Live art enters the mainstream, but it has been a long time coming

Performa's RoseLee Golderg, asks what took so long for curators to catch on to live art? Read more...

Image: Four movements to the music of Steve Reich at the Tate Tanks

Performa founder RoseLee Goldberg on the rise of performance art

Performance art is everywhere these days - the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale, MoMA, the Guggenheim... To understand the phenomenon, ARTINFO spoke to Performa founder and art historian RoseLee Goldberg about the rise of performance art. Read more...

Image: Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present exhibition, MoMA 2010

de Appel and the Stedelijk present a conference on exhibiting contemporary performance

Staged by de Appel arts centre and the Stedelijk Museum, a little less conversation will question how contemporary performance is exhibited. The conference follows previous enquiries into contemporary performance organised by the de Appel arts centre, including the symposium The Manifiold (after) lives of performance (2009 and 2010), which scrutinised the different ways performance is documented and collected.
Image: Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present exhibition, MoMA 2010

Performance art groomed for museums

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

How to collect performance art

THE ART NEWSPAPER Art Basel Daily Edition published an article in June on How to collect performance art, the day before it was the subject of a debate in an Art Basel Conversation. Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) and Conversation panelist said: When you look back you understand that video art was the 'golden frame' of the 1990s. In 2009 we look back on the first ten years of this century and it is performance... At some point it reached a critical mass and awareness so that now it seems to be everywhere." MoMA has, in the past year, added performance art to its former media department and acquired new works. You can read the article by clicking here and scrolling down to page five of the newspaper.

Image: Alicia Frankovich, Trajectory, video projected onto found technologies, 2008-09