Feminist Performance Art

 

[I’ve blogged a bit on performance art on Rick On Theater: “Lady Gaga: Artist For Our Time” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2011), “Performance Art, Part 1” (7 November 2013) and “Part 2” (10 November 2013), “Penny Arcade: Two Performances” (15 November 2013), “‘The Second Life of Performance’” by Katie Kitamura (10 January 2016), and “‘Art That Flows From a Will to Live’: Marina Abramović, Performance Artist” by Jessica Testa (7 September 2024). 

[The reason there’s not more is that, frankly, it’s not a subject about which I know a great deal.  (My appreciation of performance art is more for what its innovations and experimentation contribute to more conventional theater than for the live art itself that the artists make.) 

[However, when I read the article below on the revival, so to speak, of interest in the feminist performance artists of the late-middle 20th century, my attention was piqued.  I decided it was more than worth sharing with ROTters; I hope you’ll agree when you read it yourselves.] 

“THE RADICALS”
by Amanda Fortini

[The article below, published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 17 May 2026, was also posted on the Times website as “Is Yoko Ono Still Our Most Radical Artist?” on 30 April.]

A crop of recent exhibitions prove how feminist performance art from the 1960s and ’70s is more relevant than ever.

In March 1965, almost two years before she’d meet John Lennon [1940-80] and form their infamous alliance, Yoko Ono [b. 1933] staged “Cut Piece,” a groundbreaking work of performance art, at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. It was the third presentation of the work (the first two were staged in Kyoto and Tokyo in the summer of 1964), but this one was filmed by the documentarians David [1931-87] and Albert Maysles [1926-2015] and has thus been preserved for posterity as a nine-minute black-and-white film. Ono, then an avant-garde artist known for her involvement in the Fluxus movement, sits impassively onstage next to a pair of fabric shears. She is dressed in clothes of obvious quality (an elegant black sweater suit with pearl buttons, a silk slip underneath, fishnet pantyhose), which members of the audience, strangers to the artist, are invited to approach and snip off.

[A very brief bio of Yoko Ono: Ono, an artist, musician, activist, filmmaker, and performance artist, was born in Tokyo. Her father was a wealthy banker and, during Ono’s early years, was transferred to bank branches all over the world, including San Francisco (1933, two weeks before his daughter’s birth), New York City (1940), and Hanoi (1941).

[In 1945, after World War II, Ono’s father moved to Scarsdale, New York, but Ono remained in Japan until 1952, when she joined her family. She enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, where, among other subjects, she studied music composition. She became interested in twelve-tone music and then moved into the “avant-garde.”

[In the ’50s and ’60s, Ono lived an eventful life, including two marriages, the birth of a daughter, and exploration with music and art of a decidedly experimental nature. She exhibited and performed in several venues. She came to London in September 1966 and met John Lennon in November at an exhibit of her conceptual art. He was intrigued by her art, and in September 1967, Lennon, who was still married to his first wife at the time, sponsored her solo show at a London gallery.

[Lennon’s first marriage was terminated in November 1968, and he and Ono collaborated on a number of works during the last two years of the Beatles, 1969 and ’70, and attended many public protests against the war in Vietnam. The couple married in March 1969. They had formed the Plastic Ono Band in 1968 as an outlet for their collaborative work.

[Ono and Lennon moved to New York City to escape the press attention, especially the racial prejudice in the media directed at Ono, in August 1971. They initially settled in Greenwich Village, but moved to the Dakota Apartments on the Upper West Side on Central Park West, between 72nd and 73rd Streets, in 1973.

[On 8 December 1980, Lennon, returning home with Ono after a recording session, was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman (b. 1955), who remains in prison on a 20-years-to-life sentence.

[Ono continues to perform, exhibit, and release recordings. She appears for, promotes, and supports many charitable, artistic, and humanitarian works and organizations around the world. She also works to preserve her murdered husband and collaborator’s legacy, having funded the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan’s Central Park in his memory in 1981-85, along with other memorials to Lennon.

[In 2005, as keeper of the Lennon flame, Ono was actively involved as a primary consultant to Lennon, a musical about the post-Beatles life of the rock songwriter with music and lyrics by Lennon and book by Don Scardino (b. 1949; retired actor; television director and producer).

[Ono made the whole Lennon catalog available to Scardino. The gatekeeper to the Lennon legacy, Ono retained final script approval and required the Broadway producers to present the completed script to her live in workshop format.

[The show went into previews on 7 July 2005 at the Broadhurst Theatre, opened 14 August to negative reviews, and closed on 24 September after 42 previews and 49 regular performances.]

At first, the audience-perpetrators are reticent and even polite, cutting bits from her sleeves and collar and waistband, then setting the shears back on the stage, as Ono stares ahead unperturbed. Eventually, though, an overzealous man saunters up and begins slicing off Ono’s slip with gusto, first cutting directly between her breasts, then snipping the slip’s arm straps and finally slicing all the way around her waist to reveal her bra. The audience titters with nervous laughter (“Don’t get carried away,” a female voice admonishes), while the artist herself begins to look uncomfortable, biting her lip, her eyes darting around. Only when the man clips Ono’s bra straps does the audience protest. “Stop being such a dweeb!” a female voice yells, breaking the offender’s spell; others boo and hiss. “Cornball,” a male voice declares. Ono’s eyes tilt upward as though imploring the heavens for assistance; she crosses her arms over her chest. But she perseveres, and the film ends before the performance does.

“Cut Piece” — in its enactment of public violence, escalating sense of dread and implication of the audience as voyeurs — was a pivotal work of feminist art and would inspire numerous others: Among them were Carolee Schneemann’s [1939-2019] provocative “Interior Scroll” (1975), in which the artist pulled a scroll inscribed with an excerpt from her book “Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter” (“If you are a woman … they will almost never believe you really did it” [Tresspuss Press, 1976]) from her vagina; and Marina Abramović’s [b. 1946] “Rhythm 0” (1974), in which the audience was encouraged to interact with the artist using any of 72 objects set on a table (a rose, a feather, a whip, a gun) while Abramović stood still. “Rhythm 0,” like Ono’s piece, reverses the usual artist-audience dynamic. “Instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give,” Ono has said of “Cut Piece,” “the artist gives what the audience chooses to take.” Abramović, who had a loaded gun pointed at her, put it more bluntly: “What I learned was that . . . if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.”

Viewing “Cut Piece” now, what struck me is how genuinely unsettling it remains. I watched the short film once, then again, floored by how relevant, how prophetic, it feels in our own cultural moment, when many of the long-held gains of feminism, both legal and cultural, seem on the brink of being lost forever. The reality most people took for granted merely a few years ago — that men and women were inherently equal, and that as a society we were collectively striving to remedy the ways in which we weren’t paid or treated as such — is being peeled away with alarming speed. This atmosphere is surely one reason we are seeing a resurgence of interest in feminist performance art of the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, much of it difficult, aggressive and surprisingly radical — certainly for its era but even now.

In the past decade or so, the defining trend among curators has been to shine a light on artists who were previously “overlooked.” Various groups who were once misunderstood, neglected or ignored have been excavated and exhibited — artists of color, older women artists, women of Abstract Expressionism and so on (though “overlooked” is, of course, itself a deprecating term). The “rediscovery-industrial complex,” as it’s been wryly termed, has now reached female performance artists, arguably sidelined in their day not only for the confrontational radicalism of their work — what Schneemann called the “considered disregard for the comfort of the audience” [The Obscene Body Politic (Carolee Schneemann Foundation, 1991)] — but because their particular art form was not salable, collectible or tied to the market in any way.

Ono, who has a new exhibition, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” opening at the Broad museum in Los Angeles next month [23 May-11 October 2026], is at the center of this reassessment, but she’s not alone. In July, London’s Tate Modern, where the Ono show originated, will mount a significant retrospective [Ana Mendieta, 15 July 2026-17 January 2027] of the work of Ana Mendieta [b. 1948], the Cuban American multidisciplinary artist who died in 1985 at 36 years old. The exhibition picks up where this winter’s comprehensive show at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York [7 November 2025-17 January 2026], “Ana Mendieta: Back to the Source,” left off, examining her short but prolific career through early paintings, remastered films, late sculptures and site-specific interventions in natural landscapes, which Mendieta documented with slides, photographs or film.

[Ana Mendieta died on 8 September 1985 after falling from her 34th-floor apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village. She lived there with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre (1935-2024). The circumstances surrounding her death were the subject of controversy.

[Prior to her death, neighbors heard the couple arguing violently and, after Mendieta’s fall, to which there were no eyewitnesses, Andre had scratches all over his face.

[During three years of legal proceedings, Andre’s lawyer described Mendieta’s death as a possible accident or a suicide. After a nonjury trial, Andre was acquitted of second-degree murder in February 1988. The acquittal caused an uproar among feminists in the art world, and remains controversial.]

Also this spring, Abramović, now 79 and the most influential performance artist still working — for “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA in 2010 [14 March-31 May], she sat staring at museumgoers for roughly seven hours a day over two and a half months, and has generally made testing the limits of human endurance her artistic pursuit — is presenting new and old work at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice [Transforming Energy, 6 May-19 October 2026], the first living female artist to have a major solo exhibition there. And her “Balkan Erotic Epic,” a four-hour dancing and singing extravaganza that mines Balkan folklore, will have its North American premiere at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in December [8-20 December].

[Before New York City, Balkan Erotic Epic (Abramović was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in the Balkans) has played in Manchester, U.K. (début); Barcelona, Spain; Bochum, Germany; and Berlin, Germany. Following New York, the project is scheduled to travel to Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Paris, France.]

Last year, Karen Finley [b. 1956], 70, the artist known for covering her body in chocolate to point out the degradation of women [The Return of Chocolate-Smeared Woman, The Flea Theater, 17 June-4 July 1998] — but even more so for suing the National Endowment for the Arts for denying her funding over “decency standards,” a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court [National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, et al. (1998); co-plaintiffs: John Fleck (b. 1951), Holly Hughes (b. 1955), Tim Miller (b. 1958), and the National Association of Artists’ Organizations; decided against the artists] — had a solo show at Freight + Volume gallery in Lower Manhattan [More Desperate Than Ever, 17 May-5 July 2025]. Other female performance artists had posthumous exhibitions at various major galleries in New York and Los Angeles: Schneemann (who often used her body as what she described as “visual territory” in transgressive pieces exploring female sexuality), Lee Lozano [1930-99] (whose most famous performance was a satirical inversion of feminism in which the singular artist avoided speaking to other women for 28 years [Decide to Boycott Women, August 1971 until her death]) and Hannah Wilke [1940-93] (who made stark work documenting her nude body’s deterioration from cancer). Curators have made it their mission to rescue subversive feminist performance work from the purgatory where it’s long dwelled. At a time when manosphere podcasters extolling the virtues of female subservience are increasingly influential in public discourse, the constitutional right to abortion has been overturned and social media is rife with a kind of emboldened misogyny I thought we’d left in a bygone era, what could feel more apt than a group of pioneering feminist artists who confronted exasperatingly similar issues in their own lives?

There are perhaps no two artists who were as misunderstood in their prime, and who are more worthy of a critical re-evaluation now, than Ono and Mendieta, who have more in common than one might think. Both lived in the shadows of famous men, both existed between two cultures and both made conceptual work about gender, power, vulnerability, dislocation, connection, ritual and transformation — work that was deeply female in its sensibility, and that was about navigating the fraught space between the female self and the larger world.

The Broad’s Ono show, through drawings, films, conceptual art, music, performance pieces, installations, photographs and archival ephemera spanning seven decades, illuminates her immense contributions to culture — some explicitly feminist, some implicitly so. Putting a finer point on this feels like a necessary corrective, as her Beatles-adjacent celebrity has often eclipsed her art career. “She used her work and her music to communicate a lot of important feminist messages,” Connor Monahan, Ono’s studio director, told me. (Ono is 93 and no longer gives interviews.) “But in a way, I don’t really think that’s been digested in society.”

Ono, who was born in Tokyo in 1933 and received classical music training as a child in Japan, told her father — a classical pianist turned successful banker — that she hoped to be a composer. He replied there were no great female composers. Instead, she’d become the first woman to study philosophy at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, lasting only two semesters before moving to New York to attend Sarah Lawrence College for three years and eventually finding herself at the center of the heavily male downtown avant-garde art scene.

Ono was making her early work amid the first stirrings of second-wave feminism; the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, combined with the publication of Betty Friedan’s [1921-2006; American feminist writer and activist] “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, lit the kindling of widespread discontent among postwar American women. In the 1950s and early ’60s, women were expected to suit themselves up in the suffocating corset of domesticity. Until 1974, unmarried women were often required to have a male co-signer when applying for a bank loan or credit card. Abortion was only legal in a handful of states by 1970, and sexual harassment, though pervasive, did not yet have a name. It’s this unnamed menace, I’d argue, that Ono so cleverly countenances in “Cut Piece.”

Two of her short films from this period (both made in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade) address feminist ideas. In “Freedom,” Ono, whose face is out of the frame, attempts to wrest herself free of the purple bra she’s wearing while a score by Lennon drones on in the background. “Fly” zeros in on a fly crawling over the rolling landscape of a woman’s naked body. Is the woman sleeping? Dead? The ambiguity is intentional. “This whole idea of a male society was based on the fact that women shut up,” Ono has said, “but shutting up is death, in a way. So we were always kind of pretending to be dead.”

In Mendieta’s case, the death was all too real — she fell from the window of her 34th-floor Manhattan apartment; her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was subsequently tried for murder and acquitted. Frustratingly, her tragic end has become the salient fact of her biography. Helen Molesworth’s [b. 1966; curator of contemporary art] popular 2022 podcast, “Death of an Artist,” investigated Andre’s suspected involvement, along with the couple’s tumultuous eight-month marriage; the actress America Ferrera [b. 1984] has announced plans to executive produce and star in an upcoming limited-series adaptation of Robert Katz’s [1933-2010] luridly titled 1990 account of the incident, “Naked by the Window.” To a maddening degree, Mendieta gets treated like the Sylvia Plath [1932-63; American poet and author; known for the 1963 semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar] of the art world. Her aesthetic obsession with blood and death and burials, with tracing the outline of her body in her iconic “Silueta Series” — a leitmotif of hers that unmistakably evokes a chalked crime scene — is said to prophesy her own death. Yet finally, with these shows, Mendieta’s mystical, powerfully haunting art gets its due.

Born in Cuba in 1948, she was sent to America with her sister at the age of 12. Mendieta made her most important work between 1972 and 1985: on creek banks in Iowa, where she lived in an orphanage, a boarding school and a series of foster homes as a child, then later studied at the University of Iowa’s avant-garde Intermedia M.F.A. program; in Mexico, where she visited pre-Columbian archaeological sites in the early ’70s; during a series of trips back to Cuba in the early ’80s; and in New York City, where she moved in 1978 and was welcomed by a community of feminist artists.

Mendieta’s varied oeuvre — influenced by Afro-Cuban religious rituals, Indigenous goddesses and the idea that a universal energy animates all life — includes paintings; photographs; works on paper; films of her pieces shot on Super 8, 16 millimeter and video; and sculptures she made at the American Academy in Rome, where she had her own studio for the first time, in the two years before her death. At Marian Goodman, there were drawings on leaves and an installation of black candles arranged in the shape of her body — called “Ñañigo Burial” (1976) [Ñáñigo refers to a member of a historic, Afro-Cuban, all-male fraternal organization], the installation was created by Mendieta for her first opening in New York [November 1979 at the A.I.R. Gallery (SoHo); Siluetas series]; it was lit the day I visited. But her signature pieces are her “earth body” works, as she called them, which are perhaps best described as ephemeral sculptures that straddle performance art, body art and land art, which Mendieta created using natural elements (mud, fire, feathers, flowers, blood, water, gunpowder) to carve, mark, burn or otherwise manipulate the earth. In “Imágen de Yágul” (1973) [“Image of Yágul,” a pre-Columbian Zapotec (indigenous pre-Columbian civilization that flourished from ca. 700 BCE-1521 CE in the Valley of Oaxaca in southeastern Mexico) archaeological site and former city-state], for example, she integrates her body into the landscape, lying inside an ancient Zapotec tomb, her naked form obscured by a gauzy spray of flowers; in other works, she inscribes her corporeal outline into the landscape by igniting it with gunpowder, say, or setting it on fire. Mendieta staged many of her pieces privately, capturing them in arresting short films and photographs, which are artifacts in their own right — “the afterimage of primordial remembrances,” in her words. Mysterious and intimate, her earthworks make you feel like you are being let in on a secret.

Ono and Mendieta have something else in common: Their work, as well as that of nearly all the female performance artists of this era, was marginalized, demeaned or slighted. When she died, Mendieta had no formal gallery representation and did not receive an obituary in The New York Times, though the paper extensively covered her husband’s murder trial. Reviews of the albums Ono released with Lennon were harsh: “A little of it goes a long way. Too long,” wrote the Times critic Don Heckman [1934-2024; New York Times pop and jazz music critic, 1969-73] of Ono’s half of the couple’s dual 1970 “Plastic Ono Band” releases, dismissing it as “wailing vocal sounds.” Her visual art was ignored almost wholesale until the 21st century.

Surely a primary reason for this dismissal of both women is that their work focused heavily on the female body. The body is the performance artist’s vessel, of course, but first- and second-wave feminist art, especially in the ’70s, was also engaged in “a rethinking of how we represent the female body in all its forms,” as the critic Lauren Elkin [b. 1978; Franco-American cultural critic, essayist, novelist, and translator] writes in “Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art” (2023). Some artists made work that was in-your-face, like Wilke photographing a series of topless self-portraits in which she covered her torso and face with labia-shaped pieces of chewing gum that looked like tiny scars [S.O.S. – Starification Object Series, 1974]. These artists were, as Elkin puts it, “harness[ing] the power of repulsion” to make their point.

Others employed the body as a vehicle for interrogating themes of displacement and identity, which were particular concerns for Mendieta as an exile. “I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette),” she wrote in an artist statement in 1981. “My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.” In her work, this return often means merging with the earth, as she does in the 1974 film “Grass Breathing,” where she lies beneath the sod, visibly inhaling and exhaling, like someone who has been buried alive. The three-minute silent film is claustrophobic, uncomfortable, intense, but also meditative, peaceful and almost erotic, masterfully taking the viewer through the full arc of emotions.

For these artists, the body, rather than being “mute” and “almost exclusively . . . a mirror of masculine desire,” as the [art] critic Jan Avgikos wrote in 1997, was, as it is in life, a site of liberation, agency, eroticism, pain. In a 2011 talk, “Regarding Ana Mendieta,” Schneemann, who was friends with the younger artist, said, “We have forgotten the danger, the dangers of depicting the explicit sensuous female body, we have forgotten how much hatred and resistance that inspired — rage, envy, domination.”

Have we? In “Moffitt Building Piece” (1973), Mendieta poured cow blood and viscera on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building, then filmed passers-by, none of whom intervened. In “Rape Scene,” from the same year, she loosely re-enacted the aftermath of a female student’s rape and murder, inviting an audience into her apartment to witness her half-naked, smeared with animal blood and tied to a table. Ono and Lennon also made a film called “Rape” (1969), in which the camera relentlessly stalks an unsuspecting young woman; it incriminates viewers, just as Mendieta’s films do. Yet Ono’s most notable project in this vein is “Arising” (2013), for which she invited women to send stories of harm done to them simply because they were female, accompanied by a photo of only their eyes. Numerous testaments hung in the installation — a bracing reminder of the dark side of the universal female experience.

Is it fair, in the end, to group these female artists together under a feminist banner? Mendieta resisted any such identitarian designation — though her work was clearly invested in feminist themes, and justice for her death has become an article of feminist conviction. Schneemann was not fond of what she called “the confines of essentialist theory.” Lozano, in her absolute spurning of other women, was rejecting all categories imposed on her. Ono, for her part, cared about the plight of women, but the cause was a tributary that fed into her larger humanist aims. “I am a woman, and my experiences produce my works,” she said upon the debut of “Arising.” “To me, feminism should be about understanding women and their condition, about expressing who they are and what happened to them. If you put it this way, you see how feminism does not concern only women but everybody as humans. Also, men.” Although these artists didn’t always readily embrace the label, had they known how shockingly essential their art would remain over a distance of 40, 50, even 60 years, they might have seen it differently.

[Essentialism, which Schneemann rejected, is the belief that things have an underlying, unchanging nature that defines what they are. It argues, for example, that gender differences are fixed, natural, and biologically determined, rather than shaped by culture or history. This becomes a simplistic excuse for discrimination, intolerance, and inequity.]

[In 1992, I was approached by Drama Review editor Richard Schechner (b. 1934) to do a profile of The Shaliko Company for the planned series.  For the better part of a year, I shadowed company director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), attending rehearsals for the various productions he was directing. 

[The company’s main project at the time was the environmental production of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven—originally called Going to Iraq (and returned to that title after the 1992 staging)—and I attended most of the rehearsals.  The production, at Theater for the New City in Manhattan’s East Village, from 17 September to 11 October 1992.

[Malpede had been working on Going to Iraq/Blue Heaven during the build-up to Desert Storm, and her response to the Gulf war had compelled her to write about it.  The playwright was, however, already contemplating another occurrence as the base of the drama: the death of artist Ana Mendieta. 

[For Malpede, Mendieta’s fate is emblematic of the position of women artists in America, and she found herself struggling with this subject when war broke out in January 1991.  Aria, a sculptor who serves as the play’s central character, is a sort of avatar of Mendieta.

[(It’s interesting to note that the actress who played Aria in Blue Heaven, Rosalie Triana (aka: Rosalía Triana. 1946-2023), had portrayed Ana Mendieta in June or July 1992 in Madre Selva by Alma Sanchez (b. 1947; aka: Alma Villegas) at the Galerie Lelong—which showed Mendieta’s work.)

[There are three posts on Rick On Theater that cover Blue Heven/Going to Iraq, and one more that’s an interview of playwright Karen Malpede.  For those interested, these are: “‘As It Is in Heaven’” (25 March 2011), “Blue Heaven (Going to Iraq)” in “Some Women Writers from the Archives” (10 July 2019), “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq) – Part 1” (11 May 2020) and “Part 2” (14 May 2020), and “An Interview with Karen Malpede (1992)” (5 November 2014).

[Amanda Fortini has written for the New York Times (including contributing frequently to T), the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, the Paris Review, New York, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Slate, and Salon, among other publications.  She’s worked as an editor at Mirabella, the New York Review of Books, and Slate, and has been the William Kittredge Visiting Professor at the University of Montana.  

[Her essays have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Political Writing (PublicAffairs, 2008) and Best of Slate (Atlas Books, 2006), and she was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award in 2012.  After several semesters as a lecturer in journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s Greenspun College for Urban Affairs, Fortini has contributed articles and essays on Las Vegas, including several for the New Yorker, and an acclaimed cover story for California Sunday.]

"Art That Flows From a Will to Live": Marina Abramović, Performance Artist

by Jessica Testa 

[Marina Abramović (b. 1946 in Yugoslavia) is a pioneering performance artist, best known for her works that explore the physical limitations of the body, as well as the body’s potential as a vehicle to spiritual metamorphosis.  Born in Belgrade (now the capital of Serbia), Abramovic studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1965 to 1970 and in Zagreb, Croatia, at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1972.

[("When people ask me where I am from, I never say Serbia,” Abramović declares.  “I always say I come from a country that no longer exists" [Sean O'Hagan, “Interview: Marina Abramović,” Guardian [New York] 2 Oct. 2010, Interview: Marina Abramović | Marina Abramović | The Guardian].  What became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was formed in 1918 after World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, gaining recognition in 1922.  It became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after World War II in 1945, and dissolved into six independent republics in 1992.)

[She was among the first generation of performance artists of the 1970s, a group that often resorted to using their own bodies as an artistic medium.  Her works often explore extremes of sensation, and, frequently, the audience is invited to participate in the intense, and often exhausting, painful performances.  Aramović's presentations include sound, video, photography, language, and sculpture, in addition to using her body as the central medium for her work.

[She later regularly collaborated with German artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen, 1943-2020; German performance artist known for his ambitious conceptual works) on other performative works, exploring the capacities of the body, as well as constructions of gender and social systems in their pieces.  

[In 1976, following her marriage to Serbian performance and conceptual artist Neša Paripović (b. 1942), Abramović went to Amsterdam to give a performance and decided to move there permanently.  She divorced Paripović in 1976 (m. 1970) and began living with Ulay, with whom she worked for about twelve years.

[From 1990 to 1995, she was a visiting professor at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and at the Berlin University of the Arts.  From 1992 to 1996. she also served as a visiting professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and from 1997 to 2004, she was a professor for performance art at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig.

[Abramović also began traveling around the world to perform, exploring the body and nature with Ulay as a means of achieving spiritual transformation, in locations ranging from the Gobi Desert to the Tibetan mountains, and the Great Wall of China (1988).  At the end of this project, her relationship with Ulay dissolved.  

[She has exhibited her work at the Venice Biennale, where she won a Golden Lion award in 1997 (and met Italian contemporary artist Paolo Canevari, b. 1963, whom she would later marry), and at Documenta in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Art Basel in Switzerland, and the Kumamoto Museum of Contemporary Art in Kumamoto, Japan, among many other venues.

[Abramović and Canevari moved to New York in 2002 and married in 2006.  She bought an estate in upstate Hudson, a small city in the center of New York’s eastern border of with Massachusetts, that became her private residence and a meeting place for performance art.  Abramović divorced Canevari and currently lives and works in Amsterdam and New York City.

[Eleven years ago, I posted a two-part article entitled “Performance Art” (7 and 10 November 2013).  It was a short history and exegesis of the artform as I understood it (and it would be pertinent to this post), so I will republish my definition of performance art (slightly edited and reformatted) for readers who haven’t encountered this hybrid of theater and art (my characterization):

Also known as “live art,” “living art,” or “body art,” performance art exists at the conjunction of the worlds of art and theater.  Performance, as it’s often called, is the demonstration or execution of the ideas of Conceptual Art, defined as “art of which the material is the concept.”  (Other, earlier art influences include Dadaism, Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop Art.)  

Conceptual Art, which flourished between the mid-’50s to the mid-’70s, elevated ideas and the process of creation over product and technique, and insisted that art can’t be bought or sold.  Like performance art, it can’t be commodified and brought home for display.  

Accepted as a separate medium of artistic expression in 1970s, performance, however, defies precise definition, asserts RoseLee Goldberg (b. 1947), an art historian, critic, and curator who’s lectured at many institutions and schools and who wrote the most comprehensive texts on it.  (Goldberg’s Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, originally published in 1979, was reissued in 2011 in an edition that brings the history of performance up to the first decade of the 21st century.)  

As performance artist Laurie Anderson (b. 1947), a composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings a variety of experimental music and art rock styles, puts it: “This is literally living art that continues to evolve and expand.” 

Except that it’s live art by artists, in fact, few practitioners will agree on what comprises performance art and the artists and writers about performance keep expanding the scope of the definition with each succeeding wave of experimentation and exploration.  By nature, performance art constantly changes and evolves, as the artists adopt and adapt new technologies and media, engulfing new ideas and concepts as they pursue their aims.  

The event might be performed only once (most common in the early years) or repeated several times, with or without a prepared script, improvised spontaneously or rehearsed over many months.  The works might be presented in solo performances or in groups, with lighting, music, or visuals made by the artists themselves or in collaboration with other artists.  Performances could take place in galleries, theaters, museums, streets, parking lots, public squares, parks, open fields, vacant lots, bars, night clubs, lofts, or any space the artist selects that’s suited to the piece.  

In general, however, in addition to being live, it’s also predominantly presentational and typically involves improvisation.  The artist-creator-performer, using her or his body as the primary artistic medium (either as canvas or as sculpture, or both), combines dance, music, drama, and often technology like film, video, projections, or computer imagery, as well as any other media that the artist can adapt and apply.  

Performance also encompasses behaviors outside the performing and visual arts like ritual, work activities, sports, and daily tasks.

[Because performance art is ephemeral, photos or videos are frequently the art objects displayed after the live performance and sold to subsidize the work and provide the artists with income.  They are also the only record of the art event that can be preserved or archived—with the caveat that the “liveness,” one of the fundamental criteria of performance art, is missing.

[(Note, incidentally, that despite my labeling performance art as a fusion of theater and art, Abramović has insisted: “To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre.  Theatre is fake . . . .  The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real.  Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real” [O’Hagan].)

[Jessica Testa’s interview with Marina Abramović ran in the “Sunday Styles” section of the New York Times on 4 August 2024.  In addition to “Performance Art,” other posts on the subject on Rick On Theater are: “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist” by Kirk Woodward (8 January 2011); “Lady Gaga: Artist For Our Time” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2011); “Penny Arcade: Two Performances” (15 November 2013); “Lady Gaga and Once” by Kirk Woodward (5 May 2014); "‘The Second Life of Performance’" by Katie Kitamura from T: The New York Times Style Magazine (10 January 2016)]

Marina Abramovic, still a performance artist at 77, talks about her desires to keep going.

Marina Abramovic stood and faced the ocean on Fire Island.

[Fire Island is the center islet of the barrier islands parallel to the South Shore (the Atlantic shore) of Long Island (though the name sometimes refers to all four of the small islands). It’s 32 miles long and ½ mile across at its widest point (9½ square miles in area) and lies off New York’s Suffolk County, the easternmost county on Long Island (and location of The Hamptons, the collection of villages—67 miles and 2 hours east of Fire Island—that are weekend and vacation homes to the arty and wealthy of New York City).

[Fire Island is a 2½-hour drive from New York City (though no cars are allowed on the island itself; one must park and take a ferry) and is a popular summer resort for New Yorkers, with an active LGBTQ community for which Fire Island is well known. There are fewer than 300 year-round residents and the population swells to 14,840 at the peak season. Many celebrities, from the entertainment world and other fields, have homes on Fire Island.]

For a long minute, her arms rose symmetrically from her sides until her body formed a T shape. Her long red dress was stark against the waves. Her palms faced forward.

Ms. Abramovic’s face was not visible, but it was conceivable that she was screaming. The performance artist once screamed for three hours, until she couldn’t anymore (“Freeing the Voice,” 1976 [Budapest]); once yelled into her lover’s reciprocating mouth for 15 minutes (“AAA-AAA,” 1978 [Amsterdam]); once persuaded hundreds of people in an Oslo park to shriek in homage to Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” ([Ekeberg Park, Oslo; 15-25 August] 2013).

[The iconic composition The Scream (Skrik in Norwegian) by Munch (Norwegian, 1863-1944) exists in several versions.  The first painted rendering was made in 1893 and is in the National Museum of Norway in Oslo. A pastel version, also from 1893, is in Oslo’s Munch Museum. The second pastel version, from 1895, was sold in 2012 to a private collector. The second painted version dates from 1910 and is also in the Munch Museum. Munch also created a lithograph stone of The Scream in 1895 and made about four dozen prints, several of which survive.]

Perhaps now she was expressing rage at humanity’s spoiling of the planet — the rising seas turned into garbage patches. Years ago, she said, after a deadly tsunami in Southeast Asia [the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, known as the Boxing Day Tsunami, that killed an estimated 225-230,000 people], she whipped the ocean 360 times, wanting to punish it [God Punishing (2005) in Phuket, Thailand, whipping the sea with hundreds of performers and reading poems at the first anniversary for those lost in the tsunami].

But no, Ms. Abramovic was not screaming at the ocean. At 77, she was trying to give it positive energy and “unconditional love as a way to heal,” she said in her artist’s statement for “Performance for the Oceans.” The new piece [May 2024] — an edition of three photographs to be auctioned in October by Christie’s in London [Frieze Art Fair, 9-13 October 2024)] — was made for the conservation charity Blue Marine Foundation.

Ms. Abramovic has long explored endurance and extremes, whether by sitting in the Museum of Modern Art for upward of 700 hours [The Artist Is Present, 14 March-31 May 2010] or walking across the Great Wall of China [The Lovers – The Great Wall Walk, 30 March-3 June 1988]. (Or, more recently, leading seven minutes of silence at a rowdy music festival [Seven Minutes of Collective Silence, Glastonbury Festival, near Pilton, Somerset, England, 24 June 2024].)

This year, she took the idea of endurance a step further. With an Austrian herbalist, Nonna Brenner, she introduced a line of products called the Marina Abramovic Longevity Method. They are tinctures made with vitamins and natural ingredients, like garlic and cranberry juice, to boost energy or support the immune system. (The instructions: “Take 50-60 drops two times a day — with food and water.” [This parenthetical insert from the online version is not part of the print edition.])

Immediately, some questioned whether the line, which promises “inside-out beauty,” was performance art. It was not. Ms. Abramovic, who survived a health emergency last year [see below, re: “pulmonary embolism”] — and who said she had worked with Dr. Brenner to treat her Lyme disease, including with leeches — wants to stay on this planet as long as possible, trash-filled oceans and all. “I’m not going anywhere until I’m 103,” she said.

“In American culture, when you’re old, it’s like you’re dirty, like something’s wrong with you,” said the artist, who was born in what was then Yugoslavia. “In Balkan culture, being old is actually great.”

This was the first thing Ms. Abramovic told me on a video call in June, while in Greece. We were supposed to talk about the ocean. We spoke more about the will to live. (They’re connected.) This conversation has been edited.

On Longevity

You say Americans are obsessed with staying young and living forever, but you’re also interested in living past 100. What’s the difference?

Every wrinkle is a threat in American culture. My idea with aging is to embrace the limits of the body. That you wake up in the morning, that you have pain, that you have arthritis, that you’re not flexible like you were before. Enjoying the limits and seeing how you can accept your body as it is. That’s the difference. Americans don’t accept their bodies as they are.

Personally, I’m a little afraid of living to 100. I don’t know what the planet is going to look like. You’re running toward it.

I really want to see aliens, finally, in my lifetime. Some years ago, I asked Richard Branson [English business magnate, founder of spaceflight corporation Virgin Galactic; b. 1950] if he could give me a one-way ticket to go up and not come back. I want to see what is behind all this. I want to see black holes. Who made the cosmos? I have the curiosity of a kid of 5 years old.

By the way, I think here’s how I’m going to look at 120: My nose is very big and my chin is glued together, and I will have one big hair growing out.

Humor about yourself is so important. We have to have a few jokes about this hell we’re living in.

Well, when your Longevity Method was announced, some people weren’t sure if it was serious.

I am completely smashed by the press. This is not new for me. If I read and took seriously people’s writing, I would not leave home.

I’ve worked with the body all my life. But first of all, I’m not the doctor. I’m just giving my name to Dr. Brenner in order to promote the product. Nobody knows about her. Everybody knows about me.

The products are drops for energy, allergies and the immune system. We are allergic to everything these days because of the way we’re eating food and how pollution is in the air. If you stabilize your immune system, and you don’t have allergies, and you have drops of energy, you’re doing fine. Nothing crazier than that.

You do seem healthy.

Every day I’m eating branzino, a grilled fish, with steamed vegetables. Nothing else. I don’t have dinner. I have a light breakfast, and then I eat around 2 o’clock. When you get older, you don’t need to eat so much because you’re not running around like crazy.

What keeps you up at night?

The news is always bad — every morning, one horror after another. Why are humans historically constantly at war? Why do we have violence? How is it possible that we never learned lessons? How is it possible we never learned simple things to forgive each other?

I think we need good news. In the Second World War, when everybody was painting the atrocity of the war, [Henri] Matisse [French Post-Impressionist artist; 1869-1954], for four years of the war, was only painting flowers. That’s what we need.

So you’re an optimist?

I always see the positive side. And mostly I’m right. Like, every breakup will look terrible in the moment. Actually, years later, you’re so lucky this person is not in your life.

Every day is a miracle. I wake up quite happy every morning. Not always — my life was really difficult. I’m only getting happy lately.

What makes you so happy lately?

That I’m alive. I am a little bit worried that I will not have enough time to do whatever I am interested in doing. I’m doing a big thing in Manchester [England] next year [Manchester International Festival, 1-31 July 2025]. It’s such a crazy project, I’ll just tell you the title: “Balkan Erotic Epic.” In Balkan culture, genitals were used in rituals to connect to the spirits and the gods.

It’s going to be such a scandal. Britain is so puritan. I can’t wait.

Are you going to appear naked?

I don’t know yet. When you have the naked body and you present it to the public, it’s not me anymore. If I’m fat, or with cellulite, or with sagging tits, who cares? I’m presenting a concept in that body.

Ask me something that you never asked anybody else before.

Since we’ve been talking about longevity, have you ever not wanted to be alive?

No. I always want to be alive. I had a very bad heartbreak [the break-up with Ulay in 1988]. It was the saddest thing in my life. But I was just crying. That’s it. And one day I woke up and I didn’t cry anymore.

On ‘A Good Death’

A few weeks later, Ms. Abramovic agreed to continue the conversation at her apartment in Manhattan. She showed me footage from the “7 Deaths of Maria Callas,” an opera she conceived that includes several video clips of Ms. Abramovic, with Willem Dafoe [stage and film actor; b. 1955] as her co-star, dying various painful deaths. [7 Deaths débuted on 27 July 2021 at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera (Bayerische Staatsoper).]

She showed me photos taken last year in a hospital, where she was treated for a life-threatening pulmonary embolism [May 2023]: images of the blood clots removed from her body during surgery and of her first time walking again after being in a coma. (For when she needs it, there is still a cane in her entryway, next to a framed photograph of the German dancer Pina Bausch. [See note with above parenthetical comment.])

After her discharge, she couldn’t travel by airplane for some time. So she took a boat to Europe, developing a new appreciation for the scale of the ocean. “What’s your Plan B, by the way?” she asked, referring to the day disaster strikes New York and its citizens need to flee. (Her plan is Australia; she has a permanent visa.)

When I arrived at the apartment, a 27-year-old performance artist mentored by Ms. Abramovic was just leaving. The artist, Miles Greenberg [Canadian performance artist and sculptor; b. 1997], asked if he could bring her back any gifts from his summer travels. She requested a “supernatural story.” She is interested in the mysticism — like crystals and numerology — and in 2016 won several bets with friends after her horoscope reader predicted that Donald J. Trump would win the election. (The horoscope reader said he would lose in 2024.)

After Mr. Greenberg left, she explained that she met him when he was 17.

“I don’t have any contact with anyone in my generation,” Ms. Abramovic said. “They’re so boring and depressed.”

So you don’t have any friends your age?

No. The oldest ones are 55 or 60. But not 77. They’re half-dead, they’re always complaining, they’re always sick.

What do you do for fun?

I always try to see life through a child’s eyes. I don’t take drugs, and I don’t drink. I love chocolate. But I don’t need to drink to be funny. I think I’m hilarious. I think I should do stand-up comedy.

Did your perspective on life change with your health scare last year?

Yes, oh my God. I have no reason to be depressed. I spent too much time on my broken heart. What a waste.

One of the reasons that I think survived was everything that I learned through performance about pain, about endurance. Last year was the most physical pain I had in my entire life. I could not move, for six weeks, my little finger. The other physical pain I could control. This was something uncontrollable. You can’t control death.

I read that you planned your own funeral many years ago [Keynote Address, 30 June 2015; Marina Abramović: In Residence, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney, Australia, 24 June-5 July 2015].

After Susan Sontag’s funeral, I was so discouraged. I want a big celebration. Nobody wears black, only bright colors. I had a crazy life, and I want to have a good death.

[Writer, critic, and public intellectual Sontag (b. 1933) died in New York on 28 December 2004, but according to her wishes, she was buried in Paris.  Her funeral was in Montmartre on 17 January 2005.]

Do you think you’re fixated on death?

No! I just wanted to stop being afraid of it.

[Jessica Testa is a New York Times reporter covering the worlds of style and fashion.]

"The Second Life of Performance"

by Katie Kitamura

[Once left behind by the competitive market, live art is now everywhere—thanks in large part to its staunchest advocate, RoseLee Goldberg.  In November 2013, I posted a two-part article on ROT on the history of performance art (followed by an archival review of some of the work of performance artist Penny Arcade).  I little less than a year later, Katie Kitamura, a critic and novelist, published this article under “Art Matters” in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 15 June 2014.  It looks like a good continuation of the history post I published on 7 and 10 November 2013.]

I was standing in Marian Goodman Gallery’s booth at the Frieze Art Fair last year when a young girl in jeans and a T-shirt asked me whether I’d rather feel too busy or not busy enough. Nonplused, I said that on the whole, I’d rather be too busy, and she asked me why. I said that I didn’t know, maybe because it made me feel important. She considered this for a moment, then recited a passage by Heidegger.

By then, I knew that this – the girl, my nervous response, the entire situation – was part of a performance by the British-German artist Tino Sehgal. I asked her to repeat the Heidegger quote, as it was a lot to take in. This caused some tittering among the growing crowd, which felt a bit mean-spirited (she was a real child, after all). But the girl complied with my request, then turned and glided away. A moment later, she was replaced by another girl, who approached a different adult and asked him whether he’d rather feel too busy or not busy enough. When I left, there was already a line to the booth. By the end of the day, it snaked around the corner.

Historically the most anti-commercial of art forms, performance is now a fixture at art fairs, the organizers of which have found that live art adds a sense of occasion to the experience of shopping in a hangar. For Art Basel this month, Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist have invited Marina Abramovic, Damien Hirst, Yoko Ono, Sehgal and others to “activate a room” for an exhibition of artworks whose ” ‘material’ is the human being.” Elsewhere, live artists are being picked for prizes – Tris Vonna-Michell, who specializes in monologues and presentations, is one of the four Turner Prize nominees this year – and structures are being erected to accommodate the form. The Tanks at Tate Modern are cavernous spaces, and the new building for the Whitney Museum of American Art, opening next year in New York’s meatpacking district, will house a theater. Most symbolic, perhaps, is MoMA’s controversial expansion plan to replace the Folk Art Museum with a building designed by Diller Scofidio & Renfro, which includes a proposed ground-floor “art bay” for performances.

“Is performance back again?” asked RoseLee Goldberg, the author of what remains the definitive tome on the form, “Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present,” first published in 1979. We were sitting in the study of Goldberg’s Manhattan home, the walls lined with artists’ monographs, where she lives with her husband, the furniture designer Dakota Jackson. “Well, it never really went away.” Goldberg, who grew up in South Africa and came to New York in 1975 by way of the Courtauld Institute in London, has arguably contributed more to the revival of performance art than any other individual. As the curator of the New York experimental performance art venue the Kitchen during the late 1970s, she was in the thick of the scene, hosting artists such as Laurie Anderson, Sherrie Levine and Robert Longo, with whom she would debate the meaning of art in relation to popular culture, punk music and film, before heading to music venues such as CBGB or the Mudd Club. Ten years ago, she founded Performa, a New York biennial for live art that has influenced the practices of curators and museums worldwide.

According to Goldberg, live art is critical to any deep understanding of art history but has spent centuries “hiding in plain sight,” going by other names. (To her mind Leonardo Da Vinci, Jackson Pollock and Cindy Sherman are all performance artists of one kind or another.) By most accounts, however, performance art, which has its origins in Futurism and Dada in the early 20th century, was first recognized as the most radical of art forms in the 1960s and 1970s, with the bold, confrontational performances of artists such as Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys and Carolee Scheemann. Ridding themselves of “the art object,” the artifact that was bought and sold in the gallery, these artists bled, masturbated, got naked, danced and shouted their way through a series of actions that were politically charged and defiantly ephemeral. Goldberg, who wants to steer the conversation away from the enduring stereotypes of early performance, prefers to focus on the medium as the “avant avant-garde,” a form through which artists have always broken barriers between “high” and “low,” tried out new technologies and pushed political boundaries.

Performance art’s best evangelist, Goldberg feels that live art has a new relevance to our culture, being well-matched to the anecdote-seeking Twitter generation, and offering the promise of intimate contact, an antidote to our atomized lives and fragmented concentration spans. “In this multitasking, multimedia world, performance allows for a lot of layering of ideas,” Goldberg said, referring to performances that incorporate various media, such as “True Love Is Yet to Come” by the artist Jesper Just, in which an older actor performed alongside a hologram of a younger man. “That’s why I believe performance is going to be so huge in the coming decades.” Live installations such as Abramovic’s at MoMA or Sehgal’s at the Guggenheim have already fundamentally changed art institutions. “In the old days,” Goldberg said, “you would go to a museum and drop your voice and speak like you were in a library.” Today, large open spaces encourage congregation and participation.

But when Goldberg founded the festival in 2004, the medium was in a rut. “It was repeating itself,” she said. “Performance was starting to feel quaint.” The New York art scene had become depoliticized and overly preoccupied with the market; commercial galleries were reluctant to invest in art that couldn’t easily be sold, for which often the only proof of purchase was a catalogue or grainy video. Performance art seemed an awkward relic of the ’70s, the easy butt of jokes. (“How many performance artists does it take to screw in a light bulb?” Lynne Tillman writes in her novel “No Lease on Life.” The answer: “I don’t know. I left early.”)

Goldberg is a slender, charismatic woman, who has, she told me, excised the words “challenge” and “failure” from her vocabulary – evidence of the kind of steely optimism necessary to starting a “world-class biennial from scratch, with no money, in six months.” One of her triumphs has been to show museums how to turn the impracticality of live art – its risk and unpredictability, its impermanence, even its unwieldy expense – into a selling point. Every other November, Performa has sent art folk scurrying across Manhattan to attend events as diverse as a hula-hooping session on the rooftops of Chinatown (Christian Jankowski), a reenactment of dance clips gleaned from YouTube (Ryan McNamara) or a reading of a Pirandello play by Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman (Francesco Vezzoli). After Performa, performance art was suddenly unmissable, precisely because it was so easy to miss. As Holland Cotter put it, the festival was “a paean to you-had-to-be-there.”

Performa has restaged historical performances – such as Allan Kaprow’s “18 Happenings in 6 Parts” (1959) – and brought existing ones to New York, but Goldberg’s canniest move has been to commission new works herself – ambitious, edgy, big-budget (they are mostly funded by foundations and private donors). She wants to create what she calls “museum-worthy” work, and her attention to the most old-fashioned of artistic tenets, beauty, has produced a series of lush, visually intense commissions by artists such as Elmgreen & Dragset, Florian Hecker and Isaac Julien, many of which have been shown in museums. “I can only describe it as desire,” she said about her approach to commissioning. “It’s a feeling of – please, make this happen for me, because I want to be knocked out.”

Nowadays, “performance artists” are less common than “artists who work in performance,” a distinction that means new blood is constantly being pumped into the form, the parameters of which have expanded to include multimedia, lectures and social interactions (known in art-speak as “relational aesthetics,” of which Sehgal’s work is an example). But live art’s sudden popularity comes with its own growing pains. In a promotional video for the proposed Marina Abramovic Institute in upstate New York, Lady Gaga can be seen practicing the “Abramovic Method,” prancing nude through the woods and reclining on a bed of crystals. Last year, Jay Z released a music video, “Picasso Baby: a Performance Art Film,” inspired by Abramovic’s MoMA performance “The Artist Is Present.” Featuring art-world notables such as George Condo, Lawrence Weiner and the Performa alums Wangechi Mutu, Rashid Johnson, Abramovic and Goldberg, in addition to members of the “Girls” cast, Judd Apatow, Jenna Lyons and Jim Jarmusch, the video begins with Jay Z declaring, “Concerts are pretty much performance art with the venues changed” – a position the more political artists who started out in the 1970s would seem unlikely to share. The video caused one critic to call it “the day performance art died,” but Goldberg is sanguine about such developments, believing that Jay Z made an interesting statement about the form as it “steps over into the commercial world,” while not claiming to be a performance artist himself. As for her, she will always occupy “a quieter space.”

As Tino Sehgal’s performers asked visitors to the Guggenheim in 2010, “What is progress?” Goldberg speaks of the need to keep asking questions – about how to nurture, preserve, collect, exhibit and critique the most transient of art forms. Such issues might sound academic but, as performance goes mainstream, it will need voices like Goldberg’s more than ever. As I learned in 2011, the best works are rarely those that translate well into language (or a press release). “Bliss,” a performance by the rising Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, had a simple premise: A troupe of singers and musicians perform the concluding minutes of the final aria in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” again and again – for 12 hours. It was a work whose delirious effect I did not expect when I sat down, and which I would not have understood had I not stayed in that room for much longer than planned. The performance was in the middle of the day, and it was across town, and, if I had gone by description alone, I would almost certainly have said that I was too busy.

[Katie Kitamura has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, Granta, Triple Canopy, Frieze.  A recipient of a 2015 Lannan Residency Fellowship, she’s the author of The Longshot (Free Press, 2009) and Gone to the Forest (Free Press, 2012), both of which were finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.]

Lady Gaga and 'Once'

by Kirk Woodward

[Once again, my friend Kirk chimes in with an interesting contribution to ROT, this time covering two topics in tandem.  He saw the Broadway production of Once on a recent evening and also a performance by Lady Gaga, one of her concerts for the closing of the Roseland Ballroom in midtown Manhattan.  Kirk wrote on this blog about Lady Gaga before, in “Lady Gaga: Artist for Our Time,” 1 November 2011, though this is the first he’s seen her perform live.] 

I lived in New York City through most of the 1970s; then I moved to New Jersey, and since then it’s an event for me when I’m in Manhattan at night. I tend to forget what a marvelous place it is once the sun has gone down. The lights, the varied range of people, the availability of something different to do on every block . . . . It’s an exciting city, almost a living state of mind.

It wasn’t always that way, of course. Someone asked me the other day if it was the same when I lived there, and of course it wasn’t at all. When my friend asked me the question, we were walking down Ninth Avenue in the evening. In the 1970s I wouldn’t have done that on a bet. I also wouldn’t have done it without the company of a squad of police. Things have changed, though. The rents plummet; the artists move in; everyone else moves in; the rents go up. It’s the Great Circle of (City) Life.

I happened to be in the city several nights in a row during the first week of April of this year, and had two real New York experiences: I went to the noisiest event of my time in the city, and the quietest.

The quietest was the last fifteen minutes or so of the musical Once, currently playing at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. Once opened on Broadway on March 18, 2012, so it’s been running a little over two years. It received eleven Tony Award nominations, and won eight of them, including the award for Best Musical.

The reviews were also excellent. Ben Brantley of the New York Times reviewed the show when it first opened at the New York Theater Workshop in 2011, and seemed to be focused more on the movie of the same name (2006) that the musical was based on, adding somewhat sarcastically that the musical was “steeped in wise and folksy observations about committing to love and taking chances.”

When Once opened on Broadway, however, Brantley wrote that “what is essentially the same production feels as vital and surprising as the early spring that has crept up on Manhattan” – an observation that strikes me as wise and folksy. Anyway, he liked it.

I didn't know a thing about Once when I went to the theater to see it, except that I'd read it was a “bittersweet love story.” That's correct, if limited. It's set in Dublin and is about an Irish singer-songwriter who's having no success at all – basically singing in pubs and on the street, when he can – and a Czech immigrant girl who sees potential in him, connects him with a record producer, and eventually sends him off to the United States to rekindle an earlier relationship and presumably to make his fortune.

It's a musical in which the songs are all “performed” as part of the story – nobody exactly just bursts into song; instead they sing for plot reasons. It has a small cast, just the two leads and eleven others who both play instruments and sing, and also play roles in the story. Cristin Milioti and Steve Kazee originated the roles of the Girl and Guy, the leads; the current leads are Joanna Christie and Paul Alexander Nolan, both wonderful.

The songs, some from the movie and some composed for the show (both written by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová), are Irish flavored and infectious. There’s a unit set, a half-circle Irish bar that makes you wish it were just around the corner from where you live, and the show invites you to come onstage before the performance or during intermission and have a drink. It seems like a natural thing to do.

So what was the incredibly quiet experience? Most Broadway musical hits are noisy, and they progress over the course of the evening to really noisy. This show went the opposite way. A great deal of it is boisterous, but it also provides a number of moments of simple human responses that are striking, like the slowly dawning realization on the face of the owner of the bar (played by Paul Whitty) that, despite his fantasies, he’s never been the one for the Girl and never will be. It’s a sad, sweet, true moment of the kind you don’t necessarily expect to experience in a Tony winning musical hit.

And at the end of the play, as the characters began to go their separate ways, you can hear a pin drop in the auditorium. The truthfulness and believability of the story wins the audience over completely, and it’s almost as though the spectators are afraid to interrupt the mood, not for themselves but for the characters’ sakes.

That’s my “quiet” experience – in a place I would not have expected it. And the noisy one? I went to the Roseland Ballroom, the famous dance hall on 52nd Street in Manhattan, to see one of my favorite performers in person for the first time.

The current Roseland is the second one; the first was a block south, built in 1919 and torn down in 1956, after hosting a spectrum of events like marathon dancing, weddings, and appearances by (among others) the orchestras of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Chick Webb, often nationally broadcast on radio.

The new hall was originally an ice skating rink, then a roller rink, then a ballroom, then a disco, and it has struggled to survive as entertainment fashions have changed. Now it’s slated to be torn down and replaced by luxury apartments (illustrating the Great Circle of City Life again). To close the hall in style, the redoubtable Lady Gaga (née Stefani Germanotta) was brought in for seven concerts between March 28 and April 7, 2014.

Roseland is, or was, depending on when you read this (I’ll stay in the present tense), a big rectangular room, mostly painted black, with a balcony running around a main floor that can hold 3,500 people standing if there’s nothing else on it. For Gaga’s shows a stage was erected at one end, with a huge red curtain in front.

All seven of her shows there sold out, and she also took an audience from the David Letterman show over and did some numbers for them one afternoon. Letterman’s studio is right across the street from Roseland, the old Ed Sullivan Theater where the Beatles made their famous TV appearances on his show. New York!

The audience for Lady Gaga’s concert, the night I was there, seemed to me to be mostly people in their twenties and thirties. There were some Gaga look-alikes, both men and women, and the mood was festive and noisy. It was a standing event – no seats, except a few on the balcony.

Standing events can be tough on the feet, and on the spirit. If the room is crowded, you can’t move; getting another drink or going to the bathroom is practically warfare. Two times people asked me to back up and give them more room, but I couldn’t. Once a couple of belligerent guys pushed and shoved their way through the crowd; that was irritating, but it did reduce the tedium of waiting.

I arrived around 7:30 PM for an 8:00 PM show, which cut down the potential standing time some; a few years ago I stood for two hours before a similar concert by Bob Dylan (not at Roseland), which I wrote about on this blog. I had a good view then, but an equally good view this time; I ended up the equivalent of about eight rows from the stage, and I managed to maneuver to one side of the really tall guy in front of me.

The opening act, from about 8 to 8:30, was Lady Starlight (née Colleen Martin), an old pal of Gaga’s from the days when they did a sort of stripper-vaudeville-performance art act together in the East Village area of Manhattan. It’s lovely of Gaga to give work to her friend and mentor (Starlight is older than Gaga), but – well, here’s what Starlight did: she stood at the console of a Roland sound machine, programmed beats and sounds that blasted at volumes so high they literally shook the room, and bopped along to the bone-crushing vibrations with a sort of idiotic grin. For half an hour.

Performance art is structurally a kind of practical joke. I suppose I wasn’t in the mood, because Lady Starlight’s act drove me almost out of my mind. First I tried to endure it. Then I hated it. Then I bitterly regretted the time I’d lost and would never get back again. Then I wanted to shoot her – no one would have heard the gun. A very New York scene, I thought.

She stopped finally, ending – incidentally – that “noisiest experience” that I referred to earlier. (Gaga’s volume was nothing compared to Starlight’s.) Then followed an idle half hour of standing around, then the huge red curtain dropped to the ground and was carried off and Lady Gaga appeared, on a sort of perch above the stage, posing and playing a slow, expanded version of her song “Born This Way.”

She wore a huge, messy blonde wig that made her look a little like Dolly Parton peering out of the mouth of a lion. She talked, when she spoke to the audience, which was often, in a sort of baby-talk Marilyn Monroe voice that she adopted for the whole show (her natural speaking voice is exactly like that of Fran Drescher of The Nanny). When she came down onto the stage floor, she began with a couple of Madonna-like numbers with dancers, at high (though not the highest!) volume.

So I found myself wondering: If I didn’t know who she was, would I even think she was any good? Then about four numbers in, I realized I was dancing and grinning from ear to ear, and it occurred to me that I was having a wonderful time. Gaga is an extraordinary singer, with a big sound, big range, and the ability to change from mood to mood at will, turning on a dime. (In the lower registers she sounds something like Bette Midler, who can do the same thing.) Her keyboard playing – there was a lot of it – is also excellent. (She’s a classically trained pianist.)

And she’s endearing, even in her fairly frequent bouts of self-admiration. Part of the reason is that she’s really not a typical star type at all. She’s short and kind of fireplug built, and not particularly pretty in a conventional sense, except that her face is mobile and she can make it look like nearly anything she wants. She’s also not a great dancer – but really, does she have to do everything as well as it can be done? She works hard to move well (and she had major hip surgery just over a year ago).

But she really, really relates to her audience, who ate it up. And she works hard, uses everything she has, has ideas for everything (whether they work or not), and in general packs about a dozen shows into one. At one point she climbed on a ladder onto the balcony, and back down again, backwards, while singing at full volume. I wouldn’t try that, particularly in a show, under any circumstances, and she was wearing heels. She wasn’t particularly graceful doing it, but I thought the moment perfectly expressed her determination to make everything she does into something more than a little special. 

She played both familiar and new songs, approaching her hits in creative ways and demonstrating again, if it needs proving, her superior musicianship. (I actually heard somebody say afterwards, “She sang well, but she didn’t do her best-known songs.” I have no idea what that person heard – half the show was made up of hits.)

My favorite moment in the concert: Gaga was performing at a little set that looked like a subway car, built on the main balcony, singing and playing the keyboard while surrounded by audience members standing practically on top of her. She was in the middle of a fine slow version of her song “You and I,” very soulful, just piano and vocal, when all of a sudden she stopped and said to somebody nearby, “Are you taking a selfie? . . . Selfies are taking over the world!” Then she returned to the song. A charming moment.

And here’s what I thought was the most revealing and truthful moment of the concert: at the end of the show, she staged her curtain call like the show was a play. She and the dancers lined up, held hands, and as they say in the theater, “took the bow off her” – bowed when she bowed. Then the dancers moved upstage, the musicians came down to the front, formed the same kind of line with her and held hands, and bowed. Just like it was the end of a Broadway show . . . .

And it was a show in more than one sense, because Gaga is at heart a performance artist, like Lady Starlight except not unendurable. Her show is an act – except the act is her. This is complicated, aesthetically speaking – I thought of the lines from the Beatles song “Penny Lane”:

Though she feels as if she’s in a play

She is anyway.

But because Gaga is so talented and shares so much of herself, it’s a delight. I had a ball (at Roseland Ballroom!), tired feet and all. I would do it again, even if I had to stand. It was that much fun.

[Kirk observes that Lady Gaga is a performance artist, so ROT-readers may recall that I posted an article on this blog about the history and structures of performance art in . . . well, “Performance Art,” 7 and 10 November 2013.]