Quite clearly, it’s one of the series of old-school backlashes against our basic freedoms, such as freedom of expression – unfortunately we see too many of these today in Europe.
Although Holzinger and Riebeek’s piece has absolutely nothing to do with “pornography”, I would like to say the following:
In my personal opinion, we, as society, actually have to start using public money for pornography. The kind of great independent pornography that aims to show real pleasure on camera, diverse bodies and identities, creative approaches to sex and intimacy. This kind of pornography cannot survive in the world that is dominated by the mainstream male gaze, and we will be doing a great service especially to the people who are just starting their exploration; who, if we want it or not, often gain first knowledge about sex through pornography. I hope that the first thing they see is not fake orgasms and face ejaculations, not the bodies augmented by plastic surgeries to the unrealistic standards of beauty, but real people, with real bodies, having real fun with sex. I really hope to see public funders supporting this kind of pornography one day.

I’M INTERESTED IN the highly choreographed ways in which porn is edited and shot. My original idea for this piece was to have a porn shoot in the VW Dome, which is located outside the museum. I was going to have a live-streaming camera shooting during a panel discussion—actually the panel was going to become the porn shoot and the actors were going to be played by PS1 staff. There were also going to be actors playing security guards; one was going to be an escort named Hunter. The male escort service Cowboys 4 Angels has a cowboy named Hunter, and I wanted to hire him but it didn’t work out. (I actually met with him and he was kind of a jerk.) My idea had been that Hunter would say to me, “Excuse me, ma’am,” and make it obvious that he’s not a guard, and then we’d have sex on the panel table. I planned to edit it as “MoMA Porn” and post it on pornography websites. Part of this idea was about looking at the live thing and then realizing that the live thing is for the camera.

Sex with consenting adults is something the art world can handle. I’ve been to MoMA and I’ve seen mainstream porn repurposed as art—cutouts from magazines and so forth. To me, that could be considered more offensive than what I wanted to do, which was actual, real sex but in a way that tears down porn, that makes it awkward and uncomfortable but also maybe pleasurable. It wouldn’t be functioning as glossy and glamorous—I wanted to undercut that version of pornography.

In the end, MoMA HQ rejected most of my ideas. Slowly all the elements in the piece had to be stripped away and I realized all I had left was a panel talk. So I made a documentary about the three months of making the piece, which is what I’ll show.

I understood that the staff being involved was a no-no, but I still wanted to use the museum logo in the edited porn videos I ended up making. The dome itself also just seemed so good for porn, especially with the gray carpeting and lighting. And I think a table with water and mics would be a funny setting for a shoot. Since the whole thing was going to be set up as a scene for something else, with the final product being a video that could be uploaded to other sites, it wasn’t actually a performance; it was just a shoot. The audience would have been voyeurs and there would have been close-ups projected onto the dome walls. Of course, I didn’t expect the museum to say yes to everything. It was just my fantasy idea. But what I didn’t realize was that this piece would become so much about the institution. I never planned to make a performance about PS1’s rules—that was never my intent.

There are so many unknown factors in performance, especially when you’re commissioning a work that’s never been seen before. The museum didn’t really know what I was going to do, and so there was a fear both of the unknown and of bodies. I made the people at the museum anxious, from the beginning, I think, just because most of the work entering a museum has been made already. So it was the not knowing in addition to the fact that I had proposed something sexual. Oh, and also that it could fail—that it could be both bad in quality and offensive at the same time.

Maybe they should just disown the dome—it’s already outside the museum, anyway. Maybe they should just let it be a place where things happen that we don’t have control over.

“Well,” Mr. Taylor says in the film, “you try things.”

But Mr. Taylor’s studies of gesture, pedestrian movement and stillness add up to more than just a gimmick or, as Mr. Horst insinuated, a blank — void of meaning and intelligence. Experimental corners of the dance world are still obsessed with that historic program. Wouldn’t it be thrilling if Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance revived those early works?

That will probably never happen. Instead, for the group’s coming season, we’ll be treated to a pair of what are likely to be easy-does-it dances by Doug Elkins and Larry Keigwin.

Stephen Thompson in “Culture, Administration & Trembling.” Credit Meg Lavender/Fierce Festival
Most large institutions rely on the status quo, the safe and the sometimes dull. That’s why it’s so important to seek out dance that exists on the margins. Risk is crucial for an art form; so is failure. They’re necessary for growth. And following a choreographer is an investment. You don’t watch just one Quentin Tarantino movie, you watch them all. Similarly, choreography is a progression: one long piece shown over years.

Each January, the spirit of “trying things” is celebrated and alive in the contemporary dance world. Festivals like Coil 2016, organized by Performance Space 122, and American Realness, put together by Ben Pryor and held mainly at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side, begin early in the month. Both are presented in conjunction with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters showcase, in which artists show works in excerpt or complete form for theater directors and programmers from the United States and abroad. Much surrounding the association showcase is disheartening, including its meat-market approach. But what’s especially disappointing is the way many productions are presented as excerpts. Dance — both to make and observe — takes time.

These days, following contemporary dance is a little like digging for treasure in a junkyard. What I’m always looking for are choreographers who are not pushing boundaries blindly but investigating the myriad possibilities of modern dance and the body and how to situate both in popular culture. I keep up the search because of those moments during a performance when, suddenly, my spine straightens: I’m in the presence of an artist and not an impersonator. Performance-ready is not the point, and new is never quite new. Imagination and a sense of theater matter enormously. I would rather see struggle, a dance full of tension and questions, than another generic, spirit-free, derivative work.

How do dances even get made these days? Since I started covering it in 1995, contemporary dance has deteriorated — not the work, which will always ebb and flow, but its structure and support system, museums aside. And while it’s nice (or is it?) that the visual art world is interested in presenting dance, the involvement by museums, from the Whitney to the Museum of Modern Art, has resulted in artists trying to validate their ideas more through words than movement. The heart of a dance cannot exist as just a museum catalog. It’s easier to talk your way around a dance than to make one.

While there are exceptions, the company model, in which a choreographer works with a steady group of dancers and puts on a show once a year at the Joyce Theater, has waned for most daring dance makers for reasons that I think are both artistic and financial. Now many choreographers hire dancers according to the project at hand. It’s not new — Twyla Tharp has done it for a long time — but it has become the norm. The impossible economic climate of New York (yes, rent) makes it hard to imagine a return to the spunk and spirit of the 1960s and ’70s. Now, it seems, choreographers and dancers spend more time teaching Pilates than working in the studio or training, and that has seeped onto the stage, where technique has dwindled.

Is this why simple, repetitive phrases have become so ubiquitous, since mastering a variety of intricate steps is harder than just repeating a few? The alternative, in which a dancer tries to attain the kind of presence that emanates from the inside out, is profound in the skilled bodies of dancers like Molly Lieber and Melanie Maar. It may look easy, but there’s nothing simple about such subtle work. Do it halfheartedly, and it’s nothing.

Over the years, American Realness — which will branch out this spring with a tour of France — has been uneven, but there have been memorable performances, including two by Europeans: Marten Spangberg’s “La Substance, but in English,” performed over four and a half hours at MoMA PS1, and Ivo Dimchev’s “FEST,” a brilliantly satirical look at the performance-festival circuit. This season, there are plenty of artists in which to invest some time: Jillian Peña, who works in video, will continue her fixation with unison movement and choreographic kaleidoscopes in the premiere of “Panopticon,” a meeting point of mirrors, film and movement. And the earthy, experimental choreographer and improvisor Yvonne Meier, one of the most important members of the East Village dance scene of the ’90s, presents her new prop-heavy “Durch Nacht und Nebel.”

In “Culture, Administration & Trembling,” another ’90s dance fixture, Jennifer Lacey, returns to New York from Paris to team up with the choreographer Antonija Livingstone and others for a series rooted in “time-based sculptures.” What does a dancer’s discipline look like? “Excavation Site: Martha Graham U.S.A.,” a one-off presentation by the Austrian choreographer Michael Kliën, features performers — past, present, future — from the Martha Graham Dance Company as they explore their relationship to that modern master. In late January, Ann Liv Young, the brash and wise performance artist, takes on Sophocles in “Elektra.”

The point is to embrace unpredictability. But here’s a safer bet: If you missed David Neumann’s “I Understand Everything Better” last April, there’s another opportunity to delve into this choreographer’s deeply personal look at death and dying. Mr. Neumann has been hiding behind his virtuosic performance skill for the past few years. In “I Understand,” he peeled back those layers; he showed himself. Do I support that? Always.