who has been in several Lars von Trier films and whose agile and commanding presence is usually, but not always, real.\

Making emotionally resonant use of the music of the Ink Spots, a high-speed plunge through a forest and the antique carousel from the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, the 30-minute work is a dreamlike tale of spurned love that could be either ambiguously filial or homoerotic. To see and hear it on its intimate, beautifully proportioned stage at the Stephan Weiss Studio in Greenwich Village is to experience technological innovation at the service of a haunting expressiveness.\