Julia Heyward. God Heads, February 28, 1976; performance, as part of “Performances: Four Evenings, Four Days” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Courtesy of the Artist.

Rituals of Rented Island, now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is only a brief, disembodied impression of performance art in 1970s Manhattan. No reproach, actually: Rituals is an enlightening—and productively frustrating—exhibition of documentation of works by artists who were beginning their careers at that time.

There are plenty of performers in the exhibition who went on to become art stars: Mike Smith, Laurie Anderson, and Vito Acconci all have works here; but it’s mostly the lesser-known artists who steal the show. The work of Julia Heyward, in particular, is a revelation. In the video documentation of Shake Daddy Shake (1976), an excerpt from the performance series “Three Evenings on a Revolving Stage” at Judson Memorial Church, she appears on a tiny lazy-Susan platform, speaking in an exaggerated southern drawl about her father. Shake Daddy Shake is stripped-down and bare, emphasizing Heyward’s ability to manifest characters in the fashion of a spiritualist medium. Likewise, the video excerpt of This Is My Blue Period (1977) shows the artist wearing a blue dress and talking about a woman named Mary, alternately enunciating clearly and croaking through strained vocal cords to emphasize different words. With the modulation of her voice, Heyward embodies a tumult of personae in quick succession, shifting so rapidly within the same sentence or phrase that she evinces these characters almost simultaneously.

Michael Smith. Secret Horror; Busman’s Holiday Retreat Revue; Down in the Rec Room, installation view, Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama—Manhattan 1970-1980, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

Nevertheless, it’s nearly impossible to apprehend the reality of these performances from their documentation. Though photographs of Heyward’s other works, along with the artist’s notes and scripts, are hung between the two monitors, this arrangement begs the question: What are we really looking at? When we regard performance through the artifacts of notes and videos, we do so at an extreme distance from the original; in no other form of art is the span between the thing and its own representation so vast. If this somehow seems a tedious and obvious distinction to make—the difference between the primary form and these short video outtakes—it’s also a crucial one: This exhibition regards not so much art as anthropology, as suggested by the word “rituals” in the title. Here, what viewers actually see is less performance and more “ways in which performance can be represented and historicized.”

Vito Acconci. Claim Excerpts, 1971 (still); videotape, black-and-white, sound; 62:11 min.

If documentation cannot reproduce the experience, what can it do? Obviously, it sheds a partial light on what these performers attempted to convey; and often this imperfect illumination is so engrossing that it’s difficult to remember that the video is not the work itself. Stuart Sherman’s Tenth Spectacle: Portraits of Places (1978) demonstrates the artist’s purposeful machinations. He builds an intricate cosmos by making quotidian objects—a few wire coat hangers, a front-desk bell, a teacup, a mallet, a tape recorder—interact in seemingly spontaneous and idiosyncratic ways. Sherman’s absorption is childlike, and he often manipulates these things as though he has never seen them before and does not understand their normal function. At one point, he slides the hollow barrel of a revolver snugly onto the upright stem of a metal music stand. In the conventional world, neither of these objects exists to interact with the other, but for Sherman, the rightness of this maneuver is self-evidently demonstrated by the snug fit of the two cylinders conjoined, showing a universe in which likenesses catalyze action. Witty and clever, he fully inhabits a realm of his own making. What Rituals does, beyond historicizing these artists’ contemporaneous practices, is make viewers itch to see the real thing in the same way that a movie trailer incites a desire for the full-length feature.

Jared Bark. LIGHTS: on/off (light-bulb suit and mask), 1974; The Cold Light House, 1977; photographs by Babette Mangolte, installation view, Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama—Manhattan 1970-1980, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

One concern raised by this exhibition—in the most productive way possible—is how best to present these ephemera so that the essence of each performance is captured in such a way that the viewer may come to understand part of what the original experience was like. Not all displays succeed: the documentation of Jared Bark’s The Cold Bright House (1977) consists of three black-and-white photographs and some of the props that appear in these photos. Though this arrangement is suggestive, it’s not enlightening. In an area reserved for Jill Kroesen, the ambient sound from a single-channel video bleeds distractingly into the audio on the headphones for a different video. In an exhibition of evidence and reconstruction, the presentation becomes central.

John Zorn, Jill Kroesen, and Jack Smith, installation view, Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama—Manhattan 1970-1980, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

Performance as a category has already capitulated to the demands of the marketplace in the form of documentation and circulation. Yes, Rituals of Rented Island is a foundational exhibition of important works, but thankfully it raises more questions than it answers. On the way back to the elevator, stop and look again at Julia Heyward’s Was Here (1973), four photos and an old typewritten explanation of a performance, mounted in an awkward arrangement under glass and defined by the perimeter of a simple black frame. The photos are warped with age, and there are staple marks, bent corners, and foxed edges on these documents. The piece acts as a metonym for the exhibition itself: contingent, evocative, and surprisingly dynamic. The notes and images provide a window into a performance, yet they are apart from it. They point, but do not touch.

Rituals of Rented Island is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through February 2, 2014.

[1] Phelan, Peggy. “The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction,” in: Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. 146-166.

Malcolm Le Grice, "Berlin Horse" (1970), still from a multi-projection film

A lively, critic-to-critic dialogue published recently in The New York Times[i] left me pondering over the persistently blinkered nature of so much “digital age” discourse on film.  Moving imagery has long been implicated and explored in and across myriad cultural and creative contexts, yet the breadth, depth, and diversity of filmic practice has been, and continues to be, belied by a narrow focus on commercial trends and big-budget studio tendencies.  The result is a (mis)conception of film and digital media—two distinct yet deeply intertwined creative conduits—as somehow mutually exclusive, and of film itself as a technologically primitive and increasingly obsolete medium.

Clearly, if one measures film’s vitality by its presence at (or absence from) the multiplex, the medium appears to be rushing toward an imminent and inevitable demise.  Major studios have already indicated that they plan to phase out 35mm film, and movie theaters are now scrambling to acquire the equipment necessary for digital projection.  Yet prognostications of film’s death are predicated on an assumption that the relevance and viability of film as a medium is entirely contingent on its embrace (or rejection) by commercial movie producers and distributors.  In fact, though film may be vanishing from theaters large and small (an issue that bears its own, complex set of implications), film has since its inception been a fluid, porous medium, one whose life extends far beyond the bounds of traditional narrative moviemaking.

Absent from much popular discussion is an attunement to issues of artistic imperative and intent and, further, an acknowledgment of film’s dynamic, very-much-alive presence in the larger realm of contemporary art.  Commenting in The New York Times[ii], film critic A.O. Scott observes:

Throughout history artists have used whatever tools served their purposes and have adapted new technologies to their own creative ends [….] Long before digital seemed like a viable delivery system for theatrical exhibition, it was an alluring paintbox for adventurous and impecunious cinéastes.

This is certainly true, as from the 1960s onward, artists as diverse as Nam June Paik, Vito Acconci, and Joan Jonas deliberately explored and exploited the raw visual quality of early video, doing so in the context and service of wide-ranging aesthetic, conceptual, and political endeavors and ends.  Conversely, today, as Hollywood studios and multiplexes rapidly adopt digital-exclusive processes of production and delivery, “cinéastes” and other artists continue to excavate, manipulate, and—often unconsciously—reaffirm film’s unique aesthetic properties.

Vito Acconci, "Claim Excerpts" (1971), still from a black and white video

In a 2001 interview[iii], avant-garde luminary Nathaniel Dorsky mused:

I don’t know what it would be like to be 20-years-old now–would I buy a Bolex and start shooting film, or would I buy Final Cut Pro and a DV camera?  I don’t know.  I know that I like the alchemy of this thing that you have to load in the dark, expose to light, and process.  [With video] you can just tape and erase. With a roll of film, you know, it’s so expensive, that when you’re going push the button, it’s an existential decision.

Predictions of film’s demise–and compelling evidence to the contrary–are hardly new, and current arguments over film and digital media echo, particularly in their “either/or” tone, many earlier debates regarding film and video.  However, as A.L. Rees maintains in his book A History of Experimental Film and Video[iv], the “1970s disputes between experimental film-makers and the then new video-art movement have long abated for most artists,” and he notes that many early filmmakers of the “first underground,” among them Malcolm Le Grice and David Larcher, now actively incorporate video into their creative practice.

Similarly, many younger artists today are continuing to explore the singular materiality of film while integrating film and digital media in ways both overt and subtle.  Filmmaker Jennifer Reeves, whose hand-painted film Landfill 16 screened at the 2011 New York Film Festival, works primarily with 16mm to produce films whose richly tactile, hand-wrought quality speak to a deep sensory awareness and visually underscore her personal, political, and environmental themes.  Likewise filmmaker and animator Stephanie Maxwell, in works such as All That Remains (2006), combines techniques such as direct-on-film etching and animation with digital post-production to visually intense, psychedelic effect.

Jennifer Reeves, "Landfill 16" (2011), still from a hand-painted 16mm film

A heady sense of artistic freedom and cross-disciplinary possibility is perhaps the most salient link between and among these (and many other) artists.  Given the unprecedented porosity and fluidity of the current cultural moment, any attempt to map the recent history of film and digital art reveals not a linear progression of technological adaptation/replacement but, rather, a zigzagging backward, forward, and sideways within and across periods, techniques, and media.  Interviewed alongside Dorsky in 2001[v], the late Stan Brakhage remarked:

Here’s the miracle–despite the closing of film labs all over the country, despite the fact that many people think film almost doesn’t exist anymore except ‘in the movies’ […] there are more young people who are more purely dedicated to film as an art many times over than in the ’60s at its height.

In a sense, the fascinating, shape-shifting nature of contemporary creative activity subverts the very notion of obsolescence.  New materials and means supplement rather than supplant older media, and collisions between past and present, between formal and conceptual, yield fresh insights into the possibilities of creative form and the implications of aesthetic experience.

Film?  Digital?  Revelations await in both.

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 10 (1973). Black-and-white photograph and letterpress text panel. Image courtesy Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, scholar Elaine Scarry describes the inability of language to interpret and express physical pain: “By its very nature, pain resists, even destroys the language that grapples with it.” But what of the capacity of visual art to interpret and translate this bodily experience? “For a Long Time”, on view now at Roberts & Tilton in Culver City, attempts to answer this question by showcasing visual work that grapples with physical endurance and its effects. The result, though ambitious in scope, is a little too conventional.

For A Long Time, installation view. Image courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

“For A Long Time” takes its cues from a long lineage: in 1974, an assistant nailed Chris Burden to a Volkswagen Beetle for his performance piece Trans-fixed; in 1989, Matthew Barney jumped for hours on a small trampoline in Drawing Restraint 6; and, in 1997, Francis Alÿs pushed a solid block of ice through the streets of Mexico City for seven hours until it melted in The Paradox of Praxis I. Several among the show’s artists—Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, and Hamish Fulton—have made a lifelong practice of using their own bodies as raw material. Abramović’s Rhythm 10 (1973), for example, depicts the artist kneeling piously before a series of neatly arranged knives; in a smaller, neighboring frame, a descriptive text written by Abramović reveals that her performance will consist of cutting herself with each knife. In A Machine For Living (1981),Vito Acconci, the self-described “godfather of transgression and pioneer of performance art,” pairs charcoal drawings and photo-documentation of himself swinging his body around a hulking, nonfunctional sculpture. The work is strong but predictable, and the show benefits from the presence of a few younger artists, such as Whitney Hubbs and Erica Love, who diversify the group.

Erica Love, Remote Control (2009). Video still. Image courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

“For A Long Time” is at its best not when it considers pain and physical endurance at large, but rather when its artists seize upon the moment of breakdown, the threshold between having control and becoming unhinged. In their respective video pieces, Smile (2001) and Remote Control (2009), Kehinde Wiley and Erica Love achieve this unnerving quality. Wiley, famous for his heroic, realist paintings of Titian-esque, young African-American men, has made a multi-channel video picturing four African-American men, each attempting to hold a smile while facing the camera. As time wears on, their smiles turn to strange grimaces, their cheek muscles twitching in discomfort. In her single channel video, Love holds Barbara Kruger’s book, Remote Control (1993), her hand in the same pinched position as the appropriated image on the cover.  Love holds this positions until she can no longer bear it, and, after thirty-seven minutes and twenty-six seconds, drops her unsteady hand.

Kehinde Wiley, Smile (2001). Installation view of video. Image courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

The show’s intentions are worthy, but the work and its curation is too tidy, failing to push into new territory or offer anything unexpected. The human body is still as enduring and even dangerous an agent as it was forty years ago. Yet after an era of art practices that bravely tested its limits and terms, we need new propositions.

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John Galliano, 2009.

John Galliano has a lavish-sounding last name (he shares it with an Italian liqueur), and lavish taste (“He knows, and we know, that no one would ever wear a 12-foot-wide crinoline over a baggy pair of printed drawers with, perhaps, a pair of plastic carrier bags on the feet,” wrote Sarah Mower for Style.com). That he would also take a lavish approach to outbursts, uttering a line of anti-Semitic epitaphs instead of just one or two, isn’t that surprising. So when, days before Paris Fashion week began, Galliano, the first Brit to head a French couture house, let his God-complex spin out and became, at least according to certain headlines, a dissolute failure, his fall seemed more irksome than surprising.

What’s happened since has been predictable; it’s exactly what happens when someone who’s found a certain niche of notoriety takes an egregious misstep and everyone sees. Dior let Galliano go; Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss  urged him into rehab; then pregnant, pixie star, Natalie Portman, the antithesis of the punk designer in deportment and pedigree, became unwitting spokesperson against anti-Semitism in general and drunken fashion gurus in particular, refusing to stay on as face of Dior fragrance if Galliano stayed on, too.  (In an effort to defend Portman’s spokeswoman clout, articles keep noting that her great-grandparents died at Auschwitz, a serious fact that this fiasco almost trivializes.)

It had been rumored, probably baselessly, that Portman would wear Galliano to the Oscars two weeks ago. Instead she wore simple plum Rodarte. Which is more or less where this string of who-did-whats has been heading: the work of the Rodarte sisters, whose somber idiosyncrasy recalls the Brontës, is the subject of a current exhibition at MOCA’s Pacific Design Center. Presented by Swarovski (yes, of the crystals) and curated by Rebecca Morse, Rodarte: States of Matter features a selection of dresses from the designers’ recent Fall and Spring collections and a few costumes designed for the Darren Aronofsky film Black Swan.

MOCA PDC fares much better when it remembers that it is the satellite of an experimental contemporary arts institution and not a history of design museum. It rarely does, however, and it’s installations too often stray toward the pedantic. But Rodarte: States of Matter tries too hard to push the other way, going to great lengths to present the gowns as sculptural experiences and thus making it a battle to appreciate them as design at all.

Vito Acconci, still from "Claim Excerpts," 1971.

Downstairs, Rodarte’s Black Collection is darkly lit and hung in the center of a black painted room. You have to get close to see the the raw alpaca wool that climbs up a mannequin’s chest toward the shoulder and the tulle that twists in on itself like nautical netting after a storm. Upstairs, the lighting is at first severe and all-exposing, but then it flashes black and the dresses from the White Collection glow like they would in a bowling alley.  This theatricality doesn’t give the clothes the credit they deserve–after all, they’re gorgeously crafted objects, with a pre-Raphaelite gentility that butts up against a DIY scavengery—or doesn’t credit viewers with the ability to understand Rodarte’s drama without the help of special effects.

But as with Galliano, the MOCA exhibition fails only in stark contrast to success–it fails because it could have succeeded. That’s the most common, prominent kind of failure. It’s also the dullest, the kind that can be explained away and potentially remedied.

The last time I was in a room as dark as the one that now holds Rodarte’s Black Collection, I was at Emma Gray Headquarters, a tiny, narrow, bird’s nest of a space perched above the corner of La Cienega and Venice. Performance artist and photographer Dawn Kasper was re-inhabiting Vito Acconci’s 1971 work Claim, wearing a black hoodie, wielding a pipe and sitting blindfolded in a candle-encircled corner.

During the original Claim, Acconci, also blindfolded, sat at the bottom of a stairwell in the basement of a New York gallery with a crowbar, two pipes and and relentless tongue at his disposal, “claiming the space.” Any time steps approached, he’d swing his pipe, and threaten to kill. “I’ll stop anybody from coming down here in the basement with me,” he’d say, his outburst far less viscous but more ominous than any iteration of Galliano’s. “This space is mine.”

Kasper sat at the same level as her audience, not below. And her piece, more about wondering what could have compelled or propelled a performer like Acconci, lasted an hour to Acconci’s three. Carol Cheh of Another Righteous Transfer recorded pieces of Kasper’s intermittent monologue:

I want to be aggressive, I want to be convincing, I want to claim this space . . .  I am alone in this space . . . but I don’t really want this space . . . I don’t want to be him, I am a woman, I am claiming my own space, my own honesty.

“My work was about getting to a place that you couldn’t get to,” Acconci said recently, looking back on earlier performances. In that sense, Kasper’s Claim succeeded by failing–failing to get somewhere she never could have gotten anyway.