– Abigail Levine, Editor at Large

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October 30, 2014

Janine Antoni: So, when I was going around offering my studio, I ran into Annie B. Parson at a performance. I didn’t know who she was but learned quickly she was a choreographer. I told her about laying a dance floor in my studio, and she was immediately curious. I naively asked her if she needed a space to rehearse. She called me the next day and said, I want to come over and work on some duet material.

Before her arrival, I made a Power Point on my work seen through the lens of the duet. I talked about the duet with ‘the other,’ the duet with my mother, and the duet with myself. After my presentation she turned to her dancers and said, ‘ok, shall we dance this?’ And I didn’t know what to think. But, of course, knowing Annie B. now, it’s exactly what she would do; she’s pulling her sources from everywhere.

Then Annie B. and I launched into a conversation about our husbands being artists while the dancers went off to create material from my slide lecture.  And then about fifteen minutes later, they had material drawn from everything I showed them. I went for a walk with my husband [the artist Paul Ramirez Jonas] afterwards, and I said, kind of facetiously, this should be my retrospective. I had seen twenty-five years of my work performed in five minutes of dance.

Abigail Levine: This was in what year?

JA: This was in 2010. And he said, ‘that’s a phenomenal idea.’ I said, ‘really?’ I was actually about to apply for the Guggenheim Fellowship and a Creative Capital Grant and this was the idea I had: to find five choreographers and ask them to choose a body of my work as a source from which to make a dance. I would call it a retrospective. It would replace the mid career survey show that is an idea that curators have been presenting to me. Frankly I’m completely terrified of looking backwards in that way. But a dance retrospective would be a way to move forward while looking back. I’d met Jill [Sigman] at a workshop I’d taught in London called Performance Matters. She’s serious, and she’s very interested in sculpture. And I said, let’s make a deal, I’ll teach you what I know about sculpture if you teach me about dance. And she said ok, and she started to do things with me that became a piece. But what she said to me was, I’d be happy to do this with you, if I can do it on you. I had no idea what she was talking about “on me.” Actually, I was really offended by the term.

AL: Welcome to being a dancer.

JA: I know. … I said you can do it with me. Or we can do it together, but what does this on thing mean? That misunderstanding basically generated the whole piece that we ended up doing together. It’s called Wedge. …The thing I should say is that rather than working directly with the content of my work, Jill did a lot of exercises to understand the feeling that I had while making the work. I wasn’t sure exactly what it had to do with the work itself, but that was part of my journey. I tried to remain open to the way she was working even though I didn’t really understand how she was making meaning. It was so different than how I was used to communicating through my work.

AL: Yes, explicit positioning of a work in relation to another is more present in visual art history than dance.

Janine Antoni. Living Set for Like Lazarus Did, performed by the Stephen Petronio Company (Performance documentation) 2013
Helicopter stretcher, polyurethane resin. Dimensions variable.

JA: Also, our relationship to language as makers, and thinking before acting—all of this is different which has been interesting. I think part of the incredible, prolific moment that I’m having has to do with, in fact, letting go of a lot of those preconceptions. Working in dance has allowed me to think in another way. And then there is my experience of improvisation; I feel like it’s not only changed my work, it’s changed my personality.

…So, when Jill said, I’m going to make a piece on you, I said, ok, and I’m going to make a piece on you! We had the pottery wheel next to the dance floor, and I was making the hip bone pots. The wheel is a moving surface, and the forms are made because of the way the material is shaped by the body as the wheel moves. So, why can’t I just apply that to Jill’s moving body? As she danced, I tried to use her body to make something. I did what I always do—I used the body as a tool for making.

I was on a crash course. Dance was slowly taking over my entire life. Jill Brienza invited me to a rehearsal of Stephen Petronio’s company. A week later he gave me a studio visit and asked me to make him a set for his upcoming performance, Like Lazarus Did.

I had been looking at these objects called milagros. In many Latin American countries, when you have an ailment, you go and buy these wax body parts, you take them to the church, and they are hung on the ceiling as a prayer for healing. The thing that struck me about Stephen’s work was how exuberant his choreography is. I would be taken away in the whirlwind of it all, and then I would leave the rehearsal with a simple gesture that kept haunting me. He has an extraordinary way of framing these provocative movements that seem to stick. Given the other work I was doing with somatic movement, I was really interested in how a gesture enters your body. For Like Lazarus Did, I decided to make Stephen a ‘living set’ of milagros.

AL: What was your process of working with Stephen and the dancers?

JA: I asked the dancers, of all the things you’re doing in the dance, can you give me a gesture that resonates with you emotionally? They took pictures of themselves with their phones doing the movement and sent them to me. I took those gestures, and I reenacted them in my body to make casts from them. I said to him, “the only thing I can offer here is stillness.” So I took myself and my objects off the stage. I wanted to be a counterpoint to the movement. I started to become interested in the stillness of the audience, how their stillness provides the space for this kind of intense movement. I love the idea of mirror cells and that the audience is moving inside in response to what they are seeing while their exterior remains still.

Janine Antoni. Living Set for Like Lazarus Did, performed by the Stephen Petronio Company (Performance documentation) 2013.
Helicopter stretcher, polyurethane resin. Dimensions variable

AL: Which is so hard sometimes.

JA: Yes, I agree. I just went to see Steve Paxton at DIA, and I have never had to hold onto my body so tightly. I felt my vertebrae just popping.

[Showing an image of Like Lazarus Did] This is what I made for him. I really wanted to equate myself with the stillness of the audience, so I hung my sculpture over the audience, and I hung under it remaining completely still for the duration of the performance.

AL: And how did you come to work with Anna Halprin?

JA: I had gone to Esalen to do a workshop with her but I was too in awe to introduce myself. I just did the workshop and then a year later, I decided to write her. I sent a thank you letter along with my catalogue and told her how much the workshop changed the way I think. Anna said, why didn’t you introduce yourself? I know Loving Care. She said, if you’re ever in San Francisco, come have lunch. So, I got myself to San Francisco to meet with her. And then we were applying for NYSCA, and we needed a choreographer to apply with. I said, I can’t ask Anna. And my assistant said, she can only say no. So, I sent her a letter. I wrote, I don’t know anything about the dance world; this may be totally inappropriate, but would you be interested in working together? I told her the idea of my dance retrospective and asked her if she would ever consider doing it. She said, come on over. She completely ignored my idea. She called me up, and she said, I have a great idea for you. I can give you the paper from Parades and Changes.

AL: Wow.

JA: My jaw dropped. I could care less about the dance retrospective at this point. It was a privilege to be in dialogue with such a historically significant work. I worked with her on her deck for a week. I lived in her house, and we spent every minute together. On the first day, she gave me the paper, which was perfect, because it was material and I could treat it just like I do materials in the studio. I didn’t have to worry about how I move. I just paid attention to the paper and let it direct me. She knew exactly what she was doing.

AL: So, the whole of her structure was giving you the materials?

JA: That was the crazy thing, especially from my naive point of view. She gave me the paper, and just said, ‘you may want to take your clothes off.’ And that was it, no instruction. Day one. We went down to the deck, and I had my roll of paper, and she’s sitting there on the bleachers, and I start to interact with the paper.

AL: What are the specifications of the paper?

JA: Just a roll of brown paper, the kind used to ship a package in the mail. She had a huge roll. I’m sure she works with it all the time. So, we pulled a piece off the roll. And, then, I was waiting for instruction, but there was no instruction, so I just kept going. Stephen told me, you’re working with a master, you go and do whatever she says. Don’t even try to collaborate. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. So, ok, I went with the intention of doing whatever she told me, but she didn’t tell me anything.

…So, no instruction is coming, and I’m working and working and working with the paper, maybe two hours. It got dark but I didn’t notice. And then I hear a quiet voice saying, ‘you can stop now.’ I guess she was just waiting for me to stop, and I was waiting for her to stop me.

The next day, she called the Berkeley Museum and said, ‘we’re coming up. Janine is here, and we’re going to perform a dance at the museum.’ I said to her, ‘Anna, you can’t do that.’ She replied, ‘yes, I can – this is what museums are for.’ It wasn’t advertised. I just turned up and did it. There were five or six people that watched.

AL: Did going into an art space do anything to…

JA: Terrible, it was terrible. Anna’s deck is magical. I thought I was just being sentimental and then I took Stephen Petronio and Adrian Heathfield out there, and we all agreed; it was the deck. Something happens on that deck. It gave me permission to use time in a different way. Not to mention all those feet that have danced on that wood. But as soon as I was done, she called up all her friends in Marin and said, ‘this artist is here, and you should really come see what we’ve been working on… and we’ll have a potluck!’ So, seventy-five people showed up, and I performed for them.

AL: She is just composing these experiences as she goes.

JA: That’s the crazy thing with Anna; everything is that open. Stephen was shocked. We went there to work, and whoever turned up, she put in the piece. So, it was the secretary, the Feldenkrais practitioner who came for breakfast, everyone. She ended up not leaving for the whole day. Tamalpa was doing a workshop, so at lunchtime Anna took the whole workshop and invited them to work with me and Stephen.

AL: And it’s a conception of dance, of the practice, the ongoing exploration, being as important, or more important, than the finished artwork.

JA: When we were there, Stephen wanted to come away with a score. He wanted to know what are we doing? And the very last time we did it, and we knew we were about to leave, she kept opening it and opening it. And then she said goodbye. And we were wondering, well, what do we work on? And she said, ‘oh, send me some videos.’ I wondered if that is a position or an insight from being ninety-five. She is much more focused on the process than the outcome.

AL: I don’t know that she’s ever been any different.

JA: I don’t know. Her work and her way of working was always radical. When I look back on my experience, working with Anna is about entering into a philosophy. Anna has taught for her whole life. Learning from her is much deeper than getting instruction.

Comparison of Gian Lorenzo Bernini “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” and Janine Antoni in collaboration with Anna Halprin “Paper Dance” (2013).

AL: So, then, do you feel any allegiance to stay faithful to anything from the work with Anna, or do you now go and just make something from that experience?

JA: It’s interesting because I didn’t realize the freedom I was taking until I saw the way that Stephen has been handling the way we work with Anna. I feel like there’s room to make decisions, and we have to make decisions about how to take what Anna made and re-site it in the gallery context, which is very specific. Of course, the decisions we make will be, hopefully, in line with what Anna has created. But I also feel a certain responsibility to it… I mean, she’s asked me to put it in a gallery. She knows what that means. But solutions that work in a dance context with a dance audience don’t always work in a gallery.

AL: What specifically?

JA: Well, with Anna, one needs to consider her relationship to scoring and community rituals like the Planetary Dance. The score is a set of visual and verbal instructions. In the gallery or museum, you don’t have that. I mean, there’s participation, but it’s always a concession to have to tell people what to do. The work should create a response that is meaningful in terms of their interaction with it. But you have to give them autonomy to make those decisions. And whatever decision they make creates the meaning, and should be embraced.

AL: Though there’s so much explaining in visual art.

JA: Right, but not explaining, as in what to do. In the art world there is the big explaining, which is more about contextualizing the work but not Anna’s form of explaining. Such as “let’s just put a score on the wall.”

AL: For the audience…

JA: Yeah. So, for the upcoming exhibition, there are all these questions that are still in the air about how this translates into the gallery and what is the most interesting way to do that. There will be the performances, and then there will be the context created by the installation for those performances because something has to remain there for three months when the performance isn’t happening. It won’t be documentation in any straightforward way.

AL: There will the space for three months and, then, you and Stephen together will create a performance work as an event in it?

JA: So, Anna made a piece called “Rope Dance” for Stephen and me to perform, “Paper Dance” for me to perform and she gave her work, The Courtesan and the Crone to Stephen to perform. And then Stephen and I will make a work together. And all four of these pieces will have an installation for the duration of the show. And the thing I’m sure won’t happen—one should never say that—is that it won’t be straight up documentation of the performance. And it won’t be performers doing the pieces the entire time. So, we are looking for some way to solve that problem: the duration of viewing an exhibition and a performance, and the physical space of viewing an exhibition and a performance.

AL: Something that signals the performance’s existence.

JA: Right. There are many examples of artists dealing with performance and retrospection in the museum context. Having performed Marina [Abramovic]’s work in her retrospective at MoMA, you have experienced her decisions intimately.  So I have been thinking about that in relationship to Xavier [Le Roy]. I’m looking at all those models really carefully. In order to get a new perspective on my past work, I have engaged not only another form (dance), but also the work of two other artists from that form (choreographers).

AL: What is it about your work with dance and with choreographers that you feel is what you want to bring into a gallery space?

JA: Well, if you think my work has always been in this terrain between object, performance, and relic, I’ve been exploring this territory for a long time. If I can take what I know from that exploration and apply it to the way dance is being seen, that may be the biggest contribution I actually have. …But I’m talking like I know how to do this; I have no idea.

AL: I do feel that things can hold bodies, that they can hold movement.

JA: I think you’re right. I feel like I’ve done that to some degree. Then there’s the question: but is it an artwork? I’m making incredible forms with paper, but somehow that’s not enough for me. The paper forms are not objects I would make to remain in the world. And I have certain requirements of objects I put in the world. And so I’m in a funny place.

AL: That’s interesting. So, you remove the body from that, and it doesn’t stand?

JA: I mean, you could read the body in the paper…

AL: But it’s not a physical thing you stand behind as an art object?

JA: What dance allows for is endless malleability. Creating a kind of life that is reinvented over and over again. To still dance is, actually, to lose that malleability. These seem like very provocative gestures [with the paper]. They feel more like drawings than sculpture – drawings that speak about process rather than autonomous objects.

AL: And then it’s a question of, if you’re an object maker, but the interest is when they get activated as choreography or danced improvisation, does it have a weight as an intervention in dance history? And is that important in the context of a visual art exhibit?

JA: Well, that’s my big fear because I realize I come to it from the art side. People from the dance world are seeing something interesting that I almost can’t recognize myself. They seem to be fascinated by watching me in the process of making sculptural decisions and how the material is moving me—because it’s telling me what I need to do to it. And then there’s something else that has to do with some kind of movement that comes from an inner listening. Those two things combined seem to intrigue.

AL: You are a strong performer.

Janine Antoni in collaboration with Anna Halprin. Paper Dance. 2013
Photographed by Pak Han at the Halprin Dance Deck

JA: I’ve performed very few times in my life. I mean, I perform things in order to make objects. When I moved Anna would say, “She is so innocent,” as if to say don’t touch her because she might lose this. And then there’s Stephen who’s completely aware of what he’s doing. She puts us together and says, how’s this ever going to work? They’re moving from totally different places.

[Pulls up a video clip of Antoni performing Paper Dance.]

JA: So, I call up a friend of mine, Chris Sollars when I was heading to the Berkeley Museum to do Paper Dance. He is an ex-student and a great artist. I ask him if he come by and photograph the performance for me? After I perform Paper Dance he says, funny thing about that dance, I saw every piece you’ve ever made in it. So I guess I have come full circle to the retrospective idea. It makes sense that if I’m improvising, all I have to pull from is my past work. And life. What I know to be true. [Shows a series of slides that have body postures in relation to the paper that very closely mimic images of Antoni in performance of other works.] This was pretty uncanny and it opened up a whole new way for me to think. I felt like if I did Paper Dance and had a retrospective at the same time that, then, the dance would become programming for the retrospective. So, I felt instinctively that I should hold back the work so that people would have to find the work in the dance. Or that the work would be in the dance, and whether people wanted to go there or not was up to them.

AL: One thing that improvisers always struggle with is that you get to know your way of moving, your movement habits, so well.

JA: Yes, Anna does not want me to repeat myself. And, of course, the dance has changed radically. I can count on the physical material to keep it fresh. I guess I have counted on that throughout my career. Material is unwieldy, and I am in an improvisational duet with the material. It is an endlessly surprising partner and it keeps me responding in the moment.

AL: But the idea for your retrospective, that your body holds and performs your history of sculptural forms, is a really nice one.

JA: And the question is: is there a way to do that without actually putting the work there?

AL: Without also visualizing your history in objects?

JA: Yes, I don’t know how to do that, but I’d like to figure out how.

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Janine Antoni employs an amalgam of mediums including performance, sculpture, photography, installation, and video. Her body is both her tool for making and the source from which her meaning arises. She carefully articulates her relationship to the world, giving rise to emotional states that are felt in and through the body. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body.

Janine Antoni was born in Freeport, Bahamas. Antoni has exhibited at numerous major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC;  The Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Magazsin 3 Handelshögskolan, Stockholm; Haywood Gallery, London, Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany.  She has also been represented in several international biennials such as the Whitney Biennial; Venice Bienialle; Johannesburg Biennial; Kwangju Biennial, South Korea; Istanbul Biennial; S.I.T.E. Santa Fe Biennial: Project 1 Biennial, New Orleans;  and Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India.

Antoni is the recipient of several prestigious awards including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1998, the New Media Award, ICA Boston in 1999, the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 1999, an Artes Mundi, Wales International Visual Art Prize nomination in 2004, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2011, a 2012 Creative Capital Artist Grant, Anonymous Was A Woman Grant in 2014 and A Project Grant from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to collaborate with choreographers Anna Halprin and Stephen Petronio at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia for a 2016 exhibition. She currently resides in New York City.

Abigail Levine is a New York-based choreographer and performer. Her work has been presented at venues including Movement Research Festival, Mount Tremper Arts Festival, Danspace Project, Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance, Roulette, The Knockdown Center, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Movement Research at the Judson Church, SESC São Paulo, Prisma Forum (Mexico), Hemispheric Institute Encuentro (Montreal), Días de la Danza (Havana), Benaki Museum (Athens), and Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (Cairo). Abigail was a reperformer in Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and has also performed recently in the work of Clarinda Mac Low, Carolee Schneemann, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Will Rawls, and Mark Dendy. In 2014, she learned Yvonne Rainer’s iconic 1965 work Trio A, coached by Pat Catterson. She holds a Masters in Dance and Performance Studies from NYU and was the 2013-15 editor of Movement Research’s digital performance journal Critical Correspondence. Levine is currently visiting faculty in dance at Wesleyan University.

Dance and the Museum was conceived and curated by Nicole Daunic and Abigail Levine.

Contributions by:
Gustavo Ciríaco
Alexis Clements
Colectivo A.M.
Samara Davis
Mark Franko
Danielle Goldman
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Sarah Maxfield
Martin Nachbar
Yvonne Rainer
Mårten Spångberg
Sara Wookey

Related interviews and writings on Critical Correspondence:
Lise Soskolne of W.A.G.E. in conversation with Abigail Levine
Richard Move in conversation with Abigail Levine
Neal Beasley in conversation with Joshua Lubin-Levy
Claudia La Rocco in conversation with Marissa Perel
Charles Aubin in conversation with Abigail Levine
Ralph Lemon in conversation with Marissa Perel
Laurel Tentindo in conversation with Christine Elmo
Rebecca Davis in conversation with Jodi Bender
Janine Antoni in conversation with Abigail Levine
Marissa Perel on Conversations Without Walls: Mutual Seductions
Christine Elmo in response to “Seven Works by Trisha Brown”

Of Note Elsewhere:
Indexing Liveness: The (In)Animacy of Performance by Lauren Bakst in the New Museum blog
Yve Laris Cohen in Mousse Magazine
Performance at the Beginning of the 21st Century by Aaron Mattocks in The Performance Club
Sarah Michelson in Art21
Open Letter to Artists by Sara Wookey in The Performance Club
Being a Thing: The Work of Performing in the Museum by Abigail Levine in Women and Performance
Three Reperformers Respond to MOCA Gala in The Performance Club

We will complement these responses with other interviews, texts, and links to resources that speak to the issues at hand. We welcome further contributions, challenges, insights, resources, as well. You may contact us at: cc@movementresearch.org

This past winter I met with Lise Soskolne, core organizer for W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy). W.A.G.E. is “a New York-based activist organization focused on regulating the payment of artist fees by nonprofit art institutions, and establishing a sustainable labor relation between artists and the institutions that subcontract their labor.” I got to know Lise and the work of W.A.G.E. as I was negotiating the complications of working in a museum as a performer. We spoke about the evolution and current work of W.A.G.E., as well as specifically considering the work of performance artists and hired performers within the context of exhibitions and performances. W.A.G.E.’s website is a clearinghouse of resources on the economic and political conditions of professionalized art-making: http://W.A.G.E.forwork.com

– Abigail Levine

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Abigail Levine: Would you introduce W.A.G.E. and its history briefly?

Lise Soskolne: W.A.G.E. was founded in 2008 by a group of visual and performing artists, and independent curators, many of whom had amassed a noticeable amount of cultural and social capital but had no money and wondered why they were always broke. There were email exchanges, meetings at apartments and studios, and discussion around the issue of nonpayment. Two public meetings at Judson Church followed; the first was attended by maybe 50 or 80 people, and the second was about the same, maybe slightly smaller. At the first public meeting the question of whether nonprofits actually pay artist fees was introduced and nobody could say for certain if they did or did not, or whether they were mandated to or not. At the second meeting we broke out into working groups and these winnowed down over time into a core group of organizers. The first two years were spent doing consciousness-raising as well as developing the 2010 Artist Survey, W.A.G.E.’s first major initiative.

AL: At that point did certain goals coalesce?

LS: 2010 was a pivotal year; in addition to the survey it included W.A.G.E.’s first certification. We certified the New Museum exhibition “Free”, curated by Lauren Cornell.

AL: What are the survey and certification?

LS: The survey collected data about the economic experiences of artists working with nonprofits in the 5 boroughs between 2005-2010. It asked very basic questions like, did you work with a nonprofit during that time? If so, did you receive a fee? If you received a fee, how much was it? Were your expenses covered? If so, which ones? The same kinds of basic questions W.A.G.E. has been asking for a while.

AL: By nonprofit you mean, a visual art, presenting organization?

LS: Yes, although at that point it wasn’t as clearly defined as it is now. The survey was split into two parts, one for small to medium-sized organizations and the other for large organizations and museums. There are operational differences between the two and there were too many organizations to list in a single survey so we somewhat subjectively determined which fit into which category, but you could fill out both surveys.

AL: This excluded commercial galleries?

LS: Yes. And nonprofit means a 501c3 charitable organization. In terms of the New Museum certification in 2010, that was for a single exhibition. W.A.G.E. had been invited to participate in the exhibition “Free” as an artist but because W.A.G.E. is not an artist, and the work that we do is not art, we instead chose to negotiate fees for the participating artists in the show. This was an important decision both because it marked the introduction of W.A.G.E. Certification as a strategy for regulating compensation and because it defined the nature of our work relative to what we wanted it to accomplish, namely: the payment of artist fees by nonprofit art institutions. From there it took about a year to clarify that certification would likely become W.A.G.E.’s primary initiative. At that point we decided that it would no longer be for individual exhibitions but would, instead, be for entire institutions because we believe that an institution must show a long-term commitment to paying artists equitably and to paying fees, and compensation for a single exhibitions isn’t enough to indicate that.

AL: There’s an assumption, I think, outside of the art world that professional visual artists make their living through the sale of their work, but W.A.G.E. was saying that, regardless of this potential, artists need to be compensated for their work presenting their work. Is that right?

LS: Yes, but it took some time to define what that meant—to identify and articulate precisely what aspects of presenting one’s work compensation was intended to be for. Certification was initiated in 2010 but was developed into a policy and regulatory tool between 2011 and 2014. We now define the artist fee as: compensation for the work that you do once you enter into a transactional relationship with an arts organization. Referring back to W.A.G.E.’s 2008 wo/manifesto, that work might include preparation, installation, presentation, consultation, exhibition and reproduction, among other things. Essentially it’s inclusive of the work that you do to mount a program or exhibition in coordination with an arts organization, and is exclusive of the labor you might expend prior to that relationship, such as time spent in the studio, in reading groups, or doing research, etc, since there is no way to demarcate when that kind of work begins and ends, or to quantify its value in monetary terms, unless it’s as waged labor, but even then it’s incredibly difficult to price. Under W.A.G.E. Certification, you’re not being compensated for being an artist, you’re getting paid for the work that you do when you work with an institution.

AL: So it’s much more circumscribed and it’s meant to move towards compensating this very quantifiable labor in some fair way, which may or may not make it feasible for you to continue to survive as an artist?

LS: Yes, it’s an effort to bring definition and hyper-clarity to something that has been hyper-nebulous for a long time. Being a fee and not a wage, this kind of compensation still remains symbolic of “actual” value but the language we’ve developed around it is intended to open the door or shift the paradigm toward thinking about artwork as labor, or artistic engagement with institutions as being labor, and to assign a price to it that reflects what the labor is worth.

But because the way artists make work and engage with institutions has and is changing so rapidly—from something like a sustained and fairly autonomous studio practice from which the work is placed in an exhibition context, to the kind of post-studio production in which the work is made on a commissioned basis—the work of making art tends to be more prescribed and much of it happens once an artist gets a show, or as we might put it, once an artist is subcontracted to produce content or provide services for an arts organization. That’s the moment you enter into a transactional relationship.

Anecdotally speaking, it seems more unusual these days for a curator to go to an artist’s studio and say, “I want to show that body of work.” When an institution invites an artist to work with them that tends to be when the work gets made. Institutions want new work, and more often than not it incorporates some kinds of institutional critique, even if it’s just a nod to the context and conditions within which it’s being produced exhibited—and this would necessarily take place once an artist has begun working with that institutional context.

When I try to describe what the fee is compensation for, I sometimes picture it like this: you’re at home or in the studio on the computer or phone, and at the other end—as in the child’s mock telephone line made of two tin cans and a piece of string—is the curator or administrator, at their desk in the institution. Their work mirrors many of the tasks you’re doing to produce the exhibition or program but they’re getting paid a salary and you’re not getting paid anything[1] .

I wish I could say that our fee schedule represented some kind of living wage standard but at this point it remains symbolic. At the 2014 W.A.G.E. Summit, where W.A.G.E. Certification was formalized into a policy, this issue was debated during a session called “Living Wage or Symbolic Fee”. We decided by consensus not to align the program with a living wage campaign for several reasons, one being that no organization would be able to afford to pay fees at that level, which would kill the project. Minimum wage campaigns are more tenable and have higher success rates because wages are lower and are thus more achievable. Essentially, the tension during the development of Certification has been between what is fair and what is possible. It might be more fair to advocate for a living wage but given the funding limitations in the nonprofit sector, achieving one wouldn’t be possible.

All images from wageforwork.com

AL: What does it take for an institution to be certified?

LS:

The first and most basic requirement is that “Artist Fees” must be its own separate and distinct line item in operating and exhibition budgets. That literally enables us to assess if organizations are paying fees that meet our requirements in one of three different tiers. If their operating expenses are below $500,000, fees must be no less than the specified minimum or “compensation floor”, which we call “Floor W.A.G.E.”.

The second tier, which we call “Minimum W.A.G.E.”, is for organizations with operating expenses above $500,000. In this tier the fee is tied to the organization’s projected total annual operating expenses and scales up in direct relation to them. So the higher their expenses, the higher the fee. Required fees are calibrated precisely for each institution so I make a customized fee schedule based on their projected budget using the equation of our fee calculator.

AL: And then above a certain amount and it tops out?

LS: Yes, at 15 million. The scale-up continues up to 15 million, but above that it is recommended and not required; at 15 million, there is a fee cap to ensure that nobody profits from the redistribution of wealth, including artists. We also require that the institution cover what we call basic programming costs and services. These constitute the baseline infrastructural requirements that an artist can expect an institution to provide, and these costs cannot be taken out of the fee. The logic here is that given the current state of precarity, in which workers are often expected to supply the workplace infrastructure, we assert that in the visual arts the opposite is true. The institution is the infrastructure that cannot be provided by the artist. This includes the provision and preparation of exhibition, performance, or projection space, the coverage of shipping and insurance costs when necessary, presentation infrastructure, including display equipment, exhibition furniture and lighting, documentation of the exhibition or event, promotion, travel and accommodation when necessary, and obtaining and paying for image rights for commissioned and existing texts.

AL: And there was also a discussion of the costs of production, yes?

LS: We decided not to make the coverage of production costs a requirement of certification because we didn’t feel it was fair to penalize smaller institutions who potentially can’t afford to cover these expenses. In a performance context it seems more necessary, but there are some aspects of performance under certification that are unresolved, actually.

AL: Yes, because the wages of performers, or subcontracted performers in the language W.A.G.E. uses, could be seen both as artist wages and as productions costs. Was performance part of W.A.G.E.’s conversation from the beginning?

LS: Yes, W.A.G.E. was founded in part by performing artists. The original tagline read, “W.A.G.E. is a group of visual and performing artists, and independent curators.” It was very distinctly part of what W.A.G.E. was organized around so there was never any question that performance would be a consideration. This became clearer in designing the survey because it consciously included a category for performance. But given the constraints of the online survey format we used, it was logistically challenging to include different questions about the exhibition conditions for performance, but it became clear that different questions needed to be asked, particularly related to what expenses were being covered. That’s probably when we started to think about production costs as being different for performance than for other kinds of exhibition or installation work. The survey was in development around the same time that Performa began, which you could point to as a marker of when performance became a consumable form within the visual arts, or as you put it, an emerging form in terms of its prominence and wider appeal. A biennial exclusively for performance says as much.

AL: Then, when I came into the conversation, you had been talking about this idea of hired performer labor? Or was that later?

LS: Do you mean dancers? I don’t think we had gotten that far yet. I think that came specifically from you and your experience. That was definitely what got me thinking about it.

AL:  Right, when I got to know W.A.G.E.’s work, it seemed logical to include some sort of fee schedule for performers within the W.A.G.E. calculator. And, again, the tricky part was the balance between what would be fair compensation and what a smaller institution, or an individual artist, could afford. My experience was with large museums, and the principle seemed clear that, if performers were working in an institution of that size, they should be compensated at a level commensurate with their work in major performing arts institutions—theaters and opera houses. The first stumbling block was that there was no precedent for this kind of compensation and, so, the logic of the fee structure for freelance performers made little sense to the institutions. Then, there was the problem of how to scale down for smaller institutions. This became clear in our discussion with Lumi Tan from the Kitchen, that the way that they structure fees for artists in either their gallery or theater would not enable them to guarantee a day rate to performers. As conversations continued, I felt that inclusion of performers and performance in a W.A.G.E. structure still should fall under the notion of visual art presentations because the economy of producing a dance or theater-based show has a whole system of considerations that this fee structure doesn’t answer.

LS: Yes, and now that we’ve launched the program and it’s operating, it’s clear that our inclusion of performance and performers has to be strictly limited to a visual arts presenting context, and for us to be able to certify dance or theater-based programs, we have to develop a fee structure for a performing arts presenting context, which we are starting to work on together. The other issues we discovered in conversation with Lumi are the cost of paying people for rehearsal time and covering production costs because they tend to be high in a theatrical context, and unlike the production of  capital-intensive material artworks, production costs cannot be recouped through sales and are generally not subsidized by commercial galleries.

AL: I also think it’s important when people look at the fee schedule they remember that the proposed fees are a minimum rather than the goal. As with the artist fees that are meant to both provide a step towards a living wage and spur conversation and negotiation, I don’t think people should look at the performer fees and think that they are meant to represent a living wage. We had this discussion about these museums essentially that their budgets are so high that the calculus of the $5 million budgets and above doesn’t any longer work. I think the numbers work so that you get up there and for a performer its about $200 a day, which would obviously be more than symbolic.

LS: Even after $500,000, its $20 per hour or a $100 day rate, whichever is higher and while $100 for an 8-hour day ($12.50/hour) is closer to minimum wage, it’s probably closer to resembling a living wage than the other fees, given the amount of production time that cannot and is not being accounted for.

AL: In these questions of situating artists in relation to different economies, were there any discussion or thinking about this organizing effort in relation to either other labor movements or other communities?

LS: Do you mean at the beginning?

AL: Anywhere throughout this process.

LS: Occupy Wall Street brought W.A.G.E. into close proximity with other organizing initiatives both in and outside of the art field, and W.A.G.E. began to shift around that time, in part because of that. On a strategic level, it’s important to align the labor of artists with other kinds of labor to make the point that art is not exceptional: it is precisely its claim to exceptionality that causes artists to not get paid, and this claim gets made by both by artists and institutions. If we identify artistic labor as being no different than any other form of subcontracted labor, laying claim to compensation becomes inevitable, while also positioning artists squarely within the ever-expanding contemporary precariat, which the exploitable nature of artistic labor was pivotal in defining. The willingness of artists to work for free, justified by the “labor of love” argument, the satisfaction of being “creative” logic, and the promise of exposure, finds application in many other industries, most notably among the so-called creative class. We are all being exploited by a similar logic, and it’s in the strategic interests of artists, not to mention in their ethical interests, to align ourselves and fight together with others in the same position. The UK’s amazing Precarious Workers Brigade does exactly that.

AL: I think people are starting to think, in regard to issues like gentrification, that it’s shortsighted to think of artists fighting alone, saying “hey wait, don’t raise the rents on the neighborhood” rather than forming more multi-class and multi-cultural coalitions.

LS: Yes, agreed. If artists don’t start building coalitions across class, then the divide will continue to widen and artists will find themselves having to pick which side of it they’re on—and given the increasing scarcity of resources, they’re likely to pick the side that guarantees their own material survival. I’m personally fascinated by, and critical of, artists’ ability to straddle and lay claim to more than one class position at the same time. Despite the fact that many artists today function more like entrepreneurs who, when their commercial success demands increased supply, run their own mini factories and liaise with the elite who consume their work, they continue to identify with and as working class—which might be appropriate to the extent that their labor is being exploited and they tangibly experience material precarity. But because only those who can afford to work for free can afford to enter the field, being an artist today inherently implies a more elite class position. When artists identify as workers under conditions that stand to benefit their careers and not a broader class struggle, then such an identification is likely more aesthetic than political. Of course not all artists lay claim to different class positions depending on what the context requires, but those that do play a dangerous game, and so any kind of attempt at coalition building across class has to bear in mind that artists are often regarded with mistrust in that sense. A text I wrote called “On Merit” for the Artist as Debtor conference in New York this past winter includes some discussion of what it means for artists to embody these kinds of contradictions.

All images from wageforwork.com

AL: Introduce a little of your thesis of what you presented.

LS:The text connects the contradictions inherent to being an artist under neoliberal capitalism to the contradictions inherent to the nonprofit economy, and tries to show how these contradictions are determined and maintained by the deeply flawed philanthropic tradition that supports it. It poses and answers the question why don’t nonprofits pay artist fees? by looking at how money is dispensed within the field by private foundations to nonprofits, and by nonprofits to artists on the basis of charity and merit. I discuss how this convention is a means of placing the nonprofit sector in service of maintaining the status quo in the for-profit sector. So, starting at the ‘top’, think about how philanthropists, who accrue wealth by exploiting labor, appear to ever so generously use their wealth to fix what they identify as “the root causes of social problems” through their giving priorities, and how nonprofits are forced to appeal to foundations on that basis in order to survive. Nonprofits have to prove that the work they do merits the charity of the funder – a very similar dynamic that artists find themselves in relative to nonprofits in the logic they’ve tended to use in dispensing artist fees (as charity and on merit). In terms of philanthropy, not only does the assertion of fixing social problems at their root cause imply a great deal of hubris, it exposes the great irony on which the entire system is based: philanthropists receive profound tax breaks and are incentivized by tax law to solve so-called “social problems” but it is precisely these philanthropists who perpetuate them through their investment in the exploitation of labor and the unequal distribution of the wealth it generates. In other words, philanthropists make money by appearing to solve the problems they helped to create and continue to perpetuate. Given that these logics underpin the nonprofit sector in terms of law and taxation, and also in terms of how labor is devalued, it makes complete sense that charity and merit are the basis on which artists are compensated. The problem is that artists are not charity cases and compensation is not based on merit. It’s complicated and there’s more to it, but as an overview does that make sense?

AL: Yeah, it makes unfortunate sense. …Ok, last question. So in the context of that, I know that you are a practicing artist and you have told me that largely you keep your work private. How does your work with W.A.G.E. and doing this with the economics of art feed your art practice, or vice versa? Does it interrupt it?

LS:

I think the work I do with and for W.A.G.E., as well as other so-called political work I’ve done, relieves my art practice from the pressure I might put on it otherwise. I make paintings, and painting, at least from my point of view, has very little or no political agency. In fact, painting is a veritable pariah in the context of so-called political art. The more I tried to make my paintings function as political actors, the worse and more untenable the whole business became. So I prefer to have a dividing line or separation between painting and politics because it’s cleaner and makes more sense to me that way. It also separates how I make art from how I make money, which I also prefer. But that still doesn’t solve the problem of how to be an exhibiting artist. I haven’t found a way to participate as an artist without doing what seems to be required of me, which at this point I seem not willing to do. So for now my work remains relatively private, only to the extent that it isn’t shown publicly. W.A.G.E. serves as a conduit through which I can participate in art, and also acts as a buffer behind which I can continue to make paintings.

AL: And you are doing a lot of work to make sure other people can do it in a different way than you choose.

LS: Well, I can’t say that I do this work only because I want to help others. I derive satisfaction (utility) from it. Like painting, I enjoy it—and I see no contradiction in being compensated for that.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Will: Before we talk about Retrospective and its placement at MoMA PS1 right now, I want to talk about the invitation to make it and what the context was. Where were you in your process when Laurence Rassel invited you to make a retrospective of your work?

Xavier: No, she invited me with what she called carte blanche, to come to Fundació Antoni Tàpies and do something, whatever I want—this was her proposal. So, there was not an expectation that I do a retrospective. The work was decided through a process. I did not say, Ah yes, good, I can do this piece I have made or that I always wanted to do. It was developed through an exchange with Laurence. She had followed my work since 2000 and we met during the Kunsten Festival des Arts [Brussels] in 2001 where I had proposed to organize a series of events that had a fil rouge [red thread, a through line], related to the question of copyright. At the time, Laurence, together with Nicola Malevé, were working on open source, software and media—the question of code, to whom it belongs, to whom the software belongs.

Laurence has an interest in the question of process and the processing of things and ideas. That’s something she is looking for in her institution—how to share, how to propose an idea of coming in contact with art, or the art experience actually being a process—by putting this idea of process in the institution.

Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy. Photography_ Lluís Bover. © Fundació Antoni Tàpies

Will: The process through which a performance gets made is something that you’ve experimented with a lot in your work.

Xavier: She pointed to this question in my work. She made her carte blanche proposal just after she saw The Rite of Spring [2007], which confirmed for her that I have an interest in the particular attention and intention of making this relationship between public and performers a subject matter. That is where she sees the potential for process.

She didn’t give me any instructions.

The first thing I thought I would do is to show my works in the museum. It was only when I got to Barcelona that I understood it wasn’t going to be possible to show the works.

Will: To show the works, intact, as they have been performed on stages?

Xavier: Yeah, because there’s no way to install a theater “situation” there. It was not fitting because the main space of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies is full of columns. [laughs]

Will: So, you arrive with a suitcase of your work in front of you. When did the idea of Retrospective, both as a title and concept, take shape?

Xavier: There was this first realization: I’m not going to be able to do what I thought. And the second thing is when Laurence said it would be an exhibition lasting 2 or 3 months. She said, “Maybe you do two days of performance, but then we have to think: what will happen in the two other months.” That is when I understood, Aha, I need to think about something in time that will last the duration of that period. It should be an exhibition, and I saw in the idea, retrospective, something that would be more specific to a museum than a theater, a time and space that brings things together, which, at first, were not made to be put together in the same space at the same time. This is something that seemed more specific to visual art than to performance in theater. I was also thinking about this word retrospective and looking backwards and how the past is part of our experience of the present.

Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy. Photography- Lluís Bover. © Fundació Antoni Tàpies

Will: How did choosing the word “retrospective” put pressure on you?

Xavier: If I had been asked, I probably would not have been able to do it. I think I wasn’t conscious of the weight that the title would bring with it. It was only after some people said, “So, you’re doing your first exhibition and you’re doing what an artist normally does at the end of a career.” I was more focused on using the past and bringing the past into the present, which I connected to my work, Product of Circumstances [1999] where I first used that operation to produce a new work. I was thinking about how the looking back produced something in the present moment.

Will: As I’ve been working as a performer in Retrospective, I’ve noticed there is a lot of repetition and recursiveness in your work. In Self-Unfinished [1998] there is a recurrent backwards walk; in Giszelle [2001] there’s a rewind and fast-forward of language and movement. In Low Pieces [2011] there’s this statement to the audience: “We can continue the conversation later on during the performance”. There is often a “return” that happens in the work. I thought maybe the idea of retrospective came from that.

Xavier Le Roy’s ‘Retrospective,’ photo: Will Rawls

Xavier: I think you are right. I didn’t see that in the way you put it. When I consciously did this for the first time in Product of Circumstances, I was using the idea of recycling something. In responding to a commission, I have often recycled things that already exist. Not that anything is ever really new; you always reuse things. I would make the distinction between consciously choosing to use something that already exists and doing so unconsciously—taking something extant and transforming it without knowing. In retrospective, this is consciously done. We use things that pre-exist and place them in another situation and out of this, something new is produced, And it’s still possible to recognize and identify the material that is used. There are different levels of this. It is also the strategy in Giszelle. There are two halves of the performance—one which is exclusively using material that people who are inscribed in Western culture will recognize or associate, very easily, with preexisting representations of bodies, and the second half, which is not based on this operation. Product of Circumstances also plays with this in a slightly different manner. When I say, “It was the ending of a three years long love relationship,” yes, it’s not something that you know, but you might recognize it because you might have had that experience also. The idea of reusing, I think, is a stream. But it’s also produced by the necessity of responding to the artistic production machines that we navigate; recycling is a strategy in order to respond to this. When I have to produce new material, for me that’s really complicated. Having the sense that you look for something that would become the movement, that is the material created for the new work; it is so difficult. I cannot do this very often.

Will: Movement invention—How does one even define the science of movement invention? It can be sought through activities you do or through sources of inspiration and feelings, but these aren’t the same as the movement that emerges that is new. And then also, it might be new for your body but not for another body.

Xavier Le Roy’s ‘Retrospective,’ photo: Will Rawls

Xavier: That is the complexity. In the way you produce movement you might engage a road that is new for yourself but definitely not for everybody; that is impossible. But you can use the strategy of reframing the movement so that it is new in another situation. It’s also what happens most of the time with things that you see in an exhibition; one takes something that is made in a context and places it in a different one: the exhibition space. If you also think of the market, you see vegetables. They are not meant to be exhibited in the market. They are from the garden and made to be put on your plate, but in between they are put in this place where they “don’t belong”, or more precisely it’s not a milieu where they are alive or are produced in the first place.

Will: And that place where they don’t belong has become naturalized in the journey of that vegetable to your plate.

Xavier: It produces an interface with the consumer. I think the exhibition space is like this, not only there for consumption but to produce a set of interactions that are specific to that space.

Will: How did Fundació Antoni Tàpies allow you to move into new territory for yourself as an artist? How did you find a way to keep it interesting for yourself, so you could keep evolving?

Xavier: As I develop my work through the years, without having a clear-cut moment when I’ve decided it, the relationship between the work and the public has taken on more and more importance. It became more obvious with Untitled [2005]—giving a flashlight to audience members in order to link the action of watching to both communal and individual action. Or, in The Rite of Spring, the idea of distributing the speakers under the audience seats and addressing my conductor’s movements to certain people across the room, as if they were musicians in an orchestra. The theater is a situation that produces relationships, and these relationships have a certain politics and poetics, and they are distributed and separated into two qualities: active and passive. This line of separation for me is somehow the question. In a way, I accept it because I use it, but also, I don’t. I try to transform it. Or, in other words, I would like to accept it under certain conditions, so I need to change the conditions or to change the theater. Some years ago I realized that this is what I do, trying to move these lines of separation; it’s in order to understand my relationship to the world, as an individual, in the group, in front of the group, part of the group. All these interests are at work in what I do and they produce questions, doubts, problems, satisfactions, enjoyments, sadness. The proposal of the exhibition space is to have another kind of this situation where relationships between people, between groups and individuals, between works and people, between people and work are also at stake.

This interest, to work in exhibition spaces, has also been activated by the work of Tino [Sehgal] as I have been involved in and followed, from the beginning, his thought and artistic project. I have been and I am very curious about why he wanted to use the visual art institutions such as galleries and museums, and how he did it. In the development of his work I saw possibilities; he opened up a way to deal with questions of these spaces and their potential.

Will: Among artists, we exchange these strategies, conversations and practices, and they manifest with different content or in different spaces but within power structures that we all manage together.

Going back to new movement, maybe it’s not possible to make new movement but—is perception easier to renew, somehow?

Xavier: You can revisit the assumption of perception, I think. Staging is a good way of thinking of this. It’s possible to produce doubt in your perception and that’s a way of conjuring something new because it can make you say “I thought it was different.” I am interested in creating this trouble in perception, the illusion, the uncanny, something that appears strange but is actually totally normal. That is what happens when we approach each visitor in Retrospective—it’s very strange, and for some, frightening. But it also comes out of a totally normal action, a human being going towards another human, with no weapons, but maybe with a strange way of standing up that reinforces the strangeness and the uncanny.

Will: Yes, it all happens before your eyes. When I watch Self-Unfinished, I watch you going through a process of being you or, being a human being, and then transforming into a creature-like body by bending over and pulling your shirt over your head, and then coming back. In these transitions, my doubt arises but I’ve also watched the whole thing happen, so I’m experiencing both transparency and doubt at the same time.

Xavier: And it’s made by both parties. It’s not only me, and it’s not only you.

Will: How would you describe the mechanism, or mechanics, of Retrospective?

Xavier: It’s three rooms. The first room one could describe as a display room, where movements, actions and choreography are displayed for the visitor. The dancers choose and perform excerpts from my works and excerpts from other performances over the course of their training and careers. These excerpts are woven into stories they share about their lives. At the same time other dancers are presenting excerpts from my works, either in poses or in loops. The second room is where two performers are at work and/or engaged conversation with visitors. So they are not “on display” in the same way as they are in the display room because the conversation that they have with the visitors and the actions each one chooses to do in that room aren’t preset or prepared; it happens in the moment out of the frame given by that room. And in the third room there are three dummies, an exhibition of objects. In each of the three rooms there is something “at work” and something “on display” but with different proportions; in one, the level of “display is” more important then being “at work” and vice versa. The third room has something that is very much on display but at the same time “at work”—when we watch the dummies for a while they seem to move. I’ve never described it like this but it’s another way of describing the three rooms.

Xavier Le Roy

Will: Would you say that part of the process of display is a kind of inertness?

Xavier: Yes but before we speak about that, there is another layer to describe which is that the choreography of the whole exhibition poses the question of, How can something that is continuous in time cohabitate with something that is discontinuous in time? Discontinuity of time is more specific to the theater. The theater is discontinuous in the sense that you have an engagement that is of a certain duration and it finishes. Beginning. End. One action or scene succeeds the next. Things are not present and visible forever; they appear and disappear. And the continuous is more related to exhibition space where you enter the room and the things are supposed to be there all the time continuously, even when you leave the room. So Retrospective is a sort of discontinuity that tries to exist in a place of continuity.

Will: How many times has this exhibition been presented before MoMA PS1?

Xavier: Seven.

Will: So you are also negotiating with different institutions that have different capabilities, different budgets, different approaches to presenting and conceptualizing performance. What I think is interesting about the project is that you’re also negotiating the labor conditions for the performers. So I’m curious to talk about what is consistent or inconsistent from these Restrospectives.

Xavier: One important thing that is, at the basis of this project is a question about objects. And how performing in an exhibition space that is made to display objects will involve a question of how much, as a performer, I transform myself into an object and the agency implied in that. That’s a line that I also relate to the work of choreography, which is very often happening in a group. Depending on how this group works together the material is very often generated from the bodies of individual people, except in a situation where the choreographer teaches the material to the others. But even then it is always about how a dancer negotiates this—and what the contract is. There are contracts and they are always subject to discussion somehow. In my experience of working as a dancer in different groups, there was always this moment of negotiation: Yes, it’s my material you used. And it’s also about what you want as a dancer—you want to be involved in something that will make you find something from yourself, or produce something. But this idea of “from yourself” implies “it’s mine”—but how do you negotiate this idea of property?

Will: Or remain conscious, or not conscious, about it.

Xavier: Exactly. It’s consciousness and unconsciousness that are at stake. And it is very exciting to work on that, if one can make it somehow productive and not only a subject of conflict. Conflict is also okay, but trauma, let’s say, is a problem. This is maybe a long deviation but I think to answer your question I have to go here. There is, for me, a necessity to include this question in the work—to put it to work—because I know I do not want to assume that it is simply possible to perform in the exhibition space all day long in order to replace the objects.

When I look at a person doing a performance, there is something in my mind that comes up. I enjoy the movement, the reflection about what these forms produce, and then there is a moment where I think, What do they think?

Will: Because they are thinking. And that’s part of the content already.

Xavier: I’m curious about that. One can think that this content is also visible. They think about the task they have to do, how the role is negotiated; this movement needs this attention in the body, et cetera. So of course as a practitioner I know this is going on for a performer, but I also know there are potentially other things, and I’m curious about those. I have a desire to try and show this, not only to represent it, but to use it as our force. In the performance, our labor is our power and is also our means of communicating. Out of this exchange, out of this communication, comes feedback. It is a way of asking, How much do I want to be an object? How much do I want to be a subject? How much, imperatively, do I have to be an object? How much, imperatively, do I have to be a subject in this situation? I relate this to daily life, Do I want to have many choices and therefore have to choose all the time? Or do I want to have only one choice imposed to me all the time? Of course I would like both but how? It seems difficult to find a satisfying balance between both. These possibilities are not very well distributed between people in our societies and it’s extremely difficult to build a situation where that would be working differently.

Xavier Le Roy’s ‘Retrospective,’ photo: Will Rawls

Will: There’s also a dichotomy through which dance can be an empowering or disempowering practice. As you participate in an artistic process, you accept a certain amount of intervention into your own body and mind, which, at times, can be traumatic. When I’m at PS1 performing I think about this—how to delineate my power, vulnerability and independence. There’s also a frustrating part, which is that, ultimately, while on the job, I cannot entirely break out of the frame of your work while telling my story. And that is a tension that I think will stay with me for the duration of the exhibition. I think the performers experience this tension at different intensities, or focus on other tensions. And then furthermore, the museum framework cannot be exploded or escaped while on the job, but I am still curious about how to work towards this.

Xavier: It points at the necessity to have this museum frame and structure in place in order to find out what you experience, but also, to encounter the limits of it. Hopefully it doesn’t produce a cynical situation. This is my hope. You have signed the contract with these limits, my works, the museum, the fact that this museum is in this place, in this city, all these things—that is what we play with.

Will: How does one perforate the limits of the museum? Maybe it is by presenting or performing in such a way that a visitor carries this performance with them, extending the experience beyond the site of the museum. But, sometimes, the virtuosity of performing so well that someone remembers you, can be a kind of hyperbolic objectification of your performance. Catch-22?

Xavier: I think one cannot break the limits of the museum, but maybe we can transform or extend them.

This might be an interesting survey to do with the visitors, if, when they go out, How and what do they remember of my work; How much what they take with them is actually this exchange with the performer(s). I’m almost sure that 80 per cent of people that don’t know anything about my work prior to Retrospective, who were not expecting to see performers in the space, who were coming to look at sculptures and pictures, leave with the impression and memory of the story of one of you, or two of you, or three of you—and my work and my identity actually disappear.

Will: Or they leave with a cacophony of impressions.

Xavier: That is what I hope. In the end, the structure and the frame have been necessary to produce attention for you.

Xavier Le Roy’s ‘Retrospective,’ photo: Will Rawls

Will: This is something that Jenny [Schlenzka] brought up when we had that reception, she was thanking the performers and was saying, “Day by day, it’s looking more like a group show than a solo show.” But I don’t know if the group show will ever supersede your authorship.

Xavier: That is, I think, the eternal question. [Long pause]. This reminds me of the intent of doing the opposite. When we were doing E.X.T.E.N.S.I.O.N.S [a collective authorship research project, 1999-2001], the intent was to present our work as something that is by these people. However, on the side of the public, institutions or the press, there was still the need to attach it to one name or one person, which at the time was me, being the project’s initiator. So then this group was full of the usual tension, all the clichés of what can happen in group work, cycles of exclusion and inclusion. This is, from my perspective, less productive than the situation that we have with Restrospective, which is, like you say, framed under my name, and yet the visitor’s experience can be of a totally different nature than that of my artistic signature, and the agency of the performers can be questioned, discussed and exposed.

Will: As the performers present their material each day, weaving our stories and dances into yours, Retrospective finds ways in which it can speak about things that your previous works don’t speak about. The subject matter and subjectivity of your work may be extended through us, and vice versa. But one thing that comes up for me is this idea of emotionality, especially when someone tells a story that engenders an empathetic response from a visitor. I don’t really associate your works with having this kind of exchange around empathy or emotional content, but I could be wrong. So, in my mind, when this emotionality, which has been “left out” of your work, reappears inside Retrospective, it throws your work into a different light. I am sure you know this and invite this. But by inviting these kinds of unforeseen contents, are you consciously inviting an undoing or a critique?

Xavier: Emotions are not a driving force to produce my work but they are also not absent. Or more precisely they conduct my work unconsciously and I don’t use them consciously or try to express or represent them explicitly. In Product of Circumstances, I attempt to transform emotions into fact, to say we encounter different things in our life such as events that produce certain emotions, reactions, and other actions and these things become facts. That’s why I try to present them as much as possible as matter of fact—this happened and that happened. Love trauma is loaded by emotion and is a fact. If I go into details there is a lot of emotion, dark feeling, extremes from joy, pleasure, happiness to desire of death. When I say, “a three-year long relationship ends”, there are all of these emotions and feelings behind this statement. So I don’t use the actual emotion—that’s not a driving force—but there is a relation to it about which I also don’t know. Maybe it’s why I do all this work. When I did Product of Circumstances for the first time in French—somehow my voice went up and down because it’s my mother tongue. Suddenly my voice reflected a trace of emotion. Or, while performing Product of Other Circumstances [2009], I have cried several times. So it is permeable. I am permeable to this. But like you say, Retrospective allows all this signification and meaning in my work, which has been classified, from a certain perspective, as intellectual. Which I think it is too hasty to classify it this way.

But I guess your remark is right, by doing Retrospective and having all these subjectivities that use the work and say “that’s what it means for me, and what it does for me”, they create a multitude of relations to my work and sometimes it activates, via personal association, some emotionality. Therefore the “subject matter and subjectivity of my work”, as you said, may be extended and not reduced to be “intellectual” and elitist or difficult.

Will: A dancer will talk about a moment in their life that involves a certain kind of dancing, and then, in the palette of your work, there is something that reflects that. They will use your work as a substitution. And we choose when to substitute or when not to. We also choose what not to share of our lives. I love this idea of mentioning a decision not to share certain information as a way of creating a space between the performance situation and me.

Xavier: It is also a way of saying, “It’s my choice.” That is important to me. This sense should be very present. To come back to your question about undoing my work: that is not a concern, it is something that Retrospective does in a certain way but it is not a desire of undoing. All the things you speak about, I also discover by doing.

Xavier Le Roy’s ‘Retrospective,’ photo: Will Rawls

Will: So what happens after Retrospective that is not a retrospective? What are your questions these days?

Xavier: I don’t know yet. I’m a bit taken by the stream of doing Retrospective again and the curiosity of what that does in each place. At the very beginning, the frame was much tighter: “You use my work. You do an excerpt of my work and you talk about yourself through that work.” Already in Barcelona there was the necessity to perform things other than my work. Then from Barcelona to now, I think the necessity of using my work is still there, because it’s necessary to produce that frame. If we don’t have the frame, then we don’t have this resistance. It is the negotiation with that frame that should be loose. It is loose from the first edition at Tàpies. But how loose? And not in the sense of more or less loose, but in the sense of, What quality of looseness?

Will: Some people might want to perform an excerpt of Self Unfinished perfectly and other people might want to perform it imperfectly as a form of resistance. That’s one way I’ve seen this looseness. There are numerous strategies for bending and playing with the frame, the material, your own story, and to an extent, the overall choreography of the exhibition.

My last question is, if you had to ask yourself a question at this point, what would it be?

Xavier: If I think about the possibility of extending this into a form that would not use my works as a frame or as material, I think that’s the question—Can the choreographic structure developed to exhibit these live materials become generic or, is it specific to my work? Can that choreographic structure be used as a frame for other kinds of material and subjects? How will that work? What would that do?

Xavier Le Roy holds a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Montpellier, France, and has worked as a dancer and choreographer since 1991. He has performed with diverse companies and choreographers. From 1996 to 2003, he was artist-in-residence at the Podewil in Berlin. In 2007-2008 he was “Associated Artist”at Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier, France. In 2010 Le Roy is an Artist in Residence fellow at the MIT Program in Art Culture and Technology (Cambridge, MA). Through his solo works such as Self Unfinished (1998) and Product of Circumstances (1999), he has opened new perspectives for dance and his individual approach has radicalized academic discourse about the body and choreographic art. Le Roy develops his work like a researcher, while simultaneously focusing on the relationships between process and product and his own involvement in the process. He regularly initiates projects to question modes of production, collaboration and conditions of group work with projects such as E.X.T.E.N.S.I.O.N.S.(1999-2000), Project (2003), and 6 Months 1 Location (2008). His latest works, such as the solos Le Sacre du Printemps (2007) and Product of Other Circumstances (2009), as well as the group piece low pieces (2009-2011),  “production” created together with Mårten Spångberg for the exhibition Move: Choreographing you, “untitled” 2012 for the exhibition 12 Rooms and « Retrospective » first realized in 2012 at the Tapiès Foundation-Barcelona, produce situations that explore more explicitly diverse mode of relationships between spectators and performers.

WILL RAWLS is a choreographer, performer and writer.  Curious about the construction of identity and agency within historical and future narratives, Rawls performances and installation engage dance, text, music, sound, sculpture and installation. In Winter/Spring 2015 Rawls will present two projects in NYC: in February, a collaboration with dancer, Kaitlyn Gilliland, for Danspace Project’s Platform: Dancers, Buildings and people in the Streets and in June 2015, a choreographic installation for the 100th Anniversary of the Henry Street Playhouse and the Abrons Arts Center. His last work, The Planet-Eaters, premiered at The Chocolate Factory Theater in November 2013. His other choreographic work has appeared at Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Dixon Place, The Brooklyn Museum, The Emily Harvey Foundation, Tanzquartier Wien, Mount Tremper Arts and Williams College, among others. From 2006-2013, Rawls collaborated with Kennis Hawkins on the performance duo, Dance Gang working in explicit and parasitic ways in public space and galleries (MoMA PS1, dOCUMENTA (13), ISE Cultural Foundation, Dance Theater Workshop and PS 122).  As a dancer, he has worked with Jérôme Bel, Brian Brooks, Alain Buffard, Maria Hassabi, Noemie LaFrance, Nicholas Leichter, Neal Medlyn, David Neumann, Shen Wei Dance Arts, and Katie Workum. Rawls has also been an interpreter for Tino Sehgal and re-performed works by Marina Abramović.

http://www.lemouvement.ch

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Biba Bell: What was your inception for this project?

Chris Sharp: Gianni was invited to compete for the commission of curating the 12th edition of the Swiss Sculpture Exhibition–a large-scale, public sculpture exhibition that has been taking place every five to ten years in Biel/Bienne since 1954, the Munster Skulptur Projekt of Switzerland, if you will–and he in turn invited me to compete with him. Although we were very excited about the prospect of doing the project, we immediately found two things problematic. The first was public sculpture, something that tends to be imposed upon whatever space it inhabits, rather than possessing a symbiotic relationship with it. And the second was public space itself. Could it, in a neo-liberal paradigm be said to even exist anymore? This being the case, we decided to liquidate, so to speak, the traditional conception of public sculpture, and focus our energy on public space, reducing it, and our investigation of it to its most fundamental, constitutive elements: physical space itself and the human body.

The Departure From Her Feet, Lin Yilin, photo: Meyer & Kangangi

BB: As primarily visual arts curators, what brought you and Gianni to work exclusively with performance (and a good deal of dance) in this exhibition?

CS: This commitment to the physical space and the human body naturally led to what the body does in public space– move through it, in it, occupying it, withdrawing from it, moving on. These considerations naturally led, at least in part, to dance. However, not just any dance, but a dance rooted in the tradition of Judson Dance Theater. In shifting our focus onto the body in public space, it was very important that the body not be something foreign to it, which is to say, not spectacular, exceptional, theatrical, but rather something natural to it, un-costumed, pedestrian, every day, but which, of course, tested the limits of the pedestrian body in public space (and no one did this more than luciana achugar).

SHOW, Maria Hassabi, photo: Meyer & Kangangi

Additionally, we were very keen to remain within the tradition of the Swiss Sculpture Exhibition as a sculpture exhibition almost in a Pygmalion sense, and therefore sought to include performances, which, in many cases, had a relationship with sculpture (Maria Hassabi for example), and which emphasized the materiality of the body (Simone Forti’s Huddle, in this context, became very sculptural, even, somehow, baroque).

Huddle, Simone Forti, photo: Meyer & Kangangi

On a more personal note, these interests dovetailed perfectly with my own growing interest and investment in contemporary dance as well as its relationship to sculpture. I saw it as an opportunity to really engage with the materiality of the body from a sculptural perspective. What do I mean by that? I mean an approach that really renders the specific, dynamic materiality and volume of the body visible from a three-dimensional perspective– as, with a few exceptions, these performances were experienced three-dimensionally, i.e., not from a single, fixed perspective (seated in front of a stage). Like sculpture, they could be circumnavigated, taken in from a variety of angles.

The work of André Lepecki was also important for me in this respect, particularly his characterization of dance as the self-erasing art form par excellence (not sure if those are his exact words). As such, what we created was a self-erasing public sculpture exhibition, which ultimately restored whatever space it inhabited to its initial state, unencumbered by objects, but nevertheless haunted, I hope, by the traces of the bodies we loosed within it.

The Departure From Her Feet, Lin Yilin, photo: Meyer & Kangangi

BB: You discuss the imbrication of the body and space as an elemental engagement in this exhibition, were there works within the biennial that expanded your curatorial vision in unexpected ways?

CS: I think virtually of all the works did. It was one thing to organize them on paper, emails, etc., but the moment the whole thing came together, what the theorist Maite Garbayo refers to as “the incalculable” (the element of unpredictably that attends any gathering of bodies) inevitably took place, altering with each performance. At times, public space was sincerely put under pressure. For instance, when Lin Yilin performed The Departure from her Feet, which consisted of him rolling on the ground from the Zentralplatz to town hall, one (drunk) man walked over him and basically tried to stop him, yelling in French, “Should I call the police or an ambulance?” But Lin ignored him and just kept rolling and eventually the man, flummoxed, went on his way. Something about a man rolling on the ground piqued his sense of civic duty. But no work, I believe, stirred up and vexed people’s sense of civic duty more than luciana achugar’s The Pleasure Project. Randomly encountering these eight people writhing and weltering on the ground, against buildings, street light polls, garbage cans, etc., many people seemed to have been slowly slapped in the face (in fact, that is probably the best way to describe many spectators’ reactions– these bodies reveling in their utter body-ness against the uncomprehending face), and in the end, were so surprised, so sucker-punched, as it were, that, after wondering for a moment if they should intervene or react, but, probably seeing that no one else was reacting, they ultimately capitulated to this urban enigma and let it be.

BB: How did you consider the specificity of the city of Biel in your curatorial concept? How did this city in particular support the invited performances?

CS: The specificity of Biel was closely accompanied by the specificity of the Swiss Sculpture Exhibition, which is to say, the fact that this public sculpture exhibition has been taking place for the past seven decades. This was very important, providing, at least historically, a kind of context within a context. No less important however was the city itself– its size and population, which is 55,000. In a larger, more densely populated city, say, like New York or London, the exhibition would have been totally lost. But Biel was somehow the perfect place, a micro city, to try such an exhibition out.

BB: I’m very curious about the body’s relationship to sculpture, a relationship that is important to this exhibition. Is sculpture a form that precedes the corporeal when negotiating this performance context? Or is there a different rhythm of emergence that we can consider when thinking bodies or performance or dance within the visual sphere?

CS: To a certain, if limited degree the sculptural precedes the performative here by virtue of the fact that this is a public sculpture exhibition, that is the context. But that precedence had a kind of fluctuating presence. At certain times, the distinctly sculptural quality of a work would emerge for a moment like a form within a cloud, but the majority of the time, the vitality of performance overshadowed the sculptural content of the show. Generally speaking, this worked because we did not want performances to be what they’re not, we wanted them to be precisely what they were. That said, certain works, such as Alexandra Pirici’s Tilted Arc, were expressly referred to as time-based sculptures (by the artist) and functioned as such. In the majority of the cases, however, the sculptural quality of the body– materiality, volume, and the haptic– could be said to play a key role in the performance but did not constitute it. I think it was this particular emphasis, along with a genuine investment in the nature of public space, that distinguished this exhibition and its use of performance and dance in the visual sphere (contemporary art) from many others, which in some cases, tend to fetishize performance and dance as a justifiable curatorial conceit in itself. Le Mouvement was not about performance and dance per se. It was about a number of things: sculpture, the body, public space, lack thereof, movement, lack thereof, etc., which naturally engendered an exhibition constituted by performance and dance.

BB: I really like the lack of constructed stages for exhibition, but it also brings up the question of alternate means by which space is demarcated in/for performance. Did you witness a range of possibilities?

CS: Not really. In almost every case, there was no stage, no demarcation, but the performance itself. This was very paramount for us. We did not want to create a theatrical situation in which the viewer was removed from the performer. We wanted them to take place on the same level, in the same space, so to speak, to share it. The idea was not to isolate or compartmentalize public space, to break it up, but rather to activate it in unusual ways by letting performances take place directly within it (incidentally, we made a point of not getting permission for any of the works, with exception of Pablo Bronstein’s, which took place on a private balcony over looking a public square, and Willi Dorner, who requested it as part of his working procedure. This allowed us to really interrogate the existence of public space – which, by definition, belongs to everyone).

The Pleasure Project, luciana achugar, photo: Meyer & Kangangi

BB: A number of New York based choreographers participated in the exhibition, some artists/works who trace back to seminal Judson-era choreographic interventions. How were you engaging work from this moment within the larger program?

CS: The legacy of Judson was present throughout the entire exhibition by virtue of its emphasis on the pedestrian, everyday body/performance. If we said “No to spectacle,” among other things, we knew weren’t the first. However, we did so for reasons that had less to do with unseating the hegemonic codes, rituals and bodies of modern dance than a sincere desire to keep it on the level of public space.

BB: I’m very excited by your proposal of performance as a type of counter-monument in relation to more common practice of public sculptural installation. Maybe you could say more how performance allows us to rethink public art through this lens?

CS: I’m not so sure that Le Mouvement necessarily presented performance as a sustainable antidote or alternative to more traditional forms of public monument. It’s interesting to think about, but I have doubts about its feasibility (it nevertheless has a kind of novelistic charm, something one might find in an Italo Calvino novel, or in some proponent of magical realism–this living monument maintained day in and day out by performers). Perhaps on a deeper, structural level, Le Mouvement was a response to the ideological untenability of the public monument, the extent to which it’s connected to a former two-power ideological system, and ideology in general. Of course one could easily argue from the perspective of post-Fordism and immaterial labor that our response was nevertheless driven by and embodied a certain ideology (reification of the body–but to what end?), but we prefer to see it as pre-ideological.

The Pleasure Project, luciana achugar, photo: Meyer & Kangangi

Taking our cue from Agamben and his definition of a movement as something unfinished and which has therefore yet to harden into ideology, we sought to represent the raw stuff of the body, alone, in pairs, and with other bodies, as something beyond the ken of language (pre-lingual) and narrative. No position was being defended, nor was a cause taken up except the capacity to defend a position via the body and public space. To a certain degree, and no matter reductive it might sound, you even could say that we, like Judson Dance Theater and even Anna Halprin, merely formalized what was already there (that is reductive). If any monuments were created, it was perhaps in the spirit of the Argentine proto-conceptualist Alberto Greco and his Vivo Ditos (art of the living finger), in which he would circle a pedestrian on the street and sign it, as if they were living sculptures.

Chris Sharp (b. 1974, USA) is a writer and independent curator based in Mexico City, where he runs, with the artist Martin Soto Climent, the project space Lulu. Together with Gianni Jetzer, he co-curated the 12th edition of the Swiss Sculpture Exhibition, entitled Le Mouvement, in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, and he is currently curating the cycle of exhibitions The Registry of Promise, at Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; Le Parc St. Léger, Pogues-les-Eaux, France; Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, France; and De Vleeshal, Middelburg, Holland. He is editor-at-large of Kaleidoscope magazine, a contributing editor of Art Review, and his writing has appeared in many magazines and on-line publications including Artforum, Fillip, Afterall, Mousse, Metropolis M, Spike, Camera Austria, artpress, Art-Agenda, and others.

Biba Bell (b. 1976, Sebastopol) lives and works in Detroit and NYC. Bell’s performance work has been shown at Times Square Arts and the Clocktower Gallery NYC, Insel Hombroich Germany, Visual Art Center Austin, Detroit Institute of Art, The Garage for Contemporary Culture Moscow, The Kitchen NYC, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Human Resources Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou Paris, Henry Miller Library Big Sur, PaceWildenstein Gallery NYC, Jack Hanley Gallery NYC, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church NYC, Roulette NYC, The Garage San Francisco, amongst others. Her current performance and video project is a three-part dance in a Mies van der Rohe apartment in Detroit (funded in part by The Knight Foundation). Bell also performs internationally with choreographer Maria Hassabi, will be defending her dissertation as a doctoral candidate in the department of performance studies at New York University in January 2015, and is on faculty in the Maggie Allesee department of Theater and Dance at Wayne State University. Her areas of study include contemporary choreography, site specificity, para-studio practice, theories of the body, and dance’s domesticity and immaterial labor within a culture industry. Her article “Slow Work: Dance’s temporal effort in the visual sphere” was published in the currently issue of Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts’.

Charles Aubin is associate curator at Performa, New York. For Performa 13 his projects included new works by artists Molly Lowe, Philippe Quesne, Konrad Smolenski, and Cally Spooner. He also curated “Man with a Projector” at Eyebeam, a program of British expanded cinema with works by experimental film-makers Malcolm Le Grice and Guy Sherwin. Aubin earned his Master of Humanities from Sciences Po Paris and is currently enrolled as a PhD student at the Royal College of Art in London. He worked as assistant curator for the 2005 Nuit Blanche in Paris and then from 2006 to 2010 at the Centre Pompidou’s performance department.

–Abigail Levine

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Abigail Levine: So, tell me a bit about your curatorial trajectory.

Charles Aubin: Well, the first key position that I had was working at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where I was part of the Live Art department as an assistant curator. Pompidou is mostly known as a museum with a world-class collection, but actually it’s a bigger endeavor. When it was created—that’s why it’s called the Centre—the idea was to house different disciplines within the same building, so the facilities were designed to support that project. You have exhibition galleries, but there is also a big theater and a smaller auditorium, a public library and movie theaters. The facilities for each of these disciplines are top-notch, which had a big impact on how disciplines developed there. Cinema, theater, dance and music could fit comfortably in the Centre, whether they were in direct conversation with the exhibitions or not. It offered leeway to either respond to the main direction in the visual arts programming or be completely independent from it. We could have our own programming within the theater—this was usually the case. We were obviously in conversation with what was happening elsewhere in the Centre, but we were also in conversation with what was happening at other theaters and dance venues in Paris. So you know…I think it was more integrated in the Parisian theater and dance programming landscape than what was happening in New York’s visual art spaces, like at MoMA for instance.

AL: You don’t see their live art or performing arts programming as much in conversation with contemporary performing arts?

CA: Well it’s changing obviously, now it’s more and more integrated: for instance at MoMA with Ana [Janevski] inviting Boris Charmatz, or Trajal Harrel benefitting from a long-term research residency there. But the way that the Pompidou was created in 1977 the idea of integration of the arts meant that we consequently had ongoing conversations with venues like Théâtre de la Ville, Théâtre de la Bastille and even the Centre National de la Danse. The idea was that they were partners with whom we would co-present new works by Rachid Ouramdane, Loïc Touzé, or Eszter Salamon, and these theaters would function as a circuit for artists. The other important thing is, of course, that the financial structures and production networks in France are quite different from what you have in the US. And again, the Pompidou was part of a system of strong production support for new works. It was less about “buying,” let’s say, existing works that were premiered elsewhere than playing a key role to support the creation of new works, helping in the financial aspects. So I think it’s quite different, also because of the network of choreographic centers and theaters throughout the country that are dedicated to producing and presenting new works. That gave France a different landscape for performance and performing arts compared to what dominates in the US.

AL: Did you come from a performing arts background?

Charles Aubin

CA: No, I did a Masters of humanities, but I had a lot of experiences working for festivals and curating small-scale festivals. Then I started interning at the Pompidou in the performance department because I loved the programming there and I wanted to know more about them and that got me started.

AL: And did you feel—despite this independence that you’re talking about—that being within the structure of an institution that is known primarily as a visual art venue affected your curating or the reception of the performance works?

CA: Yes definitely. It was also the time when, the 2000s, that was the high point of what was miscalled “conceptual dance” or some people even call it non danse, non-dance in French. These artists—Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz, Eszter Salamon, Vera Mantero, Emmanuelle Huynh or Olga de Soto these people were strongly informed by the visual arts and conceptual strategies that underpinned the visual arts. Someone like Jérôme Bel would definitely say that Marcel Duchamp is one of the biggest influences on his work. So yes, I think that being in that place at the Pompidou was also the right occasion to see where dance was exploring other sources of influence.

AL: And in your curation, did you feel like it was then part of your purview to ask people to think this work through visual art history? I guess some of this is the question of how you understand your role as a curator.

CA: Well, I think that it started with the fact that it was intellectually stimulating, for instance when Bel uses the idea of the readymade in some of his works… Like with the Macarena dance in The Show Must Go On. Jérôme takes this existing group, repetitive choreography and inserts it in his performance but, because you’re always working with performers and human beings it’s not completely right or exact, each dancer performs it differently, it’s not like a straightforward display of objects. You obviously get the concept but it had been grafted on something that is live and unstable. I think that this intersection of performing and visual arts was a place of real intellectual engagement, so that is what drew me to include it in my curation.

AL: And so, then you came across the pond, and…

Jérôme Bel “The Show Must Go On” Photo by Mussacchio Laniello

CA: Well, there was a middle period. After I had been working there for five years, I decided that I wanted to take some time and start focusing on academic research. It was a moment a lot of research was initiated in relationship to artists like Tino Sehgal and the opening of that kind of territory for museums and galleries. This brought with it a lot of younger researchers, trying to sharpen these concepts. And the role of Claire Bishop and others had a strong impact on how one framed one’s understanding of the phenomenon, as well. I felt an impulse to take some time out and to reflect on it all and, then, after two years at the RCA in London, as I said, the opportunity to come and work in New York happened, and I thought that I would take it… In fact, I had never been to Performa  before. I obviously knew the program, I was following it, but I was excited to be part of the team and to work with RoseLee [Goldberg] on defining possibilities for 21^st Century performance. Performa comes from a strong history of the 20th Century, so the question was: how do you define or see new practices and how do you also explore that limit between visual arts and performing arts? Like, we were talking about dance, but the boundaries are never clean cut, so it’s always in conversation, or sometimes it’s about smuggling some aspect of one practice into the other. So, that was the initial impulse for my joining Performa’s curatorial team.

AL: And what do you see as the difference in mandate between the work you did at the Pompidou and Performa?

CA: Well, first of all there’s the temporality that is totally different. I think when you work on the biennial, you consider the experience of the audience from a different perspective than when you work on a yearlong program because you think of people attending several performances in one night and being dedicated for a couple of days. You basically have to channel excitement. Working on and attending my first Performa biennial at the same time, I was very surprised that we had such a dedicated audience. It created a sense of urgency that you don’t really have when you work within a regular theater on a yearlong program. So I think the answer is the sense of development of the programming over time because, as with any biennial or festival, you expect people to build their own path and understanding of it by attending several performances and to be dedicated to it, whereas on the weekly basis, you have a more diffuse contact with the audience. Another difference is the geography. As a biennial spread all over the city of New York, I feel like Performa creates new experiences and memories of the city. As a curator, this is something that I’m very excited about.

AL: And in terms of the interaction between visual arts and performing arts, particularly visual arts and dance, did you see a different dialogue or a different way of functioning? As you said, the boundaries are not clear, but Performa as I understand it, has a very clear sense of moving from the visual arts world into performance.

CA: Yes, I think that was something that was established right from the beginning by RoseLee, especially considering her background in art history, writing the first history of performance art, looking at performance through the lens of visual art. That said, one can see that dance has regularly been in conversation with other art forms in the 20th century and when  you’re talking about the Ballets Russes or Judson… there are different “regimes” of collaborations between dance and the visual arts. The other interesting aspect for me being European was that, because of the financial structure of support for dance there, it nurtured a well-trained and like-minded community of dancers who wanted to challenge and deconstruct the boundaries of their medium. It’s the story of the 90s after the 80s “Nouvelle Danse” scene. Consequently, when I started working in Paris, the most interesting and experimental works were coming from what we would label dance because that’s where a lot of artists had the opportunity to have long-term research residencies.

AL: What have been your priorities in your curating at Performa? Or if not priorities, because maybe that is just curating interesting work, have there been any sort of rubrics, or modes of thinking and practice, that you’ve been shaping in particular?

CA: Well, for the last edition for instance, I was interested in looking at where that conversation on discursive works was left in France, and in Europe, so that was one of the reasons I invited Noé Soulier at Danspace —thanks to Judy [Hussie-Taylor]—because I felt that it was interesting to see where that conversation was now and why someone like Noé, who has been classically trained, wanted to use the lecture-performance format, why he went to find other philosophical sources. I think within the platform that Performa is, I was interested in picking up that aspect of the conversation. That was also one of the aspects that Lana [Wilson] and RoseLee looked at a couple of years ago with “Dance after Choreography” when they put Judson in conversation with Jérôme, Xavier, and Boris at Performa 07.

AL: And do you… Are there particular challenges or benefits that you see coming out of sort of this interest in performance and the visual arts?

CA: Well, first of all, I think it’s very positive to see that there is such an interest in performance and live works. You can’t be unhappy about it because it’s good for the artists who are working with performance; it’s also good for our work as curators that performance is recognized as part of a broader curatorial arc. Then I think one of the challenges that is still being discussed is the economic challenges for performers and creators of performances. It’s always an interesting conversation for a curator to have with an artist or a performer or a choreographer to find what is the best economic model for performance in museums and galleries because its something that is always…what’s the expression… “The elephant in the room”, right?

AL: Yes, it tends to be. Are there economic models that you think are functioning? I know Europe and the US are radically different in that respect, but in your work at Performa, are you developing any protocols?

CA: Well I think it’s always important to, in this kind of program, to learn from what one would call the performing arts model, the idea that interpreters or performers are paid for their labor, basically. Then it’s always a different situation if you’re talking about something that has already been produced and that is touring, or if it’s something that you commissioned. If it’s a commission, then you work closely with the artist to make it happen. In my work, I try to be responsible that way, and I try to be very transparent with the artists I work with on the financial aspects to find ways to make things happen with the respect that artists deserve.

AL: And when.. if you’re working with European artists, is all the funding coming from Performa, or is some of it being subsidized by European sources?

CA: You know, it depends on the situation, but with European artists, we usually try to get cultural services onboard. It’s always in conversation with, yes, the national supports we can find and how we can make it happen with local partners .You know, we work very collaboratively with different theaters and venues in New York, trying to find the way to present the work here.

AL: Do you see either in your work in New York or your work in Europe that this movement of performance into visual art spaces and visual art discourse is in any sort of tension with performance happening in more traditionally theatrical venues? Does this feels like a passing moment or if it is an illumination of an ongoing conversation?

Cally Spooner “And You Were Wonderful Onstage” at Performa 2013, Photo by Paula Court

CA: Well, I guess that one of the first issues to consider is the experience of the audience and whether a work can be better seen, better understood, better experienced within the gallery setting or a theater. For instance, Jérôme’s work, The Show Must Go On, in the MoMA atrium, definitely carried a different meaning from the way it was initially conceived for the theater. That’s the reason large parts of it were not performed because it didn’t make any sense in a gallery space. Or if you think of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A, keeping the gaze directed away from the audience is also something that as a curator you have to think about. I feel that when for instance you invite an artist like Cally Spooner to work at the National Academy, working with choreographer Adam Weinert, they take into consideration the historical and architectural contexts of the galleries at the National Academy to produce the experience for the visitor. But you know… I think there’s always a very strong site-specificity that you need to keep in mind to make the right decision for a work. So, I wouldn’t put them in competition; I think there are different tools that convey different understandings and different meanings, and it’s interesting to blur the lines sometimes and see if a work can be more expressive within one or another context. But that sensitivity is always something that is at the core of your work as a curator.

AL: So the curator’s job becomes well, I suppose from the root word, to care for, to find what conditions need to exist to see the work as it should.

CA: Exactly. I think that it’s what is stimulating, in conversation with the artists of course. And in fact, as a curator, you’re not the owner of the reception of the work. The way that it will be perceived and understood is also something that, ultimately, happens with the spectator.

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Choreographer Abigail Levine’s works bring together dance’s bodily specificity with performance art’s experiments with time and human action. They have been shown in the US, Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Canada and Taiwan, recently at venues including the Movement Research Festival, Mount Tremper Arts Festival, Center for Performance Research, Roulette, Art in Odd Places, Foro Performática, and SESC São Paulo. Abigail was a reperformer in Marina Abramović’s MoMA retrospective and has also performed recently with Carolee Schneemann, Clarinda Mac Low, Larissa Velez-Jackson, and Mark Dendy. In summer 2014, she learned Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 work Trio A, coached by Pat Catterson. Abigail holds a Masters in Dance and Performance Studies from NYU. She is currently an editor at Movement Research’s digital performance journal Critical Correspondence and has written on performance for Memory: Documents in Contemporary Art, Women & Performance, The Performance Club, and e-misférica.

Agnes Martin’s brand of minimalism isn’t for everyone, but I am always star-struck when I come across one of her drawings or paintings. Like a gust of chill, fresh air, with a view of some wide, empty expanse, her work gives me a settled, alert feeling. The shimmering surface has an authority, a presence, and at the same time a little shyness, some space for me to enter. It took me a while to figure it out, but I think what vibrates with such vitality in her work, despite its elegant spareness, are those living lines, slightly shaky, varying in tone, drawn by hand, a manifestation of concentration, deliberate gesture, and a faith in meditative repetition. Is that why I am also drawn to dance, visual art’s fleet-footed cousin? —The human body transforming our capacity for basic physical movement into an encoded, practiced, startling presence, complete with deliberate gesture and manifest concentration?

As I consider dance’s place in the museum, the big questions that arise for me are: What is dance’s place in our culture? What place does the museum hold? How is dance being framed for the public by the museum? Why do we keep defining artists by outdated genre categories? What are the practical and economic models of production that these categories imply and what happens when there is significant and ongoing crossover of genres? What kind of performance or body-based work thrives in a museum setting?

To start, I’d like to address the outdated discipline of classifications used to describe artists, as this has implications for the role of museums as well as other arts organizations and dance venues. At this point, it seems clear to me that there is a trend: many, many artists are making work at the intersection of genres. The old labels keep needing qualifiers, or we have to resort to that clunky term “interdisciplinary”. What does this signal?

Contemporary art-making is a huge, humming spectrum of activity. Visual artists are crossing into time-based and performance forms on a regular basis and with relative ease as their comfort in bucking the strictures of genre becomes a given, and as technologies such as video become ubiquitous and simple to access. Dance artists are equally versatile, jumping into new terrain, building collaborative and conceptual frameworks, employing a heavy dose of visual design and non-dance content/form as part of their practice. Collaborative art-making, always part of performance-based work, is becoming more prevalent among all artists as the mythos of the individual artist/genius dies a long overdue death and they rediscover that teams are more effective once you launch into work that requires other people’s expertise (i.e. film, performance or installation).

But more than all that, there seems to be a desire to process the multiplicity of what constitutes contemporary life: the tidal wave of data, the human and environmental costs of our policies and customs, the shifts in national or personal identity, the accessibility of information, the blurring of fact and fiction. Source material for new works is wildly diverse as artists attempt to parse this world of too much information. Processes of creation are also proliferating. Out come the raging critiques, and the desire to create artworks that have relevance, power and meaning for specific communities, rather than works that uphold and decorate the status quo. And in the midst of it all, the artist must be a savvy businessperson, able to respond to opportunities and access scarce resources, rally their own base and stay attuned to the vagaries of institutional needs. Yes, the study of a single discipline, its history, and the accumulation of its skills are essential to the training of an artist, and so most artists will identify with a certain pre-existing art form. But this continuous exchange between visual art, dance, theater, music, and performance has opened up new forms. Institutions, venues, funders and fans have been taking note.

The role of the museum, and more specifically, its role in relation to the increasing desire to have dance as a visible part of its new programming, seems to be shifting too. I can only intuit that current museum strategy is driven by the following convoluted assumption: potential museum goers are looking for social and interactive experiences, events, and spaces that bolster a sense of community while providing content based in art, that somehow are able to compete with the many entertainment options available elsewhere and at home. In short, the programming should provide connection, meaning, fun, and an aesthetic experience. In the past, museums were celebrated as places of quiet contemplation. You can still find that experience if you look for it, but more often museums bank on blockbuster (aka marketable) exhibitions to provide a celebratory, jostling voyeurism.

In addition to pouring resources into major shows in the hopes of creating a phenom, museums are also offering a variety of programs to continuously draw in a broader, more diverse audience: thematic and curator-led tours, online access to collections, video content created to elucidate the collection, kids programs, lectures, parties, event rentals, galas, etc. The museum’s goal is to sweep in as many people as possible, especially if the institution is federally or state funded. The museum can no longer be an unassailable guardian and bastion of high culture and visual artifacts, but aims to be an essential center of urban cultural life.

Bringing performance programming into the museum is a natural offshoot of this expanded mission. However, it means museums are no longer trading on their expertise in the visual arts to create more interactive content. They are now importing different art forms, and they may not have the expertise on staff to make the right choices or to be able to grapple with the implications and the practicalities of their choices. Now my first question is this: of all things, why are they importing contemporary dance? Why not stick with the basic fare that appeals to marketing departments, like VJ/DJ events, puppet theater for kids, or string quartets? Artists whose work is based in the live presence of the human body performing dance-based, non-virtuosic, non-narrative, and unintelligible (to most people) movement is not exactly going to bring in the crowds. At least it hasn’t for dance venues. Contemporary, experimental dance is so marginalized by our culture that it is barely on the radar. So why would museums turn to this esoteric genre to enliven their programming?

The answer might be something more existential. If we start with the premise that we live in a complex, commercial age of endlessly reproducible visual media and that people are being cheerfully bombarded with visuals constantly, judging, commenting, posting, retweeting images that are moving and still, user-generated, professionally refined, for entertainment, for advertising, for art, then we come to a point where we have to ask, in this melee, what is the role of visual art? Or rather, what is the larger role of the visual art market—a market whose purpose is to circulate original and historically important images that can appreciate in value and are limited in number? Besides the obvious tasks of creating and protecting the value of visual artworks, does the art market desire to be culturally relevant, to drive innovation, to capture and express contemporary concerns? Museums play a crucial role in this ecosystem of course. Is it possible that they are feeling in danger of obsolescence? If they are not the keepers of and guides to important images anymore, then what should they do? We already addressed the museum as an urban cultural center, but is there a role to play in providing new experiences to a jaded public weary of looking at crafted images?

Enter dance. If people really are craving original experiences rather than more images, dance can provide an unrepeatable, unique experience that is at once heightened and, for many people, downright strange. By virtue of its very precariousness, its ephemerality, its inherent non-commercialism, its rigorous physical demands made manifest, I think dance is being brought in as a tonic to soothe an art world that has overindulged and that, in the end, can’t really compete with the flood of images stretching out in every direction of our visual horizon. “Dance is the poetry of physical labor”, to quote Noemie LaFrance’s recent article. Like an Agnes Martin’s painting, it thrills with its presence, but without the resulting value-accruing artifact.

The art world seems fascinated by dance as an artistic practice that has no viable market and yet that continues to thrive (at least in terms of birthing new works every year, as well as new MFAs). In addition to its economic precariousness, dance has a radically different approach to presence and the body to that of visual art. Performance artists, in general, are not performers. They are engaging in a visual arts-based practice that hinges on the idea that their body, or the body of others, is their material. Therefore, they are not so much “performing” their work as “being” their work. Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at MOMA was a case in point. Her work over the years has remained powerful and important, but the re-creation of her pieces, by hiring dancers and performers, created a firestorm within the dance community, along with serious contract disputes. There was so little understanding on both sides of what it meant to embody these personal performance art works in the museum versus hiring dancers to perform task-based activities choreographed by someone else. It is not the same, to state the obvious.

In The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, Eugenio Barba writes beautifully on virtuosity in performance as opposed to performance presence. He proposes that virtuosity gives the audience a “wow factor” which generally can be distilled to the feeling “She’s good! I can’t do that!”, whereas  performance presence transfixes the audience and transports them into an imaginary world where literal thinking falls away and the audience is no longer mentally comparing the performer with “normal” people. Presence is what distinguishes an accomplished performer and it is what gives even their most mundane movements a sort of hyper-clarity, an energy that compels you to attend to it. It transcends style and technique. So, for me, dance has something that visual art does not, which is this presence, which is able to transcend the seeming limits of a situation, and which can communicate forcefully and directly. A manifestation of concentration, of deliberate gesture, alive, with faith in repetition and heightened awareness. People need to experience it, live. Like a fresh, cold gust that clears the air and opens a space. I don’t mean to suggest that performance artists can’t access this presence; simply that in dance it is one of the baseline goals of a performance, no matter the style.

So what happens when you bring this level of physical presence into a museum? Can it survive in conditions that were not created to support it, and which in fact can undermine its ability to act? While many dance artists are successfully working in site-specific ways outside of theatrical spaces, there is also a reason all of those conventions of the theater, the architecture, the acoustics, the floors, the tools and techniques, came into being: to allow the performer as well as the audience to focus solely on the demands and effects of the art. If museums want to present dance work, they are going to have to ask themselves if they are prepared to create the right conditions for it. They will also need to cultivate and support the next generation of dance artists whose work fits naturally in the gallery context.

Dance artists that thrive in the environment of a museum or gallery are ones who are able to navigate a hybrid form that accounts for the specific conditions of that type of venue. This may seem obvious, but concept and implementation are two different beasts. A few contemporary dancers and choreographers already do this as part of their practice, using some of the following strategies:

• Creating physical environments for the work by reframing or overtaking existing architecture/space.
• Inviting audience interactivity into the work. This runs the gamut from direct participation by the audience in the creation or performance process, to allowing freedom of vantage point and movement through the space for the audience, to giving multiplicity of content to attend to, so the audience must make a choice in how they relate to the work.
• Including a strong element of visual design in the work, either through collaboration with other artists and designers or within their own practice.
• Putting aside physical virtuosity in the dancing in favor of a hybrid approach, playing with the combination of movement/dance, sound design/music, visuals, interactivity and/or participatory structures.
• Facing head on the problem of performing in a loud, ambient, public space by designing specific choreography, structures and activities for the performers and the audience.
• Creating works that might not be classified as “choreography” or “dance” at all, but rather use choreographic principles in their creation, resulting in forms as disparate as websites, installations, films, videos, apps, and public interventions.

Museums are excited by this work because it is fresh, vital, and pairs the undeniable power of live performance and a choreographic sensibility with a sophisticated processing of audience, environment and art. If they want to include it in their programming, as a way to acknowledge the interdisciplinary nature of current art making (i.e. to stay relevant and on top of cresting trends), then they would be wise to help create fertile conditions for its growth. The only way to bolster the development of this work is for museums and funding institutions to refine their approaches, and deepen their knowledge and curation of dance-based work and of the specific ways it needs to be supported and presented. As the artists whose work falls outside of a theatrical context grow in their scope and practice, they will seek out and create opportunities for their work to be seen and supported, which in turn will encourage newer artists or collaborations to explore this rich terrain.

I’d like to highlight a few recent examples of artists working in this direction, many hosted by MOMA of late:

In choreographer Sarah Michelson’s works, including recent projects at MOMA, she not only tackles the challenges of framing, architecture, visual design and a potentially wandering audience, but employs tactics in her work that resonate with visual arts curators: her body of work rigorously reexamines itself, its relation to art and dance-making, to institutions, even as it cannibalizes past works to create new works, appropriating her own and others’ choreography, over time weaving a web of interconnected and living material (side note: David Velasco wrote a fabulous essay on Michelson’s oeuvre in Art Forum called “I’ll Be Your Mirror”).

Ralph Lemon’s work has always been able to glide from theater-based to gallery-based, and he has very consciously created a space in his practice for both, often creating offshoots of different forms from the same originating content, as in his work “The Geography Trilogy”. With a typical creation process that involves a long period of research, he gathers a wide range of material from historical, literary, and personal sources, develops movement material for specific contexts which again, like Michelson, might be repurposed later in a different context or form, and is as capable of writing a book, as making a theatrical dance, as putting up a solo visual art show. In addition, he engages in this conversation of the convergence of dance and visual art with institutional partners, such as in recent curatorial projects (MOMA and Danspace Project). This kind of approach leads to an engagement with the issues surrounding dance in the museum context, and gives him a particularly clear-eyed vantage point from which to assess the effect of his work in various contexts.

A recent video went around of Heather Hansen, a New Orleans-based artist who creates large-scale charcoal drawings by dancing on the paper. She reaches and sweeps across the paper, the symmetry of her body and movements creating a kind of mandala. It made the Facebook rounds, and I was surprised and interested to see how much people responded – not only the dance community but the general public. I have not experienced the work live in a museum, and maybe it functions better as a viral phenomenon, I don’t know. But it was interesting to see how effectively it swept through the blogosphere.

Yanira Castro has been making site-specific dances for years, but her most recent project “The People to Come” was by far the most adapted to a museum context and relied on direct participation of viewers. The solo dances that you could see in the live performance were created in front of you, by dancers responding to source material culled from submissions solicited from the public online. With an interactive website and archive, the piece continues to resonate after the actual live performances end, leaving a tangible trace – that could easily be installed in a gallery for visitors to peruse.

The recent show that Boris Charmatz mounted in MOMA (I didn’t see it) was designed to engage in the concept itself of dance in a museum, and was up front about the performer as both archive and living art. But I wonder how effective it was if you had to happen upon the dancers – I heard of several people who went specifically to see this show and felt frustrated by its lack of information on where or when you could see the solos, especially given the crowded conditions. Perhaps its intent (to be almost like pop-up events) and clear conceptual language undermined it as an experience.

Of course, we have seen many a performance programmed in various museums of Merce Cunningham’s work. This is as it should be, as it reads very well in a gallery setting, but it is also an unsurprising choice given the visual arts status of his collaborators and friends.

Tino Sehgal is an intriguing example to discuss with dance artists, often eliciting strong reactions. With a background in choreography and economics, he has forged an identity as a visual artist who makes “constructed situations”, essentially choreographing museum-goers by having interpreters trained to interact with them, in order to create art works that are purely experiential. There is no object, nothing to collect, just a memory of a situation or conversation. But then he is represented by galleries (e.g. Marian Goodman in NYC) and sells his works to visual arts institutions (by oral contract in limited editions) for significant sums. His work is intriguing precisely because he has figured out a way to retain and yet market the ephemerality of his works, and how to make the relationship with the museum visitor an essential part of the structure of the work. As Jörg Heiser writes “Sehgal’s work is driven by one question: are there ways to create something while circumventing the usual cycles of production and consumption?” Creating something that is not meant for consumption implies that there is no market for it, an oxymoron when we are looking at something created for a major museum.

It is hard to know which way this wind will blow. Dance in the museum might be a passing phenomenon, or it might be a sign of a major shift. In either case, the dance community and visual art institutions need to open communication pathways to address the challenges that arise when they partner. Many in the dance community have written about the economic imbalance inherent in the relationship as a major issue. Others point to the danger of dance’s own history being subsumed by the visual arts narrative. But this is an opportunity to bring greater visibility to contemporary dance. Museums must bring in large number of people to survive. Dance has not done that, maybe as is natural, but perhaps it is time to see what happens when it plays on a bigger stage, even if it’s not a sprung-wood one.

Hélène Lesterlin is an artist, curator, performer and instigator of collaborative projects. She creates performances and time-based art works, drawing from dance, visual art, literature, folklore, music and interactive technologies. Studio Reynard is her home base. Currently immersed in French medieval sources, she is working on a series of projects: a satiric puppet show based on the story cycle of Reynard the Fox; a dark, transmogrifying solo dance performance with live interactive video; and a walking sound work that visits ghosts using low power FM radio transmitters. From 2005 – 2011, she served as founding curator for dance and theater at EMPAC – the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – an institution dedicated to the production and presentation of adventurous contemporary work spanning performance, media, installation and art. For more info: studio-reynard.com.

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Responses originally in Spanish follow the English version below.

Nuria

Part I / Day 1: Nobody knows what it is, including us.

The room is ready. 00:00:00 is up on the screen.

4 months without documents and 1 drive that holds all the sound files that are now activated. A microphone hangs from the ceiling in the center of the space. On the floor there is another, one close to the table, and one that Eduardo holds and moves towards the bodies that appear in the space.

We have a five hour choreography, no, it’s a 45 hour piece divided into nine days. The work is the same each day. What changes is the document produced daily by the work. Today, the first day, we have the “on the go” sound document. Eduardo is our sound man.

At first glance, it is simply a piece.There is someone documenting the work while it takes place. What it will be is a commentary on the work and, until now, only Eduardo knows what will result from this document he produces as the choreography unfolds.

Part II / Day 1: The sound should be heard to be experienced in a meaningful way… Eduardo has become part of every act that makes up the piece. Suddenly, we have solos, duet, trios, later we are all there, later solos, duets and quartets and all together again. Eduardo is there. If you only observe him, the subtlety of the things he hears with those earphones that encase his head, you can sense it by the gestures he makes, but it is only an approximation, a space of uncertainty that, at the same time, provokes certain certainties within the piece.

Part III / Day 5: 03:32:00. I am in front of the video screen. The sound document is on the table in front of me, audible on two pairs of headphones. People look for the microphones at the corners of the room.

There are none.

Nadia

The meeting that the world of visual arts and choreography are experiencing does not much differ from that of two people encountering each other. With points in common and immense differences, we are tapped to learn to negotiate in order to be able to engage in dialogue. If one attacks the other, no dialogue is possible. In the case of Arrecife, one has to understand how the MUAC functions. It is an institutional space and extremely bureaucratic but, at the same time, it flirts with challenging the ways museums of the same size function in other parts of the world. The museum’s seductive invitation means one has to be triply cautious; one has to enter the museum with choreographic weapons at the ready, with a clear logic, and with an awareness of the problematics that have come before. Since the museum (for as contemporary as it believes itself to be) is a space that historicizes, that transforms objects into historic objects, we decided to tackle a project in which history would be written, questioned, repeated, or erased moment by moment, in which there would remain no trace other  than the memory of those who experienced it.

We have enormous bodies. And many times we are inclined to give them everything. But we are not inclined to prostitute ourselves to everything… (A little bit, yes, because it is a way to negotiate, to feel rich and manipulate the other, but only as suggestion.)We direct a more informal type of economy. Here things have distinct values, and the quality of things depends on you, on the weather, on the humors, the retrograde of Venus, on the amount of time you are willing to give us.

Invitation to performance at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, 2013.

Magdalena

Arrecife: Total concentration in the body. The body without an image, the body that wants to let go of everything to be only a body in movement. The body before the one who documents. The body of the one who documents, trying to trap what it reaches in a lasting form. The body is body in its nakedness. The concrete body is an archive in itself. It is formatted and educated to move in a specific way and it contains all the corporeal representations that it has learned and inherited. The naked and concrete body representing representations archived on celluloid that will be documented in turn in a Borgesian game of mirrors.

Esthel

There is a danger for choreography to fall in the logic of objecthood and distant contemplation that the museums usually deal with. Maybe before saying yes to a museum’s invitation, one should think in what way one could play with its time-space conventions. It is really easy to end up objectifying choreography or a dance or, worse, a body. Looking at recent examples of dance entering the museum, I notice a tendency to somehow fit to its logic: If the museum is a place that archives, then let’s archive dances. Or, if the museum spectator usually comes and goes, then let’s just dance when there is someone in the room, or let’s activate the choreography only when there is someone there to watch it.

One thing I appreciate about Arrecife is that I think we manage to avoid some of the museum’s logic: If we have three weeks to occupy a room, why not make a choreography that actually lasts all the 45 hours that we will be there. You can come and go, but during that time the choreography will not stop, and we actually need all 45 hours to complete it. It was a long action, and only the ten performers lived it for the full time. We could not assume a spectator would watch it through, but several visitors came back to see how the work was changing. I don’t believe that is typical behavior for a museum visitor.

Juan Francisco

The role of the curator is a very tricky one in general, but perhaps even more so in relation to choreography. Talking to Ale [Alejandra] Labastida, the curator of the recent project we developed for the MUAC—the contemporary art museum at the Autonomous University of Mexico—she was very insistent in the problematics of a likely colonizing gaze of the curator towards dance and choreography, being, as most museum curators are, ignorant of the subject, or at least not used to thinking in choreographic terms. I use curatorship as an example because it does have a sort of authoritative voice in the matter. But I think that this colonizing possibility is dangerous in general, and that its responsibility is shared by all involved in the choreography/museum affair. Respecting the fundamental conditions of dance and choreography while they enter a zone that was not conceived for them, not forcing them into an already existing and tested template, we may give space to a lot of interesting problems, both in this relationship itself, and in the internal dialogue of each player, namely, choreography and the museum. Coming back to the particular experience we had, having the curator “on our side” (a.k.a. her awareness of the colonizing danger and not wanting to be trapped by it), it was very interesting to see how the project (that was not only choreographic in form, but whose structure also responded to a choreographic logic), produced a very specific resonance in an audience used to more museum-like propositions, and especially in the staff of the museum themselves. What I am trying to say is that, in this situation, there is the potential for a shift of perspective, and therefore for a displacement of very deep subjectifying structures embedded in the bases of the museum’s idea. I believe that this potential can be realized if we “stay true to choreography”, which of course doesn’t mean to fight against the so-called epistemic laws of the museum, but rather to identify them and, therefore, to sway and dance our way around them.

Esthel

I think it is important to consider disciplinary specificity, rather than disciplinary boundaries. Pre-determined boundaries will usually lead to a pre-determined idea about the discipline’s potential and will, therefore, limit it in some way. By contrast, thinking about specificity does not imply the necessity to deal with limits; it is rather a way to broaden differentiation and, so, to avoid homogenization. In Arrecife, the people that made the documentation came from several different disciplines (photography, physics, primatology, visual arts, among others). What I liked about the encounter between us and them was that we proposed a very specific way to make a document of the dances—one that responded to the choreographic dispositive of the piece—and that made them explore their discipline and medium in a way they usually don´t. At the end of the process, some of the documenters spoke of how this collaboration made them discover new facets of their medium and work.

Nuria

I celebrate the chance to go beyond our usual territory as a dance community. By having the opportunity to inhabit the space of different disciplines, specialization breaks down because it will disseminate and push a radical consciousness in approach to artistic work. Additionally, I think personal background always determines the way you relate to anything, but boundaries in a sense are there to be transited. So the considerations to be taken into account are very specific of what a project proposes to use as a tool to engage, in particular with a specific discourse. The goal is to bring elements through discourse into a wider context of work.

Nadia

Necessity, retro-necessity, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s… it’s already been done. Bodies, intangible resources, responsibilities, trends, history, spaces, the domino effect, “cultural capitals”, architecture, truism, exhaustion, crises (artistic-political), claims, body-to-body, relief, breath, archive, document, death of the archive, archive that does not kill, archive that creates possibility, reinterpretation of the archive, archival resources, durational occupation of space, ambiguous space, neither belonging to the visual arts nor to dance. Spectators working. Curators rethinking. Movement and more movement.

Magdalena

I wonder how real this coming together of dance and the visual arts really is. To think of it this way keeps putting us in an ordered reality, in closed categories that move together. But, if we analyze the situation carefully, it seems that something else is going on. If a certain type of dance can enter the museum comfortably, it is because it has assumed the concerns that were before only the purview of the visual arts. It seemed that these concerns responded to a defined mode of thinking and feeling that we might call “contemporary.” This way of thinking and feeling would be validated by authoritative sources, such as philosophers, critics, market tendencies, etc. The museum did not care what form these expressions took, as long as they responded to the aesthetic and conceptual tendencies deemed relevant to the current historical moment. Therefore, it is not a coming together so much as a response to an orientation that is attractive to the museum right now. It has little to do with artistic disciplines.

Juan Francisco

It’s not so much about the discipline—fiddly word—but about the position of thought, a phrase I prefer to calling it perspective. Beyond the body as a topic, choreography as a way of thinking is practically inescapable. Take architectural thought, for instance. Architectural thought could be, in very brute terms, reduced to a combination of choreographic, sculptural and economic thoughts mixed together. In designing a building, you have to organize the way it will be inhabited or transited, walked through: you have to think about proportions, aesthetics and physical problems of the thing as object; you have to think about the way it negotiates with the environment, both the one it is embedded in and the one it produces. In choreography, although you can relate, rely or use other ways of thinking, its basic needs and tools are strictly choreographic, which makes it a very wide ranging “toolbox.”

So, yes, more than talking about disciplines or genres, I think it would be important to consider positions of thought, or ways of thinking. I’m not talking ideology, but mechanics and their relationships with contexts / context production, and whatever springs from those tensions and frictions.

Nadia

The conditions were already in place. They “gave us a chance” to present our work on the legitimating, monstrous, and marvelous platform that is a contemporary art museum (in our case, associated with the university.) Now, finally, we are able to call ourselves Contemporary Artists, debate with curators, speak of vernissage instead of première. And if everything goes well, we can leap from the MUAC to the Palais de Tokio, to PS1, to the Tate Modern and end up in the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niteroi…

Although we have not yet decided how we are going to charge for this, nor who is going to pay. This, however, is not just a problem of the museum but of our general human-dancing-choreographic condition.

Colectivo AM came to life after a funeral ceremony at the closure of Sala Tomada (Taken Hall), a choreographic self-curated project in the Teatro de la Danza, Mexico City, at the end of 2010. The current members of the collective are choreography and live-arts related artists. Thrilled about history, defenders of reflection, and critical towards their own work… Though different nationalities are mixed here, the members are based and develop their work in Mexico City, and they think an artistic practice tied up to them from a social, political, artistic and regional reality (understanding region as a fluid concept, applicable in some cases to a city, to Latin America, to the international dance community…) All of the members have a creative project of their own (choreographic / performative / theoretical…) but in AM, each one of them has found a platform to exchange and negotiate, share processes, question results, propose academic activities and eventually, to work around performative proposals as collective.

In 2011, AM presented its essay-performance MEXICAN DANCE inside the frame of Re/posiciones, contemporary live arts forum, Teatro el Milagro; and inside Des per specti vi zación, in the frame of the program Choreographic Perspectives, at the National University of Mexico (UNAM) dance direction studio. In 2011, AM received funding support from the PADID (Programa de Apoyo a la Docencia y la Investigación y Difusión de las Artes) for the creation of a publication made of creative process materials from specific works by 14 choreographers who currently develop their work in Mexico, with the title: Recetario coreográfico A Roadbook. This book is to be released during the winter of 2012.

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Respuestas en español

Nuria

Parte I/Día 1: Nadie lo sabe por ahora. Tampoco nosotros.

La sala está lista. 00:00:00 se mira en la pantalla.

4 mesas sin documentos y 1 que alberga todos los dispositivos de sonido que ahora están activados. Del techo pende un micrófono -en el centro del espacio-, por el piso hay otro, uno cerca de la mesa y el que Eduardo lleva consigo más cerca de los cuerpos que se presentan en el espacio.

Tenemos una coreografía de 5 horas. No, de 45 horas repartida en 9 días.

La obra es la misma cada día. Lo que cambia es el documento que ese día la obra produce. Hoy que es el primer día tenemos el documento sonoro ‘on the go’. Eduardo es nuestro ‘sound man’.

A simple vista es una obra. A simple vista es un documentador en acción con la obra. Lo que será, es un accionar sobre la obra y que hasta ahora sólo Eduardo conoce la resultante de ese documento que se produce al tiempo que la coreografía sucede.

Parte II/Día 1: Y el sonido debe ser oído para ser experimentado de una manera significativa…

Eduardo se ha vuelto parte de cada uno de los actos que componen a la pieza. De pronto tenemos solos, duetos, tríos, luego estamos todxs, luego solos, duetos y cuartetos y todxs otra vez. Eduardo está ahí. Si lo observas sólo a él, la sutileza de las cosas que él escucha con semejantes audífonos que cubren su cerebro, pueden intuirse por los gestos que hace, pero es sólo una aproximación, un espacio de incertidumbre al tiempo que provoca ciertas certezas en la pieza.

Parte III/Día 5: 03:32:00. Estoy frente a la pantalla de video. La mesa de enfrente tiene el documento sonoro activado por 2 pares de audífonos. La gente busca los micrófonos en los rincones de la sala.

No hay.

Nadia

El que el mundo de las artes visuales y el de la coreografía se encuentren no difiere mucho de que dos personas se encuentren. Con puntos en común e inmensas diferencias, nos toca aprender a negociar para poder entablar el diálogo. Si el uno agrede al otro, no hay diálogo

posible. En el caso de Arrecife, hubo que entender cómo funcionaba el Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, espacio institucional y extremadamente burocrático, y que a su vez coquetea con el funcionamiento de museos de la misma dimensión en otras partes del mundo. Esta seductora invitación implicaba ser triplemente cuidadosos, había que entrar al museo con armas coreográficas, con una lógica clara, y con conocimiento de problemáticas que nos antecedían. Siendo el museo (por más contemporáneo que se crea) un espacio que historiza, que transforma los objetos en objetos históricos, decidimos emprender un proyecto en el que la historia que se escribiera, se cuestionara, se repitiera o se borrara en cada instante, en el que no quedara más rastro que la memoria de quien lo vivió.

Nosotros tenemos unos cuerpos enormes. Y muchas veces estamos dispuestas a darlos toditos. Pero no estamos dispuestas a prostituirnos del todito… (Un poco sí, porque es una manera de negociar, sentir rico y manipular al otro, pero sólo como sugerencia). Le manejamos un tipo de economía más informal, acá las cosas tienen valores distintos, y la calidad de las cosas depende de usted, del clima, de los humores, del retroceso de Venus, del tiempo que está usted dispuesto a dedicarnos. Al fin que su tiempo y el mío, van a ser compartidos.

Magdalena

Arrecife: Todos concentrados en el cuerpo. El cuerpo sin imagen, el cuerpo loopeado, el cuerpo que quiere despojarse de todo para ser solo cuerpo en movimiento. El cuerpo frente al documentador. El cuerpo del documentador que trata de atrapar lo que le toca en un soporte durable.

El cuerpo es cuerpo en su desnudez de cuerpo. El cuerpo concreto es un archivo en sí mismo. Está formateado y educado para moverse de determinada manera y contiene todas las representaciones corporales que ha aprendido y heredado. El cuerpo desnudo y concreto representando representaciones archivadas en celuloide que serán documentadas a su vez en una suerte de juego de espejos borgiano.

Nadia

Necesidad, retro-necesidad, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s… ya se hizo. Cuerpos, bienes inmateriales, responsabilidades, modas, historia, espacios, efecto dominó, “grandes capitales culturales”, arquitectura, turismo, agotamiento, crisis (artística-política), reivindicación, corps-à-corps, relieve, respiro, archivo, documento, muerte del archivo, archivo que no mata, archivo que posibilita, reinterpretación de archivo, bien de archivo, ocupación duracional del espacio, espacio ambiguo que no es el de las artes visuales ni el de la danza. Espectadores trabajando. Curadores repensando. Movimiento y más movimiento.

Magdalena

Pienso en cuán real es este acercamiento de la danza y las artes visuales. Pensarlo así nos sigue colocando en una realidad ordenada en categorías cerradas que se acercan para ir juntas, cuando si lo analizamos cuidadosamente, parece que lo que está sucediendo es otra cosa. Si cierto tipo de danza puede entrar con comodidad al museo es porque ha tomado como propias las preocupaciones que antes solo atañían a las artes visuales. Pareciera que estas preocupaciones respondieran a una manera de pensar y de sentir definida, que podríamos denominar como contemporánea. Esta manera de pensar y sentir estaría validada por las voces de autoridad (como filósofos, críticos, tendencias de mercado, etc) y al museo no le importa el soporte en el que se exprese, siempre y cuando responda a las tendencias estéticas y de pensamiento relevantes para este momento histórico. No es entonces un acercamiento sino más bien sucede que se responde a una misma subjetividad que es atractiva para el museo y que no tiene que ver con disciplinas artísticas.

Nadia

Las condiciones ya están puestas. Nos “dieron chance” de montarnos sobre esa plataforma legitimadora, monstruosa y maravillosa que puede ser un museo universitario de arte contemporáneo. Ahora, finalmente podemos llamarnos Artistas Contemporáneos, discutir con curadores, hablar de vernissage en vez de première. Y si todo sale bien, podremos brincar del MUAC, al Palais de Tokio, al PS1, a la Tate modern y terminar en el Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niteroi…

Aún no decidimos cómo vamos a cobrar, ni quien va a pagar. Pero este problema no es sólo del museo, sino de nuestra condición humano-coreográfico-dancística.

A finales del 2010, el Colectivo A.M. se integra después de una ceremonia fúnebre, llevada a cabo durante el cierre de la presentacion del proyecto coreografico Sala Tomada en el Teatro de la Danza de la Ciudad de México. Los actuales integrantes de este colectivo son artistas vinculados con la danza y las artes escénicas, apasionados por la historia, defensores de la reflexión y críticos de su propia labor. Si bien se mezclan aquí distintas nacionalidades, todos ellos están basados y desarrollan su trabajo en México D.F. y piensan quehacer artístico que les atañe, a partir de una realidad artística, social y política, regional (entendiendo región como un concepto fluido, aplicable en algunos casos a una ciudad, o al continente latinoamericano, al gremio dancístico…) Cada uno de los integrantes tiene un proyecto creativo propio (coreográfico/interpretativo/teórico/…) pero en A.M., cada uno, ha encontrado una plataforma para intercambiar y negociar, compartir procesos, cuestionar resultados, proponer actividades académicas y eventualmente, para trabajar en torno a propuestas escenicas en colectivo.

En 2011, AM presenta el ensayo escenico MEXICAN DANCE en el marco de Re/posiciones, foro de escena contemporánea, Teatro el Milagro y Des per specti vi zación. Visiones coreográficas, en el Salón de danza UNAM. En 2011, AM recibe el apoyo del Programa de Apoyo a la Docencia y la Investigacion y Difusion de las Artes (PADID) para la realizacion de una publicacion compuesta por materiales del proceso creativo de 10 obras de coreografos, que desarrollan acutalmente su trabajo en Mexico con titulo: Recetario Coreografico. Un roadbook. Texto en proceso.

1) What are the most potent questions or ideas prompted by the recent coming together of dance and the visual arts?

I like the terms you choose for this meeting of two different art fields: coming together. This already reveals a movement towards a shared place and at the same time the condition of doing it together. Although the actual increase might be more of opportunities and interest in including dance in the programming of art museums and galleries, it does reveal a complex and interesting situation of meeting between two fields, between two entirely distinct ways of being together and sharing time and space, a situation which actually involves a strange interaction of two distinct publics — the spectator from the theater and the viewer at the art museum.

Seeing this coming together through the lens of dance being shown in the “white cube,” I’d say that the most potent questions that arise involve shared perception and aesthetic appreciation, role play and the conflict between economies. The conditions of visibility at stake in the white cube not only tend to enhance the objecthood of the art on display, but the room itself belongs to a whole history of art which guides and frames our perceptions and habits, as well as the use of our time as visitors.

Dance is, of course, historically related to its own specific kind of architecture and aesthetic appreciation, which is much older and differently layered than the white cube: the theater. It is also closely related to the negotiation of the temporality of the present. The theater locates its spectators at a place from which they see what develops before them. Two contrasting territories emerge: audience and stage. One is totally dependent on the other. Dance as a time based art tends to happen over a specific amount of time. It is an art based on seeing something happen and accompanying its progress in real time. The moment you move dance outside the theater, conditions that were in place to guarantee this special way of witnessing and receiving cease to exist. But the condition of viewing also depends on the context and frame of the presentation. If it’s under a dance festival’s frame, the artists and the public who accompany them might maintain the sort of aesthetic involvement and reception promoted by dance as an art form. The roles are there and habits modulate the mode being in situ and relating to what happens. These habits may continue to exert a power over an audience even outside a dance-framed context. Yet the museum is, itself, a forceful territory with its own rules and habits. But that moves us to the next question.

The bright side of the dark by Yoi Kawakubo in Gustavo Ciríaco’s A Room of Wonder | Tokyo. © Tokyo Wonder Site. Photo: Masahiro Nagata.

2) What are the responsibilities and/or challenges that accompany this interaction? For artists? Curators? Critics or scholars? Institutions?

Last November (2013) I saw a retrospective of Xavier Le Roy’s work at Museum de Arte do Rio – MAR, in Rio de Janeiro, a collaboration between the museum and the dance festival Panorama. The retrospective was composed of combined excerpts of Xavier’s dance pieces with extracts of the biographies of the dancers who performed them. When a visitor enters the exhibition room, an intricate system is set in motion, in which, as far as I understood, one dancer tells the public his/her own biographical history intertwined with extracts of Xavier’s choreographic work, using chronology as the common path for both retrospective views. While this is going on, the other dancers perform short fragments of Xavier’s and their personal retrospectives as a loop. Whenever a new visitor enters the room, a change of places and roles happen, except for the performer who is doing his/her own retrospective. This left me as a visitor torn between following what seemed to be the main retrospective and the other performers’ peripheral actions. If I were to relate to what was going on as a visual art viewer, I would probably leave the dancer who was telling me his history, and move on to the other dancers. But as a theater spectator, I was inclined to follow this dancer until he concluded his part. As there was none of the usual museum wall labels or spatial indications situating the art work, I was left to experience the 4 things that were happening in the room as either 4 different pieces, or as 2 different groups (the 3 dancers that were doing the short fragments as one, and the dancer with the longer set of actions and texts as the other). Everything there seemed to awaken in me an urge to see. What I saw, I included in my experience. It was difficult for me to distinguish them as different time and space units, once they were in the same room, affecting me together directly and indirectly.

Later, in Paris, I had the chance to see the retrospective again in rehearsal. This time, the exhibition was not yet open to the general public. It was interesting to see the work with a different group of artists. It became clearer to me how the negotiation of the time of the spectator seemed to be dependent on each performer’s ability to maneuver the audience’s attention and make decisions on the fly. This was also true of the extent to which the exposition developed new tactics with which to dialogue with the public, with the exhibition space, and the contingencies of the moment. It is in this arena that I see the difference of dance in relation to the visual arts and its possible contribution to the future of the museum. From this interchange between the dance artist and an institution such as the museum emerges the question of who is responsible for constructing the bridge. Will it be the artist? Or will the museum, as an institution, have to meet the artist in negotiating the specifics of dance as a medium? Should there be specific conditions or architecture in the gallery room or other elements that could host dance or make possible the experience of the work as a dance event might demand, like placing benches in video screening rooms in museums?

Exibicão, by Marcela Levi in Gustavo Ciríaco’s Sala de Maravilhas (Room of Wonder) | Rio. Photo: Paula Kossatz

In the case of the direct placement of a dance piece in the museum, shouldn’t the conditions of experience and appreciation that existed in its production and previous showing be reproduced or at least taken into consideration? Would this necessitate having a theater space in which to show it properly? Or is the translation into the white cube and the assertion of the museum as official keeper of the times what is of interest here?

Coming from a dance background, I share with my colleagues the difficulties and pleasures that come from my dance education, the fine and gradual work towards perception and execution of aesthetics in my body. This corporeal expertise, this savoir-faire, is an essential element in presenting or reenacting dance pieces and performances be it in a museum or in a theater. It is a training in the management of the present. It is a practice in relation that exists only when it exists. Its ephemerality is not the goal of its materiality. To the contrary, it supports the experience and is a spectral accompaniment that enriches the art. I would say that it is a fundamental qualitative element. The more frequent presence of dance and performance in the space of the museum has not been accompanied, though, by an understanding or care for what is involved in being a dancer, nor for the terms of hiring and paying them, although they are the main actors of the rendering live these art forms.

I would dare say that dance and performance offer art institutions and museums an opportunity to review the paradigms that guide their practice, their mission and roles in collecting, presenting and promoting art. It’s an injection of the intangible into the static frame of the visual arts. Rather than showing something, dance and performance inaugurate islands of experiences.

3) As artists, audiences, and institutions with varied artistic backgrounds come together, on what grounds is it or is it not important to consider disciplinary/ generic boundaries?

When I think of varied artistic backgrounds coming together, I think that this movement involves different levels of knowledge and acquaintance with unfamiliar artistic traditions. In the middle of this colliding, pre-conceptions, expertise and experiences in the fields involved affect the participation of the artist, the audiences and the institutions in different ways. This must be taken into consideration when thinking about this coming together, along with the context and the interaction of the temporary communities that make up the moment an artwork is activated. The museum, even more than the gallery space, is involved in detaching a work from its surroundings. In addition, it is often aligned with projects of collecting objects and casting them in a historical lens, somewhat less restrictively in the case of temporary exhibitions. This renders the museum a very specific context. It demands that the work on display obeys a certain inertia, a certain isolation from its whereabouts. In this sense, a dialogue is necessary between the programmatic orientation of the art space and the presentational form of the artwork. In the recent case of Marina Abromovic’s retrospective at the MoMA, a series of her performances were shown. I wonder if putting the performances alongside various forms of documentation of her work—photographs, video, objects—allowed them to happen the way they should. Strolling around a museum, seeing piece after piece, immerses me in a kind of listing of elements, object-like in terms of its general reception. This sort of display puts me in a visiting mood, quite distinct from what those performances had implied when enacted as the instigators of a particular time and space. I wonder if a dramaturgy of the space is needed, or if there should be a specific curatorship for the performing arts in the space of the museum, a curatorship centered in the experience of an art form that involves direct contact and presence between artists and public in the context of an object-based exhibition space.

Do mesmo modo que quando paro para sentir o coração bater by António Pedro Lopes (left)Eu me visto de alegria by Dyonne Boy (right) in Gustavo Ciríaco Sala de Maravilhas (Room of Wonder) | Rio

In a recent project of mine, A room of wonder | Rio & Tokyo, I invited a group of artists to choose experiences of wonder from their lives and careers and to think how to translate, or copy, or render alive again, this experience for the visitor of a museum or gallery space. Using any media that translation demanded, the artists produced a group of pieces, which acted as sensory platforms for experience. A museum of ephemeral situations, a museum of experiences. A somewhat immaterial collection. During the project, I was confronted with how the context, its conventions and expected behaviors, as well as the actual spatial architecture, played a substantial role in the perception and presence of the visitors. They became a sort of an extended part of the composition. But I wonder if this was a case of stretching genre boundaries, or was it rather the subtle and invisible work of fine adaptation to the context, in a way that the visitor retains space for his/her own way of digesting the experience?

4) What might the meeting of dance and visual art at this time herald or reflect? Or, why is this happening now? What possibilities might it open for the future?

It depends on what side of the balance this meeting might tip us towards— the object or the experience? It makes me think of the possibility of relating to time in a way not simply focused on keeping alive its traces or extracting them—with surgical precision—until they no longer belong to any live context. It’s a matter of non-matter, or rather a matter of subtle matter. We are all full of past and present moments, intensities, sensations. But rather than re-staging, recovering them, or cutting them from what make them what they are, I feel more tempted to bring them to life as part of an ongoing present and an ongoing life of the hard and soft materiality of things. As in the sensorial cinemas of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, museums in the future might become sort of sensorial wunderkammers, the heralds of new modes of recollecting and reflecting the world we live in, more and more virtual in its actuality, more and more actual in its virtuality.

Are you satisfied?, by Takumi Kitada in Gustavo Ciracio’s Room of Wonder | Tokyo. © Tokyo Wonder Site. Photo: Masahiro Nagata

Gustavo Ciríaco is a Brazilian performing artist and art maker. In his work he dialogues with the historical, material and affective context one is immersed in any given situation. As art form, his work goes from multimedia stage conceptual work to convivial and open-air pieces. -He’s been to Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East in projects, workshops and artistic collaborations. He’s been acting in museum and multimedia projects as “A room of wonder“, in urban space projects as “Here whilst we walk“ & “Neighbors“ in collab. with Andrea Sonnberger; in conversational pieces “Drifting“ in collab. with António Pedro Lopes; and in dance projects “Still – sob o estado das coisas“ (APCA prize as Best dance conception and nominee of Bravo Prize as Best Dance Show). He’s been in residency at Tokyo Wonder Site (Tokyo, Japan), Les Récollets (Paris, France), ZDB and Alkantara (Lisbon, Portugal), Bamboo Curtain Studio (Taipei, Taiwan), Al Mamal Foundation (Jerusalem, Israel), among others. In 2011, he was the artistic director of Manifesta! (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and guest curator for ENTRE Lugares (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, London, England). In 2012, he started the projects “Where the horizon moves“ at Guimarães, European Cultural Capital and London Cultural Olympiad “Rio Occupation“, in the Uk; and A room of wonder (Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro) with Japanese and Brazilian artists.

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“At the time of Coda I was beginning to negotiate my work’s positioning in both visual art and dance economies. Floors and walls with black and white patinas, respectively, were useful visual synecdoches for “black box” and “white cube”—themselves synecdoches for not only the theatrical space and the exhibition space, but for dance and visual art as fields and economies. Working with white wall as a material, something important to my current work, was the next step in this progression.

Laris Cohen reflects more broadly on the phenomenon of dance’s incorporation into the visual art landscape and the experience of practicing at the meeting point of these two sites:

“The art world’s incorporation of dance is moving very quickly; the terms have even shifted since Coda in early 2012. I have not participated in the one-way migration “from the theater into the museum”; I was starting to make work when this process was already—albeit newly—under way, and my practice was never situated solely in one site or the other. I benefit from this renewed interest in dance and visual art performance, but I’m not wild about some of the institutional modifications to the “white cube” made in an effort to accommodate dance. Accommodation is the wrong strategy.

Like many visual artists, Laris Cohen is using dance as one of many materials within his work. However, again, his approach is distinct. It is common for visual artists to insert dance into a framework that has been conceptualized independently of an active dance practice, asking the dancer be the guide to the use of movement within the work. Laris Cohen usually creates work using his own body, even understanding the making of the work itself as performance. Referencing ballet, he speak of using the form “because it is a language I can speak.” The resource of a physical language and treatment of performance as creative process moves dance into and through visual art spaces in ways that Laris Cohen ties to various dance histories. All the while, however, he rejects a positioning of his work “between” spaces, between dance and visual art, reaching instead for the less stable “transitions of among, within, and elsewhere.”

–Abigail Levine

 As part of Critical Correspondence’s ongoing Dance and the Museum project, we point you to an interview of Yve Laris Cohen by Jenny Jaskey for Mousse Magazine. http://moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=1085.

All quotations above from “Among, Within and Elsewhere” by Jenny Jaskey.

Photo by Karl Rabe, courtesy of the artist. Yve Laris Cohen, opening, from “Landing Field: Vito Acconci and Yve Laris Cohen” at Hessel Museum of Art, Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2013.