Dancing in the Museum

Noëmi Lakmaeir. March 2011. Photo: © Manuel Vason. Courtesy Live Art Development Agency.

For the longest time, museums have found it unnecessary or inappropriate to curate performance as part of their exhibition programs. Thus the history of performance and its connection to the visual arts remained a lacuna in the Western fine arts archive. Video art and time-based media (often presented in installations if not in separate film/video programming) gradually changed the perception of what is collectible in the museum, and video installations have become a regular feature in exhibition contexts. But as we move into the second decade of the twenty-first century, dance and live art seem to have arrived on the scene in full force. A range of shows testifies to this belated acknowledgement of the significance of performance for the discourse on art.

MoMA offered its first retrospective of a performance artist last year (Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present). The Guggenheim has, on occasion—e.g., Seven Easy Pieces in 2005—followed the example of the Walker Art Center and the Wexner Center, two contemporary art museums that have always included theatre and dance in their programming. The Centre Pompidou now has regular programs in dance, theatre, and performance, while the Tate Modern and other European museums have also staged live events and appointed performance curators. The Whitney Museum presented the two-part Off the Wall (July–October 2010), with Part 1 displaying an installation of actions using the body in live performance, in front of the camera, or in relation to photography and drawing. Part 2 featured seven works by the Trisha Brown Dance Company from the sixties and seventies, the historical era that initially witnessed the vibrant crossover avant-garde context for the works exhibited in Off the Wall: Part 1.

The two shows under review therefore fall into a trend and shouldn’t come as a surprise, especially if one recalls that “actions” and live interventions were not unheard of in earlier days, when the generation of Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Jonas, or Alison Knowles and her Fluxus comrades would perform their presence in the work. Likewise, the conceptual and video art pioneers of the day created their often uncategorizable installations mixing performance with video, sculptures, drawings, and objects. Sculptural installations, many of them created by visual artists, formed the backbone of the Hayward Gallery’s Move: Choreographing You, a populist undertaking addressing the visitor-as-interactor directly through its arrangements of participatory “scenes” involving physical reactions, explorations of materials and objects, and sensory experiences. The physical behavior required from the visitor ranged from the moderately banal or playful—walking through a long narrow corridor by Bruce Nauman or balancing on Robert Morris’s plain plywood see-saw, picking up a hula hoop and twirling it around your waist—to the more complex and exerting, for example in William Forsythe’s The Fact of Matter, a large installation of gymnastic rings suspended at varying heights from the ceiling that invited you to climb into and clamber through them.

Entering the exhibition, one first encountered Nauman’s Green Light Corridor (1970), which forced you to walk sideways through a very narrow space, a constraining task that is then followed by waiting in line for your solo entrance into Lygia Clark’s The House is the Body. A small dark cabin awaits you; you are suddenly alone, realizing the intimacy of the tunnel-like space and the manner in which the subsequent cells (filled with balloons, air, long strips of hair, and small colorful balls) activate your different senses, especially tactile perceptions. The sections of Clark’s tunnel, originally built in 1968, are named “Penetration,” “Ovulation,” “Germination,” and “Expulsion,” their psychological effect intended to reconnect us with birth and childhood. Nearby, several foldable chairs (La Ribot’s Walk the Chair), inscribed with different...