The Way We Perform Now

This piece is adapted from a lecture delivered in the “Performing Institutions” series curated by Artists Space with the 2012 Whitney Biennial. The event also included David Velasco of Artforum as well as Sarah Michelson, who had just become the first choreographer to win the Bucksbaum Award for the best work presented at the Whitney Biennial. Artists Space represented the Performing Institutions series in the following terms: “Taking as its starting point the 2012 Whitney Biennial's allocation of the fourth floor Emily Fischer Landau Galleries as a performance space for music, dance, theater, and participatory programming, this series of talks consider the status of performance and ‘virtuosity’ within the parameters of an institutional public sphere. Does this turn toward ‘activity without end product’ potentially shift entrenched relations between institution and artist, artwork and viewer, or reinforce a contemporary experience of totalizing social production?