RoseLee Goldberg
Reflecting Spectacle: Life as Art
A panel discussion
Institute of Contemporary Art
Tuesday, March 4, 6:30 pm
$12/$8
More information

RoseLee Goldberg wrote the book on performance art. Her text Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, first published in 1979, has seen three editions and been translated into seven languages. It's a mainstay on art history syllabi and one of the first attempts to see performance as an organic part of artistic production.

These days, Goldberg curates PERFORMA, New York's performance art biennial. The event, which began in 2005, took the city over last year, occupying 67 different venues and the hearts and minds of countless art viewers. PERFORMA has done what critics thought was impossible: it has brought performance art, regarded by many as bizarre and confrontational, to a broad and appreciative public.

Tomorrow, Goldberg will take part in a panel discussion at ICA about performance art. Artist and curator Mark Tribe, choreographer and conceptual artist Ann Carlson, and documentary director Tim Jackson will round out the panel. The discussion is part of ICA's ongoing exhibition The World as a Stage, which Bostonist loved and the Globe hated.

Bostonist got a chance to talk with Goldberg last week.

Bostonist: It's been thirty years since the the first publication of your book on performance art. Since then, what conventions has the field developed and how has it remained fresh?

RoseLee Goldberg: Even though it's thirty years since I brought out the book, which is amazing ... there's still not that much understanding of how [performance] fits into twentieth century art and culture. In a way that's why I started PERFORMA. I wanted to make a big point about inserting it into the picture of the twentieth century.

I think [performance has] remained fresh because it is so open ended -- you can never really say what it is. And if you look back at this whole 100 year history, it really changes with each period. People making performance tend to respond to politics and the aesthetic conversations of the day. So, it's sort of chameleon-like in a certain way and provocative in another. It's always changing.

Public opinion [about performance art] is still very much stuck in the 60s, with most people thinking performance is supposed to be strange and weird, about people doing damage to themselves.

But it remains fresh because there are no limits. And it attracts very young artists and people at the beginning of their career. And they're kind of thinking, "what can I do to sort of rough things up a bit?" They try to understand what's happening in [the] particular moment of history that they are about to step into.

Bostonist: How has PERFORMA reintroduced performance art into the mainstream or into the artistic conversation about the late twentieth century?

Goldberg: [The first goal of PERFORMA was to show that] this history is really important. Performance shaped the twentieth century. If you go back to anything -- from Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Warhol -- so many of their first statements were performance or were wrapped up in performance. And it's with performance that so many new directions were introduced. Even the whole idea of Jackson Pollack, this massively important American painter who changed the direction of history in America, was his action painting: jumping into or onto the canvas and being part of the action.

The second is to open [this history] to a larger understanding. I'm very aware of this. I'm very much a teacher, very much an art historian, and I really wanted, in that sense, to illustrate this point in interesting and exciting ways.

The question there is "how do you put a biennial together and what does a biennial say?" By creating a biennial, you are going public with a form, whatever that form may be, whether it's something like jazz, or painting, or performance.

There are venues all over New York and Boston, everywhere else, that do performance all the time, but [PERFORMA makes] this really careful selection and makes sure it's interesting in one way or another. So, it's not about going mainstream or simplifying, but rather trying to make the material so interesting that one can go from A to B to C.

I'm very much a writer, and I see the whole curating process like writing an essay. You develop ideas, you want those ideas to be accessible, and in a sense you're explaining those ideas to your readership. But by creating a biennial, one is actually illustrating with the real thing. You're taking this material and you're making a case for why this material is interesting.

How do you put material out in the world and make it exciting and accessible to quite a broad public? And you also do that by making sure that they have a contextual understanding -- providing talks and lectures so that people can really get it.

Bostonist: What advice would you give to an art patron who is encountering
performance art for the first time? What should we look for?

Goldberg: There's this gap between the artists and the thing they produce. And performance closes that gap. [Performance provides] a proximity to the artist. And once you get closer to the artist, to how the artist thinks about a particular work, you might not like it. You might be shocked. You might be disturbed. You might be distanced. You might be passionately in love with what you see. But because it is live, you are close up to the artist. It's a way to understand the thinking of the artist, but also the sociology of the art world. When you're just going around the gallery, you don't have access to the artist or that conversation.

What's the advice? Enjoy being that close up. It's going to force you to wonder what on earth you are witnessing. It brings you much closer to the ideas of art.

Bostonist: Earlier you were talking about how a lot of people are stuck in sort of a sixties mindset when it comes to performance art. It seems like a lot of people have this idea about performance art that it's about artists abusing their bodies or using their bodies in very extreme ways. But you suggested that that's not what performance is doing these days.

Goldberg: [It's] like any history, and it is a history that is not very well understood or even well known. There're so many variables. If you go back to the early 1900s and see what an Alfred Jarry was doing, there is such a range. It's interesting that people look at performance art as if it's one thing. But it's really about the activism of artists, about artists coming together and creating their own milieu. This was always the case.

You go back to the 1890s and read about Alfred Jarry, or you read about Picabia getting together with Satie. [Performance] is a conversation that artists have amongst themselves. Artists don't think in one discipline. It's the critics and the first tier of writers who have to respond and translate [art] for the audience who are more likely to think in one discipline. So, I think that throughout the last 100 years, there are so many different kinds of performance.

That work from the 60s specifically that was very politically conscious, and the work might have been turned in on the self. But you know everybody was involved in activism in the 60s. That's what marked the 60s generation was an activism. And I look at performance from the 60s as being parallel to that and a result of that. What we look at nowadays, there isn't that kind of activism. Artists are still making live events, but maybe we call it something else.

It's a very different crowd, working in a very different area. Consider Maurizio Cattelan or Cindy Sherman in the 80s. A lot of artists were doing performances. In Cindy's case that's how she came to making those photographs. She started out doing live performance. She used to go to parties dressed up as these characters, and then decided at some point to start photographing those characters.

So, it's surprising in a way how stuck people are on that idea of what performance was or what performance is, and it's stuck in that particular decade.

When you think of someone like Laurie Anderson, who totally personifies what a performance artist is: a visual artist who can also play the violin; who can write stories; who can articulate a political position or a cultural commentary; who can create a big stage production; who can keep people glued to what she's dealing with... she's not cutting herself, or hurting herself, or walking over glass. Performance can be that, which is fine, but there's a much broader range of what performance is and can be.

Bostonist: Laurie Anderson also releases records that sell twenty thousand copies.

Goldberg: Right, and, in a sense, she was the first artist of the 80s to really be able to make that crossover. And interestingly she did it as a performer. And the whole 80s after that -- the whole 80s generation -- everybody from Julian Schnabel to Robert Longo, were all dealing with what was called in the 80s the high and low. High art and popular culture. That became, in a way, the modus operandi of the artists of the 80s -- to find ways to translate their work and make it accessible. And to deal with the media. And so Laurie is the perfect example of somebody who used performance to move out of the visual art world into a much larger field. But she still -- she would say herself -- thinks like an artist. She can still make gallery installations. She can still get on a stage and perform. She's still a great storyteller. And so on.

It's a very rich and detailed history. It's not this one dimensional, sensationalist, weird stuff that everybody somehow fixates on.

Bostonist: ICA's current show "The World as a Stage" argues that performance has had a wide-ranging impact on visual art. What sort of artistic feedback do you see between performance art and other disciplines?

Goldberg: From the very beginning, from the introduction to my book that I wrote in 1978: I almost see performance as the avant-avant garde. It's the most experimental area in which an artist works, and it's often translated into a painting or an object.

There's an enormous amount of impact of performance on visual art. I look at the world through performance glasses, and I think that its history is so integral to informing other disciplines. I can go down the list of so many artists that you're famililar with and say let's look at the trajectory that this work has come from. And you'll find that there is a lot of impact from ideas that came out of performance, or ideas of the artists' bodies, and [making] the body the centerpiece.

The other moment we are at right now, in terms of museums, is that curators and critics are looking back to the seventies. There's enough distance now. What happens when you look at the seventies, you see that so much of the work was performance related. So, again, any artist you look back to from the 70s -- be it Joan Jonas, Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim -- Go down the list of the names of artists who have come to be known as major figures, and you are going find that there was a lot of work that was done as performance. The whole conceptual art strategy was to say "we are more interested in process and not that interested in the object" -- they were on a sort of philosophic quest. And so much of the work was done as performance.

So it's another reason that, finally, there is a need to come to grips with understanding what it means to the history. It's been so predominate for the last thirty years.

I think the show at the ICA is very interesting because a lot of those artists are showing the impact of performance on artists who might make installations -- and the different pieces that were integral to a performance or indeed totally influenced by this idea of how do we interact with work -- what is the experience of the viewer? I think the experience of the viewer is a huge part of this whole equation. It goes back to why people are intrigued by it, even though they might feel very strange and may not know where to enter. It does force an experience and a question -- that sort of close-up involvement.