The Department of Media and Performance Art's performance program resumes in 2012 with Words in the World, a series of performances exploring the different facets of language. Using language, artists can fluidly translate their works into various mediums and engage in experiments across disciplines. Words in the World generates a “live” response to the possibilities opened up by the relationship between performance art and language, as well as the intertwining of political, poetical, and linguistic structures. Such artistic manifestations include theatrical and staged events, lectures and forms of public address, experimental actions, and the deconstruction of language into structural components.
The first performance in the series, Combatant Status Review Tribunals (2007), by Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne, employs language as a tool for political activism and measures the impact of (political) language on reality. Words are not merely used for communication, but as vectors along which to maintain a movement and perpetuate the flow of things and thoughts. In this way, the theatrical performances of Guy de Cointet—whose Five Sisters will be performed on May 9 and 10—weave between different genres, including high literature and soap opera.
Words, signs, and numbers can also have an independent life, liberated from their conventional forms and meanings. This conceptual and visual distortion, counting bodies and objects as texts and numbers, is also present in the work of artists of younger generations, such as Paulina Olowska and Nora Schultz. Experimenting with presentation formats and engaging different spaces in the Museum, the performance series will also include three Modern Mondays events in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2, with Los Angeles–based performative group My Barbarian; artists Adam Pendleton and Lorraine O’Grady; and Geyer, Hayes, Hunt, Sander, and Thorne in conversation.
Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954–003064: A Public Reading
In conjunction with MoMA's presentation of the recently acquired multichannel video installation 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, the Department of Media and Performance Art presents the live performance Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954–003064: A Public Reading. The performance comprises a four-hour public reading of unedited transcripts from 18 Combatant Status Review Tribunals held at the U.S. military prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, between July 2004 and March 2005. During the performance nine readers rotate through eight juridical positions. The artist group—consisting of Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne—views the performance as a simple yet vital gesture towards making these tribunals public. Both works, 9 Scripts from a Nation at War and Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954–003064: A Public Reading premiered at Documenta 12 in 2007.
Nora Schultz with Ei Arakawa. Countdown Performance. 2007/2012
Nora Schultz (German, b. 1975), together with New York–based artist Ei Arakawa (b. 1977), performs a countdown from 10 to zero, bending a thin, flexible length of stainless steel into the form of each successive number. Because of the malleable nature of the material, each new number carries traces of the previous bended forms, and the steel becomes increasingly warped. The work confronts material transformation and the accumulation of allegory through simple means, from neutrality through action. Zero—the return to neutrality—is impossible to achieve once the material has been loaded with the history of its transformations.
Paulina Olowska. Alphabet. 2005/12
The performance Alphabet, by Paulina Olowksa (Polish, b. 1976), is inspired by Czech designer Karel Teige's typographic book ABECEDA (which was published in Prague in 1926 and recently reprinted). Referring to the poetics of typography and Eastern European avant-garde tradition, the work involves collaboration with other performers, who curve and stretch their bodies into 26 letters, from A to Z, to construct a new system for conveying meaning. The performance also includes the presentation of short poems by Josef Strau, Frances Stark, and Paulus Mazur. The physicality of text, writing, and the contexts in which words appear are all parts of Olowska’s poetics. Alphabet was first performed in 2005 at Galerie Meerrettich, on the roof of the Kiosk at the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, within a project curated by Josef Strau.
Performers: Kathy Pile, Jessie Gold, Daniel Squire, and Kevin Hurley
Guy de Cointet. Five Sisters. 1981/2011; Espahor ledet ko Uluner! 1973/2011
From the late 1960s until his untimely death in 1983, Guy de Cointet, (French, 1934–1983) was an active member of the Los Angeles art scene. Five Sisters is a collage of clichéd exclamations about beauty, self-help, and feigned emotions. Inspired by de Cointet’s compulsive attraction to language, the performance presents the story of five sisters, who busy themselves with the problems and pleasures of modern life on a Sunday afternoon. Discussions about cosmetic surgeons, exotic locales, and New Age tinctures punctuate the simple stage directions. Five Sisters was first performed in 1982 in Los Angeles at the Barnsdall Park Theatre, and it was the last performance to be staged during the artist’s lifetime. De Cointet collaborated with sculptor Eric Orr (1939–1998), who created the stage, lighting, and sound for the original production. In this new production, the lighting and sound are reconstructed by Elizabeth Orr. The restaging of Five Sisters is the result of research conducted by art historian Marie de Brugerolle, as part of If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution, a performance residency program in Amsterdam.
In addition to Five Sisters, Guy de Cointet’s performance Espahor ledet ko Uluner! will be performed by Jane Zingale. Espahor ledet ko Uluner! is a short monologue that departs from Guy de Cointet’s novel of the same name. The piece presents a succession of apparently everyday references, with different moods, in a language invented by the artist.
Performers: Violeta Sanchez, Einat Tuchman, Adva Zakai, and Veridiana Zurita
Research and dramaturgy: Marie de Brugerolle, Direction: Jane Zingale
Light and sound: Elizabeth Orr, Wardrobe: moniquevanheist
Coproduced by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Related Film Screenings
Upcoming
An Evening with My Barbarian
The Los Angeles–based performance collective My Barbarian—Malik Gaines (b. Visalia, California, 1973), Jade Gordon (b. Santa Rosa, California, 1975), and Alexandro Segade (b. San Diego, California, 1973)—combine their eclectic background in theater, theory, and contemporary art to create incisive, campy, site-specific plays, concerts, theatrical situations, and video installations. All three group members will be present to discuss their most recent works. Presented in conjunction with the Words in the World performance program. Program 90 min.
An Evening with Adam Pendleton and Lorraine O’Grady
Over the past half decade Adam Pendleton (b. Richmond, Virginia, 1984) has created language-based silkscreens, videos, and performances that critically investigate issues of identity, queerness, and power structures, using appropriated images, texts, and cultural clichés from a broad range of sources to re-imagine political and social realities. In his series Black Dada (2008–ongoing) and System of Display (2008–ongoing), he “associates” the figures of poets and Conceptual artists while repeatedly staging dialogues between 20th-century avant-gardes and the history of black politics. Lorraine O’Grady (American, b. 1934) is an artist and critic whose installations, performances, and texts address issues of diaspora, hybridity, and black female subjectivity. O’Grady first rose to prominence with her guerilla performances as Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83), in which she invaded art openings dressed in debutante white, giving away flowers, beating herself with a whip, and shouting out verses that highlighted the segregated nature of the art world. Pendleton presents a live “portrait” of O'Grady through a scripted conversation that upends normative uses of language and the re-presentation of O’Grady’s work.
An Evening with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne
In conjunction with their installation 9 Scripts from a Nation at War—a recent MoMA acquisition that is currently on view in the Media Gallery—the artists Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne join us to discuss the work and their collaborative practice. Program 90 min.