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).

Destricted is the first short film collection of its kind, bringing together sex and art in a series of films created by some of the world’s most visual and provocative artists and directors. They reveal the diverse attitudes by which we represent ourselves sexually.

Destricted acts as a platform for all forms of uncensored artistic expression as it manipulates and embraces the expression of sex through art.

The Destricted brand is the first in a continuing series. The eight films presented explore the fine line where art and pornography intersect. The films highlight controversial issues about the representation of sexuality in art; opening up debate of the question whether art can be disguised as pornography or whether pornography can be represented as art or something else altogether. The result is a collection of explicit, stimulating, challenging, provocative, strange, and sometimes humorous scenarios that leave it up to the viewer to deliberate, discuss, and decide.

Following its success at Sundance Film Festival and Cannes Film Festival Critics Week, Destricted will be released on DVD in the US on November 2 2010.

Films & Filmmakers:

Hoist: Directed by Matthew Barney
House Call: Directed by Richard Prince
Impaled: Directed by Larry Clark
We Fuck Alone: Directed by Gaspar Noé
Four Letter Heaven: Directed by Cecily Brown
Green Pink Caviar: Directed by Marilyn Minter
Scratch This: Directed by Sante D’Orazio
Cooking: Directed by Tunga

The issue of sexuality and transcendence touches on a fundamental conflict in art in general because, beyond mere appearance, behind it hides the general question of the relationship between reality (life) and imagination (image). And so the relationship between form and vision becomes a crucial issue for any artist dealing with sexuality and transcendence.

Which direction is a particular work going for? Does it answer the challenge with a praise of distance (form/transcendence) or with a demonstration of intimacy (life/sexuality)? The answers to these questions are so varied because, in addition to the paradigms inherent in the theme, the concept of desire is of central importance here. The general idea is kept open, both in respect of a desire for an ideal mental clarity, intellectual penetration and clarified form, and in respect of a desire for an ideal of realism, emotional directness and dissolution of form. Something Janus-like clinging to desire means that the two poles of sexuality and transcendence can be reflected within each other. The desire for the two things, sexuality and transcendence, dominates our existence; it is the driving force behind our earthly performance and, especially for artists, the search for an appropriate form.

Jeff Koons – Baloon Rabbit (violet), 2005-2010

The exhibition presents nineteen work groups with a total of 150 individual works in twenty rooms on four floors of the PinchukArtCentre. The staircases of the building are used as art spaces for the first time with installations by Jenny Holzer; the central stairwell features an in-situ piece with her famous texts from the series Inflammatory Essays and a second staircase houses a work with LED.

Takashi Murakami – Hiropon, 1997

In addition, for the first time ever, the PinchukArtCentre utilised the historical Bessarabskiy market hall located opposite for an eighty-meter-long frieze by AES+F, a group of artists from Moscow. With its intense sociocultural flavour and distinctive architecture, this historical site, which is of great importancse for Kiev, provides an ideal public counterpoint to the artistic message propagating a new hybrid aesthetic of fusion.

Takashi Murakami – Lonesome Cowboy, 1998

Artists in this show include among others: AES, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

This year Schaulager is presenting Drawing Restraint by Matthew Barney. Drawing Restraint is a series of performances, numbering sixteen thus far, in which Matthew Barney leaves traces in an environment of self-induced physical and psychological restraints. Works emerging from these performances, such as sculptures, vitrines, drawings and videos, are juxtaposed in the Schaulager exhibition with works of art from the Northern Renaissance.

The basic idea of Drawing Restraint is that form can only take shape when it struggles against resistance. Drawing Restraint was initially conceived such that its apparatuses would frustrate the ease of drawing. The first performances consisted of environments with ramps, sloping surfaces, elastic belts and obstacles that expressly served to restrict the artist’s skill.

As the series developed, the setting of the performances became increasingly sophisticated and the narrative more allegorical.

Objects deriving from the performances capture certain aspects of the action as “secondary forms“ – drawings, sculptures, vitrines and photographs. These objects are never random but always carefully selected and arranged. Each action is also documented on video.

About Schaulager: Schaulager was created in Basel in 1933 by the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation. It is an institution dedicated to contemporary art – its conservation, research and dissemination.
It is a new kind of space for art. It is neither museum nor a traditional warehouse. Schaulager is first and foremost a response to the old and new needs for the storage of works of the visual arts.