It shouldn’t come as a surprise that live performance art is the very rarest type of exhibit in art galleries and museums, especially performances that are designed to take place continuously from doors opening to closing each day.  In the 9 years that I’ve led gallery tours, I’ve been able to bring my groups to live performance artworks a total of only 3 times, the most well-received being Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s piece at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, in which pianists propelled a piano forward as they played a Beethoven piece while facing the piano keys backwards.

Therefore, one reason (of many) that my Sat. March 12 Chelsea “Best Exhibits” tour will be a can’t-miss event is that one of the seven extraordinary exhibits we’ll visit that day will be a live performance that happens continuously for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.  No food breaks, no bathroom breaks, no sick leaves.  The artist – who happens to be Chinese – will be there the entire time that the gallery is open, for the entire 5-week run of the exhibit, performing his creative task.  You’ll see the artist silently and continuously interacting with an enormous rock salt mound.  The second you enter the space, one of Chelsea’s more prestigious galleries, you’ll feel you have entered an alternate universe, with a vibe that will catapult you from your everyday experience.  Neither the installation nor the performance is for sale, which is itself a rarity in the gallery scene.

The world’s museums have only recently begun to embrace live performance art.  Arguably the biggest sensation of the museum season this year was the Marina Abramović retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, where two performance art pieces were of particular note.  In one, Abramović herself sat at a table in silence and stared in turn at whoever happened to sit across from her.  She did this each day from museum opening to closing, without a break, during the entire 2 ½ month run, supposedly an all-time endurance record for a performance art piece.  I felt powerfully affected when I witnessed this piece, even if essentially “nothing” was happening.  In a second piece that ended up being somewhat controversial, museum attendees passed through a “doorway” consisting of a nude man and nude woman that were so close to each other it was impossible for the attendee not to brush up against their bodies.

Last year the Guggenheim Museum, to great acclaim, filled its cavernous space with two day-long live performance pieces conceived by Tino Seghal.  My favorite of the two was a work in which each attendee was engaged by a child in conversation with the question “What is Progress?” then passed on to a young adult, and afterwards a middle aged person, and finally a senior citizen.  The conversation continued all the way up the Guggenheim’s famous spiral ramp, and as you can imagine entailed massive coordination among dozens of performers.  Years ago I brought my gallery tour to a different Seghal performance piece at Marian Goodman gallery, where he’s represented, in which 5 or 6 performers conversed among themselves thought-provoking topics, day in and day out (they did get relieved periodically by different shifts of performers).

With its 300 galleries for me to choose the top 7, Chelsea is always the most extraordinary tour I lead.  Two other brilliant stops on the March 12 tour besides the live performance piece will be a Polish artist’s immersive sound and video installation in which attendees will feel as though they are trapped in a building as gun fights rage outside in the street, and a female artist’s stunning and enormous abstract sculpture made entirely out of mylar and glue.

Man, I love my job.

Rafael Risemberg, Ph.D.
Founder and Director
New York Gallery Tours