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).

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.

elles@centrepompidou is the third thematic exhibition of the National Modern Art Museum’s collections, following Big Bang in 2005 and the Mouvement des Images (Image Movements) in 2006-2007.

This will be the occasion for the institution, which has built up the very first collection of modern and contemporary art, to show its commitment to women artists, nationality and discipline taken together, and place them at the core of modern and contemporary art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

EXHIBITION ITINERARY

The show is hung in chronological order by themes. It brings together a selection of over 500 works by more than 200 artists, from the beginning of the 20th century up to the present day.

Pioneer
Level 5. Abstract, primitive, functional, urban, mixed media, surreal, amazons, objective… Eight rooms display the works of these pioneers who were at the forefront of change in all the artistic media: Shirley Jaffe, Joan Mitchell, Sonia Delaunay, Natalia S. Gontcharova, Hannah Höch, Frida Kahlo, Judit Reigl, Suzanne Valadon, Diane Arbus, Dora Maar.

Free Fire
Opening level 4. Niki de Saint Phalle, Karen Knorr, Rosemarie Trocket, among others, represent those who played historic roles, feminists, critics, photographers and performers, with their personal visions of reality.

Body slogan
Level 4. Precocious and inventive in photography and video, women artists have lately transformed the art of drawing, revitalising the very notion of body. ORLAN, Atsuko Tanaka and Ana Mendieta worked on the representation of the body and its stereotypes, notably that of the life drawing genre, as well as ways of staging it in their early performances.

The Activist Body
Level 4. Women artists played a key role in redefining visual and theoretical categories, and explored and commented on ways of bridging the abstract and the figurative, the organic and the systematic, the conceptual and the sensual. Typical among these was Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Vera Molnar, Valérie Jouve, Hanne Darboven.

A room of One’s Own
Level 4.Borrowing Virginia Wool’s title of her book dealing with questions about the conditions of art production, this part of the exhibition is gathering the works of artists exploring the notion of private space, weaving new connections between mental projections and exhibition space. Here we find Dorothea Tanning, Tatiana Trouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Sophie Calle.

Wordworks
Level 4. From story-telling to listing, through autobiography, quotations, legends and the many facets of the artist’s book, creative women like Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Natacha Lesueur, Cristina Iglesias, Eija-Liisa Ahtila explore the various uses of language in art. Concept Art, urban myths, appropriation and post-modernism all use words as a medium while video installations redefine the idea of story-telling.

Immaterials
Level 4. Matali Crasset, Alisa Andrasek, Tacita Dean, Louise Campbell, Isa Genzken, Nancy Wilson-Pajic, Geneviève Asse and more leave us with one of the most striking characteristics of contemporary art, namely its disembodiment. The title refers back to one of the Centre Pompidou’s cult exhibitions, “Les immatériaux” (Immaterials).

Centre Pompidou