You Didn't Have To Be There: Photography, Performance, and Contemporary Art
In this panel discussion artists and critics, including Marina Abramovic, Vanessa Beecroft, Babette Mangolte (moderated by: RoseLee Goldberg) will explore the significance of photography in the history of performance since the 1960s and the influence of performance on contemporary photography. Performa Director RoseLee Goldberg will offer introductory remarks.
Aperture's "Confounding Expectations III: Photography in Context" lecture series is presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and Parsons The New School for Design in collaboration with Aperture Foundation, with generous support from the ASMP Foundation, Milton & Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Kettering Family Foundation and the Henry Nias Foundation. This, and Aperture's other artist lectures, are made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.- New School
Bio
Marina Abramovic
Marina Abramovic, is a celebrated, spirited and controversial artist who, since the beginning of her career, has pioneered performance as a visual art form in a quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. Marina has long tested the relationship between the audience and the ego of a performer. Her last exhibition/retrospective in New York, staged at the Museum of Modern Art, was "The Artist is Present," a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium. Marina's considers each public appearance an experiment and she never rehearses.
Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft is an Italian contemporary artist living in Los Angeles. Vanessa Beecroft works in the gap between art and life. The work is neither performance nor documentary, but something in between. Her live events are recorded through photography and film, but her conceptual approach is actually closer to painting. Beecroft is making contemporary versions of the complex figurative compositions that have challenged painters from the Renaissance onwards. She sets up a structure for the participants in her live events to create their own composition, presenting themselves according to their own internalized aesthetic system.
RoseLee Goldberg
RoseLee Goldberg, art historian, critic, curator, founder and director of PERFORMA, and author whose book Performance Art from Futurism to the Present first published in 1979, pioneered the study of performance art. A graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art (London University), she was director of the Royal College of Art Gallery in London and curator at The Kitchen in New York. In 1990 she organized “Six Evenings of Performance” as part of the acclaimed exhibition “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Author of Performance: Live Art Since 1960 and Laurie Anderson), she is a frequent contributor to Artforum and other magazines.
In 2001-02 Goldberg originated and produced Logic of the Birds, a full length multimedia production by Iranian born artist Shirin Neshat in collaboration with singer Sussan Deyhim, which premiered at the Lincoln Center Summer Festival in 2002 and toured to the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis and to Artangel in London. Goldberg has lectured extensively at the Architectural Association in London, California Institute of the Arts, Yale University, Princeton University and Tate Modern, and has taught at New York University since 1987. She is also the Founding Director of PERFORMA
Babette Mangolte
Babette Mangolte is an experimental filmmaker living in New York City. A complete retrospective of her films and camerawork was organized by Madeleine Bernstorff and Klaus Volkmer for the Berlin and Munich Cinematheque in 2000. And in 2004 Anthology Films Archives in New York City opened her recent film Les Modèles de Pickpocket (2003) accompanied by a retrospective of all her films. In 2007 her film Seven Easy Piecesby Marina Abramovic (2007) premiered at the Berlinale 2007.
Her films and photo work were included in "The American Century" show in 1999 at the Whitney Museum in New York and "Century City" at the Tate Britain in London in 2001.
Mangolte is also known for her photography of dance, theater and performances. Her work was included with several performance photographs and two film installations in a show titled "Art, Lies and Videotapes: Exposing Performance" organized by Adrian George at TATE Liverpool (United Kingdom) in 2003.
In 2007 she realized a new installation of her films and photographs from the 1970’s in the show “Live Art on Camera” at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK, Curator Alice Maude-Roxby and she participated in the survey exhibition on performance history “ Un teatre sense teatre” at Museu d’Art Contemporari de Barcelona, Curator Bernard Blistene (touring to Museu Berardo, Lisboa, Portugal and Wexner Art Center, USA). In summer 2007 Mangolte had her first retrospective solo show in the US at BROADWAY 1602, New York which included the premier of “Richard Serra, Film Portrait 1977.”
Mangolte will be included in the Berlin Biennale 2008.