Mori is fascinated by the way contemporary Japanese society balances technology, fantasy, and humanity. With an affectionate perspective on her native country, she explores the way fantasy and reality overlap in contemporary Japanese consciousness. Hers is a world where cartoon characters step out of comic books to stalk the real streets and real people withdraw from their grim routine to lose themselves in cartoon fantasies.

Play With Me (1994)

Mariko stands outside a busy Tokyo video store, dressed in form-fitting plastic armor and a cascading turquoise Barbie wig. She looks like a cross between a samurai waif and a robotic streetwalker who may have materialized from the video game beside her.

Tea Ceremony III (1995)

In this piece Mariko is an interplanetary geisha, dispensing tea to businessmen. Her ”office lady” uniform is regulation black, but her tight-fitting silver cap has pointy Martian ears.

Empty Dream (1995)

Mori digitally inserts herself four times into a photograph of Ocean Dome – the largest indoor theme park in the world, including an artificial beach, waves and all. Posing among happy Japanese bathers, Mori is costumed as a coy mermaid.  Hybrid creature, hybrid world; made for each other.

Birth of A Star (1996)

‘Birth of a Star”,  named for a television talent show, she is the demonic punk incarnation of the look-alike, sound-alike ingenue singers who are Japan’s premier teeny-bop idols.

Miko no Inori / The Shaman-Girl’s Prayer (1996)

In the video, which plays simultaneously on five small screens, Mori looks coquettishly extraterrestrial. With silver hair and menthol-blue eyes, she rotates and massages a glass globe in her hands as if conjuring the future. Outfitted entirely in white, the artist takes on the role of ‘alien’ (much like the being depicted in Last Departure) erotically caressing a crystal ball in her hands. All the while, Mariko voice can be heard singing an evocative ballad in her native tongue.

 Watch an excerpt of the video

Last Departure (1996)

Mariko assumes the same persona but is shown full length and in triplicate, enshrined inside a fabulous spaceship (actually a digitally morphed image of Osaka’s hypermodern Kansai airport). There’s an iconic cast to this triad: the figures suggest Buddhist Barbarellas.  They hold a glass sphere in their hands, much like a crystal ball used by mystics for telling the future – perhaps they have come to show us our destiny. The crystal ball also alludes to the 1980 novel Nantonaku Kurisutoru (Somehow, Crystal), by Yasuo Tanaka that describes the lives of fashion obsessed young women much like the young ‘cyborgs’ who patrol the streets of the Yamanote district in Tokyo.

 3-D video Nirvana (1996-97)

The title refers to the blissful emptiness that is the goal of Buddhist spiritual practice — Ms. Mori appears as the popular deity Kichijoten, in a peach-colored kimono and floating over a Dead Sea landscape tinted an acidic orange-pink. She executes a sequence of ritual gestures, accompanied by a band of cartoon musicians who zoom out toward the viewer before the whole scene dissolves into galactic mist.

Pure Land, from the Esoteric Cosmos series (1996–1997)

In order to participate in the aptly named experience, Nirvana, the viewer is led in to a dark room and asked to don 3D glasses before the film begins. The artist appears as a dancing Shaman dressed in a traditional ornate kimono and floating on a lotus flower. The Shaman is surrounded by pastel coloured elves called tunes, which each play a different Japanese musical instrument. Mariko hums and sings Japanese pop songs through a fuzzy echo chamber and the audience is treated to burst of cool, scented air on their faces. A crystal ball, much like the one featured in previous works, floats out of the sky and into the Shaman’s delicate hands.  The backdrop to Nirvana is a breath-taking view of the Dead Sea at dawn – empty yet pure.

Kumano (1997-1998)

Ms. Mori’s blend of eclectic religious symbolism, cyber technology and pop culture is well informed on all three fronts. And when she turns her attention to Japanese spirituality, as she does in the recent two-part ”Kumano,” the results are even more complex and erudite.

The work entitled Kumano is both a photograph and a film. The title refers to a Pacific peninsula in the south of Japan’s main island, a region of breathtaking natural beauty saturated in religious myth. It is the site of an important Buddhist pilgrimage circuit; legendarily Buddhist saints departed in boats from its shores in search of the Pure Land paradise. Also here are some of the country’s highest waterfalls, many of them worshiped as Shinto gods. The sun goddess Amaterasu, from whom the imperial family descends, has her shrine at nearby Ise.

In the ”Kumano” photo-mural, a purifying waterfall streams down through a grove of cedar trees; a high-tech forest shrine hovers like an apparition, as does Ms. Mori herself in the guise of the sun goddess with her symbolic mirror.

In the video, the image of the goddess flitting like a ray of light among the trees alternates with a scene of Ms. Mori performing the tea ceremony, whose elaborate etiquette she learned as a child. She gives it an unconventional tweak here by including an ancient bronze Chinese vessel among the utensils she uses, yet another indication of the hybrid, pan-Asian nature of much of her recent work.

Dream Temple (1997)

 Pratibimba (1998)

Mariko is dressed as Past, Present and Future (the three members of the Pratibimba triptych) performing Shinto rituals and running through the woods of the Wakayama Prefecture. The whole experience is made all the more enigmatic and enchanting due to the pretty, lilting songs the artist sings as she summons her audience toward the digital representation of the Dream Temple in the background.

WAVE UFO (1999)

Primal Rhythms 2007

Primal Rhythms is sponsored by  the FAOU foundation, a  nonprofit that Mori established in 2010. This project  focuses on uniting technology with ancient forces to create a harmonious, primal work on an island far from civilization.

The foundation’s mission is to explore nature and promote ecology through art. Primal Rhythms, involves a Plexiglas column, and the intimate engagement of a secluded community on the Japanese island of Miyako, part of the okinawa Prefecture. The end product will consist of the three-meter-high sun Pillar and the Moon Stone, a floating LED-equipped sphere, three meters in diameter. The pillar will jut up from a rock cluster in the island’s seven Light Bay from which it will cast a shadow over the water toward the shore that at the winter solstice will intersect with the Moon stone, anchored in the bay and changing color according to the phase of the moon and the tide. Once this Asian project is completed, Mori plans to bring site-specific works tailored to local cultures to five additional continents, beginning with South America.

Before officially beginning her work on Primal Rhythms, in 2007, Mori visited a number of sacred sites around the world and was especially intrigued by dwellings from the Jomon period in Japan—roughly 14,000 B.C. to 300 B.C.—which were associated with sculptural forms that later influenced her designs. “Two objects were always found in a particular area,” she says, “a round stone and a kind of small standing stone. The pair seems to me to be a symbol of regeneration, or a wish for help in harvest, or related to worship of the nature god. It’s probably a primitive stage of shintoism.”

Seven Light Bay will incorporate the Sun Pillar and Moon Stone. The pillar will be erected this month atop two pyramidal rocks in the bay. Originally, the plan was to carry it there in a large boat, but it was feared that the area’s precious coral would be harmed.

“Instead of placing this work in the city, I wanted to place it in the most rich nature, so that people have to travel to actually get in touch with nature and to understand that you are also the nature as well,” says Mori, who spends most of her time in New York. “I like these very ambitious projects—it’s my soul work—but my life work is to interact with the people in the city.”

Performance art is generally experienced live, but what documents it and ensures its enduring life is, above all, photography. Yet photography plays a constitutive role, not merely a documentary one, when performance is staged expressly for the camera (often in the absence of an audience), and the images that result are recordings of an event but also autonomous works of art. The pictures in this exhibition, selected from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, exemplify the complex and varied uses artists have devised for photography in the field of performance since the 1960s.

Many artists have experimented with the camera to test the physical and psychological limits of the body. Not all performances exert such dire demands on the body, although many have entailed a sustained emotional engagement on the part of the artists: Bas Jan Ader photographed himself crying for the camera, and Adrian Piper used photography to chronicle a physical and mental state induced by fasting and writing in isolation.

Adrian Piper
Food for the Spirit. 1971.
Gelatin silver prints, printed 1997, 14 1/2 x 14 3/4″ (36.8 x 37.5 cm) each.

Some artists enlisted the camera as an accomplice in experiments with identity.Vito Acconci used photography to record and then reflect on his attempts to feminize his body by plucking his body hair and hiding his genitals between his legs; and Lorna Simpson turned to the photographic archive as source material, combining found 1950s pinups with her own performative self-portraits, in which she emulates the poses, outfits, and settings of the earlier photographs.

Lorna Simpson
May, June, July, August ‘57/’09 #8
2009. Gelatin silver prints, 5 x 5″ (12.7 x 12.7 cm) each

The exhibition also presents political dissent enacted with the photograph in mind. Ai Weiwei took pictures of his hand, middle finger extended, in gestures of disrespect toward national monuments typically photographed by tourists, and Robin Rhode appears to interact with objects drawn in charcoal on dilapidated walls, exploring rites of consumerism and dispossession in his native South Africa.

Ai Weiwei
Study of Perspective – Eiffel Tower. 1995–2003. Top right: Ai Weiwei. Study of Perspective – Mona Lisa. 1995–2003. Bottom left: Ai Weiwei. Study of Perspective – Tiananmen Square. 1995–2003. Bottom right: Ai Weiwei. Study of Perspective – White House.
1995–2003. Gelatin silver prints, 15 5/16 x 23 1/4″ (38.9 x 59 cm) each.

Staging Action attests to the complex ways in which photography, with its ability to both freeze and extend a moment in time, pushes against the grain of mere documentation to constitute performance as a conceptual exercise that can be appreciated in the absence of a performing body.

Selected Artists:

1. Ana Mendieta

Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations)
January–February 1972
Chromogenic color prints, printed 1997, 19 1/4 x 12 3/4" (48.9 x 32.4 cm) each

2. Bruce Nauman

Studies for Holograms
1970. Portfolio of five screenprints,20 5/16 x 26" (51.6 x 66 cm) each

3. Rong Rong

East Village, Beijing, No. 8
1995. Zhang Huan performs Metal Case, Beijing, June 1995. Gelatin silver prints, 21 3/16 x 14 1/2" (53.8 x 36.8 cm) each.

4. Rong Rong

East Village, Beijing, No. 81. 1994. Zhu Ming performs in Beijing, September 1994. Gelatin silver print, 21 3/16 x 13 1/8" (53.8 x 33.3 cm).

5. Valie Export

Action Pants: Genital Panic
1969. Screenprints, 26 3/8 x 19 5/8" (67 x 49.8 cm) each.

6. Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman.

Untitled
1980. Chromogenic color prints, 15 x 23" (38.1 x 58.5 cm) each.

7. Lucas Samaras

Auto Polaroid
1969–71. Black-and-white instant prints, 3 3/4 x 2 15/16" (9.5 x 7.4 cm) each

8. Matthew Barney

Cremaster 3: Gary Gilmore
2002. Chromogenic color print in plastic frame. 53 1/2 x 43 1/2" (135.9 x 110.5 cm).

9. Laurel Nakadate

Lucky Tiger #151. 2009. Top right: Laurel Nakadate. Lucky Tiger #169. 2009. Bottom left: Laurel Nakadate. Lucky Tiger #181. 2009. Bottom right: Laurel Nakadate. Lucky Tiger #186.
2009. Chromogenic color prints with ink fingerprints, 4 x 6" (10.2 x 15.2 cm) each.

10. William Pope.L

Foraging (The Air Itself/Dark Version)
1995. Iris print, printed 2001, 34 1/2 x 31 1/2" (87.6 x 80 cm).

For the ninth installment of the Performance Exhibition Series, the artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla present Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano (2008).

For this piece, the artists carved a hole in the center of a grand piano, through which a pianist plays the famous Fourth Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, usually referred to as “Ode to Joy.” The performer leans over the keyboard and plays upside down and backwards, while moving with the piano across the vast atrium.

The result is a structurally incomplete version of the ode—the hole in the piano renders two octaves inoperative—that fundamentally transforms both the player/instrument dynamic and the signature melody, underlining the contradictions and ambiguities of a song that has long been invoked as a symbol of humanist values and national pride.

“I mopped the floor with my hair…The reason I’m so interested in taking my body to those extreme places is that that’s a place where I learn, where I feel most in my body. I’m really interested in the repetition, the discipline, and what happens to me psychologically when I put my body to that extreme place.”

“Loving Care”
1993
The artist soaked her hair in hair dye and mopped the floor with it.

Lick and Lather
1993
7 soap and 7 chocolate self-portrait busts, 24 x 16 x 13 inches each

“I wanted to work with the tradition of self-portraiture but also with the classical bust…I had the idea that I would make a replica of myself in chocolate and in soap, and I would feed myself with my self, and wash myself with my self. Both the licking and the bathing are quite gentle and loving acts, but what’s interesting is that I’m slowly erasing myself through the process. So for me it’s about that conflict, that love/hate relationship we have with our physical appearance, and the problem I have with looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘Is that who I am?’”

Gnaw
1992

Lipstick display; lipstick made with pigment, beeswax and chewed lard removed from lard “Gnaw,” and heart-shaped packaging tray for chocolates made from chewed chocolate removed from chocolate “Gnaw”.

“All of my objects sort of walk the line between sculpture, performance, and relic. Any time I use performance, it’s not so much my interest in performance but my interest in bringing you back to the making.”

Ene-Liis Semper points the camera at the intimacies of her personal life, observing subtleties of psychological and bodily experiences. Nevertheless, the final sequence of images is far removed from recent artistic strategies which show reality directly as an unmediated image, as if seen through surveillance or web cameras.

Having graduated from theatre art and design, Semper is clearly familiar with, on the one hand, strategies of staging, the progression of narratives and the building of dramatic undertones, and, on the other, the reinforcing role of visuality, its potentials and impacts. In her creative undertakings Semper distills the best of both fields ­ theatre and visual arts

Ene-Liis Semper likes to cast herself in the leading role. Whether the Estonian artist is testing out different methods for suicide (as in FF/REW, 1998) or living out hygienic obsessions in a white-tiled space (Licked Room, 2000), her concrete physical presence as an engaged body is the basis for videos that take their measure from reality.

Semper’s classic Oasis, 1999, seen at the Venice Biennale that year, in which a blossoming flower, together with its soil, is planted in Semper’s mouth–portraying the fusion of nature and the human body.

“Usually, I do not make stories about my real life,” the artist says. “Mainly my works are more like mental ‘results’ of my living here and now, not quotes of everyday situations, but I just could not resist the temptation to make a video of the situation I was in a couple of months ago with my very first baby, my beloved partner, and myself. The banality of the situation cut me out of my confiding happiness.”

Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by the history of art, by apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive mediums, live performance, and the virtual world. By using dated, passé, or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, such art embodies a longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past.

Christian Boltanski
Autel de Lycee Chases, 1986-87

From March 26 to September 6, 2010, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, an exhibition that documents this obsession, examining myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice. Drawn largely from the Guggenheim’s extensive photography and video collections, Haunted features some 100 works by nearly 60 artists, including many recent acquisitions that will be on view at the museum for the first time. The exhibition is installed throughout the rotunda and its spiraling ramps, with two additional galleries on view from June 4 to September 1, featuring works by two pairs of artists to complete Haunted’s presentation.

Joan Jonas
Mirror Piece, 1969

Artists: Marina Abramović, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Paul Chan, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon, Roni Horn, Joan Jonas, Sally Mann, Christian Marclay, Susan Philipsz, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, and Lawrence Weiner, as Well as Commissioned Performances by Sharon Hayes, Joan Jonas, and Tris Vonna-Michell

Marina Abramovic
Cleaning the Mirror #1, 1995

This beautiful video is a portrait of the life and work of Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta. Mendieta used her own body, the raw materials of nature, and Afro-Cuban religion to express her feminist political consciousness and poetic vision. Interview footage with Mendieta and her own filmed records of her earthworks and performances are incorporated to render a vivid testament to her energy and extraordinary talent after her tragic, untimely death in 1985. Spanish language version available.

Left: Silueta Works in Mexico 1973-78
Right: Tree of Life/Silhouettes series 1973-1980

Imagen de Yagul Ana Mendieta 1973

About De La Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space:

On December 2009 Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz opened a new space in Miami’s Design District to showcase their personal collection of international contemporary art. The 30,000 square foot structure designed by John Marquette serves as an extension of their home, which has been available for public viewing for the past fifteen years. The collection includes art from Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Allora and Calzadilla, Anna Gaskell, and Ana Mendieta among others.

Powerful Performance and Installation Art That Explores Issues of Exile, Displacement, and Instability

Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary. This is the first survey of her interdisciplinary work focusing on the relationship among art, politics, and life. Featured are her powerful, innovative installation and performance works created for various international venues over the past twenty years. (The museum has recreated those venues in a striking installation in two of its largest galleries.) In this show, the artist explores such urgent issues as exile, displacement, and instability — and individual and collective responses to them, from submission, fear, and endurance, to the hope for survival and possibility of self-expression. Multiple daily performances are included throughout the run of the exhibition.

Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginery was organized by Helaine Posner, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs of the Neuberger Museum of Art. “Tania Bruguera’s journey has taken her from the Cuban-themed body performances of the 1990s, through a series of major performance/installations that look at the social and political implications of such charged international sites as Havana, Kassel, Moscow, and Bogotá, to a new form called Arte de Conducta or behavior art, in which she stages live events meant to activate and engage viewer response,” Ms. Posner said. “Throughout her work, she uses her Cuban experience of cultural displacement and marginality as a prism through which to examine the mainstream and the individual’s often-difficult relationship to power.” Ms. Bruguera credits her teacher, the acclaimed Cuban artist Juan Francisco Elso Padilla (1956–1988), with providing inspiration for her work, stating ‘I took from him the idea that art had to be completely linked with life – and not a fiction or a virtual reality, but as alive as possible.

The Burden of Guilt, Bienal de La Habana, Cuba, 1997–1999
Coleción El Museo del Barrio, NY

The Burden of Guilt, first performed at the 1997 Havana Biennial, grew out of the colonial history of Cuba, in particular a story of a collective suicide by indigenous peoples under Spanish occupation who, legend has it, ate dirt until they died. In an homage that also represented an act of solidarity with contemporary Cuban dissidents, Bruguera appeared before an audience nude but for a skinned lamb carcass tied around her body and spent several hours ritualistically mixing dirt with salt water and ingesting it.

My art has to have a real function for myself, to heal my problems or to help other people to reflect and im- prove…’ “For Bruguera, art serves as testimony, social commitment, and emotional experience, and is, foremost, ethical at its core,” Ms. Posner observed. Tania Bruguera is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and was founder and director of Cátedra Arte de Conducta from 2003-2009, the first performance studies program in Latin America, located in Havana. Her work has been presented internationally at Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany; three Venice Biennales, and the Tate Modern, London; and included in exhibitions at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Kunsthalle, Vienna.

Neuberger Museum of Art

This performance retrospective traces the prolific career of Marina Abramović (Yugoslav, b. 1946) with approximately fifty works spanning over four decades of her early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances, and collaborative performances made with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). In an endeavor to transmit the presence of the artist and make her historical performances accessible to a larger audience, the exhibition includes the first live re-performances of Abramović’s works by other people ever to be undertaken in a museum setting.

In addition, a new, original work performed by Abramović will mark the longest duration of time that she has performed a single solo piece. All performances, one of which involves viewer participation, will take place throughout the entire duration of the exhibition, starting before the Museum opens each day and continuing until after it closes, to allow visitors to experience the timelessness of the works.

A chronological installation of Abramović’s work will be included in The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery on the sixth floor of the Museum, revealing different modes of representing, documenting, and exhibiting her ephemeral, time-based, and media-based works. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue that includes an audio recording of the artist’s voice guiding the reader through the publication.

Video: What is Performance Art?

Watch the performance live!

More info @ MOMA’s website