Contemporary Cruising

by Contemporary Cruising |February 24, 2015 8:45 pm

On Maria Hassabi’s PREMIERE presented by The Kitchen and Performa, NYC , 2013

A dance of a million première

The ephemeral nature of dance is one of its great pleasures. Every moment is special,
never to be repeated the same way, no matter how many times a dance is performed. It’s
impossible to see everything; one way to grasp dance is not to grasp at it, to be willing to
let it run its course. When dance is slowed down so that its forms and images linger,
though, viewers can immerse themselves in the continuity of the movement; there is time to
become part of the dance, to inhabit it.

“Premiere,” the new work that Maria Hassabi
presented recently at the Kitchen, in Chelsea, was an absorbing study in time distortion,
an invitation—or a challenge—to experience dance on a microscopic level.

When the big doors opened from the Kitchen’s lobby, we were confronted by the five
performers of “Premiere,” in glaring light, facing us. The risers had been moved to the
opposite side of the theatre, and we had to walk across the dance floor, around the
dancers, who were grouped more or less in the center, to get to our seats. The dancers
remained still, expressionless. It was as though we had interrupted their performance, and
now they were waiting for us to settle in order to continue. People moved purposefully past
them, caught in unfamiliar territory, onstage and among the performers.

Once we were seated, we were looking at the dancers’ backs—they still faced out toward
the lobby. Hassabi and Andros Zins-Browne reclined next to Biba Bell and Hristoula
Harakas, who stood; Robert Steijn lay next to them on the other side. Each wore a simple
costume of matching jeans and shirts in different colors, with black shoes. Vast banks of
lights of many shapes and sizes bordered the stage, illuminating the audience as well as
the dancers. And then we waited. It was minutes before anyone onstage moved.
Gradually, Bell and Harakas began making minute adjustments to their stances—turning
out a leg, allowing a foot to extend jerkily along the black floor—pausing just long enough
between movements that we wondered if there would be any more. Little by little, all of the
performers made incremental shifts in posture. It was quiet in the theatre. All we could hear
was the light scraping of a shoe now and then.

Ten minutes passed before we saw part of someone’s face, as Harakas, in her vivid
magenta outfit, turned slightly to the side. The effect of this was revelatory, and a relief.
Without faces to ground us in the human, the work up until that point, though mesmerizing,
was alienating; we wanted to connect. After twenty minutes, sound emerged from stage
right: a faint crackling. Taking in the group as a whole was difficult; the dancers often
moved at different times, and the eye naturally wanted to alight on just one, to indulge in
the painstaking progress. Focussing on one dancer—Harakas as she inched into a wide,
straight-legged fourth position; Hassabi reaching awkwardly behind her on the floor,
contorting her body—made everyone else onstage disappear, and when you looked back
at the others they’d somehow changed positions dramatically; their shifts had been
imperceptible in one’s peripheral vision.

When the attention eventually drifted to another dancer, it was like the beginning of an
entirely new piece; it was a dance made of a million premières, and every time someone
maneuvered from crouching to standing, or changed direction, it was presented with the
solemnity and the elegance of a major event. Hassabi and her collaborators augmented
this lean momentousness subtly. Alex Waterman’s sound design—the crackling, then a
metallic rustling with pings, and later a barely audible melody—came and went with large
gaps in between, so that even in its austerity it was a welcome enrichment of the
atmosphere. The lighting (by Zack Tinkelman and Hassabi) produced a lot of heat—it
wasn’t long before sweat stains bloomed on the performers’ shirts—and dimmed and
brightened sporadically, exaggeratedly, releasing the tension that had built up in the
choreography.

“Premiere” was really five dances going on simultaneously. The performers never
appeared to look at one another, and they never touched. But merely the proximity of two
bodies, even when they are striking the most casual postures, can carry a thrill, or the
possibility of one: Hassabi, reclining, stretched out her arm, her hand squeaking along the
floor, and came within an inch or two of Zins-Browne’s foot. When any chance of contact
vanished, the moment had a tinge of sadness, even though the two performers occupied
different universes, and their near-encounter was, you felt, purely happenstance. Later,
she stood in his shadow—taking refuge, we’d like to think—until the two moved on once
again. In the absence of interaction, or emotion, we latched on to expressions: Hassabi’s
suspicious, almost pained; Steijn’s matter-of-fact; Bell’s intense, wide-eyed; Zins-
Browne’s open, kind; Harakas’s like a Vermeer girl, holding a secret.

(The audience brought its own character to the dance. In the stillness of the theatre, little
dramas stood out: the man and woman who suffered through a fit of the giggles, a middle-
aged couple in the third row who clearly wanted to be elsewhere. We were, of course,
trapped; leaving in the middle of the show would have involved crossing the performance
space while the dance was going on.)

As the dance became more protracted—its silences more ominous, the slowness more
agonizing—formal arrangements (a diagonal, a semicircle, a cross) coalesced as if by
magic, then melted away. In time, the dancers began to venture farther from the center—
Harakas got right up next to the back wall, Hassabi lay on her back far downstage—but
never moved beyond the gray wreath of footprints that we had left when we entered the
theatre. After seventy-five minutes, the performers were arranged in a line, some on the
ground, some standing, looking at us—the exact formation, in other words, that they’d
been in when we entered the theatre, but rotated a hundred and eighty degrees.

Minutes passed. The lights blazed. The crackling came and went. Then each dancer
shifted slightly, and the lights went out. When the lights came back up, the dancers hadn’t
moved. We filed past them as we’d done earlier in the evening, out through the big doors.
If you stopped and looked back, it seemed possible that the dance—the same one, but
always new—might begin again, with its different facing, and be repeated over and over,
for eternity.

BY ANDREW BOYNTON
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tonginic

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tonginic1 hour ago

This sounds all nice. But Is that piece for the audience not better placed within the white
cube or at least off the theater space? That one sees the show rather as a installation. Not
having the pressure to wait till the end. I mean i guess I would not have the patience.

I would like to compare it with watching the film “24h psycho” by douglas gordon. (slowed
down film streched to 24h)

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by Contemporary Cruising |February 24, 2015 8:14 pm

Adam Linder, Cult to the Built on What, 2013

For you I put this dress on / for you I put the stress on / act like you know me / act act like you know me…

Adam Linder raps in a husky voice under the rhythm of immersive electronic music. I am fascinated, mesmerized , entertained. For this somewhat cryptically titled rapography Cult to the Built on What, the Berlin-based Australian choreographer reskills as a rapper, becoming the star of the night; the audience follows his script of staged and pre-recorded rap, timidly responding ‘oo -ooh ooh’ to his ‘ee-eeh eeh’.

s’Cult to the Built’ on What is built from the combination of classical ballet moves and variations of popular dance, including twerking and voguing, which brings out the irrational engagement and identification with the contemporaneous. It responds to Mårten Spånberg’s call to shake up the dance (conservative and stiff as it seems to be) by introducing and employing pop techniques. Yet with ‘Cult to the Built on What’, pop seems to become an attribute rather than a structure allowing the performance to retain the heavily polished carcass of the conservative: ticketed and instructed viewership, classical dance movement as well as beginning-to-an-end and partitioned narrative. The structure of the piece is dedicated to three characters: body, lectern, and language.

Body
Body in Linder’s performance submits to the knowledge of classical ballet, even if incorporating the gestures of popular dance. Formally trained at The Royal Ballet School in London, Linder experiments with meanings and connotations connected to house music, and borrows from New York ball culture of the 1980s. Re-skilling appears to become a method of bringing into dance the considerations of gender as well as elements of marginalized forms of dance. ‘Cult to the Built’ on What closely corresponds to the modes of expression currently prevalent in the mutant and cross-dressing hip-hop scene of New York, only to mention the names such as Le1f or Mykki Blanco. The latter sings in long hair wig and black leather-chain pants:

Get in line nigga <…> / Maybe she born with it, maybe it was Maybelline / All white Blanco give your heathen ass a christening / Niggas so greasy in the daylight, he glistening / “Oh this fag can rap” yeah they saying that they listening.

Associations like these make dance feel fresh and progressive; nevertheless, one wonders why dance needs to become take on a mask to feel this way. Adapting identities as well as the moves, Linder dresses in a uniform of today, wearing black Nike trainers with the surfaces in neon orange, black glossy sports t-shirt and black loose track pants (the outfit varied each scheduled performance, however, remained consistent in style).

This body follows the music, which breaks and repeats itself, employing cut-up techniques reminiscent of Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), which Linder references in his rap lyrics. Film incorporating found video footage from British nightclubs resonates with ‘Cult to the Built on What’ not only in its topics of interest but also its editing and, thus, its style. The dance is spliced together, responding to Linder’s rap tracks, repeated and slowed down, filtering in and out to create a uniform spectacle of today.

Lectern
The dance of the hypnotically rotating lectern crowns and finishes the performance. In utter darkness, amongst red, yellow, blue and purple spotlights, a tall, untreated wood structure mechanically moves in accordance with the rap music. This is one of the most fascinating moments of the event, when an object becomes an animated character, an active agent of the performance. The scenography is no doubt a contribution by the visual artist Shahryar Nashat who has collaborated with Linder on the finishing of the piece. Nashat’s addition to ‘Cult to the Built on What’, a tall semi-oval light wood lectern based on six feet, grounds the performance within the discourse of the visual arts through questions of display and staging. The lectern becomes a framing structure for Linder’s performance, accommodating the lingering gaze of the viewer.

As much as the lectern is now a performer, during the other stages of the night this same lectern functions as a prop, an object drawing attention to, and emphasizing, the space. Linder moves the lectern throughout the space, redefining its existence and performer’s relationship to it. The shift from object to the actor reminds us of the bottles that become alive in Tamara Henderson’s 16 mm film Sloshed Ballot and Anonymous Loan, recently shown at dOCUMENTA (13). Here the bottle behaves as the lectern, landing into the shot, seemingly with no help of the human hand or will.

Language / medium
‘Cult to the Built on What’ further echoes Shahryar Nashat’s work in its play on translations and correspondences: be it those of medium, language or material. It does not seem to demand its own defined present, is deferential, signaling content elsewhere, or generating it but not possessing it. Linder´s piece in many ways transposes the mascot of the work Not the Stuff of Stone that Nashat produces in 2011. Not the Stuff of Stone is a grey plaster, pigment and steel bench constructed to look as if it was sculpted from marble, which draws our attention to the nuanced relationship between idea and its modes of expression.

This particular interest in transferal, or re-skilling, reflects Linder´s engagement in current critical debate on the developments within artistic practice. The word re-skilling that Linder employs in the description of ‘Cult to the Built on What’ was recently brought into much wider use by Claire Bishop who discusses political and economical implications of the term in her article Unhappy days in the art world?: De-skilling Theater, Re-skilling Performance . Here Bishop explains re-skilling as the bringing to bear of one set of competencies on those of the newly elected discipline. Linder’s attempts to master the elected discipline of a rapper and this precise use of words suggest his awareness of the text and the creative response towards it.

To end with
It all felt like observing a masquerade of contemporaneity – fascinating, spectacular and maybe rather naïve, infused by colour and enveloping sound. As Steven ten Thije tells us in his article Reading (through) the mask: Philosophical Reflections on the Masquerade, masquerade is something to ‘enter’, whether acquiring such attributes as masks or not, in Nike shoes or not, in order to unify the rational and irrational in life, to defend ourselves ‘from the tragic aspect of the tension between magical instinct and discursive logic.’ ‘Cult to the Built on What’ also combines these dichotomies, fusing ballet with street culture, high art with vernacular vocabulary, thus, proposing suggestions on what dance and performance can be. Linder demonstrates that apart from aesthetic issues dance can be a platform for discussing the state of art and everyday life of today.
—————–
Adam Linder’s ‘Cult to the Built on What’ took place on September 1, 2013 at Uferstudios (Berlin) as part of Ausufern festival

Concept & Performance: Adam Linder. Stage: Shahryar Nashat, Adam Linder. Music, Composition: Brendan Dougherty. Light: Dennis Döscher. Production: Andrea Niederbuchner.

By EK

by Contemporary Cruising |February 24, 2015 7:44 pm

Mårten Spångberg, the bad boy of contemporary dance

The Dane likes his audience to leave their phones on and has a troupe that’s the choreographic equivalent of Occupy. He explains why he’s aiming for ‘something neo-liberalism can’t cope with You’ve seen contemporary dance, even if you don’t think you have: it’s actually been infiltrating the pop world for years. Some recent examples:Beyoncé filched great chunks of Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s

classic Rosas Danst Rosas for her Countdown video;Kylie regularly hires “serious” contemporary choreographers such as Akram Khan and Rafael Bonachela for her tours; if you go to Latitudethis summer you’ll see dance companies sharing the bill with Kraftwerk and Bloc Party; and the Knife had a troupe of experimental dancers on stage for this year’s Shaking The Habitual tour.

A bit further off the radar, when Swedish band Lune played in London recently, choreographer Mårten Spångberg could be seen looming over singer Linnea Martinsson in flowing robes and headdress, like an escapee from a particularly unscary Halloween party. A wild-haired, large-spectacled Swede, Spångberg has been creating enthusiastically academic and absurdly cool choreography for 20 years (he’s 45 now). He’s noticed the pop world’s interest in dance, and he’s got issues.

“Why is dance so fucking conservative as a response?” he wonders. “Dance should use pop to change what dance can be, not try to make something accessible. The problem is that dance tends to hook on to the wrong part of pop. Let’s climb to the top, go penthouse level and see what pop can make possible. Pop should not be about reaching the masses, it’s a matter of making the masses reach for you.”

Rest assured that contemporary dance, Spångberg-style, doesn’t look anything like Kylie. His current piece Epic, to be performed at this year’s Manchester international festival, is like being at an intimidatingly hip squat party, with guests in neon sportswear and facepaint who never go home. Across its four hours, you rarely see anything you would recognise as a conventional dance step. At one point, the troupe pick up instruments and play charmingly unaccomplished versions of songs by Bow Wow Wow and Siouxsie And The Banshees.

Epic is totally unspectacular, and quietly revolutionary. No one will tell you to turn your phone off, for a start. “Of course not!” says Spångberg. “We also have phones onstage; we have notes on our smartphones. If you take a nap or go for a smoke or want to update your Facebook, that’s also totally d’accord. I’m not interested in keeping the audience busy. I’m interested in how differently we can think about audiences today, compared with, say, 20 years ago.”

‘The dance to come is an altogether different one, that not even I can predict’

The thinking goes that if the modern audience watches TV on laptops, while Instagramming and checking emails at the same time, why would contemporary artists ignore that and insist on trapping them in a silent black box for an hour? Rather than rail against our diminishing attention spans, Spångberg looks at this as an opportunity to explore “other kinds of attention”. He’s more interested in philosophy and economics and commercial culture than what’s happening in other art forms. “I would say that eBay is much more of an influence to me than visual art,” he declares.In fact, Spångberg is so committed to being genuinely contemporary that he’s thrown away his records and CDs and only listens to new music. The same goes for books. “For me, it’s all a matter of the practising of contemporary life,” he says. And that means throwing out some other old stuff too: systems, structures, the roles of artist and audience. Spångberg’s shows are the dance equivalent of the Occupy movement, and not just because there are some long-haired youths sitting around on rugs with guitars. “We have to produce something that neo-liberalism doesn’t know how to cope with, at all,” he says. Spångberg refers to his work as choreography, not performance; there’s a difference. “It’s a tool for organising time and space,” he explains, whereas performance is about being an entertainer. “And you are not here to be entertained.”All this means Spångberg is unlikely to have his dance moves appropriated by a leading R&B star any time soon, although after his experiences with Lune, he quite likes the idea of being a rock star. “I’m quite excited about exploring the possibilities that a rock stage can offer. It is also quite fucking fab to play in front of 12,000 people.”There is actually already a choreographer who embraces the intoxicating energy of the rock gig and gets his audience moshing in the stalls: Hofesh Shechter’s full-throttle Political Mother show has a stage of drummers and electric guitars kerranging at seat-shaking volume. But this is not Spångberg’s thing. He puts it less tactfully: “Absolutely totally worthless choreography.” For him it’s old-world stuff, about representation and not form. Spångberg wants us to question what choreography can be, not give us what we already know. “The dance to come is an altogether different one, not even I can predict,” he says. Beyoncé, can you handle this?

By Lyndsey Winship

Open for comments.
3 comments.

Zagfan11 06 July 2013 4:40pm Recommend

As a professional choreographer I am disappointed with the trash that some people call art.

Art should represent the beautiful and what inspires us in life. The art itself should speak to us in such a way that it talks to us and can actually change our lives.

It should be well thought out and not some random ridiculous movement. There is a beauty to symmetry and pattern and design.

This type of work that lets an audience ignore it while it performs is stupid! Being on your phone or texting does not give you the opportunity to focus your mind.

You are just playing into the hyperactivity of society. It is too bad that anyone thinks this is art. It is – worthless – do it as a flash mob dance because the refined and well rounded artists and audience thinks this stuff has no purpose, does not inspire, and has nothing to say except some self lazy point..

Please just play out back and keep this junk off the stage.

How is it that the stupid get ahead while those of us that can actually choreograph can,t.

Is big brother messing with the arts!! Absolutely!

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RainyIsland

06 July 2013 5:40pm

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1

I find the analogy to the Occupy movement misguided. Occupy was all about community decision-making. What you are writing about is a single Nihilist ego.
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warlop 07 July 2013 10:06am Recommend

1

He’s not Danish.

by Contemporary Cruising |February 24, 2015 7:25 pm

Ellen Söderhult on AGON by Florentina Holzinger

Impulstanz offered a fabulous world premiere by Florentina Holzinger et al, an excellent piece that develops unpredictably and makes up for an interesting take on contemporary dance 2014. It is AGON, in farfetched but genius interpretations, an urgent exhaustion of the theme of struggle for recovery and the empowering and healing potential of intense physicality. Throughout the performance radically different ways of addressing this are proposed as drastically different activities, expressions and modes of performing are superimposed and transposed in and out of each other.

Instead of consistently staying with one protocol it rather changes everything all the time, including how the audience is addressed and what is put in the frame of a dance performance. The result is continuously surprising and throws me in between emotional states and ways of relating and making sense. The cohesion within the piece is created by relating to Agon in the sense of protagonist, recuperation through violence but also by it all coming from Florentina Holzinger in somehow autobiographical sense. Though, most of the time this autobiographical idea seems secondary, and most of the time I can not tell if it is her as a private person standing on stage reading us her personal notes or a continuation of a theatrical proposal or something in between. It doesn’t bother me, rather the way those “either or’s” are challenged is invigorating and appealing.

This piece makes me excited. It comes across as rigorously insistent on ignoring what is expected of it, without making that a purpose in itself. It seems not to care about what it looks or doesn’t look like and as such, it can fulfill dreams about things to stage in a fancy theatre in Vienna one did not know about. The displacement of the recognizable, the removing from context and expected meaning, functions as alienation. It opens for experiencing them as they are instead of through recognition. Where recognition is reaffirming the knowable, this kind of displacement makes things useless in relation to their original function, separates the purpose from the thing. In that sense, the ballet dancer warming up in the background and then doing a pas de deux in the boxing ring with Florentina Holzinger (in kick-boxing outfit and as herself), is taken out of the ballet tradition, the context of the opera, the ballet company, the narrative and the display of the good subbject. What is made visible is very different, and requires another way of perceiving it. It offers the spectator to create meaning on difference premises. When the audience is asked by the coach if anybody wants to challenge Holzinger in a fight, the audience is addressed as in a street performance, and when the very obviously planted accomplice begins the fight it is all of a sudden very clear that the fighting is in no way pretended. The kick-boxing match taking place within a dance performance, with strange layers of it being a part of a personal recuperation-narrative estranges not only the content but also the contract of the theatre. Through all this, it opens for newness that is not within what we already know and recognize.

A theater can feel like a strange place in 2014. From an audience perspective it can be considered as place for a break from screens, social media and as place for a state of being that is both passive – like a hostage or a prisoner staying put in ones seat quietly, upright and attentive and as always in Vienna policed so that we don’t take photos or behave inappropriate – and hopefully also active. Active in the sense of making sense, having an experience, ungrounding ones understanding of truths and reality. It is a creation of meaning that is to a certain extent an individual work, that is done collectively and through sharing an experience. A shared experience that is also singular in the sense of what it produces for each and everyone. What AGON offers is not a place for safe identification with ones pre-conceived understanding of things but rather an opportunity for good old alienation. Even so, it manages to be intuitive and inspiring.

Even though including some kind of narrative and quite a lot of speech, it detaches from dramatic theatre through activities like the fight that is obviously not fake and clearly includes actual pain and exhaustion. This fight makes me consider everything that is going on in front of me as what it is, and nothing necessarily representing anything else than that. It makes things exciting to look at Holzingers piece from such a perspective: to watch a dance as an object more than as a way to express something else (like f.ex heterosexual love). the physical exhaustion become a body state that is universal rather than exclusively a narrative component in a psychological drama designed to be understood in one way only. The subjects of exhaustion, healing, intensity is instead presented so that they become like objects for me to experience and reflect upon.

However objectified the activities might be, I appreciate Holzingers decision to appear as herself and be accompanied in her solo-project. It can be seen as an important acknowledgement of the fact that we are not authentic selves but become ourselves in interaction and exchange with others and the environment. Also, thanks to the five brilliant additional performers in very different roles or functions the performance manages major shifts from united and explosive chaos, through multiple activities and agendas activated simultaneously, to energetic and great group dancing in togetherness and not. In other words drastic shifts of both space, attention, temporality and atmosphere. Even when dancing together what is expressed is not in accord – the dancing is going on with different but other agendas than to express. Expression IS, but the manipulative impossibility of controlling the interpretation of expression seems forsaken. Instead, they carry on with their respective agendas while dancing and the expression produced is altered and manifold.

The two minute showers of violent physicality in the kick-boxing match is contrasted by the breaks in between and is a part of the unsettled overall dramaturgy – clouds of intensively vibrating energy and physical exhaustion in all its sweatiness and heavy breathing countered by confession-like attempts on an elegy, while the ballet dancer simultaneously is performing a sort of slow violence in the back of the room. The warming up and the private conversation interrupting the elegy-attempt is only a few of the many activities performed on the “off-stage-on-stage”. Other such activities are smoking water pipe and slamming side doors or changing clothes.

If we live in times of anxiety, in times where chock value and surprise, social media and pop culture is dominant, it is not impossible to think that much art is created in a try to go against or provide an alternative to this mode of oversaturation and avoidance of boredom. If pop culture is all about consensual acceptance and maximum profit through chock, spectacle and marketing the eccentric individual (basically all the opposites of what already Rainer considered the essence of dance), it is not completely unreasonable to feel a need to contemplate on something that would never get ones attention outside the theatre. That sort of binary antagonism could however be said to in some way reinforce what it opposes. It is generative to read the intensive and dense performance of Holzinger as an all together other proposal, not a negation of something, not a continuation of art history’s negation as creation but as a completely different proposal. It is as if Holzinger were assuming an utopian reality, without making a deal out of it and without letting this become the subject of the performance, or the performance become a comment upon something. It avoids becoming about anything else than itself. Agon is not like pop culture, it is just not the opposite of it either.

It is a dance performance, but a dance performance that changes what a dance performance is, through its lack of adaptation to what I recognize as trends in style and approach to contemporary dance. The not too perfect, but very specific dancing, talking and being on stage in some aspect challenges the idea of the theatre as a place for admiration, identification and being amazed over beauty, skillfulness or cleverness. For dance as a western art form, with its history of easily becoming about technical perfection and the display of the good subject (f.ex. delicate, well-behaved, rich, beautiful, 16-year old girls and princes), it is specifically interesting to push the expression in a way that is not about perfecting. Perfection could also mean cementation, reaffirmation of the aesthetic rules, trends or truths approaching essentialism. In the show other reasons and ways of pushing a body than to achieve perfection in a dance technique that is recognized by a patriarchal and racist culture is definitely bravely invested in. In the same way the superpositioning of the kick-boxing and the ballet training is interesting as two takes on violence (and pain) – one very direct and for some empowering, one as a kind of slow violence through a different kind of discipline and a constant relation to the ideal, though, of course, also possibly empowering for some. When Holzinger does the supporting in a part of a pas de deux that looks very much like what is available on youtube from Balanchines version of Agon, it removes enough context and meaning to alienate and trigger questions. The effortlessness displayed by the ballet dancer, and the exhausted kick boxer brings to my attention violence to ones own body, violence in history, structures and systems. The gap in-between what it is and what it looks like as well as what truths or taken for granteds an opinion is coming out of is highlighted.

If one consider feminism defined not only by women getting equal rights to men, but as a much bigger question concerning the invention of new ways of living together, it includes valuing traits that are traditionally seen as feminine higher. It is then nice that Holzinger doesn’t stay in any of the many states she passes through. There is respectful obedience, violent fighting, violent dancing, kicking and hitting. There is also display of emotional vulnerability, doubt, confusion and softness. When displayed in the same performance by the same person I feel optimistic about a feminism that bothers to try to change what is recognized and appraised, feminism that is not only about the oppressed taking space but also about the oppressors realizing their position, giving space and recognizing other values. Rather than trying to copy or embody a thinkable male stereotype Holzinger ignores what might be expected of a female body on stage. Expectations on female passivity are crushed and the “appropriate” from a normative perspective is let down.

There are important differences between a kick boxing fight that is essentially a game, an agreement with a very elaborate contract and violence outside those frames. Despite that, it is somehow difficult for me to deal with the fact that they are hitting each other just a couple of meters away from me. Even so, it brings my attention to the fact that I am passively part of an extremely violent world where oppressions and injustices doesn’t know any end. (There really seems to be no end to the physical violence instigated by the western world and economical interests). It is a somehow importantly irresponsible proposal, that doesn’t hide behind being correct or interesting in respect of trends and manners. It doesn’t tell me what to think about it, it doesn’t really make sense or finish what it started. It leaves me with fragments, echoes and empathies. It leaves me with work to do, in a state of energized confusion and excitement. It leaves me optimistic and with an interested “What just happened?”
2014

by Contemporary Cruising |February 24, 2015 6:59 pm

Performance art goes legit
Experiential works are showing up at fairs more and more, and a small selection of institutions and niche collectors are snapping them up.
By Gareth Harris.

Performance art is no longer a fringe activity in the art world: the genre is gaining momentum at art fairs worldwide with more and more galleries showing works that would once have been considered unsellable in the marketplace. But this field is still very much a specialist, niche area with only a small selection of major museums and a handful of collectors prepared to invest both financially and intellectually in “live” works that must usually adhere to complex sets of instructions provided by the artists. Most collectors subsequently turn to tangible items: documentation of performance works in the form of films and photographs.

Performance art’s arrival on the mainstream museum scene was confirmed last month by the inclusion of Tino Sehgal on this year’s Turner Prize shortlist for his exhibitions in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and at Documenta in Kassel last year. Having described the virtues of the other candidates—David Shrigley, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Laure Prouvost—the Guardian’s usually curmudgeonly art critic, Adrian Searle, said: “The insurmountable problem here is Tino Sehgal… a world-class artist in the way that the others are not, the bottom line is that Sehgal is already the winner.”

Visitors to Frieze New York encounter a work by Sehgal at Marian Goodman gallery first shown at the Manchester International Festival in 2011. The piece, the only work available on the stand, comprises a child actor posing as a manga character named Ann Lee, asking questions of visitors. The gallery declined to comment on the price or number of editions, but a trade source says that “Sehgal’s works now sell for at least $100,000”.

Meanwhile, Herald Street Gallery in London is showing Strangers, 2008-11, by the Argentinean artist Amalia Pica in the Art Unlimited section at Art Basel next month incorporating two actors who hold a string of bunting for hours on end (the price is undisclosed).

Visitors to last year’s Art Basel could acquire a limited edition video of Marina Abramovic’s 1977 performance of Imponderabilia for €180,000 from Sean Kelly gallery. The New York dealer restaged the work, where a nude man and woman make a doorway through which the public is forced to enter, at the Swiss fair. Kelly explains that the work is not sold as a “live” performance. “The video version was not available in the 1970s, but it was made available in the 1990s,” Kelly says, adding that both private and institutional collectors have acquired editions.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, artists including Bruce Nauman, Hermann Nitsch, Valie Export, Abramovic and Gina Pane made political, often shocking and, in many cases, deliberately anti-museum and anti-market performance pieces. RoseLee Goldberg, the curator and director of New York’s Performa Biennial, notes that museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Whitney in New York, have found—as they have researched their collections—that they hold extensive quantities of historic material connected with performance, from drawings to photographs and writing (The Art Newspaper, November 2012). Collectors in the performance field have, similarly, tended to buy objects associated with the actions, such as videos and photographs, rather than restage the performance pieces.

At Frieze New York, Lorcan O’Neill Gallery from Rome is testing the market for work by the emerging, London-based performance artist Eddie Peake by showing his new spray painting pieces (£9,000-£15,000) and a recent neon work (£16,000), rather than any “live” works. Last July, Peake presented a performance work featuring nubile, sexed-up men and women in the Tanks, Tate’s new performance and video art spaces housed in former underground fuel containers.

Even the established White Cube gallery shies away from selling Peake’s live pieces. An exhibition of the artist’s works, which closed last month at the White Cube Bermondsey gallery in south London, included studio-based works alongside an evolving performance piece, that was not “for sale in its current incarnation”, says a gallery spokeswoman. “Works likeTouch, 2012, for which the artist staged a naked game of five-a-side football do, however, follow a set of instructions and are therefore more flexible to restage. Eddie is still exploring the commercial potential of his performance works, all of which are documented through photographs and film.”

Such documentation and material appeals to private collectors, many of which still consider conceptual live works, devoid of physical objects and items, too challenging. Sadie Coles gallery in London represents the UK artist Spartacus Chetwynd whose work comes in different formats: some pieces exist only as performances, others as films of a performance, and occasionally as sculptural installations which can include props or costumes from specific performances.

“Each work is unique in its definitions and is therefore treated differently. There are no hard-and-fast rules,” says Coles. “As with many large-scale works of art, or works of art that require a slightly more complicated commitment, the main clients are museums or private foundations.”

A few major European and US museums own live performance works including the Tate, which bought Roman Ondak’s work Good Feelings in Good Times, 2003, at London’s Frieze Art Fair in 2004. The work involves creating an “artificially-created queue” using no more than 12 volunteers and actors. The Centre Pompidou in Paris owns Sehgal’s This Situation, 2007. Meanwhile, Klaus Biesenbach, who organised the retrospective of Abramovic’s work at MoMA in 2010, “tipped the balance about how people view performance art”, says Sean Kelly.

“Performance art is geared towards institutional collectors as most works in this medium require time, space and preparation. Performance artists rarely create pieces with the intention of having them staged in a residential context,” says the New York art adviser Todd Levin, the director of the Levin Art Group. Offering performance works at fairs is risky as the market is limited and may not guarantee a commercial return.

“There’s pressure to keep things fresh at art fairs. One reason Marian Goodman can present this Sehgal work at Frieze New York is because she has a local gallery where works by all the other artists she represents can be on display for viewing and purchase,” Levin adds.

Sehgal makes it particularly taxing: he sells his performance art pieces by means of verbal transactions in the presence of a lawyer with no written contract. Instructions on how to re-enact his works are delivered literally by word-of-mouth, with collectors under strict orders never to photograph or video his “constructed situations”.

“Sehgal’s impact is still being felt. He is certainly the one who has pushed this idea the furthest, not only in terms of the initial economic transaction (how to buy his work)… but also in terms of how the spectator is addressed differently in a work that literally speaks to your individual subjectivity,” says Catherine Wood, the curator of contemporary art and performance at Tate Modern in London.

This idea of selling “editioned live works”, as Wood calls them, has “become acceptable in the past five to ten years, where previously performance was seen as being anti-market and anti-institution”. The Scandinavian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset have made, and acquired, works in this vein. In 2012 the city of Rotterdam paid an undisclosed fee for their piece It’s Never Too Late to Say Sorry, wherein a male participant hollers the eponymous title in a busy street of the Dutch city once a week. “This performance will go on forever,” Elmgreen says.

“Values in our society in general are less and less bound to physical materials,” says Elmgreen, adding that the duo recently boughtKreuzberger Pfütze (Kreuzberg Puddle), 2001, by the German artist Kirsten Pieroth. The piece, consisting of instructions and a certificate, allows Elmgreen and Dragset to draw water from a puddle in Berlin’s western Kreuzberg district and pour it out in another city.

Acquiring and showing concept-based works can prove problematic from both a curatorial and commercial point of view. “I think perhaps in the private realm of collecting such ‘purchases’ are more a form of patronage, rather than an investment-oriented decision, and so inevitably have a smaller pool of potential buyers,” says Wood. “Other artists don’t necessarily mind having the score or photographic document of the acquired performance shown, but Sehgal has made this impossible, which makes his position more radical but harder to sustain as a tradeable commodity perhaps.”

Documentation methods, copyright and re-enactment remain highly contentious topics. Abramovic believes that original work should be copyrighted and that artists’ permission must be sought for re-performance. Chris Burden, famous for being shot in the arm with a gun as part of his 1971 work Shoot, does not allow his works to be re-enacted. His performances are therefore not for sale as “concepts”, says his dealer, Gagosian gallery.

There are collectors, however, usually with their own large-scale foundation spaces, that are acquiring live art works. The German collector Julia Stoschek produced and presented kWh, 2002-09 by Sehgal at her 2,500 sq. m exhibition space in Düsseldorf in 2010 as part of her “Here and Now” performance art programme. The Greek shipping tycoon Dakis Joannou is also thought to own a work by Sehgal.

One couple who have taken up the challenge is the Washington, DC-based lawyer Aaron Levine and his wife Barbara who own key performance-based works, including Light/Dark, 1977, a film by Abramovic which shows the Serbian artist incessantly slapping her then lover, the German artist Ulay.

The Levines are swayed by the notion of acquiring a “concept” behind a work which, in theory, could be acted out in their living room, saying that performance art amounts to a “different kind of viewing experience for the collector; it’s not something that you hang over the couch”. But buyer beware: this market is so underdeveloped, art advisors are cautious. “This area is so cutting-edge, we do not yet have any first-hand experience in the area for our clients,” observes Jeff Rabin of the New York-based advisory firm Artvest Partners.

by Contemporary Cruising |February 24, 2015 6:35 pm

Christian Margol introducing Michael Clark

The incredible dancers of the Michael Clark Company from London present revolutionary contemporary dance in which the worlds of classical ballet, modern dance and explosive rock music meet and coexist in perfect harmony in their work “come, been and gone”.

by Contemporary Cruising |February 24, 2015 2:05 pm

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer on Ryan Trecartin

There is nothing else in today’s art world even remotely like Ryan Trecartin’s videos. Copying and pasting a crazy collage of dialects and accents, the protagonists—so many young, sexually ambiguous, wig-wearing and face-painted chatterboxes—deliver compu-pop poetry about their chronic over-existence. It’s a sci-fi theater of the absurd for our manically paced YouTube era, a singular vision created by Trecartin in collaboration with his creative partner, Lizzie Fitch.

His movies take up the torch of forebears like George Kuchar, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, John Waters, Cindy Sherman, Alex Bag and Cameron Jamie. But, to Trecartin, apparent resemblances are merely superficial and retroactive; he is either uninterested or claims ignorance when any connections are made.

Born in Webster, Tex., in 1981 and raised in rural Ohio, Trecartin was what he calls “a tech major” (film/animation/video) at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, where he lived with a group of art students who came to be the core of his collaborative team. He attracted the attention of the art world in 2004 with his senior thesis, a video called

A Family Finds Entertainment, which was posted online—as all his videos tend to be. Two years later he was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, “Day for Night,” and his first feature, I-Be Area, screened at New York’s Elizabeth Dee Gallery in 2007. By all critical accounts, Trecartin and Fitch’s immersive, setlike video installations (dubbed “sculptural theaters”) stole the show at the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” survey in 2009. And their tour-de-force seven-part suite, Any Ever (2009-10), which was presented at museums around the world, fixed Trecartin in the firmament.

Throughout all the hoopla of this meteoric rise, Trecartin and Fitch have kept a conspicuous distance from New York, opting instead to live and work in Providence, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Miami and now Los Angeles, where they have been based since 2010. In L.A., Fitch-Trecartin Studios—the essence of sprawl, low and vast—occupies a warehouse just off the freeway in Burbank. Shooting recently wrapped for a new group of multichannel videos (his first since Any Ever) that Trecartin is presenting inside five freestanding sculptural theaters in “The Encyclopedic Palace,” curated by Massimiliano Gioni, at the 55th Venice Biennale. Retaining the awkward, blocky feel of its SketchUp origins, the L.A. set was one big room fragmented into themed zones replete with an enormous hot tub, a spinning bed, bleachers and at least a dozen disconnected toilets. But the set was deserted: party over. Trecartin and I spoke in April at his Los Feliz home and studio, where he had just resurfaced from his latest 30-hour-plus session editing these as-yet-untitled movies.

SARAH LEHRER-GRAIWER All of your videos are so layered and ambitious, I’m curious how you feel talking about a work when you’re still in the middle of it.

RYAN TRECARTIN Because I work so collaboratively, I never know what the works are fully going to be until they’re done. So I can’t really talk about them until then. It’s typical that the things I think they’re about end up being background linearities, or like a larger mesh across the movies. The most interesting concepts I’m working on at a particular time are not in the forefront of my brain; the script works as a vehicle to dig into deeper, non-frontal questions.

I structure the movies more to create opportunities or obstacles than as planned works. I definitely embrace the unintended, even in the editing. Often I discover plots or ideas that I didn’t know were there, and I then cut them into the work, altering the original script. I don’t title works until they’re finished.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Is this project for Venice a discrete work?

TRECARTIN It’s a first phase. I showed three movies in “Younger Than Jesus” and at the time I knew they were going to grow into a larger system of works, but I hadn’t conceived of Any Ever formally yet or its structure, which ended up being seven movies in total.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Are you at a comparable stage with this new work?

TRECARTIN Yeah, except that what I’m showing in Venice is complete in itself. I’ll continue to work with all the material we shot this spring and continue to shoot more, probably over the next couple of years. Instead of discovering its phase logic gradually through the process, Lizzie [Fitch] and I have planned the phases ahead of time, which changes the way we film and build sets. We’re deliberately challenging our process—the way we actually organize and make our ideas happen.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Do you mean logistically, as in the way you organize people?

TRECARTIN I mean everything. We now feel more of a responsibility to our work than we used to. Since 2011, we’ve had to think about continuing to exhibit our work and manage its installation so it shows the way we intend. (Our works are not easy to install.) I’m lucky to have a creative partnership where we believe in each other. You can do so much more with someone else than you can alone. One person’s ideas become less important, and it’s the exchange that matters. The nuance and particularity of how things are shared between people makes something special. I’m not interested in one-to-one ratios, but in what happens when many people’s associations merge in unexpected combinations.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Have you and Lizzie lived together since 2000, when you first began collaborating?

TRECARTIN Aside from gaps for logistical reasons, we pretty much have lived together the whole time. I’ve done everything with Lizzie. I have also lived near [artist] Rhett LaRue since 2000. The three of us have worked together, on and off, since 2005.

LEHRER-GRAIWER The movies are a focal point where your collaborative network converges.

TRECARTIN There’s this idea in these new scripts that an audience revolution takes place in which people are liberated. The movie supposes that if you ignore or abuse something long enough it’ll create an “I” and gain free will. The revolution generates multiple worlds that are interior, pioneering into consciousness rather than outward into space and matter. That begins an era of multiple, parallel worlds rather than one of leaders, audiences, crowds and mass.

LEHRER-GRAIWER The idea of making a sel—an “I”—out of ideas and nonhuman objects has been bubbling in your work for a while.

TRECARTIN That’s a very deep concept for me and shows up in all aspects of the work, even in the stand-alone sculptures that Lizzie and I make together, which I think of more as scripts, games, personalities or behaviors than sculptures.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Where did the “personality” for your new movie come from?

TRECARTIN I recently revisited some footage I shot back in 1999, basically right after The Blair Witch Project came out, when I was a senior in high school. It’s full of night vision. Watching my old footage now is so strange; people had a very different relationship to the camera. They didn’t want to be filmed. Then they either forgot the camera was there, which doesn’t happen now, or they narrated what they were doing. You can see how people’s relationship to the camera used to be really primitive.

These high school videos inspired a lot of this project’s content in a way that I’m not sure I’m comfortable with. I’ve started thinking about the footage in relation to anthropology.

LEHRER-GRAIWER How so? As in going undercover in a subculture?

TRECARTIN Anthropology is one of those things that eludes me. The “study of humans” could mean anything. I’m interested in the way people simultaneously negotiate divergent presentations of themselves for a variety of contexts. American culture has always had people in occupations that have to do that—politicians, PR agents, narcs.

LEHRER-GRAIWER You play a character in the new movie who I’ve heard referred to by your collaborators as the “dick director.” What kind of director is that character and what kind of a director are you?

TRECARTIN My character was commenting on everyone’s delivery of their lines in a very linear and aggressive way, like that person just said this and here’s my response posted on a message board. He was very into stopping or blocking things from happening by narrating them in real time.

That’s the character’s agenda; as a director, I shoot from scripts very linearly. A script might be 15 pages and I just go straight through, line by line. Normally I don’t show anyone the script. Sometimes lines are assigned to people ahead of time and sometimes not. Sometimes I direct body language or encourage an accent. I used to break the script down into short lines five or six words long, and have someone say them over and over. They would say them so many times that they might forget what they were saying.

This time I fed people paragraph-long lines and told them to say what they thought I said back to the camera. That kind of distortion of the script has been important. It’s a very intense thing to put someone through. I’m asking for a lot of trust and I take that trust very seriously.

There were about a hundred people in this project, half I know well and half I’ve never worked with. The sets were built in a warehouse and are not domestic scale. I learned that the amount of physical space between you and a wall is significant. I was shocked by how much the space changed acting behaviors and me as a director.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Was the spaciousness freeing?

TRECARTIN No, the opposite! Free isn’t the right word. The architecture created a situation where people felt they should project, even though we miked them individually. It’s different than yelling. Someone trying to project their voice out is less subtle in their body. I try to avoid theater associations like projection. I like things that feel real, even if someone’s acting completely psycho, it should be convincing as a person being animated and bizarre. I only like put-ons when they are used to communicate an idea.

LEHRER-GRAIWER It seems like another important directorial decision was to shoot at night.

TRECARTIN But we always shoot all night long. That started years ago because I hated setting up lights; it ruins the flow. Night shoots are the easiest way to make sure no light comes in the windows.
I also realized that at night people are less likely to get phone calls and e-mails. The performances I’m looking for require being possessed and falling into a fragile zone that is easily ruined. On nighttime shoots, people are more in touch with edgier, perverse thoughts. Their associations are different than daytime associations. Unpredictable and repressed things come out when people get really tired.

LEHRER-GRAIWER That nocturnal quality feels timeless, the same way the sets are a no-place place. That unlocatable space is very specific to your videos.

TRECARTIN I don’t ever establish location when I’m shooting. Instead of a person saying something within a space, I want to think about the space being on top of or framing the words.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Does that pose a relationship between place and media? Or maybe place is just data located in a box or hard drive.

TRECARTIN I’m actually trying to think past technology at this point and more about creative desire. People want to feel situated and located, but they don’t want to feel like they’re a slave to anything. To deal with limitations of place, characters in the movie make “fourth-wall generators,” “fifth-wall randomizers,” “location situators” and “consciousness expanders,” forcing old forms of exchange into scenarios that allow something to be broken. I’m interested in establishing a structure of obedient behaviors so that obedience can trigger destructive impulses.

LEHRER-GRAIWER And give way to disobedience?

TRECARTIN Yeah. The first phase of this project is supposed to be like level one in a gaming system, where human ancestors are accessed as information. It’s a game and it’s also a university. In the first level of the game, no one has a name—or rather, everyone’s named Jenny at first.

LEHRER-GRAIWER How do you specifically address the idea of mainstream American youth culture? The world of this new movie seems to be overtly fratty, sorority, college, MTV, spring breaker-esque.

TRECARTIN And it’s accessed in a way that’s super-reduced and basic. The idea that “pop” and “mass” are more a constructed, marketing idea than a lived reality keeps coming up in the movie. Characters constantly say they don’t want to go Top 40 because they want to be niche and pick their own fans. They refuse to be filtered through a sense of “mass.”

LEHRER-GRAIWER Has this new body of work been influenced by the fact that you’ve been living in L.A.? You have a bigger budget and are using Hollywood professionals for the first time—like set builders and some professional actresses. Is your “dick director” character modeled on a Hollywood type?

TRECARTIN No. Directing happens in all fields, not just movie-making. I was thinking of my director character more as an animator. In this movie, humans evolve into animations. Then the animations generate their own free will. It’s suggested that, in the movies, no one is human after all, but just animated. However, basing the design of the set on different television conventions was in my mind because of being in Los Angeles. Sitcoms and game shows always shoot from the same angles where one wall, the fourth wall, is missing. We positioned several open sets around a central stage so it became a continuous 360-degree situation: no inside, no outside, no separate audience position, no clear delineation of roles, on or off stage.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Is that different from your previous movies?

TRECARTIN I’ve always done 360-degree sets, but this is the first time I took the idea outside of a domestic space. There were multiple cameras. If you were helping with the shoot you were in costume too. The crew, who appear in the shots, wear sweatshirts with the word “Witness” on them. They also wear green hats, because I associate green-screen color with production; there is a lot of green-screen color that I’m not keying out. My character also wears a Witness sweatshirt. He’s the most vocal Witness, though everyone in the sweatshirts is really part of the same conglomerate character. That character is the point of access for us viewers.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Your work has generally taken a positive, optimistic outlook on the prospect of subject formation today, despite the homogenizing force of global corporate culture. Does this movie take a darker turn?

TRECARTIN I do think I’ve taken a darker turn. I generally feel very positive, but pretty soon I think there are going to be basic freedoms and rights that we’re going to have to fight for.

All my movies have addressed that tipping point where one freedom replaces another. This has a lot to do with surveillance—not video camera surveillance, but the surveillance of people’s activities, and the creation of algorithms that allow programs, companies or governments to understand what you like, buy or own. I think this is exciting and scary. Rhett sent me an article about the automation of the court systems, suggesting computers could do a better job of judging a crime than humans. Now that sounds scary to me because, personally, I like feeling that if I had to I could talk my way out of something. Clearly we’re going to evolve into something beyond what we are now, so it doesn’t really matter.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Could you say more about that?

TRECARTIN Once technology makes it possible to alter our brains, we’re going to. Not everyone will. There will be more than one species of what are now humans. That split might follow class lines. Who knows? In the past couple of years I’ve felt like the outcome is not set. I feel more angst and anger than usual.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Does that angst correspond to your own trajectory of rapid success?

TRECARTIN I’m sure it does in some ways. But I try to only pay attention to expectations coming from my friends and peers, the people that I really care about. I don’t really have anything in particular to say about art-world success, because for the most part I feel extremely lucky and excited to have the resources to be able to focus on making art.

I felt a similar angst and anger during the making of I-Be Area [2007]. I think it’s a phase. When I made A Family Finds Entertainment [2004], I was in a very positive state. With I-Be Area, I rebelled and made the process hard on myself. After beating myself up during I-Be Area, Any Ever [2009-10] came out in a very natural, inspired way. Any Ever has perversion and darkness but generally embraces the attitude that as long as you stay aware and utilize things that are happening to and around you, you’re still free.

This new project focuses more on basic human interactions, blending the lines between controlled experience and complete breakdown.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Breakdown as a way to get perspective?

TRECARTIN Yeah, to disassociate and fall apart. When a relationship stops being challenging and starts coasting, usually someone breaks the other person or themselves. Maybe humanity doesn’t actually like stability all that much.

LEHRER-GRAIWER You brought Parkour guys on set. Parkour stunts evolved out of military training on obstacle courses, right? And the whole spring-break vibe is very American. I’ve heard that a lot of props on your set were weaponized, like earmuffs stuffed with razor blades, as though any depiction of “mainstream America” would have a bellicose dimension.

TRECARTIN That’s a big part of it. People in the movie talk about funding wars as if that were a badge. Characters are always talking about how they’ve weaponized things, even family members. I weaponized the party gear, like big red Solo cups that shatter, to mirror the idea that something pleasant, communal and social can be used as a weapon.

LEHRER-GRAIWER You’re a fan of the TV show Killer Karaoke, which imposes risk-taking to exaggerate performance. Has that influenced this project?

TRECARTIN I love that show! It definitely inspired my directing style for this movie, now that I think about it. Movement didn’t happen like it used to in my work because shooting on one big open set actually produced a trapped feeling; so risk had to instigate movement.

A lot more happens in real time in this project. Normally I shoot to create material for the editing process, not for the live performances. This was different; the raw footage is really fun to watch.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Is that partly because you used some professional, celebrity actresses?

TRECARTIN We just used a few. I wanted to work with Molly Tarlov [from the MTV show Awkward], Aubrey Plaza [from Parks and Recreation] and Alia Shawkat [from Arrested Development]. Natalie Love and Jena Malone are in it, too. Jena was already a friend beforehand. I have always loved actresses in secondary roles who you wish were onscreen more.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Were they familiar with your practice?

TRECARTIN I don’t think so, except for Jena, but they watched it and said yes. It wasn’t that different from directing friends, which was great. They were good at saying something that sounds absurd and delivering it with a sense of decisiveness and confidence that’s controlled yet belligerent.

LEHRER-GRAIWER Do you think their age is part of why they were such a good fit?

TRECARTIN Yeah, they’re all generally my age or younger. I’m 32. People born in the ’80s, particularly ’86 and after, really do have a different way of accessing performance.

I’ve always been very unnostalgic about history, which is just as creative and malleable as the future. I don’t

think people need to be hung up on accuracy. A larger objective history is just not important. I think we’re moving into a world where, as everything gets captured and recorded, we’re gaining a new sense of time. Someday we’ll be able to time travel through information. The focus will then shift to intention and feelings.

I used to be fine with the idea that we supposedly make things to be maintained for history, but I don’t think that will matter in the future. If you’re making something for history or legacy or the ages, it’s in vain. The only thing that matters to me at this moment is making things for the present—and the future. It’s not about becoming a part of history. Timelessness is a romantic throwaway.

Currently on view Ryan Trecartin in “The Encyclopedic Palace,” at the 55th Venice Biennale, through Nov. 24.

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is a Los Angeles-based writer.