Recently more than a hundred artists, curators and scholars met in the boardroom of the Museum of Modern Art to talk about performance and how it can be preserved and exhibited. At the conference table were Marina Abramovic, the performance artist from Belgrade whose retrospective The Artist is Present is currently showing at MoMA and Tino Sehgal whose latest show of 'constructed situations' closed recently at the Guggenheim Museum. Sehgal is also amongst the artists represented in the Auckland Triennial which opened last weekend and runs to 20 June 2010.
In a NYT article Carol Kino says Sehgal's new approach to selling performance art was part of the discussion. He is believed to be the first to have sold the rights to a performance. [MoMA recently purchased an edition of Kiss, a living sculpture that was on loan to the Guggenheim for the recent show.] Abramovic also weighed in with her views on reperformance. In her MoMA show younger performers are re-enacting five of her old pieces. "Reperformance is the new concept, the new idea" she proclaimed at the MoMA workshop. "Otherwise it will be dead as an art form."
This link takes you to Kino's NYT article on the MoMA workshop. You can also read an earlier post on performance art here.
Image: an Abramovic reperformance enacted in the artist's MoMA retrospective The Artist is Present
