Matthew Rose shares thoughts about performance art, upon reading Marina Abramović’s memoir, “Walk Through Walls.” He reflects on the history of the art form, looking at Marcel Duchamp’s Rrose Selavy, Yves Klein’s “Leap into the Void,” and in the 1970s, Chris Burden’s “Shoot.” Abramović’s endurance performances focus on provocation and trust and, he says, over time they betoken the artist’s persistence as a performer in the public realm.
Read MoreFjord’s gallery is brimming with Freedman’s assorted colorful papier mâché and found object sculptures that exist in constant dialogue with his ideas, stories, and sketches; they are the physical manifestations of his ceaseless cerebral exercises.
Read MoreEntitled The Artist Need Not Suffer, the exhibition quickly forces you to wonder how tongue-in-cheek the title is. Paternoster’s work is an unsaturated foray into anxiety, self-doubt, introspection, and dissatisfaction with the human condition… all of which seems suspicious considering the title.
Read MoreI lost track of time as Cassils (who prefers the pronoun “they”) attacked the clay in a frenzy of finely choreographed violence. A single photographer circled the performer, the brilliant strobe lights of camera flashes sporadically illuminating Cassils, a small but impressively muscular figure.
Read MoreGary Johnson is the performance artist candidate we’ve been waiting for. Or, more specifically, he sometimes utilizes performance to communicate his ideas. Often, it is read as “class-clown” humor (which is a fair observation) but there is a part of me that respects his acknowledgment of non-traditional forms of communication. Unfortunately for Johnson, however, when you are running for president these performances are only effective when they articulate a nuanced understanding of complex issues rather than deflect or derail the conversation at hand.
Read MoreOverall, Gilli’s performance articulated a complexity that was welcome and it did so within a project space that promises more interesting interventions. What was distinctive about the performance was its staging of the artist’s thought process in a moment of its development.
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