Not for Sale: Have You Kicked a Building Lately?
 First broadcast July 16, 2010
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PERFORMA founder and preeminent performance art historian RoseLee Goldberg, shins bloodied from building-punting, introduces the Not for Sale panel Have You Kicked a Building Lately?, featuring panelists Vito Acconci, Elizabeth Berger, Beatriz Colomina and Teddy Cruz and respondents Glenn Weiss, Alexander Pincus and Peter Zuspan. The event, which took place on May 26, 2010 at Cooper Union, is PERFORMA's first panel to focus on architecture. The topics ranged wildly and frequently, from notions of how to create an organic structure and propagate natural interactions with architecture to the salience of impermanence and temporality in architectural history; panelists discussed topics both specific--like Cruz's considerations of the levee towns of the California-Meixo border--and general, like Colomina's emphasis of the historical import of exercise in architecture. Central to much of this are the moral, cultural, political, commercial, socioeconomic and artistic roles and the obligations of the architect (1 hour 23 minutes).
The title of this panel is taken from Ada Louise Huxtable's essay collection Have You Kicked a Building Lately?, which addresses notions of the manipulation of urban space by architects and artists and the active role of architectural structures in the lives of those who interact with them.
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Not for Sale: It's History Now: Performance Art and the Museum
First broadcast 2010-04-16
or listen to Pt. 1 with iTunes (53 minutes)
or listen to Pt. 2 with iTunes (50 minutes)
In this PERFORMA-sponsored panel, It's History Now: Performance Art and the Museum, RoseLee Goldberg offers a brief history of performance and PERFORMA and introduces the event's panelists: art historian Alexander Alberro, curator Chrissie Iles, artist Martha Rosler and conservator Glenn Wharton, as well as respondents Eungie Joo, Curator at the New Museum, and artist Adam Pendleton. The focus of the panel is on the contemporary state of performance art and its relation to the museum as both an institution and an archival space. Central to the presentations and discussions are the essence, history and ephemerality of performance, as well as notions of what the museum is, the import of Feminism on performance art and the role and value of reperformance. Also addressed: questioning what an undocumented performance becomes when--as with VALIE EXPORT's Aktionshose:Genitalpanik, which neither took place in a porn cinema nor featured the artist wielding a machine gun--the memory and near-mythical recreations of a piece misrepresent what the original performance actually was; authenticity and the correlation between Feminism and performance art. And then the perennial and unavoidable question: is performance an inherently radical and oppositional medium, one necessarily opposed to acquisition and institutionalization? And how, exactly, do you acquire a performance? Expect no clear and definite answers, to be sure.
It's History Now: Performance Art and the Museum, part of PERFORMA's ongoing Not For Sale panels, took place on March 24, 2010 at the Einstein Auditorium of New York University. The event was organized by PERFORMA and the NYU Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions.
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PERFORMA 2009: A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: Mike Kelley, Destroy All Monsters
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First broadcast January 1, 2010
Mike Kelley formed seminal "anti-rock" band Destroy All Monsters in 1973. After several fairly regular changes in line-up over the following years--Kelley and co-founding member Jim Shaw left in 1976 and it continued in various incarnations for nearly another decade--the band officially stopped performing as Destroy All Monsters in 1985. But on November 21, 2009, as part of Mike Kelley's PERFORMA09 mini-festival A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: A Select History of Experimental Music, three of the four original members--Kelley, Shaw and Cary Loren--played a reunion performance. Here Kelley discusses considerations of noise--which began in part, he contends, with people trying to escape their backgrounds--and its integral relation to cultural and social differentiation. Kelley also airs his grievances with contemporary noise, its new prominence in the culturally assimilated underground mainstream and its political apathy. An excerpt of their performance follows the panel discussion (21 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: Joan LaBarbara & John Duncan
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First broadcast December 25, 2009
Known for his electronic sound constructions featuring short wave radio noise, John Duncan arrives at the Gramercy Theater with a secret plan. In our interview he describes his desire to create what he has not heard before, expresses delight that the L.A. band Airway was invited to the festival, but he won't elaborate on the project of the day. We'll play you a segment and can verify that the vocalizations you hear were made by people wearing no clothes and the only illumination in the theater was mobile phone screens.
Joan LaBarbara speaks at length about her observations and ultimately her composition and performance for the Italian Futurist noise instruments--the Intonarumori--of Luigi Russolo that were re-constructed by composer/historian Luciano Chessa for a Performa 2009 event at New York's Town Hall. Then we feature an excerpt from her multi-track vocal work performed solo at this mini-festival of noise curated by Mike Kelley and produced by Mark Beasley (26 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: Z'EV
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First broadcast December 18, 2009
Just before his performance at Mike Kelley's two-day noise fest at the Gramercy Theater, writer/percussionist/mystic/philosopher Z'EV talks about his approach to soundmaking and technology, acoustic phenomena of materials and noise. He offers some historical details on the Futurist instruments the Intonarumori and the birth of the industrial music to which his name is oft attached. Then we excerpt his extraordinary solo acoustic performance, dedicated to Maryanne Amacher (34 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
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First broadcast December 11, 2009
As part of the Mike Kelley-curated, Marc Beasley-produced two-day noise music festival, A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: A Select History of Experimental Music, artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge places the process of working with Thee Majesty alongside those with Throbbing Gristle and Pigface, among others, and recounts the audience's impact on how far s/he is willing to push live performances. The candid and capacious conversation also touches on the early, Fluxus-influenced work with COUM Transmissions and how this led to their first experimentations with noise as well as the ways in which the transgressions expressed by her music are extensions of those explored in other media: of sexuality, habit, "high" and "low" culture, the personal and the public. S/he also provides a beautifully articulated response to what seems one of the simplest questions one can ask: What is the difference between art and life? Plus an excerpt from the Thee Majesty performance (24 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Mike Kelley, Day Is Done Judson Church Dance
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First broadcast December 11, 2009
For PERFORMA 09, Mike Kelley presented three short dance/performance pieces in the Judson Memorial Church on November 19, 2009, collectively called Day Is Done Judson Church Dance. Each was inspired by the darkly funny vignettes in his 2005 film and video installation Day Is Done, which was based on found photographs of extracurricular activities from American high school yearbooks, and re-worked for the context of the Judson Church. These performances included The Horse Dance of the False Virgin, The Judson Church Horse Dance, and the premiere of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33 (Ladder Piece), a work involving 13 people assembled on and around a large ladder playing music on horns. The performances feature music by Kelley and Scott Benzel--which can be listened to here--and choreography by Kate Foley. Day Is Done Judson Church Dance, at once abstractly hilarious and acutely, painfully nostalgic, will lead to a larger, evening-length performance for PERFORMA 11 (1 hour 11 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Not for Sale: Noise Panel
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First broadcast Decemver 12, 2009
Designed to accompany the two day Mike Kelley-curated festival A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: A Select History of Experimental Music, the Not For Sale: Noise Panel includes artist and musician Tony Conrad; Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Columbia University and author of Beyond the Dream Syndicate, Branden W. Joseph; composer, musician, and author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, George Lewis; and PERFORMA-commissioned artist, musician, and experimental composer Arto Lindsay.
The scope of this conversation is tremendous: Joseph offers an account of Max Neuhaus' responses to a 1974 pamphlet by the New York City Department of Air Resources called Noise Makes You Sick--among them a contentious New York Times editorial and his Listen! project--and the mid-70s equation of noise with smoking; Lewis dissects the initial dismissal, on the part of many white Americans, first of slave music and then of jazz as indecipherable "noise" and considers the social, cultural and political import of the musical form. Conrad remembers Pandora's Box of 4'33" and Mike Kelley grouses about the loss of noise's ideological foundations among its contemporary practitioners. And all set to wondering gravely whether noise has to be loud.
The event was moderated by artist and curator Mark Beasley and even features a guest appearance by Mike Kelley. It was recorded at and co-produced with Artists Space (1 hour 35 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Michael Smith
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First broadcast December 4, 2009
Host Michael Rush in conversation with artist Michael Smith who has been producing videos, performances, and installations for over three decades, often via his performance persona, Mike. MICHAEL reveals how he and Mike have more in common than we realize. For Performa09 a collaboration called Camp Kid Friendly featured Malcolm Stuart’s hoop dance troupe, Color Wheel, together with friends, performing with Baby IKKI at SculptureCenter. Manipulating hoops, fire, and other objects, the dancers activate Mike Kelley’s and Michael Smith’s video installation, A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, with a carnivalesque performance (33 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Mariana Castillo Deball & Irene Kopelman, Zeno Reminder
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First broadcast December 4, 2009
Curator Defne Ayas speaks with Mariana Castillo Deball and Irene Kopelman (The Uqbar Foundation) whose work Zeno Reminder (a Performa 09 installation) plays with the bonds and ruptures between nature and technology, based on the futurism motto that machines will improve human nature in terms of efficiency and speed. The Uqbar Foundation was initiated by Kopelman and Castillo Deball to support interdisciplinary practice and collaboration between artists, scientists, and institutions (19 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Paul Elliman, Sirens Taken for Wonders
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First broadcast December 4, 2009
Paul Elliman assembled a program for Performa entitled Sirens Taken for Wonders which consisted of several walks around New York City in search of sirens while observing and testing the impact of noise on urban life and culture. Elliman also convened a panel at the Van Allen Institute in order to "address the apparently unambiguous meaning of the sirens through a range of sometimes contradictory perspectives–from the physics and acoustic materiality of their sound, to its auditory role in the production of urban space as a form of audio signage capable of initiating levels of both fear and excitement." We have divided the program into two segments:
Part 1 (72 minutes): Paul Elliman presents his Sirens Taken for Wonders premise, vocalist Daisy Press' remarkable mimicking of sirens, artist Raviv Ganchrow of The Hague Institute of Sonology, and the remarkable Arline Bronzaft who is Chair of the Noise Committee from the Mayor’s Committee on the Environment of New York City.
Part 2 (43 minutes): Laura Kurgan, Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab of the Columbia School of Architecture, and artist Lázaro Valiente from Mexico City who composed and directed a quartet of police cars and sirens there, which we get to hear.
Both segments begin with an on-site sampling of the "Siren Walks" with our correspondent Delphine Blue accompanying Elliman and his crew of experts and afficionados
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PERFORMA 2009: Paul Elliman Interview
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First broadcast November 27, 2009
Performa Curator Defne Ayas in conversation with British artist Paul Elliman, whose piece, Sirens Taken For Wonders, brought together viewers of all backgrounds for a siren-watch across New York, observing the sounds of the city, and the varied feelings the wails of fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars can generate: alarm, stress, excitement, relief... Elliman then paired artists, academics, an opera singer, the Chair of the Mayor’s Noise Committee, and other siren experts and amateurs for an explosive panel discussion at the Van Alen Institute, available here in the Archive.
Paul Elliman is a London-based artist and designer who works with typography, the human voice, and the forms of audio signage that mediate the relationship between the two. His work has been shown in London’s Tate Modern, New York’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Musuem, the New Museum, Milan’s Galleria Massimo de Carlo, and the Kunsthalle Basel, among others. Elliman has taught in the Yale School of Art since 1997, and is a thesis supervisor for Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, Netherlands (21 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Performa Radio
Audio coming soon
Excerpts from Performa Radio commissions presented by artist Nick Relph, and experimental filmmaker and writer Karen Schneider at Artist's Space and streamcast live on ARTonAIR.org.
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PERFORMA 2009: Michael Portnoy & Sarina Basta
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First broadcast November 27, 2009
Defne Ayas with curators Sarina Basta and Michael Portnoy whose conceptual social club known as The Prompt was a nightly place of conversation pieces, rules, performances, and soundtracks for Performa 2009 (32 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Ahmet Ögüt
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First broadcast November 27, 2009
Curator Defne Ayas hosts guest Ahmet Ögüt, a conceptual artist living and working between Amsterdam and Istanbul. Ögüt has developed a work for Performa 2009 entitled The Pigeon-like Unease of My Inner Spirit in which Devorah Greenspan, a blind painter, endeavors to create a portrait of the Armenian newspaper editor, columnist, and journalist Hrant Dink who was murdered in 2007 (27 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Candice Breitz
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First broadcast November 27, 2009
RoseLee Goldberg in conversation with South African video and installation artist Candice Breitz whose Performa09 commissioned work New York, New York, her first-ever live performance, features two nearly-identical casts composed of four pairs of identical twins—with each pair of twins split into two groups of four actors each—presenting two evenings of improvised performance (32 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Aurélien Froment and Youri Dirkx
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First broadcast November 27, 2009
RoseLee Goldberg talks with artist Aurélien Froment and actor Youri Dirkx about their performance In Order of Appearance. The presentation takes place within an abstract playground where objects and artworks are transformed. Froment fills the performance space with objects then handled by actor Dirkx. Froment, French-born living in Dublin, explores how the periphery of display systems operate, from the gallery to the screen to books to theatre. Dirkx is a member of the Brussels-based theater company Tristero (28 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Terence Koh
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First broadcast November 22, 2009
Author, critic and curator Michael Rush sits down with artist Terence Koh to discuss his latest work, an untitled exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, a Performa 2009 feature. This work, a stack of 33 glass cases containing white objects, is part of a larger body of monochrome work in which Koh explores the meanings of white in different cultures, ranging from purity to mourning. With its investigation of temporality and allusions to eventual death, it provides an introspective counterpoint to Koh’s flamboyant public persona. Sex and death are themes that run obsessively throughout all aspects of his work (34 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Luciano Chessa, Luigi Russolo, and the Intonarumori
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First broadcast November 22, 2009
Luciano Chessa speaks to David Weinstein about his research, re-imagining, and reconstruction of the legendary noise intoners or Intonarumori that were built by Futurist painter and author of The Art of Noise, Luigi Russolo. From the instruments' first appearance in 1913, to the legend of their fiery demise in WWII, Chessa has investigated the techniques and aesthetics that so many experimental sound aficionados have dreamed of for nearly a century. We also include an audio sample of the instruments, made during their rehearsal in our studios in advance of a performance at New York’s Town Hall on Nov. 12, 2009 (56 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Omer Fast
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First broadcast November 22, 2009
RoseLee Goldberg hosts artist Omer Fast who is
participating in Performa 09 with Broken Telephone, an installation that combines the familiar childhood game with the confessional talk show format. Guests will recount personal memories linked to current global events focusing on themes of power and freedom. Working with film, video, and television footage, Omer Fast mixes sound and image into stories that often veer between personal, current events and history. Fast was born in Jerusalem in 1972, studied in the United States, and currently works and lives in Berlin. His video installation, “The Casting” (2008), was presented at the 2008 Whitney Biennial and won Fast the 2008 Bucksbaum Award (25 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Guido van der Werve
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First broadcast November 22, 2009
Performa curator Defne Ayas speaks to Dutch artist Guido van der Werve about the parallels between chess, piano, and literature, as well as his chess piano — an elaborately constructed instrument of his own invention, which he played with the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra at the Marshall Chess Club, a legendary spot once frequented by Marcel Duchamp and Bobby Fischer. Ayas invited Guido van der Werve to create a live performance for Performa09, following his film Nummer Twaalf, shot at the same club in 2008, featuring a chess game composed by Grandmaster Leonid Yudasin (25 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Yeondoo Jung with Leeza Ahmady
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First broadcast November 22, 2009
South Korean artist Yeondoo Jung talks with Leeza Ahmady about his art and how his childhood exposure to Traditional Chinese Medicine, and early 19th century photographers continues to inspire his artistic thinking. He discusses his latest video, Hand Made Memory, where he has juxtaposed interviews of real life characters with entirely staged interpretations of their stories. He likes to offer transparency to his viewers about the process of his image construction. “The process is what is so exciting and I want to share how I play with multiple elements: fiction, truth, documentary and pure fantasy.” In his first ever-live performance event Cinemagician, commissioned by Performa 2009, Jung integrates sound, camera feed-back, cinematic tricks, and the energy of a live magician in performance to create a magical experience for the audience (37 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Yeondoo Jung with RoseLee Goldberg
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First broadcast November 24, 2009
South Korean artist Yeondoo Jung talks with RoseLee Goldberg about his art and how his childhood exposure to Traditional Chinese Medicine, and early 19th century photographers continues to inspire his artistic thinking. He discusses his latest video, Hand Made Memory, where he has juxtaposed interviews of real life characters with entirely staged interpretations of their stories. In his first ever, live-performance event Cinemagician, commissioned by Performa 2009, Jung integrates sound, camera feed-back, cinematic tricks, and the energy of a live magician in performance to create a magical experience for the audience (21 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Arto Lindsay
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First broadcast November 22, 2009
Artist and musician Arto Lindsay (DNA, Ambitious Lovers) joins RoseLee Goldberg at the Performa Hub for a discussion about growing up in Brazil, the music and art scene he encountered on arriving in New York, organizing a parade in Times Square (his Performa project) and other cities, and some candid thoughts on process and observation (16 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Brandon Stosuy & Brody Condon
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First broadcast November 15, 2009
Performa curator Tairone Bastien interviews artist
Brody Condon and writer Brandon Stosuy on their project Case at the New Museum, a contemporary adaptation of the classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer by William Gibson (36 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Meg Stuart
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First broadcast November 15, 2009
Host RoseLee Goldberg interviews choreographer/curator Meg Stuart on
her U.S. premiere of Auf den Tisch! (At the Table!), an improvisation project at Baryshnikov Arts Center (13 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Pasta Sauna
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First broadcast November 15, 2009
Visit the most delicious sauna in the world. Visitors get to warm up at the Performa Hub in a room filled with steam from vats of cooking pasta (7 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Opening Night & Fischerspooner
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First broadcast November 9, 2009
Delphine Blue follows the sound of electroclash madness and a roaring crowd to its source: PERFORMA 2009's opening night at MOMA, featuring an epic performance by Fischerspooner. If you couldn't get in to the packed event on November 1, 2009, this is almost as good as being there. Delphine tosses out the earplugs and takes you on a fraught journey, leading to a climactic final scene in which the diva has one last performance before an adoring throng. Just trust us on this one. It's in there (28 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Alicia Framis
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First broadcast November 9, 2009
Why not take another look at the future of lunar travel, which so far has been examined mostly through the lens of military technology? With this question in mind, PERFORMA curator Defne Ayas speaks to Alicia Framis, who presents Lost Astronaut, a performance-installation as part of Performa09 about the next journey to the Moon, and the evolution of architecture and mankind (25 minutes).
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PERFORMA 2009: Guy Ben-Ner
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First broadcast November 9, 2009
Leeza Ahmady hosts Israeli-born video artist Guy Ben-Ner for a discussion about his work and his commission for PERFORMA 2009. Ben-Ner says his work has rough edges, but that's because it's supposed to reflect real life. He says he wants his work to be accessible and reach an audience beyond just the art world. His latest piece is on view at the PERFORMA hub at 41 Cooper Square in New York City through November 22, 2009 (31 minutes).
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