RoseLee Goldberg on Perfecting Performa

Photo by Marion Ettlinger

RoseLee Goldberg

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An accomplished art historian, Goldberg has made it her mission to argue performance art’s central importance to modern and contemporary art. In 1979 she published "Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present." She then wrote widely, perhaps most visibly for Artforum, on a range of performance topics, and in 1998 she published "Performance: Live Art Since the ’60s."

But Performa is her latest and largest-scale effort, and perhaps the most successful; according to critic and curator Matthew Higgs, the first biennial, in 2005, “singlehandedly reinvigorated a genre—performance—that seemed to have gone underground.”

The second Performa biennial starts Saturday. Was there ever a moment when you thought you wouldn’t make it past the first?

The day after we finished in ’05, I took my organizing group for lunch. When I said, “I can’t wait for ’07!” they all rolled their eyes. Honestly, I’m already on to ’09. Somehow I can’t help myself. I get so excited.

You call Performa a biennial of “new visual art performance.” Is that different from the more familiar term “performance art”?

Good question. I am trying to avoid the term “performance art.” We used that expression in the ’70s, but it doesn’t really apply now. If you mention performance art to most people today they start thinking of people cutting themselves and doing the heavy endurance-type performances that we all know from the ’70s. We’re way past that now.

Nowadays most artists seem to feel at liberty to use whatever forms and media they choose, and in whatever combinations suit them. Isn’t it a little old-fashioned to isolate performance in its own festival?

I don’t separate these things. The whole history of 20th-century art is predicated on live performance. Part of my job is to constantly explain that performance is so much more than what we think of under the term “performance art.” It’s not this thing that pops up every now and then. It’s always present. It’s inside the history of art. It is the history of art. I started Performa because I felt it was time to straighten out this history. We need to rethink the 20th century, because so much of it starts in performance, from the Dadaists and Futurists all the way to Maurizio Cattelan, Cindy Sherman, and Pierre Huyghe.

But what makes you think that there’s room for another art biennial?

What’s exciting about Performa is that this is a new, 21st-century way of thinking about a biennial. It’s not a single institution, it’s not a single point of view, it’s not a single curator. About 20 curators are working on this. There’s a lot of input. I see myself as almost like the editor of a book or a newspaper. All of my colleagues are my ears and my eyes, and I’m always asking questions like, “What’s the best performance in Korea? What’s going on in Japan?”

The academic conference “Performance Studies International” is happening at NYU during Performa. What sort of academic study does performance require?

Do you remember the old days when we talked about the sociology and politics of art? That’s what performance demands. It has so many layers. The PSI conference normally happens in the summer, but I said, “Put it in the middle of Performa and we can work together.” The classic problem of academia is that everyone’s into theory and history, but they don’t actually see things, so we’ve designed a program that all those captive academics will see live. To me, education is everything. I’m a great believer that the more information there is, the more pleasure. Or the more reward.

The biennial is more than three weeks long, with 30 collaborating organizations and over 100 artists. Will visitors be able to see everything? Will you?

Performa is very rich, but I also think it’s manageable. It’s bigger in scale than last time, but I’m trying to make sure that I can get to everything—if I have a rest during the day! I don’t want people to have to exhaust themselves running from event to event. The idea is to do something that people can enjoy, not feel overwhelmed by. You shouldn’t just be walking around exhausting yourself; there has to be a real engagement.