The Artist as Provocateur: Pioneering Performance at Pratt Institute

The Artist as Provocateur: Pioneering Performance at Pratt Institute

The Artist as Provocateur: Pioneering Performance at Pratt Institute February 2–March 7, 2015 Pratt Institute Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery Brooklyn Campus Part of the Art and Design Education Department’s Exhibiting Education series

Images on cover: Martha Wilson, I Have Become My Own Worst Fear, 2009, Photographic print on canvas, Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York; Theodora Skipitares, Pussy Riot in the Cathedral, 2014, Courtesy of the artist, Photograph by Jane Catherine Shaw; Jennifer Miller and Circus Amok, 2014, Photograph by Erik McGregor; Ann Messner, Performance with amplified typewriter at Franklin Furnace, 1978, Courtesy of the artist.

Table of Contents 3

Jonathan Berger: Prologue

6 Greta Hartenstein: Curatorial Statement 8

Selected Works

29 Participating Artists 31 Pratt Institute Curriculum in Performance and Related Practices 32 Acknowledgements

Prologue

I. Islands In 1976, at the age of 28, Martha Wilson founded Franklin Furnace in the Borough of Manhattan, a venue aimed at supporting ephemeral forms of art making, namely performance and installation. A performance artist herself, Wilson’s initiation of the organization was born out of the need she identified for an independent platform, not only for the unrepresented largely ephemeral genres that it supported, but one with the specific intent of supporting the work of women, people of color, queers, and other populations for whom the subject matter of their work and/or identity created limited access to presentation opportunities at galleries, museums, and other art venues.

Franklin Furnace instantaneously became an oasis, known for giving artists the keys to the space and letting them do whatever they wanted to do, without placing any expectations upon them or their work.

This independence that Franklin Furnace declared and fostered, as a pillar of what is now discussed as the “alternative space movement,” quite literally generated many of the post-war art practices that became seminal to the formation of contemporary art as we experience it today. All of these significant contributions were the export of an artist-run non-profit organization, and not a commercial gallery or museum.

The desire for “complete freedom of expression” that led Wilson to found Franklin Furnace as part of her art practice, and which she cites as the reason for choosing performance as a medium for her own work, resonates deeply with the creative practices of Ann Messner, Jennifer Miller, and Theodora Skipitares.

It is not surprising that these three artists have long and meaningful relationships with Wilson that connect directly to Franklin Furnace, where each of them presented some of the first works that they ever made.

All four share strong connections to second-wave feminism and its primary and residual effects on the evolution of performance art and the alternative space movement. The varieties of independence that the women’s liberation movement fought for and established during the 1960s and ‘70s no doubt created interest in, and desire for, a reconsideration of how newly informed notions of freedom might expand forms of creativity and its modes of presentation.

Each of the four artists recalled her formative experiences with Franklin Furnace to me with an air of disbelief and gratitude—perhaps because it all seems so unreal and impossible in today’s world, perhaps because what happened there was in some way the

beginning of who each of them became as artists, perhaps because it was a brush with complete freedom.

Performance with Amplified Typing, Ann Messner’s first solo exhibition, took place at Franklin Furnace in 1978. Messner installed herself inside the space with an amplified typewriter connected to a speaker outside the storefront, projecting the sound of her typing onto the street. She saw the piece as a presentation of her artist book practice, in which the primary function and intent of typed text was to serve as evidence of the activity of typing, and where the purpose of typing was to translate a given time-based situation in which Messner had placed herself—in this case, sitting in the Franklin Furnace storefront for hours on end. In remembering the piece, she wrote, “I related this work more to the idea of action rather than performance. I just needed to get some things done, and the body acting out a variety of activities was going to be the best vehicle. Seen in hindsight, I can see how much that commitment to not be boxed in or circumscribed within the ‘art’ context has remained with me. I continue to be ‘real’ world oriented. I still do not like rules, even if they are my own.

In that way, not much has changed.” Messner ceased making formal “performance” works by the end of the 1970s, transitioning to projects that focused on social engagement, integrating film, installation, photography, political actions, and publications via the tactics of activism, journalistic appropriation, and various forms of documentation and public participation.

In 1980 Theodora Skipitares presented her third ever performance, The Mother and the Maid, at Franklin Furnace. She performed alone, creating a series of layered multimedia tableaux accompanied by spoken text that she had written, the content of which merged autobiographical narratives related to her Greek heritage with classic Greek myths. The piece comprised a number of material elements: two elaborate sculptural costumes that she constructed and wore, or “extensions of her body,” as she referred to them; a metal apron; and a dress made of dozens of fresh fish. These were paired with the performative use of domestic objects, including plates and lamps, which also became the surface for projections, as did her un-costumed body. Skipitares’s idiosyncratic sensibility and approach to the piece was born from the melding of her backgrounds in sculpture, traditional theater design, and filmmaking, as well as her growing fascination with avant-garde theater and the interdisciplinary experiments taking place at artist-run spaces in SoHo. The unconventional use of objects in

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The Mother and the Maid, and more specifically the blurring of boundaries between inanimate objects and people, gave way to the entirely object-based visual theater practice that Skipitares continues to maintain today. This transition occurred only two years after her experience at Franklin Furnace. In 1982 she staged MICROPOLIS: Seven Portraits and a Landscape, for which she removed her physical self from the piece entirely, instead using only dioramas composed of light, sound, and puppet versions of humans and animals, all of which had Skipitares’s face.

In 1988, as part of a Franklin Furnace program called Carnal Knowledge, Jennifer Miller mud wrestled her then girlfriend and collaborator Susan Seizer, while the two took turns reciting texts by feminist theorist Monique Wittig. This piece forecast the approach that remains central to Miller’s work, most notably her acclaimed troupe “Circus Amok,” which formed one year later, in 1989. Circus Amok is rooted in a non-hierarchical, democratic, and informed sampling of nearly every performance form imaginable, each of which is chosen and wittily harnessed as a means of addressing pressing local and global social issues. Over the course of an hour, in the space of a single ring, Amok merges classical, postmodern, and folk dance, acrobatics, drag, comedy, sideshow, puppetry, rock concerts, vaudeville, musicals, and experimental theater with current events, buried histories, and radical politics around race, class, gender, and sexuality. In 1994 Circus Amok ceased performing at indoor venues altogether, instead opting to present their work only within the context of New York City’s public parks.

This choice also feels informed by Miller’s roots with Franklin Furnace in the sense that part of the venue’s mission was to foster an ongoing dialogue about the very nature of what an alternative art space could be.

At the root of all art is the individuality of a given artist, which, more often than not, is understood within the context of his/her form (such as painting) and genre (such as abstract expressionism). However, performance as a form provides somewhat of an escape hatch when it comes to classification, in regard to both form and genre, in the sense that the only expectation placed upon performance is a relationship to time.

Messner, Miller, Skipitares, and Wilson each maintain a creative practice that utilizes the label of performance to galvanize the unique combination or composite of seemingly disparate, even opposing, art forms and genres that make up their work. There really is not a name for what these artists do—they have each

essentially invented her own art form and, similarly, through its support of these types of artists, Franklin Furnace defied classification as a venue. If we consider all of this through the language of geography, a country might be a given form, with its states as genres, and each state’s cities and towns as artists working within that genre. Through this lens, the field of performance will always be an archipelago, and its artists, islands.

II. Those who can’t do, teach.

I’ve always had a problem with that statement.

First, because it implies that one becomes a teacher because one “can’t do” as a practicing artist does.

Second, because it implies that if one can do as an artist does, then one can’t be a good teacher. And third, because it implies that the do-ing of teaching can’t, in and of itself, be an art practice, and by extension that the work of the class, be it process or product, can’t be artwork. I find this all to be simply inaccurate. That said, if you really do care about teaching, you view teaching as part of your art practice, and you also have and care about an art practice outside of teaching, the reality is that it takes a lot to keep it all going, and going well.

As an artist, I think a lot about the act of creation, in the most literal sense. If you make an artwork, be it material or ephemeral, you are actually putting something into the world. I also find this preoccupation of mine quite difficult, because it means that I evaluate artworks—both my own and those of others—based on whether or not I feel they’re worthy of existing in the world and, ultimately, I feel that most of them aren’t.

The volume of artists and artworks in the world today seems unimaginable, especially from the vantage point of the mid 1970s. So much of the art made today is conceived directly in relation to certain expectations: Will it make money? Will it be well received critically? Will it be cool? Will it advance the artist’s career? Will it be presentable in a gallery or museum context? Will it be archival? The values which were so central to the Alternative Space Movement— the notion of artists making artworks for themselves, without the burden of expectation, because they needed to learn from doing it, because they couldn’t not do it, and simply because they believed the work must exist in the world—these all feel like largely antiquated concepts when one looks at the present state of so-called contemporary art.

In a recent interview with the Brooklyn Rail, responding to the problems of presenting performance

in museums, Martha Wilson commented, “I long for the days when we had control of our own space and we could just let the artist do what they damn well pleased! That is not happening anymore, and certainly not in Manhattan.”

Wilson is, of course, pretty much right, I would say with the exception of Participant Inc. Gallery—arguably the legacy of the Alternative Space Movement. I do, however, think that this kind of freedom—which can foster the notion of the artist as truly independent—does exist in many places, including Manhattan and Brooklyn, albeit in a form other than a venue.

As a professor who teaches art at the undergraduate level, I’ve come to realize I feel almost unequivocally that what my students do in the classroom is worthwhile. This isn’t because the work is necessarily “masterful” or “good,” whatever that means, but rather because their sole intent is to make the work exist. This sincerity is unique to the classroom environment, where nothing stands between desire and execution. Artists who teach have the potential to be to the classroom space what Martha Wilson was to her storefront space on Franklin Street. I believe that the many profound breakthroughs that happened for the artists of Franklin Furnace, and subsequently for art history, now are most likely to happen in the classrooms of artists like Messner, Miller, Skipitares, and Wilson, where self-development and independence are the only expectations placed upon the artist and his/her work.

The need for students to figure out what they believe in, and want to fight for, is an immensely powerful force. This sense of belief has the very real ability to make change even when, as students get older, they realize that change may not happen at the pace, in the way, and by the means that they may have wanted and expected.

The reality that art school presents is a microcosm of life as an artist in the real world. Art school reality fosters a very specific kind of idealism, which is taken into battle as that chapter of one’s life comes to an end. As a student, you believe that everything can be subjected to change and that you have an infinite amount of time to do it. You believe that anything is possible and that as an artist you possess the ability to see beyond the limitations of the present and create new possibilities for the future. This idealism is incredibly valuable because it lays the groundwork for your life’s work—for what you want to accomplish for

yourself and what contributions you wish to make to culture and the record of history.

It seems karmically fitting that Franklin Furnace is now housed at Pratt and that Messner, Miller, Skipitares, and Wilson are now colleagues teaching performance at Pratt Institute, some 30 to 40 years after they each presented work at Franklin Furnace. The acts of exploration, bravery, defiance, experimentation, and independence that they engaged in there, while in their twenties, bear a striking resemblance to the acts that their students are engaged in now.

These too are primary acts, each of which is the beginning of something greater.

Just as Franklin Furnace made an alternative space within the art world for each of them to feel complete freedom to pursue the work they were meant to do, they, in turn, are creating new alternative spaces out of their classrooms, empowering their students.

– Jonathan Berger, New York City, 2014

Jonathan Berger’s work encompasses the fields of sculpture,installation, performance, archival and curatorial projects, conceptual art, design, relational aesthetics, and education. His projects often engage in an experimental and cross-disciplinary approach to the creation and presentation of exhibitions—ranging from work that he physically produces, or asks others to produce for him, to materials that he collects, seeks out, and re-contextualizes, or that are the product of conversations and exchanges with others. These exhibition projects often combine new and old, traditional and non-traditional, popular and obscure, static display and events, which are widely acknowledged as art and which are not. Recent exhibition projects include On Creating Reality,

by Andy Kaufman (2013) presented at Maccarone, Inc. in conjunction with Andy Kaufman’s 99cent Tour, the first comprehensive screening series surveying Kaufman’s performance work, presented at Participant Inc. In 2009 he organized the exhibition Stuart Sherman: Nothing up My Sleeve at Participant Inc, which was included in the 2009 PERFORMA Biennial.

Past solo, collaborative, and curatorial projects have been presented at the Busan Biennial, Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Vox Populi Gallery, Karma Gallery, Andreas Grimm Gallery, MOCA Los Angeles, The Hebel Theater, and Performance Space 122, among other venues. He is presently the Director of NYU’s 80WSE Gallery, where he has organized the exhibitions “DEVOTION: Excavating Bob Mizer” (2013), “NEW SIGHTS, NEW NOISE,” a collaboration between artist/musician Michael Stipe and seventeen undergraduate studio art students (2014), and “Learn to Read Art,” the first survey of the artists’ book organization Printed Matter (2015). Berger is a recent recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and has completed residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, among others. He received his M.F.A. from New York University in 2006 and his B.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in 2002.

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Curatorial Statement

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“The Artist as Provocateur: Pioneering Performance at Pratt Institute” brings together Pratt’s professors, alumni, and current students to trace a rich legacy, lineage, and future of performance-based practices which have emerged over many years within Pratt Institute. The artists featured are creating work that is performative in nature, or experimenting within the realm of performance, each coming from their own disparate backgrounds and mediums. Whether yearning for narrative, abstraction, social consciousness, a public voice, a sense of self, or propelled by another impulse, these artists have approached creating live work as a means of exploring expression in the ever boundless area of performance. Highlighting the courses taught by artists Ann Messner, Jennifer Miller, Theodora Skipitares, and Martha Wilson and their own personal art-making practices, this exhibition seeks to distinguish a performance focus at Pratt that has uniquely developed independently across four different academic departments.

Theodora Skipitares is a foundational artist both in her career as a pioneer of downtown performance and in her role at Pratt, spearheading studies of puppetry and performance, as well as discussions around artistry and persona. In her art making and teaching, she focuses on the prescient themes of self-presentation, boundaries between the object and self, and the material and social constructs of identity. Skipitares created a course on puppetry in the Art and Design Education Department, with the extensive support and influence of Amy Snider, former chair and an important innovator and advocate for performance and interdisciplinarity at Pratt.

“Puppets and Performing Objects” culminates in solo performances by each student, featuring a puppet of their own creation. Puppetry exists as a unique junction of the object and the live body, creating a territory where an emotional connection is fostered between the viewer and the object. Artists and former students, Catherine Garger, Constance Slaughter, and Britt Moseley, as well as Pratt Professors Accra Shepp and Deborah Bright, have been compelled to create new trajectories in their own artistic practices and will exhibit works that have been influenced by or developed in this course.

Foregrounding their own bodies amidst an array of objects in performance, Polina Porras Sivolobova, Macklen Mayse, Leah Olbrich, and Maiko Kikuchi, will each exhibit documentation of performed works, provoking specific questions pertaining to the con-

text of their individual realities. Many former students have expanded into teaching alongside their art-making, such as Cindy Cooper Blair, Cynthia Favia, Sarah Holcomb, Ryan Minezzi, Anthony Palocci, and Morgan Street, who will show recent pieces featuring puppets, shadow puppetry, and wall-mounted sculpture.

Aileen Wilson, the current chair of ADE, was an instrumental figure in the establishment of Skipitares’ course, “The Performance of Fashion,” which is co-taught by designer Susan Cianciolo in the Fashion Design Department. Students will exhibit work developed throughout the semester, merging performance, objects, and fashion to open doors for their own discoveries and innovations within the realm of their performative-self. Yuka Kishi, Lilly Ramirez, Sara Simon, and Victoria Prokhorova, will show objects, garments, photos, and videos, highlighting their experimentations, studies, and recent performance-based works.

Since the 1970’s, Martha Wilson has been an important artistic innovator and stalwart of performance, notably in her role as director of Franklin Furnace. She and Dorothea Dietrich team-teach a course within the History of Art and Design Department on the history of performance art, with a focus on the “activist tradition” running from the 20th into the 21st Century. “The Artist as Provocateur: Critical Moments in the History of Performance Art,” as the course is titled, examines the “activist avant-garde artists” who have “historically ignored national boundaries as well as aesthetic ones,” and questions the standards of artistic production, commercialism, and current sociopolitical issues. Students presented two final performative projects; the first followed the model of a campus tour with intentionally placed information and stops along the way, the second group employed social media as an impulse generator for real life actions.

This emphasis on social practice and activism is at the core of the work of all four professors, and is reflected in the work of their students. Ann Messner, teaching in the Fine Arts Department, pushes her students to explore interdisciplinary practice as a means of cultivating conversation and social exchange, challenging the preexisting structures surrounding themselves and their work. Through her teachings, students have transitioned from mediums such as painting and sculpture to live action, breaking their personal boundaries and discovering new

methods of expression. To name a few, artist Mirland Terlonge is creating work that directly challenges our society’s conception and treatment of the black body and issues of police brutality, Self Introduction by Liang-Pin Tsao explores one’s sense of self in relationship to nothingness, and Raquel Du Toit’s piece, Mop, engages with emotional distress in a raw open-studio performance.

In the Humanities & Media Studies Department, Jennifer Miller has been a catalyst for promoting non-conformist ideas and their visibility on campus, fostering conversations around queer identity, and encouraging students to unearth and perform themselves. Since beginning at Pratt, she has linked her artistic practice with her teaching methods, bringing the circus-theater ideas into the classroom and incorporating students and their work into her own company, Circus Amok. Anthony Scudese was one of several students who performed in Venus, directed

by Miller at Pratt; his subsequent work has pursued drag as a platform for his own performances. A current student, Harry Mortiz, is designing live sculptural pieces to create a coalescence of the natural body with a machine structure. Through film, live performance, projection, and photography, Linda Frank has developed a recent work delving into definitions of exoticism within the standards of present day society. Working within the public spectrum, artist Nini Ayach developed Elgarida Eihaya (The Living Newspaper), a bi-weekly performance that addresses current political issues through puppetry, live-theater, and outdoor spectacles.

This particular confluence of artists and courses at Pratt has produced a unique school for teaching performance-based practices as a result of the microcosmic initiatives of professors Theodora Skipitares, Ann Messner, Jennifer Miller, and Martha Wilson, whose backgrounds and artistic interests are rooted in this field. Although their courses developed autonomously, they each foster a similar sense of exploration, urgency, and freedom of expression that is undeniably present in the students’ work.

“The Artist as Provocateur: Pioneering Performance at Pratt Institute” defines an artistic community with a shared necessity for engagement in critical dialogues with social practice, identity politics, and the current cultural landscape.

–Greta Hartenstein Born in Rochester, New York, and living in Brooklyn, Greta Hartenstein received a B.A. in Art History and Dance from Wesleyan University. She is currently Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum, working with Curator and Curator of Performance Jay Sanders. Previous exhibitions she assisted include 2012 Biennial, 2014 Biennial, Rituals of Rented Island, Stewart Uoo & Jana Euler: Outside Inside, and Sarah Michelson: 4. She has produced performance projects with artists such as Matana Roberts, Carolee Schneemann, Ariana Reines with Jim Fletcher, Miguel Gutierrez, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Jared Bark, Thomas Bradshaw, Richard Maxwell, and others. Since 2010, Hartenstein has danced with Sophie Sotsky | TYKE DANCE, recently performing in the evening-length piece LIAMB.

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Nini Ayach Elgarida Eihaya (The Living Newspaper), 2013 photo of performance, 22 minutes; Directed by: Nini Ayach; Script for puppet theater: Mohammed Elsoury; Performers and collaborators: Amira Elmallah, Houssam Saeed, Omneya Azab, Raphaelle Ayach, Tatiana Carret, Paul Dumayet, Abdo Hemdan, Hany Hommos, Mohammed Fattoh, Essam Ammar

Deborah Bright Protagonist from “Existential Puppet Crisis” performance, 2013 papier-mâché, wood, wire, cloth, yarn, found materials; 12" x 18"

Raquel Du Toit Mop, 2013 video, color, sound; 2:16 minutes

Cynthia Favia Santa Rod Puppet, 2009 Materials: Head: papier-mâché and paper clay, body and boots: velvet, faux fur and bells, coat: hand-spun and hand-woven lamb’s wool; Photograph by J.Gold&Co. Photography

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KJ Cooksey On the Spot, 2014 microphone and stand, spotlight, recorded button devices, and platform; platform is 48" round

Cindy Cooper Blair Kneeling at the Source: Happy Discovers Peace, 2012 tagboard, acetate, glue, tape, and Velcro® on watercolor board; 16" x 20"

Linda Frank Spectacles, 2014

Catherine Garger Angeline, 2006 Wire, sculpey, fabric, thread, acrylic; 8"

Sarah Grace Holcomb A Dada Puppet, 2014 Paper, wire, ink

Maiko Kikuchi PINK BUNNY, 2014 photo of performance; Performed as part of “Labapalooza!

2014” at St. Ann’s warehouse. Photographes by Richard Termine

Yuka Kishi Speechless 1, 2014 Images of performance (Materials in performance: wool and acrylic paints)

Macklen Mayse Binary, 2013 video, color; 4:52 minutes

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Maiko Kikuchi PINK BUNNY, 2014 photo of performance Performed as part of “Labapalooza! 2014” at St. Ann’s warehouse. Photographs by Richard Termine

Yuka Kishi Speechless 2, 2014 Images of performance (Materials in performance: wool and acrylic paints)

Ann Messner Untitled (Performance with Amplified Typing at Franklin Furnace) 1, 1978 photo of performance

Ann Messner Untitled (Performance with Amplified Typing at Franklin Furnace) 2, 1978 photo of performance

Ann Messner Frogman, 1978-1979 photo of performance

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Ann Messner Hitchhiking, 1978 photo of performance

Ann Messner Caribbean Buoy, 1984 photo of performance

Ann Messner Stealing, 1978 photo of performance

Jennifer Miller Iris 3, 2012 photo of performance; Costumes designed by Melanie Schmidt and students (Elizabeth Ammerman, Alicia Arlotta, Rachel Duncan, Madeline Gruen, Debra Lin, Madison May, MacKenzie Stratton, and Boya Zhang) (Photograph

by Ira Livingston)

Jennifer Miller Iris 4, 2012 photo of performance; Costumes designed by Melanie Schmidt and students (Elizabeth Ammerman, Alicia Arlotta, Rachel Duncan, Madeline Gruen, Debra Lin, Madison May, MacKenzie Stratton, and Boya Zhang) (Photograph

by Melanie Schmidt)

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Jennifer Miller Iris 1, 2012 photo of performance; Costumes designed by Melanie Schmidt and students (Elizabeth Ammerman, Alicia Arlotta, Rachel Duncan, Madeline Gruen, Debra Lin, Madison May, MacKenzie Stratton, and Boya Zhang) (Photograph

by Ira Livingston)

Jennifer Miller Iris 2, 2012 photo of performance; Costumes designed by Melanie Schmidt and students (Elizabeth Ammerman, Alicia Arlotta, Rachel Duncan, Madeline Gruen, Debra Lin, Madison May, MacKenzie Stratton, and Boya Zhang) (Photograph

by Ira Livingston)

Jennifer Miller Camille Act 1, 2014 photo of performance; Jennifer Miller and Pratt students; Costumes designed by Melanie Schmidt and students (Bianca Bloom, Hannah Eckhardt, Molly Glover, Junzaburo Iwasawa, and Sooji Lim) (Photograph by Tiffany)

Jennifer Miller Camille, 2014 photo of performance; Jennifer Miller and Pratt students; Costumes designed by Melanie Schmidt, and students (Bianca Bloom, Hannah Eckhardt, Molly Glover, Junzaburo Iwasawa, and Sooji Lim) (Photograph by Tiffany)

Jennifer Miller Camille Dinner Party, 2014 photo of performance; Jennifer Miller and Pratt students; Costumes designed by Melanie Schmidt and students (Bianca Bloom, Hannah Eckhardt, Molly Glover, Junzaburo Iwasawa, and Sooji Lim) (Photograph by Tiffany)

Jennifer Miller Venus 2, 2013 photo of performance; Jennifer Miller and Pratt students; Set Design by Greg Corbino; Costumes designed by Melanie Schmidt and students (Dion Buchanan, Kai Bussant, Molly Glover, Elizabeth Lindholm, Madison May, Anwar Roberts, and Youngeun Won) (Photograph by Erfu Wang); Printed pieces designed by Dennis McNett and students

Jennifer Miller Circus Amok_At the Crossroads Jennifer Miller and Circus Amok; Costumes by Melanie Schmit; Set design by Greg Corbino (Photograph by Cate Dingley)

Jennifer Miller Circus Amok_Distopia, 2014 photo of performance; Jennifer Miller and Circus Amok; Set design by Greg Corbino (Photograph by Erik McGregor)

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Jennifer Miller Venus 3, 2013 photo of performance; Jennifer Miller and Pratt students; Set Design by Greg Corbino; Printed pieces designed by Dennis McNett and students; (Photograph by Ira Livingston)

Jennifer Miller Venus, 2013 photo of performance; Jennifer Miller and Pratt students; Set Design by Greg Corbino; Costumes designed by Melanie Schmidt and students (Dion Buchanan, Kai Bussant, Molly Glover, Elizabeth Lindholm, Madison May, Anwar Roberts, and Youngeun Won) (Photograph by Erfu Wang); Printed pieces designed by Dennis McNett and students

Jennifer Miller Circus Amok_Goddess Gold, 2014 photo of performance; Jennifer Miller and Circus Amok; Goddess Head and Set design by Greg Corbino (Photograph by Erik McGregor)

Jennifer Miller Circus Amok_Moo, 2012 photo of performance; Jennifer Miller and Circus Amok; Costumes by Melanie Schmit; Set design by Greg Corbino (Photograph by Andrew Lichtenstein)

Ryan Minezzi Chen Thou’s Tuk Tuk, Chen Tou, Independence Monument in Phnom Penh, 2012 cardboard, mixed media; 14" x 26"x 10" small scale bunraku toy theater puppet setpieces

Harry Mortiz Humachine, 2015 steel, alumnium, human; 6' 2"

Anthony Palocci MAD DAD, 2011 cut construction paper; 12" x 9"

Polina Porras Sivolobova Viva la vida, 2014 photo of performance; Performance in Plaza of the Church of Santo Domingo de Guzman, Oaxaca, Mexico. Photograph

by Augustine Sacha

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Lilly Ramirez Stuck Inside (exterior), 2014 video, color, sounds; 1:30 minutes; Dead Horse Bay, NY

Britt Moseley Big Stink, 2013 Co-collaborators Tucker Marder, Nick Fusaro (Photograph

by Jenny Gorman)

Leah Olbrich Reversal: Destruction as Creation, 2012 video, paper, paint, Xacto knife, scissors

Victoria Prokhorova Space Cat, 2014 New York, Los Angeles. Photograph by Jurgita Sereikaite

Anthony Scudese Some Assembly Required, 2014 Photo of performance at TRL: Total Rejects Live; Photographed by Tinker Coalescing

Accra Shepp Wind God, 2013 mixed media: papier-mâchÊ, wood, steel, leather; 36" x 10"

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Sara Simon Bittersweet, 2014 (film still featuring Yuka Kishi) Cinematography Credit: Sara Simon

Theodora Skipitares Gertrude and Ionesco (from THE CHAIRS), 2014 Wood, paper, paint; 5' x 10' x 16"; Photograph by Jane Catherine Shaw

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Theodora Skipitares Gertrude Stein, 2014 wood, fabric, acrylic, mixed media; 26" x 15" x 36"; Photograph by Richard Termine

Theodora Skipitares Mary Fisher, 2014 Wood, papier-mâchÊ, paint; 14" x 14" x 32"; Photograph by Jane Catherine Shaw

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Theodora Skipitares Pussy Riot in the Cathedral, 2014 wood, paint, cloth papier-mâchÊ, mixed media; 30" x 15" x 36"; Photograph by Jane Catherine Shaw Theodora Skipitares Old Woman, 2013 Paper, aluminum, cloth, acrylic paint; 10' x 4' x 42"; Photograph by Sarah Grace Holcomb

Constance Slaughter Portrait de Famille, 2013-14 Scrim, wire, glue; Eight figures, each 3 to 4' high

Morgan Street Fractal Cloud, 2014 Photograph by Danae Lagoy

Liang-Pin Tsao Self Introduction, 2010 Video, color, sound; 8:27 minutes

Martha Wilson Final Project Performances: The Artist as Provocateur: Critical Moments in the History of Performance Art (Group A 1), 2014 photographs; Martha Wilson and Pratt students (Elisabeth Berg, Jessica Marie Wilkins, Emma Louise Kaye, Yasmeen Abdallah, Laiza Nasser, Laia Sole, Seth Persons, Colombina Zamponi, Serry Park, Sky Yoon, Raquel Du Toit, Michael Levin); Photographs

by Serry Park.

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Mirland Tirlonge Black bag, 2014 Video, color, sound; 5:50 minutes; Location: Fort-Greene, Brooklyn, NY

Mirland Tirlonge Strange Fruit, 2014 Video, color, sound; 2:43 minutes; Location of performance: Brooklyn, NY

Martha Wilson Final Project Performances: The Artist as Provocateur: Critical Moments in the History of Performance Art (Group A 2), 2014 photographs; Martha Wilson and Pratt students (Elisabeth Berg, Jessica Marie Wilkins, Emma Louise Kaye, Yasmeen Abdallah, Laiza Nasser, Laia Sole, Seth Persons, Colombina Zamponi, Serry Park, Sky Yoon, Raquel Du Toit, Michael Levin); Photographs

by Serry Park.

Martha Wilson Final Project Performances: The Artist as Provocateur: Critical Moments in the History of Performance Art (Group B 1), 2014 photographs; Martha Wilson and Pratt students (Elisabeth Berg, Jessica Marie Wilkins, Emma Louise Kaye, Yasmeen Abdallah, Laiza Nasser, Laia Sole, Seth Persons, Colombina Zamponi, Serry Park, Sky Yoon, Raquel Du Toit, Michael Levin); Photographs

by Serry Park.

Participating Artists

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Martha Wilson I have become my own worst fear, 2009 photographic print on canvas/video trasnferred to DVD; 87" x 44"; Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York

Ann Messner Ann Messner is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist. Her work has examined fault lines between the individual and the larger social body as encountered within public realm discourse, investigating the incongruities between notions of private life/space and public/civic engagement and experience.

Her 1970s performative work, interventionist in strategy, took place “unofficially” within the context of the urban street, and survives as super 8 film and 35mm photos. Messner’s first solo exhibition, an ongoing public performance (Franklin Furnace 1978), utilized a crudely over-amplified typewriter with outside speakers projecting the pounding of keys well beyond the parameters of the interior building space. It was not until later, in 1995, that these early performances were critically considered together in the exhibition of subway stories and other shorts, Ann Messner: Photographs and Film 1976-1980 (Nina Felshin, Dorsky Curatorial Projects).

A hit-and-run strategy developed into more permanent, but still intentionally temporary, public projects, activating impersonal urban sites with an intimate object-based encounter. Meteor (Public Art Fund 1986), sited at Times Square, was one such project. These works eschewed the monumental, echoing in scale an early commitment to experience as perceived through the individual psyche in relationship to the body.

In 2005 Messner directed disarming images, an open-call project produced by the collective Artists Against the War. Screenings of disarming images, accompanied by public discussion, took place, notably, at Yale University, School of Visual Arts, The New School, Hunter College, Carnegie Mellon, and Casa delle Cultura (Rome). The agency of individual action within the context of both a larger collective and far-reaching socio-political intention exemplifies this project.

Three recent works continue a commitment to engagement: The Real Estate Show and Other Histories, presented at Creative Time’s Summit 2013: Art, Place, and Dislocation in the 21st-Century City; the underground potato (in collaboration with artist Laurie Arbeiter), a food vending media cart, installed in the Essex Street Market Cuchifritos Gallery in conjunction with The Real Estate Show: Was Then: 1980; What Next 2014?; and DuBois_the FBI Files, commisioned for DuBois in Our Time, University Museum of Contemporary Art, UMASS, Amherst.

Messner is the recipient of numerous fellowships: the NEA, 3 NYFA Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and a Gottlieb Foundation Fellowship. She was fellow at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2000) and Princeton University Council on the Humanities (2001). She has taught at MIT’s Visual Arts Program, Hunter College, Bennington College, and Princeton University. She currently teaches at Pratt Institute.

Jennifer Miller Jennifer Miller is an award winning theater artist who works across multiple performance platforms. She is co-founder and director of Circus Amok and an Associate Professor at Pratt Institute.

Miller spent her early years as a dancer researching improvisational strategies, working with Screw’s Loose, They Won’t Shut Up, and a myriad of other informal collaborations “below 14th Street” in the mid 1980’s and early 1990’s. In these years, she also appeared in many of Sarah Schulman and Robin Epstein’s early plays; in dance/theater numbers at downtown clubs like Limbo Lounge, 8BC, and the Pyramid Club; in a wide range of ensemble projects including San Francisco’s Make-A-Circus and Hartford’s Protean Theater; and in several solo shows, including Morphadyke and Free Toasters Everyday. She spent seven seasons working at Coney Island Sideshow by the Seashore.

In 1989 she co-founded the one ring, no animal, political, queerly situated circus theater extravaganza Circus Amok. Since then she has directed and performed with Circus Amok annually, outdoors, in the parks of New York City. Circus Amok embodies Miller’s political and aesthetic desires—free and open to all comers, it engages many theatrical languages at once, deploying tropes of old-school popular theater, juggling, and acrobatics, alongside high camp, dance, drag, and puppetry. In Circus Amok, a pie on the face can play next to a post-modern dance, Mingus can play next to Bhangra, queerness is a fact of life, and high art and low art are both art. For over two decades, this project has brought people together across class, community, and political lines in shared public space.

Miller has also written and performed in plays for the indoor theater, and maintained an ongoing dance practice. Her plays Cracked Ice 2009 and The Golden Racket 2011 were produced at La Mama and Performance Space 122. She performs regularly in dance performances with Cathy Weis and Jennifer Monson.

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Miller has been honored with a long list of awards, include a “Bessie” in 1995, an OBIE in 2000, a BAX 10 in 2003, and the Ethyl Eichelberger award in 2008. She is the subject of the 1992 documentary “Juggling Gender” and the updated 2009 “Still Juggling.”

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Theodora Skipitares Theodora Skipitares is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Trained as a sculptor and theater designer, she began creating personal solo performances in the late 1970s. Gradually, she moved away from autobiography and began to examine social and historical themes. She introduced small three-dimensional representations of herself into these performances, which she understood (later) to be puppets. She has created 25 works featuring as many as 300 puppet figures. These works are boundary-breaking experiments with puppetry, scale, video, and the use of documentary texts. In all of her work, Skipitares infuses her often dark subjects with a trenchant, at times playful, humor.

Her work has influenced many emerging artists who work with puppetry, both through her classes/ workshops and within the contemporary performance scene. She considers teaching itself to be a performative act and stresses that idea to her students in the Art and Design Education Department.

She has taught art and performance classes in alternative community settings, such as Riker’s Island jail and Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

Her work has been exhibited widely in Europe, South America, and the United States, most recently at the Whitney Museum. She has created performances in India, Turkey, Iran, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, and South Africa. Skipitares has received several National Endowment for the Arts grants for her work, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, McKnight Playwriting Fellowship, and Rockefeller Fellowship, among others. She was twice a Fulbright Scholar in India.

Martha Wilson Martha Wilson (b. 1947) is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past four decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. She began making these videos and photo/text works in the early 1970s when she was studying in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and further developed her performative and video-based practice

after moving, in 1974, to New York City, embarking on a long career that would see her gain attention across the United States for her provocative appearances and works. In 1976 she also founded, and continues to direct, Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration and promotion of artists’ books, installation art, and video and performance art, further challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within visual arts organizations, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums.

Wilson, a native of Newtown, Pennsylvania, who has lived in New York since 1974, is esteemed for both her solo artistic production and her maverick efforts to champion creative forms that are “vulnerable due to institutional neglect, their ephemeral nature, or politically unpopular content.” Described by New York Times critic Holland Cotter as one of “the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s,” Wilson continues to remain what curator Peter Dykhiuis calls a “creative presence as an arts administrator and cultural operative.”

Written into and out of art history according to the theories and convictions of the time, Wilson first gained notoriety thanks to the attention of curator Lucy R. Lippard, who placed Wilson’s early efforts within the context of conceptual art and the work of women artists. Commenting on Wilson’s first projects, art historian Jane Wark wrote in 2001: “In her conceptually based performance, video, and photo-text works, Wilson masqueraded as a man in drag, catalogued various body parts, manipulated her appearance with makeup and explored the effects of ‘camera presence’ in self-representation.

Although this work was made in isolation from any feminist community, it has been seen to contribute significantly to what would become feminism’s most enduring preoccupations: the investigation of identity and embodied subjectivity.”

Wilson’s early work is now considered prescient. In addition to being regarded by many as prefiguring some of the ideas proposed in the 1980s by philosopher Judith Butler about gender performativity, many of her photo-text pieces point to territory later mined by Cindy Sherman, among many other contemporary artists.

Pratt Institute Curriculum in Performance and Related Practices

New Forms: Ann Messner, Professor, Fine Arts. Integrated Practices and New Forms is a generic naming of practices within the field of visual arts that resists standardization, that resists the historically canonized categories of sculpture, painting, etc. Integrated Practices and New Forms might further be considered as outside or beyond even the more recent recognized forms of installation, performance, or video. This area of focus is by definition investigatory and resistant to the static or prescribed paradigm. In contemporary discourse, Integrated Practices considers a re-framing of diverse disciplines, encompassing an interdisciplinary perspective. It may be informed by, but not restricted to, inventive processes of social, political, philosophical thought and practice, inventive forms of technology, or architecture. Integrated Practices questions and pushes at the reality of the relationship between artist and audience and the spaces and time within which creative expression takes place. Integrated Practices is the chameleon in that it resists static definitions—as soon as one attempts to formalize given parameters for this practice, it inevitably morphs into the unrecognizable—in fact, by its very definition, it must strive toward the unfamiliar, to investigate the unknown. We will question the legitimacy of such an autonomous free-yielding practice. We will consider the parameters of a new form as engaged and imagined within a real and physical world.

The Artist as Provocateur: Martha Wilson, Visiting Associate Professor, Fine Arts and Dorothea Dietrich, Chair, History of Art and Design. Activist avant-garde artists have historically ignored national boundaries as well as aesthetic ones, taking regular people to be their audience and any subject or material under the sun to be appropriate to their means. Contemporary activist visual art performance practitioners view this avant-garde legacy as their own, incorporating musical, theatrical, literary, dance, film, and technological elements in their work in order to address the pressing issues of our time. This course will focus on critical examples of performance art from the last century to today to analyze how artists have positioned themselves in relation to current standards of artistic production and developed techniques of provocation to activate the audience.

Puppets and Performing Objects: Theodora Skipitares, Associate Professor, Art and Design Education. This studio course explores the various styles of

puppetry: performing objects, shadow figures, Bunraku and other rod puppets, body puppets, large-scale outdoor parade puppets, and toy theater. The goal is to create a unique and contemporary language of object, gesture, and story. The class culminates with final performances in any form or combination of puppetry forms.

The New Circus: Jennifer Miller, Associate Professor, Humanities and Media Studies. In this class, we will combine practical skills with a study of the historical and theoretical issues involved in the evolving new circus movement. Practical skills include juggling, slack rope walking, object puppetry, basic partner acrobatics, and clowning. We will explore performance styles ranging from Judson-influenced improvisation to clown shtick and the grand circus Ta-Da. We will look at traditional circus history, history of the sideshow, pageantry, political theater, writings on freaks and otherness, contemporary performance art, and clowning. We will also collaborate on an end-of-semester show.

The Performance of Fashion: Theodora Skipitares, Associate Professor, Art and Design Education and Susan Cianciolo, Assistant Professor, Fashion. This course investigates the close connection between the contemporary worlds of fashion and performance art. By looking at the work and lives of artists such as Marina Abramovic, Nick Cave, E.V. Day, Lady Gaga, K8 Hardy, Yayoi Kusama, Bowery Leigh, Alexander McQueen, Vanessa Beecroft, Rei Kawakubo, James Lee Byars, Yinka Shonibare, RuPaul, and Leonardo da Vinci, among others, students will understand the deep similarities between personal fashion style and performance art. Both forms use the body as medium and exist in the moment, the here and now. Both fashion and performance art exist as social experience and depend on having an audience.

Also, the use of narrative has become an important part of a fashion concept, just as it is in performance art. In fashion design, the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. This course explores an expanded definition of fashion to include the body’s presentation in the public sphere. In addition to researching living as well as historical artists, students will create objects to be worn by the human body that are performative; they will also make informal presentations of these projects in class.

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Participating Pratt Students, Alumni, and Additional Faculty

Nini Ayach Deborah Bright Angela Checco KJ Cooksey Cindy Cooper Blair Raquel Du Toit Cynthia Jones Favia Linda Frank Catherine Garger Erik Goldberg Sarah Grace Holcomb Maiko Kikuchi Yuka Kishi Macklen Mayse Britt Moseley, Tucker Marder, and Nick Fusaro Ann Messner Jennifer Miller and Circus Amok Jennifer Miller and Students (Costumes by Melanie Schmidt and Students)

Ryan Minezzi Harry Mortiz Judy Myrto Leah Olbrich Anthony Palocci Polina Porras Sivolobova Victoria Prokhorova Lilly Ramirez Anthony Scudese Accra Shepp Sara Simon Theodora Skipitares Constance Slaughter Morgan Street Mirland Terlonge Liang-Pin Tsao Martha Wilson Martha Wilson and Students

Acknowledgements

The editors would first like to express their gratitude to Ann Messner, Jennifer Miller, Theodora Skipitares, Martha Wilson, and to the Pratt Institute students and alumni included in this exhibition.

We gratefully acknowledge the support from the following individuals at Pratt Institute: Thomas Schutte, President; Peter Barna, Provost; Gerry Snyder, Dean of the School of Art; Amir Parsa, Director of Academic Transdisciplinary Initiatives; Nick Battis, Director of Exhibitions; Olivia Good, Assistant Director of Exhibitions; and Daisy Rivera, Director of Finance and Administration for the School of Art. This exhibition was funded in part by the Office of the Provost, Pratt Institute and the Risk, Dare, Experiment (RiDE) grant.

For her commitment to exploring the history and future of performance practices at the Institute, we thank the curator of this exhibition, Greta Hartenstein. For his scholarship and contextualization of the artist-teachers whose performance work has shaped the landscape of the field in the Pratt community and beyond, we thank Jonathan Berger for this essay.

We also delight that “The Artist as Provocateur: Pioneering Performance at Pratt Institute” coincides

with the exhibition “Performing Franklin Furnace” at the Pratt Manhattan gallery. This dual showcasing of Martha Wilson’s practice and performance art archive is a testament to her many contributions to the field. It is particularly exciting on the eve of Franklin Furnace’s permanent migration to the Pratt campus, where this rich resource will no doubt bolster and inspire new art historical scholarship and a new generation of performance practices.

For their excellent work on the production of this catalogue, we would like to thank David Dupont, Senior Production Manager, Communications and Marketing and his staff. We would also like to thank Noah Krell for his photographic documentation of many of the objects and ephemera included in this catalogue.

Edited by Aileen Wilson and Lia Wilson

Publication copyright 2015, Pratt Institute Art and Design Education

PRATT INSTITUTE Art and Design Education Fine Arts Humanities and Media Studies