Last week, Boston Ballet dancers performed in front of a painting by Sarah Crowner in the “Conversation Piece” exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. The week before, a poet read in concert with an experimental percussionist, as white box sculptures emitted more sounds, at MIT List Visual Arts Center. Next month, an artist onstage at the MFA will interact with a set and video projection.
Performance art is coming to a museum near you, as more institutions integrate it into their programming. Notably, the Museum of Fine Arts — which has only stepped up its contemporary efforts in recent years — now has a curator of performance art.
“Performance art has been systematically excluded from museum spaces, because of traditionalist definitions of art, like museums are places meant to preserve art objects,” says Liz Munsell, the MFA’s assistant curator of contemporary art & MFA programs, who oversees performance art programming. “Bringing more ephemeral artists into the museum breaks with those goals.”
So what is performance art, and how do you distinguish it from, say, dance, music, or theater?
“Traditionally, performance art has its base in the visual arts,” says Munsell. “Its root is in sculpture, in the image.” Composition matters. Visual effect matters; narrative, maybe not. And unlike theater, music, and dance, the standard setup for performance art can be anywhere, anyhow, often with the audience on its feet.
At a performance art event at the Boston Center for the Arts last summer, artist Jeff Huckleberry sent an audience skittering around the gallery like a flock of sparrows as he sloshed buckets of paint over his head, and built paint fountains that splattered color on anyone close by.
Pioneering performance artist Joan Jonas made a name for herself in the late 1960s, and earlier this year was tapped for the 2015 Venice Biennale for a project presented by the List Center. Jonas, who is in her late 70s, will perform an ambitious piece titled “Reanimation” in the MFA’s Remis Auditorium next month. The audience will be seated, like theatergoers. But visual art, video, and conceptual art are all vital components in her work.
A lot of performance art today is driven by conceptual-art notions. Last May, Munsell invited Venezuelan artistic team Nascimento/Lovera to present “Song for a Military Band,” a concert at which the US Coast Guard Band played, as did Foundation Movement, a local hip-hop group, and a Brazilian drum troupe.
The concept? “To have a military band play countercultural songs, a melding of official culture with counterculture,” says Munsell.
Whether the audience experienced that tension is up for debate. “What could have been a dissonant clash of musical styles and cultures,” wrote Globe critic Sebastian Smee, “ended up looking like a model case of civility and respect, an overflow of harmonized energy.”
“I question the decision to integrate the samba band — it broke up the tension of the rapper and the Coast Guard band,” says Munsell. “With performance art, there’s always a high level of risk. A lot depends on the audience.”
Performance art teems with interdisciplinary projects like “Song for a Military Band.”
“Creativity and innovation happens at intersections,” says Trevor Smith, Peabody Essex Museum’s curator of the present tense, pointing to Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s sonic installation there, “From here to ear,” earlier this year, in which live zebra finches played amplified guitars.
Performance art proliferates because “that’s where the artwork is going,” says Dina Deitsch, curator of contemporary art at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. Deitsch frequently curates performance into exhibitions. Artists coming out of art schools often consider performance intrinsic to their toolkit, along with video, installation, and, oh yeah, painting.
Part of the art world for decades now, performance art has its theoretical roots in the work of Marcel Duchamp, and peaked in the 1960s with Happenings, staged in art galleries and in public by such artists as Yoko Ono and Allan Kaprow.
Still, institutions avoided it. It was ephemeral, harder to commodify than painting or sculpture. (Now, Munsell says, artists provide instructions and certificates, so it’s possible to own a performance art piece). And after National Endowment for the Arts chair John Frohnmayer vetoed proposed grants to four performance artists in 1990, presenters who had stakes in NEA funding shied away from performance art, which is inherently unpredictable.
In 2004, RoseLee Goldberg founded Performa, a New York institute that presents a performance art biennial. The following year, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presented performance art powerhouse Marina Abramovic in “Seven Easy Pieces,” a weeklong series. But the watershed came in 2010, with the Museum of Modern Art’s blockbuster “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present.”
“It’s taken 40 years for performance art to come into general acceptance by the public and curators,” says Paul C. Ha, director of the List Center. “There’s been a progression from photos to video, then video to performance. The generation now is a lot about time-based work.”
“For kids holding their phones,” he adds, “looking at something static may not be as exciting.”
As the culture has changed, museums have adapted.
“Museums have gone from being storehouses of objects, to having an educational component, to institutions of the experience economy,” says PEM’s Smith. “Learning through participation is a natural thing for museums to be doing.”
Some are slower to catch up than others. The List Center has been presenting performance art since it opened in 1985, when Ping Chong performed in conjunction with his show “Kindness.”
But the List, at an institution as forward-thinking as MIT, is exceptional. The MFA tasked Munsell with developing a performance art program in 2012, and presentations kicked off the following March. She is one of the only performance art curators in the country at an encyclopedic museum.
Meanwhile, the Institute of Contemporary Art has done a stellar job of presenting interdisciplinary works that may or may not fit under the umbrella of performance art, depending on how broadly you see that umbrella. This month, there will be a film with live narration and music from Sam Green, and a slide-talk presentation by cartoonist-author Art Spiegelman and saxophonist-composer Phillip Johnston.
Closer are the projects that happen in the galleries, such as Trajal Harrell and Sarah Sze’s dance “The Untitled Still Life Collection,” presented earlier this month in the “Fiber: Sculpture 1960-present” exhibition. That work was first performed at the ICA as part of the “Dance/Draw” exhibit in 2010, a show that naturally synthesized performance, as did the deCordova’s “Temporary Structures: Performing Architecture in Contemporary Art” in 2011.
The ICA will look to local performance art for the 2015 James and Audrey Foster Prize, which celebrates Boston-area artists, according to senior curator Jenelle Porter. “We’ve been cooking up something that has to do with performance,” Porter says. “What’s exciting in Boston is performance and collectives, but it’s very underground. My hope is to give it exposure and space.”
Dedicating temporary space to live performers may be simpler than inviting them into a gallery space with precious art. When “Walden: revisited” opens later this month at the deCordova, Tigue, a percussion group, will perform at the opening, partnering with sculptor Michael Mercil on a piece called “Thoreau’s Desk (requires some assembly).” (The opening is not open to the public.) The act of building will provoke a musical score, with saws, drills, and the like as instruments. Risky? You bet.
“There are logistical issues, having power tools in the gallery,” Deitsch admits.
But it’s a contemporary art curator’s job to roll with the risks. With a second performance in January, open to the public, the show will go on.
More coverage:
- Performance art in Boston and beyond
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @cmcq.