All day, every day, from the middle of March through the end of May, performance artist Marina Abramovic sat at the Museum of Modern Art in her performance piece, The Artist is Present. This appearance was Abramovic’s contribution to the eponymous MoMA retrospective running in the gallery space four flights above. Clothed in a full-length gown, her brown hair braided to one side, she sat in a wooden straight-back chair in a demarcated performance space within the museum’s Marron Atrium and allowed museum-goers, one at a time, to sit opposite her for as long as they chose. One sitter, philosopher, art critic, and contributor to the exhibition catalogue, Arthur Danto, described his participation. After taking his place and contacting her with a shy wave, artist and audience-participant reached a kind of communion, which he described in the New York Times:
The 63-year-old Abramovic emerged from Eastern Europe’s art scene in the early 1970s, one of many “ordeal art” performance artists who became famous for taking ideas of the body as performance subject and art object (or vice versa) to an extreme. In Rhythm 10, Abramovic spread her hand palm-down on the floor and rapidly jabbed a knife between (and occasionally into) her fingers. In the followup Rhythm 0 she stood passively in a gallery surrounded by objects, including a loaded gun, a rose, a bunch of grapes, and a knife and invited onlookers to do whatever they wanted to her. “I use my body for an experiment,” she told one audience in 1974 before taking pills that sent her into convulsions.
This time, despite one participant’s attempt to vomit on her, Abramovic was hardly in danger. On the contrary, the MoMA under director Glenn Lowry is moving in the direction of “interactive” exhibits—Yoko Ono’s Voice Piece for Soprano was in the atrium this past July—as part of a broader curatorial effort to create a repertory of the performance art movement of the 1970s and ’80s. Many of Abramovic’s former colleagues do not agree with this attempt at re-creation: Their performances were meant to happen once, and once only. But art goes on. What began in New York as a playful (and naïve) art-for-art’s-sake movement has become, thanks in part to political controversy, canon. With this show, a new biography, and an appearance at the Whitney, Abramovic is the movement’s reigning queen.
The “danger” Abramovic has sought for her creative work is this state of emotional exhaustion and physical pain: It might yield personal fulfillment, but it does not create theater. Sitting all day in the MoMA—no food, no potty breaks—was, no doubt, exhausting; but there is remarkably little artistry in The Artist is Present. It’s pure manipulation in a room full of people watching one person watch an art star. This is the kind of work for which the German term ein Stück is apt: a kind of secular David Blaine magic act, an artful semi-retirement. And yet, regardless of its fatuousness, performance art can be enjoyed as live action, as metaphysical riddle: Was it Abramovic’s physical suffering that made this performance art and not celebrity worship? Is the suffering an act? Is the audience complicit?
These are the kinds of questions that keep university art and theater departments in business. And the university is the place where the young avant-garde is reared. If, as Danto has written, the end (or the limit) of art is philosophy, the limit of dance is history. Art is concept; dance is action. And at the beginning of the 21st century we see dances about dances about dances. This exaggerated determination can have the ironic effect of removing the dance movement from the dance. As dance has become more experimental, performance art has moved into more formalized settings. The two disciplines have created an uncomfortable overlap, and it’s hard to know who’s doing what—especially from the funding, presenting, and reviewing perspectives.
The dance artist Faye Driscoll is one inheritor of this messy legacy. A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and one of Dance magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2008, Driscoll has been quietly building a reputation as a serious artist. Her latest full length show, There is so much mad in me, appeared last spring at Dance Theater Workshop, New York’s premiere contemporary dance venue. DTW presented There is so much mad in me in a return engagement late last month, and with that show, Driscoll proved her creative voice is reaching maturity, and that she might be the only dance artist attuned to contemporary anxieties of intimacy, and the ironies of a society that “overshares.” Driscoll’s work explores the limits of empathy in our post-9/11, digitized world through a lens of hyper-emotional physicality. Oscillating between verbal and non-verbal communication, her dancers are always on the edge, insecure, needy, overconfident.
This, in performance-speak, is a post-evolutionary vision; but the world (and it is a world) of There is so much mad in me is Darwinist from the start. Nine dancers in colorful street clothes enter the empty, white performance space following an overture of birdsong designed by sound engineer Brandon Wolcott. Biologists think birdsong, like human speech, is an arrangement of consonants and vowels; dance is an arrangement of step sequences. When the overture ends, the dancers have formed a circle around dancer Nikki Zialcita. They’re looking at her, and she’s staring down the audience. She hunches and growls at two men, one of whom is cradling the other and pulling an imaginary hook through his cheek.
This encounter sets the tone for the 75-minute work, the movement of which will strike a ballet or traditional modern dance audience as undisciplined. But again, dance is action. The action in There is so much mad in me is a development of Driscoll’s previous work, particularly her autobiographical 837 Venice Blvd. This show is decidedly darker. In its opening duet Zialcita, one of New York’s most compelling performers, wiggles, giggles, and shimmies towards the audience while Michael Helland holds her arms behind her back. It’s hard to know whether he is hurting her, or trying to hurt her, as the duet becomes more intense. But she seems to enjoy it and laughs giddily. When he starts swinging her upside down, and she tries to keep her skirt from falling down, Helland remains impassive while controlling her. Zialcita body-slams him, NFL-style, to get a reaction; but that doesn’t work. She slaps her body, first at Helland, then for its own sake. The rest of the group, attracted by the commotion, comes onstage to watch. They cheer her on with real enthusiasm and, when she stops, congratulate her with a box of chocolates and bouquet of flowers.
If this sounds like reality television, that’s because it is. To create this work Driscoll gave the performers images which they, in turn, used to conjure emotions. It’s a process of “researching through the body,” in the words of dancer Jacob Slominski, to generate movement. Images drive the work, but they are as fluid and graphic as their meanings are personal: A prisoner turns into a dog into a burlesque performer, a fight turns into a church social into a rave. The group starts in a motionless circle but finishes in a marching phalanx.
These microshifts are made possible by Driscoll’s strong direction and structural design. Trios, duos, a false ending, singing, blackouts, and kitsch each has its proper place. Driscoll also samples television. When Adaku Utah, clad in red denim and a Mohawk hairdo, steps onto a riser, her fist raised overhead, she’s a Black Power figure and demagogue of materialism. Riffing on talk show hosts, she declares that no one in the audience is taking this seriously enough—and we’ve all won new cars! (The fourth wall is breached expertly by lighting designer Amanda K. Ringger.) The dancers, who have become an audience, rush the stage, screaming. Later they re-create a famous/notorious episode of the Tyra Banks talk show (“Five Women, Ten Vaginas”) with a gay twist, ending in a brawl.
This is important: If dance is becoming history, it is manifestly a history of sex. The sensibility that aggression is the most authentic representation of life, love, and art pervades the dance and performance community. From So You Think You Can Dance to elite ballet companies, scenes of domestic violence have replaced the traditional, romantic pas de deux. These duets all vary on the direction to “run together, embrace, punch, run away, repeat.” For this we can thank Twyla Tharp, whose duet “That’s Life” in her seminal Sinatra Suite (1984), which updated the danse apache for the American concert audience, was created for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Elaine Kudo. This power struggle was one piece of Tharp’s statement, and unfortunately it has become an end in itself.
The ballet world is so mired in this misery that many choreographers are turning to traditional narrative ballets to escape it. Several of New York City Ballet’s premieres last spring were throwbacks: Christopher Wheeldon’s Estancia, a fairy tale on a ranch; Melissa Barak’s Call Me Ben, a bio-ballet of the founding of Las Vegas; Alexei Ratmansky’s Namouna: A Grand Divertissement, an abstraction on the theme of classical ballet. George Balanchine insisted that a man and a woman onstage made a story. Today we need man, woman, horses, skyscrapers, goofy costumes, sailors, and bathing caps.
Perhaps the renaissance of performance art corresponds to our anxieties in the age of terrorism. What in Marina Abramovic’s time was defined as a crisis of the body is now a crisis of community, and many are capitalizing on this rage of rage. But Faye Driscoll questions the audience’s complicity in the culture of voyeurism and doesn’t deliver on it. She is the most promising performing artist of her generation.
Natalie Axton writes about dance in New York and blogs at www.howdotheymove.com.
