DECEMBER 2021
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 4
THE POWER OF PERFORMANCE
GIRLS MAGAZINE
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 4, DECEMBER 2021
GIRLS MAGAZINE THE POWER OF PERFORMANCE Letter from the Editor, Page 3 Anna Cahn, Page 4 E. Jane, Page 10 Ceci Moss, Page 16 Margot Norton, Page 21 Alex Sloane, Page 26
GIRLS MISSION STATEMENT
GIRLS is a revised portfolio of interviews from a nationwide community of real,
strong womxn. It's a magazine that is 100% all womxn, which is beautiful in its rarity - the magazine is a safe space FOR womxn ABOUT womxn. Created by Adrianne Ramsey, it serves as a content destination for millennial womxn. Read on for an engagement of feminist voices and a collaborative community for independent girls to discover, share, and connect. The usage of the terms "girls" and "womxn" refers to gender-expansive people (cis girls, trans girls, non-binary, non-conforming, gender queer, femme centered, and any girlidentified person).
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: THE ROLE OF PERFORMATIVITY
BY ADRIANNE RAMSEY GIRLS 12: The Power of Performnace speaks with artists and curators who are focusing on the intersections of performance art and media art in their practices. There is a rich history of performance art in the art history canon, particularly in California and New York, that this issue will further investigate. Performance and media are a huge part of contemporary art, but haven’t been as well represented in art institutions. In recent years, museums have been making a larger, concerted effort to advocate for these mediums through exhibitions, programming, and events. Performance art isn’t simply performed, it’s a durational medium that involves real people. Audience engagement can be essential to specific performances, such as Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” (1964), Andrea Fraser’s “Museum Highlights” (1989), or “Anthology (Kara Walker)” (2011), performed by Clifford Owens. It’s hard to understand the contemporary art world without performance, as it crosses over through so many mediums. The evolution of technology (video, television, computers, cell phones, music players) and the Internet (the World Wide Web and social media apps and websites) have not only led to an increased connectivity within society, but higher modes of visibility for artists. Artists can make work that is influenced by the internet, such as Cory Arcangel’s “Super Mario Clouds” (2002), or use the internet to their advantage – let’s say that an artist wants to stage a performance on Instagram live. They can do that with or without informing their followers, which is the beauty in spontaneity. Whoever gets to be a part of the audience is now a participant in this performance and can engage with the artist. There is a new generation of curators, artists, and scholars who have lived their lives on and off the Internet who understand the importance of promoting performance art and media art in museums. While performance and media art can benefit from being more of an underground thing, there are benefits to including these hybrid mediums in the institution. Thank you to Anna, E. Jane, Ceci, Margot, and Alex for participating in this issue and speaking so passionately about your individual practices and the importance of highlighting performance art and media art in exhibitions and programming!
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ANNA CAHN
Courtesy of Martina DaSilva Anna Cahn is a curator and writer based in New York City who is particularly interested in the intersection of performance and interdisciplinary media in contemporary artistic practices. She recently curated the exhibition In Longing at the CUE Art Foundation, which explored the emotionally and politically charged power of longing. From 2016-2020 she worked as a Curatorial Associate at the Rubin Museum of Art, where she assisted with exhibitions and curated performances and artist talks such as the Refiguring the Future series. She has held previous positions as guest curator and visiting critic for Residency Unlimited, adjunct lecturer at the City College of New York, and research fellow at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and Spiral. She received her BA from Clark University and an MA in Art History from the City College of New York. She is currently a PhD student in the Art History & Criticism Department at Stony Brook University.
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ANNA CAHN This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in October 2021. GM: What was your path to becoming a curator? AC: Being a native New Yorker and living here for most of my life has played a really big role in shaping my interests. New York is such an amazing, influential place. I was introduced to art history in high school, but decided to be a history major in college. I was taking all these history classes, but they were extremely male dominated and I felt really out of place. I was interested in ideas of speculative history and felt super misunderstood by my colleagues and fellow students. I started taking art history classes again and realized, “This makes more sense. This is my truth and how I see the world.” After graduating, I had a brief transition of coming back to the city, living at my parent’s house for a year, and working at the front desk of The Met before going to graduate school for my master’s. […] Having internships in the curatorial departments at the Guggenheim and the Met was foundational for me, and made me realize I wanted to be a curator. GM: What is your background in curating exhibitions relating to the intersections of performance art and media art? AC: Growing up in New York City, I went to LaGuardia, a performing arts high school, and studied music there. I was classically trained as an opera singer and performed from ages 14 until 20. The reason why I stopped singing is because I had really terrible stage fright. I hated performing and the nerves I got; I felt like I was going to throw up or cry. I don’t miss performing, but the feeling that I got from singing and using my body in a performative way. Still to this day, singing was the thing that made me feel most embodied; that feeling of connecting with your body and also the voice’s reverberation. (Continued)
SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, REQUEST-->LURE-->RESPONSE-->REWARD(?) OR A COVERING FOR THE CAGE, 2017. Photo by Adam Reich and Courtesy of CUE Art Foundation
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ANNA CAHN I think that my work with performance art is me secretly trying to chase that feeling again, and working with artists who have those moments of bodily relation and resonance with their audience. I worked at the Rubin Museum of Art as a curatorial assistant and helped out with exhibitions for five years, and had the opportunity to curate the performance series “Refiguring the Future.” This was in response to the Rubin’s thematic approach at the time, where they programmed each year of exhibitions to revolve around a central theme. The exhibition that was up at the time was about futurity from a very traditional, historical Buddhist perspective. I thought it would be super interesting to be in dialogue with contemporary artists who don’t necessarily have a Buddhist practice, but one that could be intersected with ideas of futurity, alternative understandings of time, non-linearity, and contemporary myth making. I also curated a show with Residency Unlimited. I’m really interested in having a studio visiting practice where even if an artist doesn’t have a formal studio, [I could] just regularly meet with artists and have the dialogue that takes shape with wherever they’re working. I like to think of exhibitions as really being led by the artists and their ideas.
GM: Can you discuss your experience curating “In Longing” (2021) at CUE Art Foundation? AC: It was a super wonderful experience. There’s a really great support team at CUE, and just the resource of having an [accompanying exhibition] catalogue produced for the show and being given the opportunity to work with a curatorial mentor, especially one as brilliant as Legacy Russell. Working with her was such an invaluable experience, because I felt super supported and like I had someone who had gone through this process before that knew the ins and outs of curating an exhibition, nonetheless during COVID. I started thinking about this exhibition in December 2019; I had just finished reading Ocean Vuong’s book, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” (2019). [I was] thinking about how poetry can inform curatorial and artistic practices, specifically his ideas on longing and desire. I conceived “In Longing” as a performance show with at least three Raymond Pinto, what is left, if I am earth, 2021.
live commissioned performances and submitted the
Photo by Adam Reich and Courtesy of CUE Art
proposal in March 2020. (Continued)
Foundation
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ANNA CAHN After the proposal was accepted that June and I started planning the exhibition later that summer, it became very clear that we needed several contingency plans and that the performances weren’t going to be able to be fully executed like we imagined. It was a very difficult situation to work through. I found that there was a sense of loss, not only with the artists that I was working with, but the art world and those who work in performance - in general for the people who had passed and all the horrible things that had happened, but also the loss of a medium. The raw materials of performance – the spontaneity, liveness, and interaction with the audience – could not happen in the same way. We were simultaneously grieving and trying to create at the same time. It was really difficult and challenging, but also a super illuminating experience, to see the artists and myself work through these issues in real time. All of the performances happened in one way or another, and I’m really proud of that and the artists in the show The featured artists were Alison Chen, SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Raymond Pinto, Marie Ségolène, and Xirin, who are a group of very talented and diverse artists who work in very different mediums, but performance unites their practices. I was interested in how they all utilized movement, whether that be dance, everyday gesture, or performance to inform their understanding of longing and desire. All of the performances happened in hybrid models of live streaming or performance film; they were all amazing, but something super interesting happened with Xirin’s performance, which was originally supposed to happen in the gallery.
Xirin, Belly Kiss Performance, 2021. Photo by Adam Reich and Courtesy of CUE Art Foundation
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ANNA CAHN
Alison Chen, In and Out, 2005 – Ongoing. Photo by Adam Reich and Courtesy of CUE Art Foundation
GM: Are you talking about her performance “Taste Test: Dinner Banquet” (2021)? AC: In her [exhibited] film, “Hope Eats The Soul” (2019), there’s an egg pass between her and her partner. We wanted to expand that performance into “Taste Test: Dinner Banquet”, where she and her partner would have a three-course meal of the food pass in a kitchen. Instead of building a fake kitchen in the gallery, she made it site specific to a cooky kitchen in Brooklyn and we invited a live streamed audience. It became really cinematic in that way and was reminiscent of DIY performances of the 1960’s and 1970’s, where people went to each other’s lofts to watch a performance. It was really cool that we could do that, and I don’t think that that would’ve happened if we’d hadn’t had to re-think the performance. GM: Do you believe that art institutions embrace performance art and media art in terms of exhibition and programming thematics? AC: In the past year, a lot of institutions have turned to BIPOC performance artists who make political work as a way of figuring out the museum shit for them. I don’t think that’s enough, and it also enacts some sort of violence back onto these artists. I want to think about if it’s possible to do these political performances without simultaneously redeeming these institutions. These institutions have a lot of financial support they can offer, but how do artists and curators utilize these resources without redeeming these capitalist, racist agendas that are so often perpetrated at these institutions? I don’t have an answer right now, but I’ll let you know if I ever do. One of the other reasons why I’m so drawn to performance art is that there’s a certain urgency that is translated, unlike any other medium, because of its spontaneity and how things play out in real time. The way that institutions interact with artists directly affect their performances. A few years back at the Rubin, I was working on a performance with two artists, Morehsin Allahyari and Shirin Fahimi, which was about breaking through geographical, political, and emotional borders. (Continued)
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ANNA CAHN This was during the beginning of Trump presidency, during the travel ban, and these two artists were Iranian. Shirin was living in Canada at the time and had just gotten a Canadian passport, but didn’t know until two days before the performance if she was going to be able to get through the border because she was a citizen of Iran. It was just so metaphorically charged that the performance itself could possibly break down due to these political implications. Luckily, she was able to come and it was an amazing performance. That was such a pivotal moment for me to see the political powers of performance. GM: What are you currently working on in your graduate studies? AC: I’m a first year in the PhD in Art History and Criticism program at Stony Brook, so I’m still figuring out what I want to focus on. I’m really interested in looking at the ways in which experimental movement and choreographic practices intersect with the New York art scene in the 1970’s and 1980’s. A lot of the artists that I’m looking at right now, both curatorially and as an art historian, are artists that use the body in a poetic way and explicitly map out gestures of yearning, longing, and desire, and what that means to them. Going back to what I said in the beginning, I have issues with feeling disembodied and a little on the outside of my [own] body, so I’m drawn to artists Installation view of "Rogue Gogue" by Marie
that show me how to sit inside of my own desire.
Ségolène, 2021. Photo by Adam Reich and Courtesy of CUE Art Foundation
*All photos in this section are installation images from the exhibition "In Longing" (June 3 - July 14, 2021). Curated by Anna Cahn for CUE Art Foundation
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E. JANE
Photo by and courtesy of E. Jane E. Jane (b.1990, Bethesda, MD) is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Brooklyn, New York. Inspired by Black liberation and womanist praxis, their work incorporates digital images, video, text, performance, sculpture, installation, and sound design. E. Jane’s work explores safety and futurity as it relates to Black femmes, as well as how Black femmes navigate/negotiate space in popular culture and networked media. Since 2015, Jane has been developing the performance persona MHYSA, an underground popstar for the cyber resistance. MHYSA operates in Jane’s Lavendra/Recovery (2015 – present) -- an iterative multimedia installation -- and out in the world. Jane considers this project a total work of art -- or Gesamtkunstwerk -- that honors and examines the life of the Black diva and of Black femmes in popular culture. In 2018, MHYSA followed her critically acclaimed debut, fantasii, with a live EU/US tour. Highlight performances include the ICA and Cafe OTO in London and Rewire in The Hague. Her second album NEVAEH came out in February 2020 on Hyperdub Records in London. (Continued)
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E. JANE E. Jane received their MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and a BA in Art History with minors in English and Philosophy from Marymount Manhattan College in New York in 2012. They have performed at The Kitchen, MoCADA, and MoMA PS1 as one half of sound duo SCRAAATCH, alongside collaborator chukwumaa. They have exhibited their solo work in group shows in the U.S. and internationally at institutions and galleries including MoMA PS1, Anonymous Gallery, Shoot The Lobster, EFA Project Space, Studio Museum 127 in New York, Gallery 400 at University of Illinois, Chicago, and MCA Chicago, IMT Gallery, and Edel Assanti in London. Their installation, Lavendra/Recovery, has been shown as solo exhibitions entitled "Lavendra'', both at American Medium in Brooklyn, NY in 2017 and at Glasgow International 2018 in Scotland. In 2015, they wrote the widely-circulated NOPE manifesto, which was recently featured in Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (2020, Verso). They were a 2016 recipient of the Wynn Newhouse Award, a 20192020 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and are currently a Harvard College Fellow in New Media as a part of SCRAAATCH.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in October 2021. GM: What was your path to becoming an artist?
and creative writing. My school required that I take EJ: I was in undergrad, focusing on art history, philosophy, visual arts classes to graduate because the art history department was within the art department. I was doing my study abroad at the time and had to take these classes while in Paris. I took a History of Photography class and black and white photography for the first time; I like learning about the history of art, but I also learned that I preferred making art in response to it than writing a paper. It took me years until I accepted being an artist as an identifier because it felt more like an aspiration. You don’t understand how art can be a real profession until you meet other people who are doing it. Another thing that doesn’t get discussed is how artists make money. It’s not necessarily just from shows; that’s one way that artists make money, but there’s also grants, fellowships, and residencies that pay. The Studio Museum pays a $20,000 stipend, which is an entry level job. You get paid every two weeks and it turns into a very real job. You’re maybe selling art and possibly teaching. Most people I know are doing some combination of all of it to survive being artists. I’m teaching at the moment to pay my bills, and I have no problem with that. It’s really messed up that people think that you can’t have a job in art, but it was the only thing I was good at after leaving school and came natural to me. I started pursuing it seriously but I told myself that I would work on a photo series and if this art thing doesn’t work out, I’ll try to get a PhD in Art History. But then someone liked the photo series I was working on at the time and it became my first solo show, and it started working out. I got into graduate school, so I decided that I could pursue art - not that grad school is the only way to [do that]!
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E. JANE
E. Jane, "You are a light shining (Maxine Waters)" (2020). Installation view in "This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019–20" at MoMA PS1, December 10, 2020 – March 14, 2021. Photo by Kris Graves
GM: Why do you work in the specific mediums that you do (performance, installation, and media)? EJ: When I was in D.C. after graduate school, I was in a performance scene. My friends were performance artists and I was very moved by performance, so I decided to try it. I think a lot about the performativity of the everyday. If you’re into fashion or pop music, you understand that there’s a lot of persona construction happening in the world, and that you’re always performing. Performance is this space where you get to take that, twist it, and really manipulate reality. A big project that I’ve been working on for the past six years has been MHYSA, which is a performance persona that I created. She came out of me being in my studio and thinking through media, specifically R&B music, music videos, and history, and these performances of femineity and power. [I was] basically watching Black femme hood unfold in R&B music performances and thinking about these women and their histories, as well as understanding my role as an artist and how powerful it is to keep a history and an archive. I was making these lip synch videos in grad school, so I was already working with these videos, but I had a professor, David Hartt, say to me, “I want more sincerity from this.” And I thought about my own performing art background from childhood and realized that I had performed, sang, and danced on a stage. So why was I pretending that performance was this foreign, abstract concept? Performance is a way to connect your body to concepts you’re studying in the world, or histories that you’re interrogating. Video art is a way of slowing down time and a moment. One of my videos that was in the Studio Museum residency show is called “LetMEbeaWomanTM.mp4” (2020), and it contains a series of speeches from Black women accepting major awards. The first clip is of Diahann Carroll accepting a Tony Award for Best Lead Actress. The work as a whole is about a desire to perform inside of femininity as a Black woman and getting a leading role is one way to do that.
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E. JANE GM: So looking at recent figures like Halle Berry, Viola Davis, and Taraji P. Henson? EJ: Not Halle, because I focused on people who have histories of singing. The Viola Davis speech was just this moment, because her being a darker-skinner, femme Black woman on public television was a national phenomenon and was just so powerful. The speech she gave [when she won the Emmy] where she recited Harriet Tubman was such a huge deal to me. I’ve manipulated it in different pieces before and brought it back to this project. [She was] super phenomenal in that role as Annalise Keating. The speech was super interesting, and I don’t agree with all of it, but I love her optimism and the melancholy when she talks about trying to have a space in a white dominated media field. And with Diahann Carroll, it was the same thing – it was a situation where people denied her for so long, like roles on Broadway, even though she had had a successful television show. She’s the first Black woman lead to have her own sitcom, “Julia”, and she could sing. GM: That’s right - when Kerry Washington was cast as the lead for “Scandal”, she was only the second Black actress to have a lead role on a television drama series. There had been this huge gap. EJ: Yeah, it’s really wild. And when Diahann died, The New York Times wrote a really nice obituary that really broke down the significance of her career in relation to all of that, and her struggle with still making it, despite proving that she was good enough. Her [Tony] speech is really interesting in that this white male director wrote her a role, and she’s thanking him, and I cut all of that out! (Laughs) I have her talking about her longing, and the piece thinks of these moments of longing over this desire to successfully perform this construction of femininity that was given to us by white people. I’m ambivalent about performing, because I know there’s so many reasons why we have to interrogate this. (Continued)
E. Jane, "LetMEbeaWomanTM.mp4 (Still)" (2020). Single-channel digital video (color, sound), fabric, monitor. 6 min., 56 sec. Courtesy of E. Jane
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E. JANE There’s this moment [in my video] where Beyoncé is complaining about having to do these somersaults in the air while singing, and she’s saying, “I’m so tired! I’m so hungry! It was my idea to perform while upside down!” (Laughs) So she can’t be mad at anyone but herself. That’s a moment of vulnerability for Beyoncé that people don’t acknowledge. She’s singing while doing summersaults in the air! Being able to slow those moments down, make space, and draw out nuances, is really fun with video. Right now, I basically just use mediums to express the embodiment of the diva and what that is. GM: What was your experience being an artist-in-residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as your participation in the exhibition “This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019-20” (2020-2021)? EJ: It was a great experience. I talk with Naudline [Pierre] and Elliot [Reed] about how we were definitely spoiled in the way that [The Studio Museum] supported our vision. Not that art spaces don’t do that, but they showed us how we should be treated. It’s now a standard that I compare every interaction with a museum with, and that’s really great; being nurtured in that way is really invaluable. In regards to the exhibition, it was really nice to be able to try out new things with the work and think through how to show the remnants of a performance that’s very much embodied and in the world. How do I connect this to the larger questions in my practice?
MHYSA — "NEVAEH LIVE" (Behind the scenes) (2020). Single-channel digital video (color, no sound), mirror, and LED lights. 15 min., 3 sec. Directed and edited by E. Jane; choreography by Jumatatu Poe; assistance by chukwumaa. Installation view in "This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019–20", MoMA PS1, December 10, 2020 – March 14, 2021. Photo by Kris Graves
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E. JANE GM: What are you currently working on? EJ: I have a solo show that’s going to be at OCD Chinatown in New York City in November. That’s going to be really exciting. The presented work is very much going to be in conversation with the Studio Museum/MoMA PS1 show, but there’s so many ways that you can explore embodiment, and this work is a slower way of exploring that. GM: Do you believe that art institutions embrace performance art and media art in terms of exhibition and programming thematics? EJ: The problem really becomes whose [work] do they accept, who do they give permission to try things, and who gets to make sense in a certain way. For example, in Stephanie Jameson’s practice, she works in performance and does these really beautiful works. She just won an award and gave an interview where she talked about talking about it being so weird that she won because for so long people weren’t processing what she was trying to do. I’ve definitely experienced that; it’s not that people aren’t down for performance and media, but it’s definitely hard to get them to let you experiment. And that’s why I think the Studio Museum exhibition was so great, because I could do whatever I wanted and people trusted me. I worked with Legacy Russell and Yelena Keller, and I just felt like me and my ideas were so held. And even when a show opens, having to explain it to the public and realizing there are certain people in the art world that wonder how the work makes sense and ask what I’m talking about. Lynn Hershman Leeson talked about making work for twenty years without people understanding what she was doing.
Co-directing a music video "I + II" (2020), Selfie diptych in still life installation, including two lightbox prints, fabric, etched glass vase, dried flowers, pearls, gemstones, bows, and wood MHYSA, Brand Nu/Sanaa Lathan (2020) Music video credit: Co-directed, edited, and lit by Lane Stewart; assistance from Ty Hampton and chukwumaa; styled by Becky Akinyode; makeup by Jesse Genao; with funding from Hyperdub Records. Installation view in "This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019–20", MoMA PS1, December 10, 2020 – March 14, 2021. Photo by Kris Graves
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CECI MOSS
Courtesy of Jessica Fee Ceci Moss is a curator, writer and educator based in Los Angeles, CA. She is the founder of Gas, a mobile, autonomous, experimental and networked platform for contemporary art. Her first book, "Expanded Internet Art: Twenty-First Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu" (2019) is released through the Bloomsbury series International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics. Her writing has appeared in Rhizome, Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, The Wire, CURA, New Media & Society and various art catalogs. Previously, she was Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Senior Editor of the art and technology non-profit arts organization Rhizome, and Special Projects Coordinator at the New Museum. She is currently a Lecturer in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts and she has held teaching positions at University of Southern California, Scripps College, the San Francisco Art Institute and New York University.
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CECI MOSS This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in October 2021. GM: What was your path to becoming a curator and arts writer? CM: I fell into it accidentally! (Laughs) Throughout my life, I’ve simply shown up for creative and artistic communities. I started going to punk shows when I was twelve years old, and I’ve always been instinctively drawn to people making their own worlds. GM: What is your background in curating exhibitions relating to performance art and media art? CM: My roots are in punk, so playing in bands, organizing shows, publishing zines, and making my own clothes, etc. I’m interested in the immediacy and accessibility of performance and media art. I got into media art more specifically while I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, as I had a number of friends who were involved in the Bay Area’s video art community, especially at SFAI. Around this time, I also discovered internet art, and after college I moved to New York City. Luckily, I landed at Rhizome and the New Museum, first as Special Projects Coordinator, and then as Senior Editor of Rhizome. GM: What types of exhibitions did you curate while you were Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at YBCA? CM: I was primarily responsible for organizing exhibitions in the upstairs gallery. I started a series called “Control: Technology and Culture.” I grew up in the Bay Area and I witnessed the Silicon Valley boom and bust in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, so I approached the program at YBCA with an interest in critically addressing and exploring the cultural effects and resonance of the tech sector in San Francisco. Through the “Control” series, I was able to commission new work by artists to produce solo exhibitions in the upstairs gallery and accompanying publications. (Continued)
Exterior view of Gas, 2019. Photo by Andy Bennett and Colleen Hargaden and Courtesy of Gas
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CECI MOSS Installation view of “Custom” exhibition at Gas (February 15 – April 5, 2020). Left to right: Louise Rosendal, No Limit (Scratch Deluxe), 2020; Dahn Gim, Names I Had You Call Me: Catherine, 2018; Natani Notah, Don’t Bump Her, 2018; Louise Rosendal, No Limit (Diesel Destiny), 2020. Photo by Andy Bennett and Colleen Hargaden and Courtesy of Gas
[…] I also feel really blessed that I was at YBCA when I was because [there was] a lot of conversation about how [the institution] places itself as a catalyst for social justice and social change. Being in the room and collaborating with my colleagues to reflect that institution-wide was incredible and put me on my path to doing something like Gas. I learned so much during my years at YBCA, and what I took away from that experience is the importance of community building and development, as well as the limitations of working within a building. GM: What has been your experience founding and directing your mobile art gallery, Gas? CM: I’m in a transitional moment [with Gas] because of COVID, but before [the pandemic] I organized three shows a year, which featured a lot of Los Angeles artists. I would partner with an artist-run space, such as Tin Flats and Night Gallery, to park and present the truck every weekend, and do pop ups all over LA. I feel an immense amount of gratitude for the fact that I was able to connect with all these different communities in Los Angeles, especially as someone who had recently moved here. Each exhibition had an affordable fundraising edition, where those funds would go towards the production costs for each show, as well as an accompanying publication. As I mentioned, I got my start publishing zines as a teenager, so it was full-circle to be able to publish free publications again! Artists would say to me, “I have this poem I’ve been sitting on!” or “I have a fictional project that I don’t have a home for.” The publications allowed an additional presentation space. The shows would also include at least one work that was on the website or otherwise online. Each Gas exhibition lives on multiple platforms simultaneously, and not as a closed, temporal structure. As a curator, I believe work can exist in this layered fashion, and also be really welcoming – most of the time I was the person who would greet visitors during open hours. I also want this project to inspire people to start their own spaces. (Continued)
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CECI MOSS In pre-COVID Los Angeles, there was this immense abundance of artists creating their own venues and institutions, which is a big reason of why I moved here! I hope that people look at Gas and are empowered to start their own projects, and realize that this mystique of the institution is simply that. It’s just smoke and mirrors, and we don’t really need big, fancy institutions to create a public for one another. GM: You mentioned that you’re in a transitional moment with Gas due to COVID – could you expand on that? CM: I’ve organized a number of successful online programs over the last year, and I’m super proud of them. Right now, I’m meeting with artists, curators, and the community to ask them how they want to authentically show up going forward, what they want to build with others, and further lessons from the pandemic. Before re-opening in-person programs again, I want to take the time and space needed to gain a sense of people’s deeper needs – creative, spiritual, psychological, etc. – given the world that we are in now and the varying futures we’re moving towards. GM: Can you discuss your experience writing your book, “Expanded Internet Art: Twenty-First Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu” (2019)? CM: The book looks at contemporary art practices, the rise of social media, how artists are engaging with and thinking about their work vis-à-vis new social media platforms, and how they’re experimenting within that space. One of the main concepts of the book is Tiziana Terranova’s concept of an informational milieu, which is the notion that we are inhabiting a world that is increasingly optimized for the circulation of information. (Continued)
Installation view of “Common Survival” exhibition at Gas (January 26 – April 14, 2019). Photo by Andy Bennett and Colleen Hargaden and Courtesy of Gas
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CECI MOSS
"Expanded Internet Art: Twenty First Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu" (2019) by Ceci Moss. Photo by and courtesy of Ceci Moss
I argue that contemporary artists working in an expanded fashion fold this orientation into their work. Expanded Internet Art was originally my PhD dissertation. I started graduate school at NYU in 2008 and earnestly started writing my dissertation in 2010. So, there’s a way in which the book is still really relevant and important, but it’s also a product of conversations I was having over those years. GM: Do you believe that art institutions embrace performance art and media art in terms of exhibition and programming thematics? CM: The support of performance and media practices in these institutions is part of a larger historical pivot in response to institutional critique, social media, and the explosion of an experience economy, for starters. It’s a big topic. How does the traditional museum address liveness? Often times, not so well. I think you can stretch and do more when you leave that container. For example, Pieter Performance Space will program the parking lot of The Box this Fall, and I won’t be surprised if they end up hosting the best performance art and dance projects that we’ll see this season. My heart and passion are for these smaller institutions, as I feel the future is there. How do we build alternate structures that support artistic community? What other structures are there? That’s one of the major questions that we’re all looking at now. It’s exciting to be in dialogue with colleagues who are thinking about solidarity economics and how that can translate into practice, or thinking about cooperative structures, etc. All of these conversations are coming from the grassroots on up, and attention should be placed there.
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MARGOT NORTON
Courtesy of Scott Rudd and The New Museum Margot Norton is Allen and Lola Goldring Curator at the New Museum, New York. Most recently, she curated “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted” and the 2021 edition of the New Museum Triennial: "Soft Water Hard Stone", co-curated with Jamillah James. Norton joined the New Museum in 2011 and has curated exhibitions with Carmen Argote, Judith Bernstein, Diedrick Brackens, Pia Camil, Sarah Charlesworth, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Nathaniel Mellors, Laure Prouvost, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg, and Kaari Upson. In October 2017, she curated “Sequences VIII: Elastic Hours”, the Eighth Sequences Real Time Art Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the Georgian Pavillion at the 2019 Venice Biennale with artist Anna K.E.. Before joining the New Museum, Norton was a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She has contributed to and edited numerous publications and exhibition catalogues, and regularly lectures on contemporary art and curating. She holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from Columbia University, New York.
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MARGOT NORTON This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in November 2021. GM: What was your path to becoming a curator, as well as your current job at The New Museum? MN: I grew up in New York City and going to museums and art spaces here. I had a poetry teacher who was influential in taking me and my class to shows in alternative spaces in SoHo and the Lower East Side. I studied art history in undergrad, and after I graduated, I worked at various places, including a commercial gallery, a nonprofit gallery, and an auction house. I ended up doing my Master’s in Curatorial Studies at Columbia University, concurrently working part-time for a commercial gallery. Following graduation, I worked at the gallery full time while looking into working at a museum. I ended up working at the Whitney Museum for three years as a curatorial assistant, working on the 2010 Whitney Biennial and in the Prints and Drawings Departments. I curated a show on my own in the Whitney’s lobby gallery with artist Dianna Molzan before getting hired at The New Museum as an Assistant Curator in 2011. GM: What is your background in curating exhibitions relating to performance art and/or media art? MN: I have several notable experiences working with media art and performance. In 2017, I curated the eighth edition of a time-based media festival in Iceland called the Sequences Real Time Art Festival. The show I curated was called “Sequences VIII: Elastic Hours.” I loved how the festival was called a “real time” festival and how that juxtaposes with unreal time. In Iceland, the experience of time is very different than in the United States because the daylight hours shift so dramatically over the course of the year – from full daylight in summer to darkness in the winter. During October, when the festival happened, the daylight was one hour longer in the beginning of the week than it was at the end. The festival took over diverse spaces across Reykjavik, from an exhibition of Joan Jonas’s work at an artist-run space called the Living Art Museum to a performance in a hotel room by Anna K.E. and Florian Meisenberg. [There were] other performances by David Horvitz, Florence Lam, Aki Sasamoto, and Cally Spooner in more established venues, including the Reykjavík Art Museum and National Gallery of Iceland. I also curated another project in Iceland, which was a program for their public television station RÚV, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. The program was called Næturvarp (Night Transmissions), and I programmed art videos in the middle of the night for two weeks, which ran from 12 PM to 7 AM. I titled the program “Electronic Intimacy” based on our increasingly intimate relationships to screens, and every night had a different theme. I got such interesting feedback for that project; since it was on the main public station, it was playing in all the gyms and hospitals. People would be working out at 5 AM and seeing Carolee Schneemann’s Infinity Kisses (1981–87), or seeing Chris Burden rolling over shattered glass in Through the Night Softly (1973). (Laughs) At the New Museum I’ve curated many shows involving media art and performance, including exhibitions with Ragnar Kjartansson (2014), Laure Prouvost (2014), Pipilotti Rist (2016), Kaari Upson (2017), and Mika Rottenberg (2019).
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MARGOT NORTON GM: Can you discuss your experience curating “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted” (2021) at The New Museum? MN: Lynn is somebody who I’ve always admired; she was actually in my thesis exhibition that I curated while in grad school. She’s been an icon for me and so many people of my generation. Some of her works that were made so long ago seem so relevant now, and it’s amazing to see how she was thinking about those things so early on. Lynn is someone who I wanted to work with since I started at the New Museum; I was finally able to work with her for this show, which was such a joy and honor. She had a major retrospective in 2014 at the ZKM Center for Media Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, that was called “Civic Radar” and traveled to several institutions in Germany and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. For our show, it was important to us that it be a survey and focus on a theme, which is how “Twisted” emerged. We focused on the relationship between technology and the self. It was also based on her fascination with DNA and this idea of coded and malleable identities. In our show, everything exhibited had to relate to the figure of the cyborg in some way. We included works from early in her career up until the present, including a work that we commissioned for the exhibition, Twisted Gravity (2021). These were etched water women figures connected to tanks of water that were purified throughout the exhibition using a new technology developed by the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. Lynn definitely has more of a presence on the West coast, in the Bay Area specifically. My experience of her work was seeing one project at a time in a gallery or group exhibition, and it is powerful to see it come together.
“Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted”, 2021. Exhibition view: The New Museum, New York. Photos by Diana Lasagni and Courtesy of The New Museum
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MARGOT NORTON GM: Can you discuss your experience co-curating (with Jamillah James) the 2021 New Museum Triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone”? MN: Jamillah James and I were appointed curators of the Triennial in 2018, so it’s been a little over three years that we’ve been working on the exhibition. When we started our discussions about the show, it was important to us that we not start with a theme already in mind, but rather let the theme emerge from the research process. We spent the first year allowing our studio visits and conversations along the way guide our research. During the summer of 2019, we settled on exploring this idea of perceived solidity. Many artists we looked at were exploring this idea that the structures that we once thought to be forever or unchanging, were being revealed to be precarious or on the verge of collapse. I was in Brazil during a research trip and one of the artists in the exhibition, Gabriela Mureb, told me about the proverb that informed a work of hers and would later form the basis of the exhibition’s title, “Soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole.” The proverb elicits ideas of persistence and resistance, but also transformation. It was through these conversations with the artists and Jamillah that formed how the exhibition would come together. GM: That’s amazing and incredible. It’s also cool that you’re from New York and work at The New Museum in New York City, and Jamillah works at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. You each bring your own East Coast and West Coast perspective, but the Triennial also focuses heavily on international artists and bringing their work and perspectives to New York. MN: Totally. Jamillah is amazing, and such an incredible collaborator. We had already transitioned to this remote working environment because we were Skyping every week prior to the pandemic, later switching to Zoom. (Continued)
Installation view of Harry Gould Harvey IV's work in “2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone”, 2021. Exhibition view: The New Museum, New York. Photo by Diana Lasagni and Courtesy of The New Museum
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MARGOT NORTON
“2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone”, 2021. Exhibition view: The New Museum, New York. Photo by Diana Lasagni and Courtesy of The New Museum
The show only includes a handful of artists from LA and New York, and it was important for us to focus on areas throughout the U.S. and Canada that are often overlooked in these international exhibitions. There are 23 countries represented out of the 40 artists and collectives in the show. For me, the Triennial has always been this incredible platform to introduce the voices of artists that were new to me and most audiences. It’s such an incredible opportunity to have the time and resources available to do this kind of research and provide the majority of these artists with their first major presentation in a U.S. museum. GM: Do you believe that art institutions embrace performance art and media art in terms of exhibition and programming thematics? MN: There’s been a lot more attention given to media and performance, with departments now dedicated to them in bigger museums and new curatorial hires specializing in those areas. The pandemic has been really hard on performance in terms of gatherings and with the restrictions now required. There’s still a long way to go, however. Lynn was working in sound in the sixties, performance and video in the seventies, and web-based work in the nineties, and certainly did not have institutions embrace her practice at that time. People had no idea what she was doing! (Laughs) It’s taken this long for institutions to catch up and they still have a long way to go. Similarly, there’s a lot of artists that are working today in ways that are yet to be recognized institutionally, and it’s going to take a while for institutions to catch up in terms of how to properly embrace them.
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ALEX SLOANE
Photo by Carlos Vela Prado and Courtesy of MOCA Alex Sloane is the Associate Curator of Performance and Programs at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Recent projects include the Los Angeles presentation of the awardwinning opera-performance Sun & Sea by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė; Carl Craig's site-specific installation, Party/After-Party; and an upcoming exhibition with artist Simone Forti. Prior to joining MOCA in 2021, she was the Assistant Curator at MoMA PS1 in New York City, where she co-organized the performance series, Sunday Sessions, with an emphasis on commissioning new work and establishing a residency series. Projects featured new work by artists working across sound, dance, performance, theater, and environmental installation, including Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Moriah Evans, NIC Kay, Leslie Cuyjet, and Jonathan Gonzalez. She has worked on exhibitions including Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy (2014); Anne Imhof, DEAL (2015); Greater New York (2015); Rockaway! Katharina Grosse (2016); and Rockaway! Yayoi Kusama's Narcissus Garden (2018).
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ALEX SLOANE This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in October 2021. GM: What was your path to becoming a curator, as well as your current job at MOCA? AS: I originally came to New York in 2009. I had been in art school in Paris and transferred to Parsons in New York, and I graduated from there. While I was in school, I worked a lot with performance. Following graduation, I got a grant from Franklin Furnace Archive, along with three friends who were fellow artists, and we opened our own space called 1:1 on Essex Street in the Lower East Side. We had funding for a year to do a range of different types of programming; we did have some exhibitions, but we also did a lot of performances and residencies, including these big performative dinners that featured pre-arranged and impromptu performances, poetry readings, and music. Through that, I decided that I really wanted to be more actively involved in programming; I saw that as my work rather than creating my own work. [I wanted to] create the space for artists to present and bring together an eclectic and diverse mix of programming. That was when I got an internship at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the Department of Media and Performance Art, where I met my future boss, Jenny Schlenzka, who was just moving to MoMA PS1 in Long Island City. She hired me to come with her to help organize and run the performance program that PS1 was initiating at the time. It was called Sunday Sessions and was in this geodesic dome. I had a fellowship originally, which then progressed to a full-time position. When Jenny ultimately left PS1, my colleague Taja Cheek, who leads both the Warm Up program and Sunday Sessions, and I took over the mantle of all the programming there for three years. After being at PS1 for 8 years, I left in 2020. Klaus Biesenbach, who I knew well from when he was Director of PS1, had invited me to MOCA. The pandemic affected the timing, but I was eventually able to come in April of this year as Associate Curator of Performance and Programs. GM: What types of programming do you hope to bring to MOCA? AS: What excited me about MOCA was that it has a long history of supporting performance, but I’m eager to implement a program that can create a beat and a sustained community and audience, not just for artists but also for visitors. [I want] MOCA to become a place where people want to see what’s going on and what’s happening here, whether that’s through residencies, commissions, etc. Everything is in infancy at the moment, but the Warehouse space at The Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo has nothing but potential. It’s exciting to think about creating a cocktail of different types of programming. On November 19 and 20, we are co-presenting the U.S. premiere of HIVE RISE with The Industry, a Los Angeles based arts organization focused on experimental opera. HIVE RISE premiered at Berghain in Berlin and is co-created by Ash Fure, composition and musical direction, and LILLETH, direction and choreography. (Continued)
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ALEX SLOANE The performance features a diverse cast of performers and creators from the LA area, including Jay Carlon, Rayne Raney, and Jasmine Nyende, the lead singer of the band Fuck U Pay Us. This will be a whole mix of different practices – punk bands, opera singers, classically trained theatre, and movement artists. I am enthusiastic to collaborate and share resources with fellow art organizations in the city to bring exciting projects to LA. In December, we’re working with BlackStar, a film collective based out of Philadelphia, to screen a series of short films by Black, Brown, and Indigenous filmmakers in the LA area. A lot of the filmmakers will be able to be on site and participate in the panel, “Mothering and Laboring the Cinematic Revolution.” I also have a lot of hopes for artist residencies at MOCA; I think they are an amazing opportunity for the museum to really support the creation and workshopping of new work, not just the presentation of existing work or the final product. GM: Can you discuss your experience organizing “Sun & Sea” (2021) for The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA? AS: It was a new experience in that I’ve never collaborated so closely with so many other institutions to make a project happen. It was three organizations – MOCA in collaboration with CAP UCLA and The Hammer Museum – coming together and pulling their resources to make it happen. Because I’m new to LA, it was great to meet a lot of colleagues in other institutions and develop those relationships. Touring a large international piece with a cast and crew of over 29 people, during a pandemic, is a challenge. (Laughs) It’s definitely not something that I’ve experienced before, and we made sure that everyone had all their [COVID] tests and everything. It was one of those things where there’s a lot of phone calls, organization, and coordination in advance, but once everyone gets here, it all comes into focus. (Continued)
Installation view of Sun & Sea, October 14 – October 16, 2021 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo by Elon Schoenholz.
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ALEX SLOANE It was an exceptionally special project to be a part of because it’s so timely. We are living in a climate crisis, and this is a work that really speaks to the apathy of humanity in the face of said crisis. It really drives home the idea of how the planet is warming up and species are dying, but let’s just sit on the beach for another hour and have a drink because it’s all going to be fine. Hopefully people will be spurned to action after seeing it; we put together a packet of different resources so that people can take what they’ve seen and translate it into something more. The three artists, Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, are unusual for an opera because they are a trinity of creative directors. It was also fantastic to work with an all-female team who are really pushing this work forward, and to see how this work that made such strides at the 2019 Venice Biennale can now be seen by a broader audience around the world. GM: Can you discuss your current experience co-curating (with Rebecca Lowery) Simone Forti’s retrospective for MOCA, which will premiere in 2022? AS: It’s definitely a crossover, as this exhibition will include performance, documentation, sculpture, and drawings from across Simone Forti’s 40-year career. For me, it’s been fantastic to work with Simone; she’s someone who I’ve admired for many years. Simone is such a pioneer and has such strong opinions of her work, so it’s great to have a dialogue with her and Mara McCarthy, the founder of The Box, which represents Simone. Working closely with Rebecca is critical because this is going to be Simone’s first museum show on the West Coast, and we want to make sure we do Simone and her work justice. After her family fled fascism in Italy in the 1930’s, California is where they landed and made their home. The West Coast has remained a strong influence throughout her career. (Continued)
Simone Forti, Phoenix, Circling I/II, Huddle, Garden, Fountain Huddle, Projects: Performance, Summergarden series, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, August 18-19, 1978. Performed by Simone Forti, Peter Van Riper (music) and others. Photo by Peter Moore, © (1978) Barbara Moore, all rights of reproduction reserved.
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ALEX SLOANE For me, it’s been particularly interesting to learn about the extent of her collaborations across decades, not just the sixties, but through the present day. She’s still actively collaborating, writing, and working with people much younger than her. It’s been fantastic to see how this intergenerational network of fellow artists and peers continues to inspire her today. […] I will say that our show is not a retrospective, but will encompass a large number of her bodies of work. It’s great that MoMA acquired Simone’s “Dance Constructions” (1960-61) to give greater credibility to this series, and acknowledge that Simone has had such an impact on contemporary dance and the future trajectory of dance within the visual arts context. Simone always refers to herself as an artist, not as just a dancer or choreographer. Being an artist can encapsulate so many different aspects -- she’s also a writer, musician, sculptor, and drawer. That’s what I hope that this show will be able to demonstrate to a Los Angeles audience, that while she is most well known as a dancer and choreographer, she is an artist and the scope of her work is remarkable. GM: Do you believe that art institutions embrace performance art in terms of exhibition and programming thematics? AS: Performance and live programming in museums is becoming much more common because it’s an intrinsic part of contemporary practice and what artists are using today. [But] the museum is not a theatre, and there are things that museums don’t have the capabilities of doing, such as having a sprung floor for a dancer or altering the climate-controlled galleries. Museums were made to accommodate objects, and I see myself as [wanting to] integrate movement and bodies into museums. There are many projects and pieces that [could] really work in a museum, but you want to give the piece the best context. I get really excited about performance in relation to visual art objects, and I enjoy doing that when it’s possible. […] There’s this opportunity of inviting people who wouldn’t necessarily see themselves in a gallery exhibition, but whose work is just as important. Programming can bring those artists and communities into the museum, and by extension, their supporters. I have a long history of working with sex workers and their allies in New York. We organized two large programs, The Sex Worker Festival of Resistance, in collaboration with Arika, and Kink Out: SPACES with the collective Kink Out, and I hope to continue this dialogue and engagement in LA. [The museum should] be a space for conversation, different types of programming, and welcome people across a diverse arrange of interests.
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DECEMBER 2021
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 4
THE POWER OF PERFORMANCE
GIRLS MAGAZINE
