 Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for making it out on a Sunday afternoon. My name is Mayen Wong. I'm the associate director of Under the Rain of Festival. And we are at the LeWester Lounge Hall for the festival. I would like to introduce Eddie Horitz, who will be moderating this panel. And many of you are actually familiar with him. He is the director of programming at LXCC and the founder of Culture Bot. Andy wrote, and he's a really interesting thinker and a really great writer. And he wrote a blog post on Culture Bot about three a month ago, maybe, some time ago, quite recently, and about visual art performance versus contemporary performance slash time-based art performance. And I remember I was reading it on my iPad or something on my way back from a NEA panel from the DC, an Amtrak. And I just thought that because we were preparing for Under the Rain of Festival, and I think it's important to have this conversation in the context of so much work that we're seeing in the city and the festival. And so I'm just very excited that all of you are here. And we have some great panelists. And I would like to introduce Eddie Horitz, who is sort of the brains behind this operation. And so welcome. The thing will be about an hour and a half altogether. And I hope you guys enjoy the discussion. And it's Eddie. Hi. So welcome, welcome. It's great to see so many of you here today. I want to take care of some housekeeping first. I guess first I want to thank May Yin for inviting us to do this today. We had coffee and we brainstormed and worked very closely on this, so it's really exciting. I also want to shout out my culture bot colleague, Jeremy Barker, who's right there. Culture bot is eight years old in December. We've been covering contemporary performance experimental theater advance. And I was doing it pretty much by myself until Jeremy showed up. So we've doubled our capacity. And it's been really great. And then I have to thank Mark Russell, who, yeah, round of applause for Mark, please. A little backstory. I said, I used to work for Mark at PS122. And I kind of, culture bot wouldn't exist if he hadn't sort of given me permission to write a grant to NPN to do some support for that project. And so I'm really honored to be a part of anything Mark's doing. And you should be, too. So really quickly, some of you may have clicked through to my post or Claire Bishop writing or some of the stuff. Before I introduce everybody, I just want to sort of frame it a little. That I'm kind of new to this conversation. It's obviously been going on for 40 years or more. And so I'm really excited to have artists and Rosalie and Phillip here. And I'm looking around the room. And there are people here who I'm sure really have a strong grasp on this. So it's been very exciting for me to investigate. Since Rosalie launched Performa in 2005, so this is coming from my place of recently discovering this. It seems like the visual arts world has really discovered or rediscovered performance in a really big way. And it's kind of interesting because under the radar was launched in 2005. And in the wake of under the radar, we've gotten PS1 to introduce TOIL, the American Realist Festival. And we've seen this incredible fluorescence of really exciting contemporary performance in a theater context, as well as this evolution of performance in a visual arts context. And yet, they're on these parallel tracks that never meet. And the more I watch work like temporary distortion or Roto Zaza or Annie Dorsen or Richard Maxwell's ads, and the more I see it having the visual art, I'm like, there's a conversation to be had here. There's similar ideas being investigated, but it's not happening. So we're hoping to unpack some of that today. And with that, oh, and just a total plug for a show. On January 19th, God Squad's kitchen, you never had it so good, is going to open, play for your last year under the radar, it's going to be open here at the public. And especially for people from a visual art background, what they do is they have sort of taken some of the ideas that Warhol put forth with his films, and specifically the film Kitchen. And they totally reanimated it in this really exciting way that engages with many of the issues around authenticity and presence and spectatorship and mediation. It's just a really great piece. So I really encourage everyone to check it out here. What? It's called God Squad's Kitchen. You never had it so good, and it opens here on January 19th. So let me, without further ado, introduce our panelists or discussants, if you will. To my immediate right is Rosalie Goldberg, the founding director and curator of Performa. I'm not going to go into everyone's bios because they're on the website, culturebot.org or .net, but not .com because I can't buy it from them. But you should all be familiar with Rosalie. Liz Magic Laser, who is an artist and who was recently in Performa with her piece, I Feel Your Pain. I Feel Your Pain. David Levine, also a fantastic artist who is currently in PS120's Coil. Your show is Anger at the Movies. Anger at the Movies, and it is next week. It starts Tuesday, it's Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and kind of for free for an hour and a half on Monday. OK, so that's a tip for free on Monday. And at the end, but certainly not least, Phillip Byther, who is the senior curator of Performing Arts at the Walker Arts Center. So I think what I'd like to do is we'll start over with thought because I know the Walker Arts Center is a multi-discipline, it's visual art, it's performance, it's all those things. So I thought we could just start about talking about, and you've been there for 15 years. And so I thought we could start talking a little bit about sort of how the performance program works with that and your relationship to visual art in that environment. Sure. Well, the first thing I'll readily admit to is that really my background in training was in the contemporary performing arts. So really when I went to the Walker it was the first time I worked in a museum or art center construct. So when Liz said, it's funny that we don't have anyone here from the performing arts side, even though I'm at the Walker, I'm kind of that person. And I run a program that is devoted to new forms and contemporary expression across a range of performing art disciplines, contemporary dance, experimental theater and performance, and a whole wide range of contemporary music forms. So that's really in the world that I live. And I think that ING at the end of perform is kind of critically important because it really is a 40 year history, 45 to 50 year history that the Walkers had involved in bringing contemporary performing arts and supporting new directions in these disciplines within a much bigger cultural setting in which we have a large collection and an acquisition program and a great exhibition program and a media program and film media. But really my area is in following what's happening in dance and theatrical forms and in music. That being said, being within the sort of construction of a contemporary art center, we also very consciously try and by mission specifically to blur lines between disciplines, to look at hybrid forms, to really sort of share ideas and influences across the disciplinary lines. It's not as always as easy as one might think it it should be, there's all kinds of things that stand in one's way. Timelines being a large one of them is that exhibition planning often is three to five years in advance, performance planning is a year and a half to a year or sometimes six months and film programming is three to six months in advance. So increasingly we are striving to find ways to have these conversations across departments. But when I look back at the last 15 years we really have actually supported a wide range of work and something that wasn't really reflected in Andy's essay is that this work often in recent years has gone both directions. My program embracing people who have really had some, their primary training in visual art or collaborating with curators within the visual art side to make something special and new happen. Rosalie and I got a chance to work together on Sherina Schatz's first live performance piece 12 years ago. We worked on a project with Dan Graham called Don't Trust Anyone Over 30. We've supported artists even like right here this week. Rabia More was coming to our out there performance festival next week. Claude Wampler, many people who really live in the gray area between contemporary performance coming out of visual art training and contemporary experimental theater. We also have, and there's been a great openness at The Walker around identifying some artists who we think might either have interest and capability to transition into placing their work within gallery settings. So the Eiko and Koma, the dance artists work naked that just had a run here in New York and their entire retrospective project found a home with us. We commissioned that work. We placed it in a gallery last fall. They ran the work for six hours a day for an entire month. Now these are artists who primarily are identified as dance artists, but we sort of framed them within, we felt it would fit within the exhibition program. Ralph Lemon, we offered a first-time chance to have his work. He's a choreographer, American choreographer, but really in many ways thinks as a visual artist to place his work in a gallery setting. We've sponsored some exhibitions that have looked at performance work, an exhibition 14 years ago called Art Performs Life that focused on the work of Meredith Monk, Bill T. Jones, and Merce Cunningham. And in some ways, Cunningham was sort of the, is kind of the patron saint of the program. He's one of the first artists that we made a commitment to. He and the company were with us 15 or 18 times or something, there were multiple commissions and lots of different projects. And I think the spirit that Cunningham and Cage really lived throughout their lives, it really informs and drives much of what we believe in and how we work at The Walker. You know, I think a couple of things I might just say about where we are now and what we see happening in the future is that it's both an exciting and a sort of open question time as performance is embraced by the visual art world increasingly. But I think in some ways, I guess, Andy, I would say a lot in your essay, I hope most of you have had a chance to read it, resonated, it was drawn, I found it compelling and important and timely. I also found that I didn't entirely agree with the slightly black and white nature of the conversation because I think there's a lot going on in these gray areas. And actually the artists themselves tend not to be the ones who say, well, I'm a visual artist making a performance or I'm an experimental theater artist. You know, there's a bit more fluidity between these worlds and these influences. And I think that there are many institutions outside of New York. I'm part of a network called the Contemporary Art Center Network. There's 10 different institutions that are multidisciplinary contemporary centers that have dedicated performance departments. And those are places that I think are really fertile grounds and are actively exploring this terrain. For whatever reason, and maybe it's because the cultural landscape is so visible and so large here in New York City, it's a particularly charged conversation. And I think those crossovers are a little bit more challenging, perhaps. But performance done a tremendous amount around bringing this work to the surface. And I would say that Rosalie's done a lot in bringing contemporary dance and some theatrical artists into that umbrella as well and exploring these questions. The other thing that I think is at the root of the sort of conversation is the fact that it's such a resource-challenged moment, particularly I think in dance and theatrical forms, but in the States, but in New York in particular. So I think that makes the conversation that much more slightly heated because I think sometimes we see a lot of attention or energy or press attached to a particular approach to performance art and that people may feel like, where's ours? Why not the same attention devoted over here? There is a bit of grass is always greener, I would say. I think if you talk to contemporary visual artists that everyone has challenges around resources to a certain extent. But I do feel that there's a great deal of education that's needed and that's why I so wanted to be part of this conversation from both directions. Performing the performing art world really could use a crash course in contemporary art history and artistic movements and new performance and I would agree with Andy's comment around there's a lot of new performance art happening, perhaps being made by artists who might benefit from seeing a lot of the experimental theatrical and dance work that's happening simultaneously. So, at The Walker, right now, for instance, we're forming a work group between curators. There's a great collegial spirit between the curators in visual art and film and performing art. So I feel like it's a fortunate place to be where you can wander down the hall and say, what was that that you guys just supported? Because we have, through the visual art program, supported Tino Segal and Sharon Hayes and a number of artists who have worked performatively but have not been necessarily curated out of our program. People like Catherine Sullivan have created work through our visual art program but with applications from performing arts to identify and help support her interest in using choreography in a new performance work. So there is this chance to kind of support one another and we have a full-fledged production department so we're able to, if an artist has an idea like Haigu Yang wanted to take a margarit du rat play, it was the first time she'd done a theatrical work and sort of experiment with using her lens to apply an approach to this work and we were able to sort of collectively as a team, visual artists and performing arts curators and staffs and production people, support that effort. We did it as a kind of private showing because it was an experiment but it was really intriguing and I think that's the other thing I would add to it. Sometimes we think, one might say, well, why does this artist think given their training or trajectory, they have the right to say work in these other disciplines and I think that's really the wrong question. I think a lot of times artists from different backgrounds and different orientations who see the world through a different lens can in fact bring something really fresh and new to the forms that we're working in. The last things I'd say is there's of course been a long history of collaborative work between primarily performing artists and visual artists. It's really on our mind at the moment at The Walker because we're starting to actually acquire the work, remnants of and set pieces and elements of performing artists work that was left after the ephemeral performance is over. So we just acquired for our collection the entire archive of sets, props and costumes from the Cunningham Company now that they have ended their life and that made perfect sense. Of course, it was kind of a no brainer that it's Rauschenberg and Johns and Warhol and Nauman and things, but we also are, we purchased last year a work 16 millimeter earrings by Meredith Monk who were in the process of purchasing a work by Ralph Lemon called Meditation that was part of his last performance piece. So I think there's a, Andy brought up the question of like is there ways to leverage some of the financial underpinnings that sometimes is able to support the visual art practice but through the area of performing arts and in some ways that's not why we're doing this. We feel like these elements have an integrity and an absolute worth within a museum setting but it may be also from a kind of selfish, interested in maintaining the life and work of artists and the performing arts may also be another thread that helps support their future works as well through the acquisitions of some of these pieces. We also think that the acquisition of those works will for the future tell, partly tell the story of what these ephemeral forms have, what have happened with them, otherwise they're lost and the last thing I might just say is that we're devoting a lot more energy and time toward around interpretation and scholarship. You know, we've developed not just several exhibitions around performance one last year or two years ago looking at the work of Tricia Brown but also catalogs and interpretive material and online material and a lot on our new website that is really attempting to provide some writing and some scholarship and some interpretation around the work that is for the most part emanating out of experimental theater and contemporary dance forms. This was an interesting year for performer. It was the third, fourth. Definitely in terms of the work that was being presented, we talked a little bit about this. There was definitely a more theatrical element to a number of the pieces, Elm Green and Dragset, actually had a scene with actors. Simon Fujiwara did his autobiographical solo performance. And you know, it seemed pretty conscious. So do you wanna tell us a little bit about sort of performance as a whole sort of what was happening this year? Sure. So this year, indeed, our fourth biennial and one of the themes, not the only theme, was to look into how do artists look at the stage, the stage in a very visual sense and how do theater people do that? Many because I don't know any artists who go to theater. And it's a really interesting problem. They don't like to go there. They don't like to sit there. They, it's just total anathema and so that was one problem. Another, I tended to walk out of, you know, a streetcar named as I when I had to see the rapes even third time in the fourth time. I get very, I'm looking for something else, I realize. So we're talking here, so I really wanted to actually, it was intentional and tended to look at the way artists specifically think of theater. And so a lot of the work came in response to that. And again, we take a very, very experimental approach to everything we do in the form of we set ideas up for artists, they don't have to follow the program. They can take as much or as little as they want. And then it's, we all head to the precipice together, which is opening line when you see it first time. But audiences get very interesting and some of the things that did in fact, oh, just one thing to say, so it's on the record. Bravo is a blog that actually brings people together to have a good conversation. If anyone's worried about what criticism on blogs do, this is what they can do in the most positive way. So I wanted to do a little experiment if you don't mind just working with me. And I'm gonna stand up so I can see you all. Just to talk about audiences. Anyone here from finances, will you please stand up? Okay, 1%, they're not here. Anyone from a literary background? I mean, you know, let's say your undergraduate degree, yes. Can you stay, remain standing? Shelley, you might wanna help me count. Can you just come here and count? So we've got three people, four people. How many people do we have from literature? Okay, visual arts, strict visual arts, some of you coming out of art history or visual arts. And I should say not including my performer crowd, right? I was wondering about visual arts. Yeah, so okay, how many do we have from visual arts? So, what if you both? And please, okay, and David's on the fence. It's okay, it's one for one, and we're gonna talk about that because I think that students have one for one side and I think that way they lead. Terry has become a choreographer, leave him to me if you don't mind. Okay, and who is from the theater world? Oh! Yeah, okay, everyone from the theater world needs to raise your right hand for right brain people. You know that, right? Okay, everyone from the art world, please raise your left hand. So your left hand brain people, left brain people, you know what the difference is, right? One is very logical, one is rational, you tend to like math, I can't do math. You tend to think, you like small details apparently if you look this up, right brain, left brain. Those who have a left brain in the art world, they like to see the big picture, they like to touch and feel things, remember making things, right? So, now you may sit down, so I don't come and actually say anything. But, so the conclusion I come to, one is we've got evidence here today that you're all here today, not because anyone said to the art world, don't come, but because Mark's under the radar festival, just give me the byline again, is described as new theater from around the world. I don't know, I think it's a byline we're using this week, sorry. Okay. I looked at it on the, in something like that. I've been here before I was a girl. Say that again? Tracking new theater from around the world. So, because of that, everyone from the theater world comes here, and where's the art program? I went to Sontag the other night, I looked around, I didn't know a soul. I went to big art group, remember, it's got the word art in it. I looked around, I saw one person from Performer with me, sitting there, two people sitting next to me because we thought we'd try to be sure to see everything. And David, no, it's really David, no, you weren't there. No one from the art world. So, I'm talking here too about many, many different audiences, but going back to what I really find intriguing is that these different brains. Now, if I were to peel back some of your brains, the left-hand brain here, left brain and the right brain, art world, theater world, they're different brains. I grilled Andy the other day. So what's your background, Andy? He says, oh, classical theater. I said, tell me what's classical theater? Check out Ibsen Shakespeare. Sort of bright, bright, got up to there. Language, he starts with language. He's a good art world person. What's your background? No way. Terri, are you trying to say something? Oh, sorry, I did leave out dance and- No, no, I'm just improving my hair. Oh, okay. You know what they say with your auctioning, you just gave away your house, right? Yeah. Anyway, but you did remind me that we could be talking about dance, but I just thought we might be going too far because we're probably three dancers here today, right? Mm-hmm. Five, yay, some more. Okay. But so I'm trying to really conjure up some of these ideas. So the art world crowd do not start with language. Language is nowhere in. You know the thing the dumb artists don't talk to them, just let them make or do. That was the 50s. You know, this idea that artists make, they don't say, they don't speak about that, what they do. People in theaters start with a very different place. They start with a lot of words, basically. They start with loving words. They start with loving to articulate words. You see how I'm struggling here to get my voice out? I'm not a training speaker. I'm not, you know, I tend to mumble. I'm very, you know, I don't project what I'm working on. So, and in theater, what happens too is that, you know, let's take the basics. And this is, again, what's coming out of this, is looking into artists looking in theater. In theater, you have a playwright. Then you have a director. Then you have, well, probably a producer, if you like. Then you have a set designer. Then you have a costume designer. Then you have a lighting designer, and on and on and on. If you go backstage, you've got a long list of collaborators. In the art world, you tend to have this one vision, this one visionary, this one person. Even if they do eventually hire somebody to do the film with the lighting or the costume, it's still theirs to decide. They're the one driving the Porsche. Everybody else has to get in the back seat. That artist will make all those decisions. And of course, some directors will be back to Victoria, but by then they've already, they're working with a lot of other people's material by the time they come out and act as directors. So these are the questions that I've been looking at in relation to this area called performance art, visual art performance, or even in the art world. And that was a lot of the separation that was coming up in the blog was that the art world needs to pay attention. You know, you won't get the artist to talk to the theater people, I suppose. If they don't have a common language, they really don't. I think if you put them in front of the theater, they first of all, they wouldn't sit through it. You can't tie them down to sit through it. So these are some of the questions that I find very, very interesting about these different grades, the different starting point. So what do I do with performance? And maybe I should say, some of you probably know my book on the history of performance art, which first of all in 1979. And what I think about all the time, all the time, all those edges. What goes on here between arts and art, between film and art, between theater and art, between politics and art, between, and on and on. And maybe my entire sort of intrigue for this area that I spent the last four decades writing back is because I'm always looking at how those edges come together. And maybe if I am forced in the corner with everyone throwing things at me to define what performance art is, I would say it's actually almost things here, those edges where they're here. That it's not one defined thing. This is performance art. No, it was, you know, artists were doing, Leonardo da Vinci did performances in 1460. Bernini did performances in the 1700s. On and on and on. Artists have always done live performance. Performance by some other name, it might be called a pageant, might be called a fireworks. But artists have always done performance. And they're not doing it particularly looking over their shoulder at what the theater people are doing. They're doing it in relation to ideas that are going on in the art world. So I've always seen people who can point, oh, she's dealing with the art world. And that was the slightly naive thing about some of the culture bodies. Oh, you know, the art world has money. A few artists have money. It's not that much money rolling around the art world that, you know, than any of these other worlds. There are a couple of high earning artists. So the rest struggle like everybody else. So this is what performer does. And from the beginning, why I started the former, the biennial, was because I felt that this, all these areas, there's a very, very rich history. There's a rich history leading back, and I decided, you know, as my book, to start with the 1900s, with futurism, with the theater people, which were talking to the artists, with Russian constructivism, Myahold was talking to the constructivists and making unbelievable theaters slash dance slash, visual arts slash, you know, we don't know what to call it because they were drawing on all these different disciplines. Moving to the 20s in Paris, we have Picabia with Duchamp with the Swedish ballet, with Man Ray, with René Thierre filmmaker, all coming together. So if you want, my own fascination has been from looking at 100 years, let's say, of performance, where actually it is always about those collaborations. So this is something I think about all the time is those collaborations. So that's a little bit to talk about. Starting with former was to say, this area needs a special, needs thinking in a way that we're not getting when we go just to a museum or when we go just to a performing arts, these separate schools. We need something that brings us, as you're doing today, all together to start to understand how these different histories happen. And you know, sorry to say, my own obligation life, I feel so much like I'm Chinese, you know, going like this and keeping 14 plates in the air and one is called Theater Dance Film, you know, on graphic design, architecture, sculpture, because it is our job to see what's going on in all those disciplines and find how they connect. And that includes music and anyone else I might have left out. So that was the starting point for Performer to make this history above all. It's a real history, it's a hugely intellectual endeavor to talk about history. How important history is for us, how looking back on those earlier periods, they were more radical in anything we're doing today and maybe history is my inspiration, saying come on, let's have courage to look at things in a very, very new way. And the next point was, I wanted to provoke the future by commissioning new work. And that was very, very important to us because I felt what I was seeing out there, if I saw one more monologue, I was gonna take off my shoe like I did in Iraq and throw it. It's like, no more monologues, please. Please don't keep redoing this album, please stop, you know, no more bloodletting and all these really difficult pieces of that item, you know, all that stuff. I wanted to think maybe by supporting young new artists by proposing to them, even maybe someone who hasn't done performance before, what would we do? How would you treat time? What happens? Maybe we could actually generate new generation, generate a new way of thinking of what all these things could be and make them very, very public and bring people together around there. So that's the big mission. Just one other question, just since I'm such a historian, I had to answer all your questions. You did mention in the email you sent me, like for example, this year you even had Reggie Watts and he's a comedy act and he's been in under the radar. Why are you dealing with comedy? Once again, take you back in history. Firstly, if I close my eyes sometimes and I'm watching Reggie Watts, I think I'm hearing Eric Pagosi. The 70s was riddled with fabulous artists making live performance and comedy. Mike Smith, Doug Skinner, Stuart Sherman, Andy Helfman, Pat Lesko. The 70s was fabulous, Ralston Farina, people who are not with us anymore. Just endlessly going to these events that were funny, they were clever and they're always, yes, they're very much about the art world because people tend to talk about their own worlds but they were also looking outside. So history is what guides this question, are we gonna try to keep all these doors open? Absolutely, but there's a lot to explain when there's this question on how come you're only handling the art world? Because I feel that we're actually always trying to keep our eyes open and keep these plates in the air. Great, thank you. Thank you. So that brought up a lot. And I wanna actually turn this over to the artists because they're the ones actually making the work and can discuss this from the inside what they're dealing with. I just wanna throw out a couple of things that Rosalie brought up, which I think is really interesting, which is that actually much of the work that's happening, that's exciting in theater is not necessarily text based and not playwright driven. And that model is not necessarily the prevalent model in performance making right now. So I think I would like the artists maybe to address some of the thoughts about sort of are they left-brainer? I mean, is that relevant to your process? Just really quick. And the other thing is that I think, so I guess one of the things that came up for me and that prompted me to write the article was about craft and practice and authenticity versus me-mesis in that I think the idea of bringing artists different imaginations together or to create is great. But if a subset of artists has a particular skill set that enables them to engage with a certain set of issues around presence and performativity and spectatorship and spends a lot of time in that realm, is it unreasonable to expect there to be a dialogue between new people exploring that so that they can actually build a skill set and implement their vision more aptly. So I'm just throwing that out there, but I guess we'll start, but what I'd like to do is to sort of have David and Liz, maybe David, do you wanna start? Sure. Just sort of talk a little bit about your work and sort of some of the ideas that you're engaging with. Cause you're kind of like, you were starting in theater and then moved individually? Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, I could probably try to adjust some of the things Rose had brought up also. I started out as a theater director who didn't enjoy going to the theater at all, but really liked the process of rehearsal and I liked the sort of intense amount of rigor and skill that went into really conventional theater. I mean, all kinds of theater, but what I was really fascinated by all the time was actually the mimesis and just how much work it took and how much intense, very classical analysis of a script it took to actually get to the point where it looked like you weren't acting and the whole sort of mania of method acting. The sort of, cause obviously if you take it far enough, you've turned into another person completely and nobody will ever know that you're acting. So it's kind of, and in a weird way it struck me, I mean, it always kind of struck me when I was working. I mean, I was doing a bunch of downtown stuff. I was also doing stuff off Broadway and realistic kind of stuff, but I was mainly going to museums and I was mainly going to galleries and I grew up in a household that was kind of saturated with sort of 60s and 70s kind of art and I really thought of, I thought that's what I was doing and I thought that's what was going on and I sort of came to realize very quickly that's not what's going on in theater and that actually the sort of parameters and the idea of artistic authorship and some of the stuff that Rosie is talking about isn't necessarily feasible for a variety of reasons, but I also wound up realizing what really fascinated me a lot about theater and the techniques that it employs were especially with regards to method acting, which nobody really does anymore, but all sort of conservatory training is based on it, was that in its 70s high parity kind of version it really approached the condition of endurance or of body art and all the sort of legendary stories of actors kind of losing 30 pounds and like swallowing mayonnaise to learn how to vomit and all this kind of stuff. It was really, I mean, if you'd recontextualized it, it would be something else. It was in a sense that simple. So I liked everything about theater except going. And I liked everything about theater except the rituals involved, but so I started thinking a lot about, so this is a long answer for it, but one quick thing to say about Rosie is I don't think it was really about, for me it was never about language. It was actually about form. Like I wasn't, and this is where I mean like the misapprehension. I think the reason I never, people get into theater for a lot of reasons. Playwrights get into theater because they love language. Actors, some actors get into theater because they love language, some don't. I think directors, some directors get into because they love language. I got into it because I love being able to sculpt time and space, but again, a concession to Rosie's point at a certain point I couldn't do what I wanted to do in mainstream theater. It just became kind of impossible because of production pressures and things like that. So, I went to Berlin to start a program there and I went to this theater called the Volksbühne, which is kind of the only theater I've ever enjoyed going to in my entire life. And partially because it's just, you don't feel like you're walking into the theater. There's, I mean, the tickets are cheap. There's a Turkish guy in the lobby selling sandwiches. They rarely turn off the lights. Turn off the lights. They've got, you know, they had Schlingen Sief and Yonatan Misa. They were trying to get Paul McCarthy to design sets for them for a while. And it was just incredibly loose. I mean, the whole thing was very, and I was watching this and I was like, and I had the same reaction that a lot of theater people do when they go over to Berlin. And which was kind of like, oh man, you know, why are we doing more of that radical shit in New York, da, da, da, da. And the more I thought about it, and this is where I think we really, we really deviate, is it's what it really is a question of institutional context. It's a question of institutional financing structures and it's a question of a million protocols. And y'all are gonna, in my experience, and this is someone who doesn't like going to theater, you know, like 70% of your experience going to theater is determined by the rituals involved in going to theater. There's very minor degrees of variation in terms of what's on stage. Like you can put all the video you want or whatever, but pretty much 70% of it is always the same thing. You go, you show up on time, you sit down or you stand, but you're really sitting or, you know, there's people in the audience that are not, but it always feels very much to me the same. So what I wanted, but that's also because of, you know, like Philip was saying, you know, you've got these crazy kind of structures that dictate when, you know, exhibitions are planned five years in advance, right? You know, and theaters plan a year in advance, but theaters plan a year in advance, but six months, you know, six months, not in America, but like six weeks are allowed for rehearsal. Whereas, you know, whereas there's no time for rehearsal and generally in a performance art event, you know, and so part of it is, as you said, a kind of emphasis on the authentic as opposed to the rehearsed, which also kind of interested me, but part of it is just production pressures. I mean, like art curating, art institutions, you know, performance art curating are really set up to allow for, like fiscally, spatially, to allow for the kind of prep that goes into theater things. So the ways in which institutional context determines the content start getting really fascinating to me, and then the third part of this was that I realized that theater, theaters, there's no, there's a really rich language in contemporary art for discussing the conditions of its own production, for discussing art making, and it's viable as art. There's no such context for theater. Like occasionally someone like Mike Daisy will like be able to talk about how theater gets made in a theatrical context, but for the most part we have no, there's no tradition of institutional critique at all, and there's no space for it. There's no, I mean, one thing about visual arts, it's incredibly flexible in terms of like how it can put things up, where it can put things up. It's voracious that way. Theater has a much more cumbersome setup, like institutionally, financially, spatially, and it makes it much harder to pose these questions in a way that is not external to the thing itself. So I started, I started really thinking about what the kind of work I wanted to make, there was room for it in the visual arts context, and there was room for the formal questions I wanted to ask in a visual arts context, but there wasn't room for it in a theatrical context, and then I started wanting to play these things off against each other in whatever ways I could, so what would happen if you floated straight theater under the formal conditions of visual arts? So the first kind of project I did was at Gavin Brown's Passerby, where I blocked two actors into a fake minimalist sculpture and had them do a Broadway plays on a loop all day for a week, and you couldn't see them, you could only hear them, and you just walked in and there was this big terrible, like Dan Grammie kind of thing just floating there, but you heard this drama, there was just no way to focus on it, so ways of kind of allegorizing the split that you were talking about, but also ways of saying, ways of saying, there's also the other thing that happens with theater and Philip mentioned this, there's a huge, when performance art started calling itself performance art, when performance art started popping up in the 60s, there was a huge stress on the artists to differentiate themselves from theater, and you've got all these statements about a capra and burden, you think like, it's not theater, Dan, it's not theater, because it's really happening, or I got an argument one time with the Brown of the Church, which was like, why don't you put yourself in your pieces, and I was like, well, because it's fake, I mean it's like, if I'm suffering for people, I'm not really suffering. Like, I mean the promise of authenticity isn't, I mean it's not, and she's like, no, no, you just forget about it, you just forget they're there after long enough, I'm like, yeah, but you're still not really, so I wanted to be like, okay, I'm gonna take Strait Minesis, which is sort of the kind of theater that a visual arts performance context just loaves, like weeks of rehearsal, all this kind of stuff, and then I'm just gonna loop it, and I'm gonna loop it, and I'm gonna get rid of the theater, and I'm gonna get rid of all the rituals that make it theater. I'm gonna get rid of the ticket purchase, I'm gonna do it during the day, I'm gonna do it in the gallery, and I'm not gonna have staging, but it's still gonna be realism, but, and it's still gonna be a conventional narrative, which I love, and which I really miss in visual arts performances, you know, this kind of is straight soap opera-y kind of narrative, which is always somehow in quotes, which is something we can talk about, but, and just see, so basically create a situation where the audience is, you'd have this object that would sit between the two disciplines, and it would satisfy minimum requirements of both disciplines, but you'd have to, depending on where you came from, you'd own it as one, or as the other, so you don't like narrative that this is running on an endless loop, this is sculptural, or, oh, you don't, you wanna sit down and bite, you wanna see a drama, and you're seeing a straight drama, but, and also ways that you can get the institutions to either trip each other up or to work together, you know, if you could get a piece of this co-commissioned by a theater, and, you know, like I did a piece with Mass Mocha, and then there was co-commissioned by Mass Mocha's performance department, and the visual arts commission in Toronto, and so what you could do, because that would seem to be the real achievement in a way, and then, you know, we talk about under the radar and performer, and Rosalie's totally right, I mean, we've all been on this panel together at various points, and it's either, only art people, if it's in a gallery or in a museum, or it's only theater people that's here, but if you could actually force two institutions to actually work together, that would be the real artistic achievement. The content is almost immaterial, in a way. The content is a free text for that kind of fusion. I think, great, thank you. Sorry. Yeah, no, no, no, it's good, we're good. No, I mean, I think that that's exactly, I mean, hopefully this is a first step in sort of an ongoing process, because I do think, you know, you address, like, you know, Peter said, like, I think one of the things that performance, performing arts-based artists can really benefit from learning from the visual art world is creating content for self-critique, and actually building, I mean, visual arts has this wonderful wellspring of discourse, and theory, and we don't have that as much of the performing arts, or at least it's not as integrated into the experience of the performing arts, I think, and it's also something we don't do a very good job of communicating out to the world. Why would you want to come and have this other experience, or why is it not, you know, how do you get people to learn that, you know, a performative experience isn't necessarily, you know, Strasburg-ian, or whatever. Anyway, so, enough of my yakken. Liz, please, you're definitely in the visual art world starting, and then, but your work is very performative, and this last piece I saw at the SVA Theater was really very, you know, kind of like environmental theater, in a way, so you want to talk about, you know, your process, and how you come up with what you do. Sure, my history with performance is fairly familial, actually, because my mother is a choreographer, and I grew up in a rehearsal space, so I had, you know, in a loft without, where the walls don't go up all the way, I had improvisation going on, I don't know, three or four days a week, a very visceral process that incorporated a variety of methods from dance and theater, and kind of therapy. So, my mom's name, Wendy Osserman, so we don't have to say the last name, but so I grew up going to see dance and theater, and so maybe I do, I am the one artist, you know, then who does enjoy going to theater, and I was thinking, as that issue came up, I was thinking about it, how even when I go to see a piece, and I don't go all the time, but maybe on average, twice a month, I go to see theater, dance the last few years, and it comes in different spurts where I'll go every week, and then I don't go for a month, but I think that maybe I appreciate it, even when I think something isn't fully successful, I appreciate the level of commitment, which I more often feel is lacking when I go around to Chelsea, sometimes I have the demoralized feeling, and I almost never have that when I go to see a piece of live performance because I can feel the level of energy investment and commitment that went into doing that, and so there's almost always something for me to chew on. But so that said, I was a photographer for some years, and I would photograph my mom's dance company, and then I would, some of her dancers became choreographers like Asher Barton and Ophelia Loretta Molia, and I would do their photography for posters, flyers, press, and they would participate in my projects, so this issue, even though I was very situated, oriented towards photography, it was directorial photography, and I was very engaged in this issue of how to translate performance through the camera, and so when this transition happened, for me where I started to work with, at first it was performance-based video, and then it transitioned into live performance, I would always incorporate the role of the camera, the videotaping or the photographing became an active element or participant in many of the projects I've developed, and this also brings me to the subject of a lot of my work, has become how the media affects us and how the mediation of the camera can be reoriented or redirected in some way, and that's largely because I'm looking at how ideology is being insinuated into us, into our psyches, through the visual culture, through film and television, but so then what also happened for me is that a theater director asked me to collaborate with him, as it was 2007, and we were both at grad school at Columbia, but there was no institutional, this is, I think you brought up a really interesting point, David, about the need for contextual collaboration, institutional collaboration, because it's happening amongst artists, practitioners in both fields, that kind of collaboration is happening all the time, but audiences aren't necessarily being cross-read and context aren't necessarily being shared, so a theater director named James Daker asked me to, he's British, and he asked me to collaborate on making video and photograph self, became the environment for a production he was doing at here, Art Center, and so I worked with all the actors in that production, and one woman, Annika Boros, I really got along well with and we kept working together after that. Then I was in, actually in a choreographer, Corey Kresge's dance piece, and I met another actor in that, in doing that, and all of these elements cross-wired, and I made this gradual turn towards working with theater as material, and most often, in your questions about context, I first misunderstood it, because I'm thinking about context quite a bit in an immediate sense with bringing theater in quotes into other contexts, like the bank or Times Square, and that's often the groundwork or parameters that I set up that becomes the genesis of a project is really a friction between the activity of theater and the space that it's in, so. Yeah, so thank you. Okay, well, I have a question though, because I, do you document your work? Yes, but the documentation was part of the project, so for instance, in the piece that you saw that I worked on with Rosalie for Performa, we performed the live production of a film, so in that case, that was a situation where for a while I felt like this is the time I'm gonna have to confront the black box where I've been going to the black box my whole life, but it's maybe has become somewhat of a specter of fear for me because it seems like lack of context because it represents this illusory space where the, I don't know, the total spectacle happens, and so that was interesting to think about the way that Claire Bishop spells out that dichotomy between the white cube where everything is visible, but it's really just a myth, she says it quite well, it's a myth, it's a performance of the reality effect. There is no, we're already operating under these conditions, so I think she ends with a great conclusion where it's time to get over this obsession with reality effect, but back to a question. For the Performa piece, I developed a script that was working off of dozens of interviews with politicians and also texts from press conferences and so these dialogues were montage and adapted into a number of vignettes that took on the character of romantic banter or marital spat, and so these scenes played out, the setting was people on dates at the movies, and so this took place amongst the audience, and I was also working with cinematographers who were filming the scene as it unfolded, so it produced a live film on the screen of the cinema, and it was a, you know, Red Shares typical pop movie theater, and so in that case we were literally performing the live production of the film, and so that was, I edited it as it unfolded, I was talking to the camera, to the cinematographers, and threw in your piece as it unfolded, and I realized later, actually in a moment, so basically the object is the film we produced there, so it's not really something separate, it's not something I separate out from the rest of the process, if that makes sense. Okay, great, we're at two o'clock, and just, you know, I'm about time, it's a time-based performance, but I'm looking around and I'm like, there are just so many amazing artists and curators here in the room, so unless anybody minds, I'd really like to open it up at this point and invite questions or comments or, so we can, I mean there's a lot that we didn't, we brought a lot to the table in terms of everyone's experience and what their professional practice is, we haven't really started to unpack some of the issues around, we've started opened up a little, a few avenues here and there about, authenticity, practice, context, I think the right brain, left brain thing would be a very interesting thing to unpack and sort of artistic process, so I'd really like to open it up, I know, I don't wanna call anybody out, but I know there are some really smart people in the room, you're all smart people, some people I actually, I know, so maybe we can, does anyone have anything to share, questions, thoughts? I can, I can, can I ask Rosalie a question? Yeah. What, what do you, I mean, what do you think of, what do you think of artists like, like Liam Gillick or Alex St. I mean, people who are just extremely text and language-based, like are they, are they, are they, what is one, I mean, no, I mean, would you invite them to do a performance or like? Yeah, the text part is obviously, I mean, in fact, that came out a lot. Right, he said, mentioned two artists, Alex St. and Liam Gillick, they both work with a lot of text, and in fact, the starting point, and that was another aspect of the performer, was looking at a lot of use of text in different ways, so we had a newspaper, I mean, there were a lot of other elements that we were looking for where text was present, and in fact, we've worked with both of them and will continue to work with both of them, so. But you wouldn't call them theater artists, just because they're out there, but they don't seem like those tactile, I mean, your distinction about artists go for material for us, I mean, especially with contemporary conceptual work. Right, I mean, you know, like any of those, trying to create these two separate areas, I think people also take from a lot of those parts, like those described, so like you do, I would say, I see people like with one foot and one side, or intentionally crossing and cross-fertilizing, but where you choose to put, where you choose primarily to work, who we are talking to, I think it's very interesting that it's not just context, it almost makes it too, you know, like, oh, I made this decision for context, I think the art world, this is one other thing to add that I believe in, I really feel that the art world is a very permissive sociological subset, maybe the most permissive, in fact, not only expects, it insists that you break rules, it insists that you don't do something that was done like that last week, you know, and it's not just a fascination for the new, it is the nature of the artist to be in this constantly ruminating about the present and about what culture means in that as it affects my skin, you know, it's a very personal take on society and culture as it is moving, so there's something that the art world, and maybe that's the one umbrella that I do call this thing, the performance art world, is where people come from all those different disciplines to do their most inventive work, and just going back to art historically, I mean, history again, Philip Blass, Trisha Brown, the Senator Chiles, these people came to the art world, their first 20 years was in the art world getting their recognition, they then, like, prodigals go back and now you can believe it, you better believe Philip Blass is in music history, but he wasn't for 20 years, you know, Judiard was not looking at it, Trisha Browns, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Those people come into gravitate to the art world from these different disciplines, you know, Eric Bogosi recognizing that he can do performance although he's coming totally out of theater, but recognizing you don't need permission, you don't need a theater, you don't need a director, you can just sit up in any room and say, hey guys, I'm a theater artist, but you know what, I'm gonna do it. So the art world provides not only this very interesting conversation, but a radical place to operate, and I don't think you get that in theater, you don't get that in architecture, you just don't get it because of the nature of the news. It's hard to get a lot of theater people, who's, you know, which part of the theater you're talking about. The artists are still the singular, individual and the very strange ones. And just one more thing I wanted to throw in there, talking about these many, many divisions, and I'm not one or the other, I'm just saying that so many slithers of different audiences that I look at every day I'm amazed at all these different audiences, you gotta operate and sit there and say, people are having a ball, I don't get it, they're having a great time and they're, you know, but when they come here, they do it or not. I mean, there's some things I look at performer programs, like, no, no, no, don't go there, be free, go there, that's okay, you'll manage there, it's a different audience there, but also by the way, and I noticed that today, there's, well, yes, there were two major articles by Ben Brantley, he got out to the God Squad, he got out to the Japanese this weekend, could not get him to see performer, even though we had theater, even though we had two famous, you know, Shakespearean actors and the younger in drugs, drugs at least, Joseph Fiennes and Charles Edwards, could not get a theater person, review a critic, to come and see that work, even to talk about what is this argument, so that's another thing, next week when you had your critics talk, the fact that critics won't cross, the editors won't let them cross the line, you know, I sort of even asked, you know, well, how do we get Brantley, I know some, you know, how do we get him to come and see Simon, who you are, I want this conversation, you can't do it, they will send the art people in. I mean, it's a big problem even in theater, Ben Brantley and Charles, are they here? You know, they don't necessarily, I mean, dance and theater don't cross either, there's a handful of critics who can kind of go back and forth, even among performing arts, and you know, I'm thinking, I don't know if anyone last year saw Brian Rogers' selected memory out of the chocolate factory, which was a dance piece that was essentially a video installation with one embodied actor, dancer on stage, running everything from a mode, moving really slowly, and it's like that would have been an awesome piece for a visual arts writer to come and examine, or a theater person, but Alistair McCauley surprisingly did a really thoughtful piece around it, but writing around all of this stuff is really complicated and really problematic, I agree. One thing that I sort of want to address, because in my sort of arc I've worked with not so many visual artists, that's new for me, but I have worked with dancers and theater artists, I know you've worked with them as well, and I guess that I'm a little resistant to the idea that only sort of, or maybe that's not what you're saying, I agree that my experience has been the visual art world is more permissive, but I resist the characterization that it's only visual artists that have this sense of exploration and being constantly seeking the new and constantly engaging with contemporary dialogues. I know most of the artists in the dance world and in the theater world that I enjoy and I admire are constantly working, constantly, it's all here. Not me in that way, but I'm not saying that they, those really doing that most difficult work in that field will find their way into the art world. But that's exactly what I'm saying. I thought that you were saying that the context is permissive. Yes. And that the context of the art world is a bit more permissive where anyone, there's some sense that people oriented towards other fields are allowed to hop in. And so yeah, it's interesting because one of the other questions that you asked in your email that I didn't get to answer was if I would ever consider working in a theater context and it recently came up a few months ago where a playwright in Peter Morris approached me if I would consider and I never thought of it and I had no idea if it'll work out or not but I decided that I would want to try it. But the issue was exactly this. How is it legitimate for me to perform as director in that case? And maybe I'm also looking a lot these days at Irving Goffman, a sociologist who uses theater as his. So I was looking at that and he talks a lot about this issue of what's perceived as a legitimate performance or an illegitimate performance and it's again this issue of whether it's accepted in that field. So you know, would it be perceived as what she thinks she's doing acting as a theater director? It goes in both, and I also know the possessiveness. I mean, on the one hand, it's totally true and this is sort of what I meant by 70% of theaters. Even if you are restless within the formal constraints of your field, you go to visual arts. Because it's partially a financial question because it's so commodity based and it's constantly looking for new markets. I mean, I say that in a good way but there's room for you, right? I mean, if you're frustrated with the formal constraints of your field, you can carve out space there and do stuff in there. Just one misconception. Yvonne Rainey did not go to Judson Church and become because it was money. No, no, no, I don't mean that kind of money. No, no, I'm not saying it's because we can make money. I'm saying- I'm saying this idea that the art will provide the space because it's commodity based. No, no, my point- Take a minute. My point is that the art context is in a fundamental way. Based on and funded by, I mean, it'll be an individual performance artist, especially not performance art, but funded by sales. And I think, but I think one reason why it's such a welcoming place is because like capitalism generally is constantly in some, not consciously in terms of individual actors, but it's constantly looking to open up new markets. It's constantly looking to colonize new things. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just, I'm trying to understand why it is that a frustrated artist will not necessarily go into theater. But a frustrated theater artist, my or a frustrated musician or choreographer will find a home and dance because it's always willing, the art context is always willing to like take a look or try new things or let you find a new way of creating work. And I think one thing that performing arts, non-visual performing arts struggles against is that we don't really ask these kind of formal, I mean, you can have formal experiment on stage, right? I mean, the spectacle can take two hours or five hours, but it's still gonna be on stage and you're still gonna need to take a ticket. And this apparatus, and so I think places like the Walker Center or MOCA, wind up actually being incredibly necessary and radical because they let you ask this really basic question that you really can't ask in a theater because it's committed to an architecture of proscenia. Whether it's site-specific or not, you're always fundamentally having this theatrical experience that makes it very difficult to experiment. But in spaces, at MOCA, we use their big theater and we just clear out every single thing in it and so they give this huge box and if you bought a ticket to MOCA, you could go into the, you could experience that theatrical space as an extra gallery and museum which changed the entire way that you would look at it, but you have to have opportunities like that because otherwise this communication doesn't happen. But there are, I mean, there are turf wars, there are little turf wars in both directions. I mean, in terms of, you know, theater people are gonna be like, ah, what the fuck you think you're doing and I'm waltzing in here, you know? And then our people are gonna be like, you come from the theater, what the fuck you think you're doing. I just want to say one quick last thing is that I think a lot of it has to do if you look at just in terms of markets and again, I'm not talking about getting paid or monetizing anything. But the luxury goods sector, you know, Gordon and I wrote a lot about this a long time ago, like the luxury goods sector, if you look at where the grants are or where the fellowships and the big prizes are and visual arts are generally funded by, like, they were funded by Altoids or Hugo Boss or, you know, Prada has a foundation. Like, they have an interest, these brands have an interest in maintaining the highest possible, most radical profile. Like, they're gonna promote kind of restless, really cutting edge works. Theater, dance, opera, they're funded by banks. They're funded by banks and they're funded by airlines. I mean, the grants come from, but the point is they're funded by, they're funded by things that are, have a basic, they're populist in a way. They're not luxury brands and they can't create a cutting edge. They can't create a cutting edge kind of profile. They're, the funding sources are inherently conservative and that actually prevents this kind of restless forward motion in a way that visual arts is funded by, when it's funded, a totally different set of brands that really want you to, like, you know, take a chance out of something on stage. So I think that, there are these really tiny things that really, that really have to make an enormous difference in the culture. Well, I think the culture, oh, sorry. Sorry. I was gonna move to another point that I thought maybe was a touchdown that might be worth, you know, Andy, you brought up in your essay and I, like, the quite distinctly different approaches that people, curators from different camps, view work in and, you know, I sent your essay around to all the visual arts curators at the Walker, you know, and it was interesting because one of the responses I got back was a good friend and colleague was, he had sent back and said, I have a complete disinterest in many of the values that underpin most performing artists, i.e. conditioning viewers to experience within a confined space aimed at a specific end, including the appreciation of the craft that we've been conditioned into in the space to appreciate. And so that sense that you brought up of people feeling manipulated or sort of driven to a certain kind of response, unlike, say, in a gallery setting where people can come and go and say, please, and have whatever kind of response, you know, they may want, that I don't think was entirely accurate in the moment we're living in right now, which I think is really exciting, especially at this time with coil and under the radar and American realness and all the things going on in New York, I do think that some of those structures are starting to break down. The bulk of the performing arts field is built on selling tickets, a certain theater, filling a kind of space in a certain kind of way. But certainly European festivals have led away and I think more and more we're seeing, Claudia Lerocca wrote about it, more and more festivals starting to spring up throughout the U.S. that are really after breaking apart the frame in some way. And so I'm hoping that those trends will continue. If you wander through the resource room at the Association for Performing Arts Presenters, you won't have any real sense of that because that's about sort of a certain traditional model of kind of buying touring artwork. But I think there's more and more little opportunities for that frame to be broken apart. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think, well I was, why can't I remember bodies in urban spaces? I thought that was, you know, he was making, did you, it was in filly live arts, I can't remember his name right now. Willie Garner. Willie Garner, he was making these sculptural installations out of bodies in urban spaces. You didn't have to really pay to go see it. You could just follow it around the city. It was really cool. They did it here last summer and it was in filly. So I mean, that's just one thing that sort of pops my mind about, there's also site-based work, which is sort of breaking down the model of, you know, transaction and place. But I, you know, to, I feel like there's actually some overlap from what you're talking about and what David's talking about because there's this cultural issue, which is, which is process-based, which is that I feel like performing arts is more collaborative in the way it's built, necessarily, than visual arts. Even probably the, where was the touch on this? Even the most sort of dictatorial choreographer or theater director, still on something they're reliant on, on actors and on collaborators to build, whereas a visual artist is gonna, we had that whole outsourcing thing, so you have coons or, you know, these people who hire other people to make their work. Yeah, that's a contractual distinction. I mean, if I hire an actor in, if I make a project that's funded by theater, right, then that actor has to get credit because he's meaning dictates it, right? If I use an actor in a project funded by a visual arts, he's just a fabricator. The same way, I mean, the same way the guys do, and he doesn't get any credit at all. But that is really this weird contractual, I mean, the work, it's not like, oh, visual arts is an outsourcing thing. I mean, it's actually just, it's actually, I'm really tired. Yeah, go ahead. Actually, we are mainly talking about festivals, and I think it's an interesting thing that's also my experience of how dinner presented performance arts in art institutions, because art is ending as a form of festivals, so it went with, like, a time frame, it happens, and then it's over, or you find another format more closer to the exhibitions, because I'm at the moment working at MoMA, the performance department, and I just started six months ago, so it's like the stuff, I mean, I realized in the project, but from my previous experience, when I was working at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, but I completed different scales, so it's much more of a last date, like the timeline, and much more, like, flexible and so on, we realized that this, and now I'm back, I'm like going to Europe, but this, I think, very important performance exhibition, performance project called Living Currency of Pierre Balblanc, and maybe some of you are familiar, Claire Bischoff wrote about that, it's actually, Pierre Balblanc is a French curator, and it's a project that started in 2005, where he takes, I didn't try to make it short, because it can bring you long, and he takes, like, Pierre Balblanc's Living Currency, which hasn't been translated in English, but I wanted it long, so, like, a theoretical framework, that you can see there, like, what the role of the body, like, the body is as a value exchange in the, in the, in the, in the global economy, and he is, like, working with artists as Santiago Serra, as Sanyo Recovich, as Prince Bola, as Teresa Margo, as many artists, actually, where a lot of things, a lot of objects, as France writes, the Prince of Edelwalter, so many objects that have to be somehow activated, the body is the center of the, of the, of the performance, so the project has not as the body art for the cities in the 70s. So when we invited him to come to Warsaw, the museum, it's a temporary space, it's an ex-religio shop, and then Pierre said, let's do something in the theater, let's use the theater stage, I always wanted to use the theater stage, I always wanted to ask a question, all the mechanism that exists in the theater, and all this hierarchical structure. So we approach the dramatic theater in Warsaw, which is a very Italian scene, and there they had a very classical repertoire, and also to mention that in Poland, with Rottowski, Kantor, like, theater, it's really something, say, that you are not really allowed to touch, so it was very difficult also to explain what are we going to do, that those are actors, it would be a free date exhibition on the stage from two to seven every day, and if you're calling it exhibition, there will be different actors, and here it's also this idea of what is performing today, because there were many, many work that we needed to hire other people, like this and the other set of work with 100 ten construction, ten workers, so you have to hire ten workers to do it. It was a call, like, as the small institutions that weren't born, new born institutions were really faced with how to produce performance today, so what are the economic conditions to produce performance, and so it was really tough, it was really tough, in many sense, because it was all this name-shaking, there was the resume of the artist piece when there is actually the bubbles with the water of the dead bodies, like from Mexico, so the technician from the theater knew what was about, he didn't want to work on it, so it was like how do they convince him someone can do it and we did it. And it was, I think it was really great, there was also the part of the music, first time to do it, it was the Montellan, Permanente Gardens, Permanente Gardens and so on, and the public was entering from the backstage, so the seats were used kind of the landscape, so they can really walk around on the stage. Can you actually maybe scan and direct out? Because I'm talking, yeah, I'm sorry. Sorry, sorry. So sorry, yeah. And so actually, so the public was circulating and the different works- Okay, wait, hold on, let me just back up and explain what you- This is Anna Janewski, she's currently the associate curator of performance at MoMA, and she was previously at- Me too, MoMA and Warsaw. MoMA and Warsaw, she's talking about an exhibit, The Living Currency. The Living Currency exhibit that they did there, where- On the theater stage. On the theater stage there, because they had some artists that, they had a temporary gallery there, and they saw that there was a theater, so they went to the official state theater and worked with them. So she's talking about that experience and about the challenges of learning about producing performance coming from the visual art context. So they filled their context and like to make it very shortly, it was a total clash. In the sense that the performance, like the three days were great, after what they were at the Berlin Biennial, like a few months after that, but nobody wanted to write about that because it wasn't not theater, it was not performance. So I was receiving SMS, it's the most touching, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And just a digression, maybe someone you are familiar with Tanya Bulgaria's piece, The Tatling Whisper, when the, when the, actually the policeman is coming at the take gallery with the white horse, and this was part of the living currency done at the date. So it's a project that has been shown four times. So to come back, nobody wanted to write about that, but what, the only, like the only writing was a critique from the dramaturg of the theater, saying that the museum wanted to criticize the theater. It was very, very long. Absolutely not taking into consideration any of the works that have been shown, that actually were questioning many things, all the theater, but also the art, and this is the, the context of those institutional critique present in the contemporary art. So it was this really, this clash of the theater and visual art, and it was like a fight almost. Then the curator was answering, then she was answering, then I was answering, then he translated the Bishop texts about performativity and outsourcing when she's mentioning the living currency. And so it was closed, but it was like five articles of like attacking. We tried to discuss, but then again it was like attacking each other. So it's like, it's interesting because then it's like from the other context, but it's very similar. It's like sometimes it's a possibility to, to communicate and to accept like the different approach but also the stretching these boundaries of the also the time and space. And for me, this is also I wanted to ask you how, because I think this is something we are also faced more not in a way, anyway, in art institutions, how do you present life art? Because it's not just like, we are talking about festivals that happens. And one of the great examples that the performer this year and player is mentioning in the, in the article, is Museo de la Dona, so we'll cherish your maths, which actually he succeeded in addressing those different disciplines from dance to visual art in philosophers spending into the three days to create also this involvement, famous involvement of the audience, which is not, nothing to do with like relational aesthetics and so on. So this would be like really curious to know how you're dealing and how you are asking yourself when you're saying, okay, so I know that you're working a lot with performing art in Europe. We don't have such a distinction that it's also something that then it's making this conflict even more stronger. Well, we did five years ago, or six years ago, we opened actually a sort of formal theater, which seems a little odd, but it's a intentionally fairly flexible space that can be used in lots of different ways and things. But we have a season of work that actually does follow quite traditional models of selling tickets and having people come. But we also buy part of our mandate and strategic plan, are really as many times as possible trying to break apart the frame, trying to create work in new ways and have the audience, performer relationship just be very different. So whenever we can, we look at like, how can the space be turned around? How can we work still spite site specifically? How can we support, although it's not easy, a one-on-one performance piece. We did remedy protocols, call cut in a box a year before last. You know, it is true that most models of performing arts aren't set up budgetarily and logistically to support, you know, works that are, have quite a different relationship to the experience of going to the theater. But I think it's, there's all these contemporary arts centers and people really looking to support ways to do that differently right now. And I think MoMA and in New York, one of the really exciting directions is there's so many museums that are really looking at those questions and I think are bringing new thinking around it. I feel like I'm really lucky because a lot of colleagues I had at the Walker are now in different places, you know, around at PS1, Peter Ely and, you know, and Philippe Verne and Dia and Kathy and Dorian at MoMA and different people. But I've seen almost every museum, anyway has a contemporary art perspective, looking at ways to figure out how performance can work within those contexts. To sort of build on or to open up a slightly different channel of question and we're sort of tough on time, but I'm really interested in, because you talked about the Living Currency exhibit and I'm thinking of Judy Hussie-Taylor who has this platform model that she's doing and we're seeing this idea in dance more so. Dance, I think it's coming from the visual world of actually ideas-based themed exhibits where artists or curators are being invited to explore ideas much less so in performing arts. And so I guess my question is, is there a possibility or a reason to sort of look at, I mean, because I think artists are like scientists sort of explorers and we like to put them into dialogue with ideas. Is there an, A, is there a reason for an ideas-based investigative model for building performing arts projects? And if so, what would sort of be the curator, like what sort of curatorial dialogues do we have to have both in, as we're training new performing arts curators and visual arts curators and trying to engender dialogue? It's an unfocused question, but I just. Well, you mentioned, you asked a question. There's a program that started up at Wesleyan last year called the Institute for Curatorial Practice and Performance. Looking at exactly at the questions around can there be deeper training for performing art professionals who may not have had rich academic training around art history or curatorial practice, but ways to instill, ways that visual art curators naturally are trained to grapple with ideas and apply them to the formation of an exhibition. And so Judy is on the faculty, Judy Hussie Taylor from Dance Space. She's been doing some wonderful work around creating platforms and small catalogs. And I think more and more, especially younger curators and the students in the size of the B-plus are really being asked to think about their projects coming from a point of view and grappling with ideas and then applying the content within that structure. But it's not as rich or as long a history at all in the performing arts of thinking that way. Certainly there's festivals that are thematically based, there's threads of programs, there's some great examples in different parts of the country, but I think it's now a developing trend that people are really interested in looking at more seriously. And we're really discursing people. Like when, I don't know, years ago, we started all over and all we were discursing was all about training, training, training. And now it has, I mean, I've participated into so many workshops and discussions about training. And now there is this formative. Point your comments sort of. This formative moment, the ICI has been organized, has organized this, like, curating performance. And I know that NYU, so it's something that is starting to be discussed also because of the presence of the performance of live art in the art institutions. So there is this moment that, this is what you're saying in the beginning of the article, that a lot of people involved in visual arts of performance and performing art doesn't have any really background in the art. We've got to start out. I'm sorry, Terry. I just wanted to say another observation in all of this that I'm hearing, and maybe we can zoom out a little bit. You just kind of have a look at the kind of real provincialism in this discussion. Which is around the privileging of self-proclaimed gradualization as more important than other investigations. And also, the hybridity of forms being assessed through their visual kind of juxtaposition as opposed to myself, many of my colleagues, where that is a swim inside our practice without trying to make it visible as an incrementure of some really provincial discussions such as this. But it's starting to come up with some statements about what we can do, you know, no reality, all these things. We have to go to a post-opinion place to really become avant-garde to say all usages in your lead, in juxtaposition, are completely valid. And we're still in this place of looking for the new, which is a banality, and it's an anachronism. And that might be a provocation to get mad, but I see it in a lot of artists. You can look at the website for Under the Radar. The biggest thing on there is the new big thing. And I'm like, is it a dishwashing? And I didn't set up to be an artist to do the next big thing. And in terms of educating people further about all these discussions, if there is this obstacle, the commodification of radicalization as part of the education, you will not be able to see the fullness of practices that are out there. And what could become a really burgeoning new way of looking at things. And it will ultimately have to do with seeing a range of usages. Saying things like 70% of theater, whatever you're talking about. These ideas that your work is predicated on a comment about theater. I'm like, yeah, there's a lot of work like that. But you can go see something like Orange County, Osage Orange County, that beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, fiery piece of work that was inside of a very conventional theatrical place. So if we have this kind of incrimatur of provocation as our value system, there's a whole bunch of stuff that gets missed. Well, I actually don't understand what I mean. What do you mean? Everyone here who said, Phillips colleagues, that I can't, whatever it was, I can't see these things that are, whatever you said, you say in your article, you know, psychological realism, no, that's out. Based on our, who's the Oracle here? We're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're out of here. First, wait a minute, you can argue with these things, but it's in this discussion. I don't, Terry, I love, I don't see that at all. Also, also, also, if I, if I say that, if I say that, you know, I can't, if I say that, that, you know, 70% of it, you know, is the same, that's just, that's just me. I mean, given it, wait, wait, wait, given it, given a choice, I would sooner go see August Osage County than I would go to see like a self-proclaimed radical piece of theater, mainly because I think that's all theaters are actually, that architecture is actually good for. But I think the only time radicalism ever came up in this discussion was about, was about actually frustration with the formal constraints of the first institution you start to work with. I don't think anyone was really valorizing. I'm just hearing a bunch of kind of, you say something about psychosis and the fact that you're like, well, so does all these other things. Everyone. I have to go do this, but I mean, my point is just that personally, I find psychological realism coming from that and my background, it's like, you know, I, as a creative person, I no longer find that satisfying form. I'm not making a categorical definition that it sucks. What's an intriguing idea is to look at where our opinion resides in the importance of our spirituality, I don't think it's important. I don't, for me, I'm not going to work in saying, does this replicate my existence? And I myself am not looking to do work. I've done a work right now that I was really surprised about where it ended up. But if I was saying, if I was in this good bad part of paradigm, saying like, that's not good, that's not radical, that's not this, that's reality, that's artifice, I couldn't make anything, you know, so I'm making these works that just fall out of me in a way that's not about representing my opinion. This kind of progressive, counter-cultural stance is a breeze to make that. No one's saying that we're not working in exploratory ways. It's just that we're in a conversation and we're not showing the work we're doing. There's just something I'm putting out there, ABC will bring out for something. But I think you're also misunderstanding the conversation about the reality effect. And we're also having a conversation about this idea that the space of the art gallery is neutral, these ideas about the performance art standing for authenticity and a real performance in opposition to theater, it's an old divide. And so all what came up was it's time to get over that because it's just a performance of reality or neutrality, so I think. I would actually encourage you to come back next week for the citizen criticism discussion because what I really wanna talk about, huh? I don't need your opinion. But I really wanna talk about actually what we were talking about, which is the critical stance, which I think as we enter into this sort of new period of discourse and structures and the way we relate to performance. I mean I really, I'm a little, I'm trying to be cool, but it's like I really built what I do at Culture Bot and what Jeremy does and what we do, not to replicate the critical stance of the New York Times, but to create dialogue and to be a discussant. So it's like, so the personal experience is always there. So I actually agree with you, like we have to sort of move beyond this dialogue. Yeah, I'm saying at this point, it's not about you or against anyone, but it's in this room, it's in this place. Teri, I totally don't know what you're talking about. I mean, what nonsense, if this is a professional conversation. I mean, I wanted to say provincial, I'm getting the wrong word. It's not remote provincial. Everybody here is supremely specific and included in the audience. Everybody here is working very hard to break all those texts, to break all those institutions. The form is totally set up to look to be old, to the new, to support all kinds of generations, to support artists whose work gets only better and better by the time they get to nine. Nobody, this idea that we're all sitting here going, oh, we only want the new. This is talking about directing, Peter. This is just not true. Everybody on this floor represents such a search for really not authentic realism, to really investigate what are we looking at? Yeah, no, I don't disagree with that. No, so I'm just saying, be careful with using words like, this is a provincial, I mean, we're meant to sit here, but we're a real provincial, it's ridiculous. We're talking about certain things here that I think we could use, or we could zoom out and see bigger. Absolutely, but there's a lot going on here. The last word you can apply to anyone in this room, and I see everybody here too, is provincial. These are some of the biggest movements and shakers that might have made this city. Okay, so we're running out of time. I see a couple of hands that I wanna address. I think this is an important dialogue. I will try and figure out how we can continue it in virtual space, if not in real space, this young lady. I'm sort of an agreement, actually, in relation to, I think there's been a deferral to a binary opposition between art and theater. And I think that most of us in the room are here because we don't believe in that. And yet we were asked to stand up as theater people or visual arts people. There are dance people here, but also there are people who work between architecture and dance and visual arts and media. And I think most of us here don't represent those. That's why we're here for that dialogue, really. So I'm sort of an agreement that, that I think there was something more than talking about, in a way, what you were talking about is what we know. Do you know what I mean? But for me, what's come up, really, is how do you talk to the critics and the reviewers and the institutions and also audiences? I don't think it's going to be all we're trying to do is, I mean, I think we all want the same thing. Everyone feels like they're sitting between disciplines and they're just basically making some kind of progressive output. But that they're continually stymied by sort of enormous institutional divides which exist outside of this room. And I think, I mean, Rosalie's point about audiences or, you know, Liz talking about actually facing down a black bar. I mean, this is, I mean, what we're actually talking about is, you know, or what happens when a visual artist winds up directing. We all want the same thing, but what we're actually trying to address is the fact that there really are huge firewalls that force whatever we make into one thing or the other. And we're frustrated about that. And yeah, we've all experienced it, but I think what we've been trying to address is let's accept the facts and try to think about the facts in the most analytic way possible and figure out how to actually break them down. It's not that any of us are embracing this opposition. It's like we're saying that the opposition exists outside these walls and we're trying to figure out what to do about it. And it's funny that you brought up this issue of the new and then the complaint is that we didn't succeed in bringing up the new answer. I mean, we're kind of, we're here as somewhat, I guess, expert witnesses, but I don't think anyone's proclaiming to have the answer. We're going through the conversation and going through the frustrations with the contextual frameworks that we're working in and how it could shift in some way. But I don't think I have the one singular answer to that. I think we're, I think we're, I think in some ways we are articulating things that we already have no experience, but I think that, you know, that I'm really excited and pleased that we have sort of everybody here at the table, of varying experiences who are in that middle place. And yes, I'm sure that as this is a professional performance conference and we