My partner Peter Zuspan and I will speak at Have You Kicked a Building Lately, a panel discussion about architecture and performance presented by Performa’s Not For Sale Series.
Have You Kicked a Building Lately?
Featuring Vito Acconci, Elizabeth Berger, Beatriz Colomina, and Teddy Cruz, with Respondents Glenn Weiss, Alexander Pincus, and Peter Zuspan
Introduced and Moderated by RoseLee Goldberg
Wednesday, May 26 at 6 pm (Doors open at 5:30 pm)
Rose Auditorium, Cooper Union
41 Cooper Square, New York
Tickets:
FREE. Seating is limited. Please RSVP to guarantee a seat.
RSVP to notforsale@performa-arts.org
New York, May 3, 2010 — Performa is proud to continue its Not for Sale series with Have you Kicked a building Lately?, its first panel involving the architectural community, that will examine the role of biennials and festivals to activate the city and foster cultural activism as a form of radical urbanism. In preparation for Performa 11, this panel will begin a series of conversations with artists, architects, writers, curators, urban planners and museum professionals, to understand how live interventions in the architectural environment increase the pleasure of the city, its streets, facades and skyline, and deepen a sense of connection to place for all its inhabitants.
Taking its title from a 1989 collection of essays by the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic and writer Ada Louise Huxtable, Have You Kicked a Building Lately? encourages the following questions: How do artists and architects manipulate, activate and disturb urban space? Is it possible for architecture and the urban environment to be integral actors in a live event’s unfolding rather than just providing the stage? How does live performance occupy a space and create a destination where people want to go and return to again and again? How can architects and artists work together and create a space for theatrical possibility?
Panelists will include Artist Vito Acconci, President of the Downtown Alliance Elizabeth Berger, Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University Beatriz Colomina, and Architect and Professor at the University of California, San Diego Teddy Cruz. With respondents Glenn Weiss, Manager of Public Art and Design of the Times Square Alliance, and Alexander Pincus and Peter Zuspan, Architects and Founding Principals of Bureau V.
The panel will be introduced and moderated by Performa Director RoseLee Goldberg, who wrote the first history of performance, Performance Art from Futurism to the Present, in 1979, and went on to found Performa in 2004 specifically to make this extraordinary history known. After launching the first biennial in 2005, she predicted, “All signs are that we are in the midst of a strong reemergence of performance, and that the coming years are only likely to bring more.” Now, six years after Performa was founded, and over thirty years since Goldberg’s first book was published, museums and cultural institutions are indeed finally taking notice, and the results are very exciting.
For Performa 09, Performa commissioned its first architecture project, the Performa Hub, an innovative temporary structure that served as a base of biennial activities. Designed by Berlin based architecture firm nOffice, and installed in the ground-floor commercial space in the new Thom Mayne designed Cooper Union building, the Performa Hub functioned as an information center, exhibition space, central meeting place, screening room, ticketing office, conference center, amphitheater, and recording studio that also served as a round-the-clock, infinitely flexible public forum for pop-up conversations, seminars, concerts, panel discussions, and food events. For Performa 11, Performa will expand and develop the Performa Hub concept to accommodate new projects and add rehearsal and presentation spaces for Performa artists.
ABOUT NOT FOR SALE
Not For Sale is an ongoing public education series presented by Performa that features artists, authors, architects, policy-makers, curators, and critics discussing current issues in performance and new media, and the related task of writing about art and artists whose work encompasses several disciplines at once. Previous Not For Sale panel topics include: It’s History Now: Performance and The Museum (2010), Noise Panel (2009), Ideal Performance Space (2009), You Didn’t Have to be There: Photography, Performance and Contemporary Art (2007), Dance and Conceptual Art in the Visual Arts (2007), Forever Radical? (2007), We Are Still Appalled (2006), Writing on Performance and New Media (2005), New Media and Sound (2005), Artist’s View (2004), and Curating, Conserving, and Collecting Ephemeral Art (2004).
Past participants in Not For Sale events include: Marina Abramović, Alexander Alberro, Jan Avgikos, Terry Dean Bartlett, Vaness Beecroft, Jennifer Blessing, C. Carr, Tony Conrad, Christopher Cox, Michelle Dunn, Didier Faustino, Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena, Sandra Grinberg, Laura Hoptman, Anthony Huberman, Chrissie Isles, Susan Jarosi, Branden W. Joseph, Florian Idenburg, Margo Jefferson, Dana Karwas, Ron Kuivila, Carin Kuoni, Andre Lepecki, Arto Lindsay. Elizabeth Lecompte, George Lewis, Xavier LeRoy, Eric Liftin, Babbette Mangolte, Christian Marclay, Greil Marcus, Kelly Nipper, Hans Ulrich Obrist. Orlan, Klaus Ottmann, Taisha Paggett, Adam Pendleton, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Martha Rosler, Robert Storr, John Rockwell, David Ross, Shohei Shigematsu, Bennett Simpson, Debra Singer, Marten Spangberg, Emily Sundblad, Rikrit Tiravanija, Christian Wassmann, Glenn Wharton, Catherine Wood, and Linda Yablonsky.
ABOUT PERFORMA
Performa, a non-profit multidisciplinary arts organization established by RoseLee Goldberg in 2004, is dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century. Performa launched New York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05, in 2005, followed by Performa 07 in 2007 and Performa 09 in 2009.
More information is available at www.performa-arts.org.