Everywhere and all at once: Performa 07, the second installment of the new biennial, brought a staggering range of live events to venues large and small throughout New York City

Art in America, March, 2008

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Brainchild of the indefatigable art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg, who was everywhere all the time at this round as at the last, the second, significantly expanded biennial Performa performance series spanned four weeks last fall (Oct. 27-Nov. 20, 2007), a week longer than the first. Ten new works were commissioned by Performa 07 from artists including Carlos Amorales, Sanford Biggers, Nathalie Djurberg, Japanther (Ian Vanek and Matt Reily), Daria Martin, Kelly Nipper, Adam Pendleton and Francesco Vezzoli. In all, 114 artists were involved in a total of 95 events, 58 of them free. They took place at 63 venues (up from 20) in four boroughs, including half a dozen museums as well as numerous smaller nonprofits, theaters big and small, a range of commercial galleries, several office buildings and two universities. A full complement of related activities again included a symposium at NYU (where Goldberg teaches) along with post-performance talks by artists and many related exhibitions.

As is increasingly true of art's signature events, Performa 07 was way too much for any one person to see--which, paradoxically, instigated a lively and very old-fashioned word-of-mouth communication network about what was not to be missed (and many events were sold out). On the other hand, blogging, e-mail and the Internet were among the program's alternative media, with an online role-playing game a new addition to digital performance platforms. The premium on being there--even if that means being online--for events designed, in many cases, to resist documentation, remains performance's blessing and its curse, with a strong emphasis on the former.

In several events, the center of gravity was between performer and individual audience members, who could avail themselves of experiences ranging from haircuts (by children in Chinatown, coordinated by Darren O'Donnell) to personal conversations (with Dave McKenzie, outside the Studio Museum in Harlem) to private photo sessions (with Tania Bruguera at the Bronx Museum of the Arts). By contrast the commissioned works, chosen by Goldberg (with advice from more than 20 other curators) to "allow artists to step out of video and film and come to life," tended toward more traditional presentation formats. As has always been the case with performance, questions arose about the boundaries separating the genre from its kin in film, video, music, theater and dance.

For Performa 07, a stated emphasis on the seminal relationship between avant-garde dance and the visual arts (buried fairly deep in press material in order not to scare the art world away, Goldberg says) was manifest in work as different as choreographer Russell Maliphant's lyrical contribution to an evening of video by Isaac Julien and Aida Ruilova's brusque neo-retro-science fiction dance-drama. Yvonne Rainer's affectionately irreverent take on Diaghilev's 1913 staging of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was among several occasions when Performa 07 looked back, honoring such pioneers as Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Jonas and Rainer herself.

Performa 09, already in the works, will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first Futurist manifesto and explore Futurism's wildly contradictory inclinations: to noise as music, words in liberty, radio as an avant-garde art medium and war as a way to clean up the past and get the future under way. In that spirit, Performa 09 will, Goldberg says, "again look both backward and forward, and use history to provoke the future."

The following reviews, which provide an account of Performa 07 that is necessarily partial in both senses, were written by Art in America staff members Elizabeth C. Baker, Brian Boucher, Stephanie Cash, David Ebony, Stephanie Gonzalez-Turner, Faye Hirsch, Leigh Anne Miller, Marcia E. Vetrocq, Kate Wodell and myself, and by John Menick. For a full listing of Performa 07 events, go to www. performa-arts.org.

Allan Kaprow, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Re-doing), at Deitch Studios

The late Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) long insisted that Happenings, which he invented, should never be repeated, for any reenactment would undermine their "suchness," or immediacy. Several weeks before he died, however, he authorized a "re-doing" of his seminal work, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, under the auspices of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, which was searching for creative ways to mount a career retrospective of an artist whose oeuvre was in many ways inimical to that kind of benchmark. On the basis of Kaprow's scores, notes, sketches and writings for his breakthrough piece, and in conjunction with the exhibition "Allan kaprow--Art as Life," which opened in Munich in fall 2006 (it travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles next month; see article, this issue), 18 Happenings in 6 Parts was performed for the first time since 1959 when, over six nights in October of that year, it inaugurated the Reuben Gallery in New York, the venue for later Happenings by Red Grooms, Robert Whitman, Claes Oldenburg and others.