Misinterpretative dance.

May 25, 2018 7:40 AM

In the last several decades, performance art—or at least the evocation of “performance art”—has somewhat unexpectedly wormed its way into popular music.
posted by spaceburglar (20 comments total)

A lot of navel gazing wind up that led nowhere (the article, not performance art per se).
posted by jdfan at 8:03 AM on May 25, 2018 [3 favorites]

Q: Why are pop stars trying to be performance artists?
A: Because they can.
posted by goatdog at 8:11 AM on May 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

Q: How many performance artists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: I don't know -- I didn't stay for the whole thing.
posted by Capt. Renault at 8:20 AM on May 25, 2018 [19 favorites]

David Bowie, Yoko Ono, Klaus Nomi, Laurie Anderson - I can think of a lot of antecedents here.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:32 AM on May 25, 2018 [8 favorites]

David Bowie, Yoko Ono, Klaus Nomi, Laurie Anderson - I can think of a lot of antecedents here.

Kate Bush
posted by NoMich at 8:36 AM on May 25, 2018 [5 favorites]

Somewhat unexpectedly...over the past several decades...

OK.
posted by davebush at 8:40 AM on May 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

Unexpectedly, artistic expression has wormed its way into the expressions of artists.

And, unexpectedly, the commercialized versions of these forms are found wanting.
posted by mondo dentro at 8:45 AM on May 25, 2018 [8 favorites]

I think Fischerspooner's unexpected popularity right around the same time as the rise of Cirque du Soleil really brought interpretive dance and performance art into the mainstream. Electronic artists with elaborate stage setups and Kanye probably also pushed it forwards.
posted by sleeping bear at 9:04 AM on May 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

The article is weird, it meanders and then attacks a particular piece of performance art for using a lot of symbolism without spelling it out for the viewer. Oddly it never asks whether the album’s lyrics have any reflection on the performance, and doesn’t bother asking the artist, whose views are evidently as relevant as those of a trombone. It’s just a complaint.

There’s a lot of interesting questions in the phenomenon of music artists doing performance pieces - the economics of concerts and the constraints of speech in the music industry are two that seem much more interesting than this bland musing - but these aren’t asked. So we’re left as nonplussed as the author was. Go figure. Does that make the article a form of performance art?
posted by graymouser at 9:08 AM on May 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

I think we're supposed to get off the author's lawn?

It's not just that there's a ton of antecedents (which there certainly are). I would bet that there are things that would fall under this "performance art" umbrella that she's not classifying as such, because it's being perpetrated by artists she is more in tune with, so that's just, like, what they do, you know? Not performance art.

Looking at her article about Her Ten Best Albums of 2017, she's got Björk right in there, and just about her entire solo career has been a blend of music and performative works. And yet, this article doesn't mention Björk. I wonder why.
posted by curiousgene at 9:17 AM on May 25, 2018 [4 favorites]

> David Bowie, Yoko Ono, Klaus Nomi, Laurie Anderson - I can think of a lot of antecedents here.

So did the author. RTFA.
posted by ardgedee at 10:08 AM on May 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

"Performance Art", as a term coined to denote a genre, dates back to the 1960s to describe artists working from the late 1950s onward, so performance art as such is pretty much contemporary with rock and roll; for each to influence the other, especially since they're both stereotypically about audacious displays of various kinds, shouldn't be particularly surprising.

I feel like the author only did half a job here, namedropping a bunch of stuff and checking out. She could have elaborated on these links, and how and why they occured, but it's not there. This reads more like a proposal for a longform piece than a standalone essay.
posted by ardgedee at 10:17 AM on May 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

So did the author. RTFA.

Fair enough, but the author misses the point - none of this is specific a feature of the "last several decades".
posted by ryanshepard at 10:30 AM on May 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

I think that you could make a case for the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour (the movie, not the album) being recorded performance art; much of the film is about a bunch of middle class Englishpeople touring the countryside, and although some of the film consists of conventional musical numbers, you also have one number ("I Am the Walrus") performed by the Fab Four wearing proto-furry costumes.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:08 AM on May 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

Thought for sure there might be some Maddie Siegler/Sia or Die Antwoord...it's a little odd to me that Lady Gaga doesn't mention Bjork in the context of stunt clothing.

But musicians as massively successful as Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Jay-Z, and A$AP Rocky can’t effectively rattle the culture because they are the culture.

So they can steer it. I don't understand the point of this essay, it's either three times too long or three times too short.
posted by rhizome at 11:17 AM on May 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

So, what am I missing here, exactly? Is there some definition of "performance art" that is different from what I have in my mind? I think about the current U2 tour with its middle section that involves a giant video screen that can be walked around inside of while video plays so there's a live person actually INSIDE the video content, and which is also hanging above the stage so people can be outside of it and interacting with both the video and the person who is inside the video... Is that performance art? Or is it not performance art because it can be done repeatedly?

Or I'm thinking of one of the NIN tours I saw which had three layers of transparent LED screens that were in front of and running through and behind the band and which featured generated video content that was reacting to the band while they performed, not pre-programmed.

Like, what is "performance art" and what is just a performance that is artfully presented? Or is there even a line?
posted by hippybear at 6:18 PM on May 25, 2018

I've always thought that performance art is art that has to be embodied in some respect by the living artist (and/or their proxies) but isn't a narrative or song, or a series of same, in the usual sense. As with any art form or medium, there probably isn't (or shouldn't be) any sort of clear line between quote-endquote performance art and more traditional musical or theatrical performances.

Of course, the resistance to fitting into easy categories, plus the resistance to easy interpretation, can lead people to believe that a lot of (if not all) performance artists are just a bunch of arty-farty types fucking around, even more so than your usual flingers-of-paint-at-canvas types. If nothing else, generations of lazy sketch comedians have no doubt appreciated the grist, not to mention people who believe that public funding should be cut for any art that doesn't non-satirically portray bald eagles, the flag, veterans, or Jesus.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:08 PM on May 25, 2018

I can't really fault this piece. I don't think she was aiming at an in-depth piece on the topic, just sharing an observation on her perspective. I think she nods to the antecedents and timeframes sufficiently. And I think a key point here (from her perspective) is when she states "For pop stars, engaging in performance art feels less about conveying something new and meaningful to their audiences and more about imbuing their careers with the kind of seriousness previously reserved for less commercial artists.". I think that's true for some. There is a lot of appropriation with little value or progression added.
posted by spaceburglar at 9:57 PM on May 25, 2018

I'm of the opinion that it was 3x too short, and it should have involved actual research and reporting on what had gone on in the past and how this was new or different involving actual examples. This was more of a blog post than an actual New Yorker article on this topic.

Maybe The New Yorker will assign her to expand on this and we could get some real reporting on this rather than whatever-this-is.
posted by hippybear at 10:20 PM on May 25, 2018

Yeah, I guess I should have tempered my grouchiness: I don't hate the piece, and on rereading I feel like it was meant to just be a short review of A$AP Rocky's livestream with enough contextualization for the critic to demonstrate that she's trying to weigh the work fairly while panning it. So that's fair.

But I felt frustrated by the threads it dropped. Aside from describing the A$AP Rocky livestream it didn't tell me much about a subject that I was once more interested in but for which my knowledge is now a few decades out of date, and it dangled a premise that's hardly new but deserves to be updated. What context does A$AP Rocky's livestream derive from? A piece of art can fall short of greatness but deserve attention because of what lead to its creation, and the future it implies. In this case, maybe it implies the relatively recent* engagement of black celebrity entertainers with performance art is interesting because of the traditional exclusion of nonwhites from gallery spaces, and how this is arguably a way to assert their legitimacy as artists deserving serious attention without having to submit to the conventional tastemakers. And that in turn reopens the issue of whether celebrities are using their popularity as a gold ticket that talented and deserving artists who aren't in the music industry can't get. It's an evergreen topic, repeatedly raised regarding Yoko Ono and John Lennon for almost fifty years and probably unresolvable in the way any argument will be regarding who is deserving and who isn't. But that doesn't make it less interesting or relevant, as long as it can still be timely.

*(I feel like Sun Ra and George Clinton, for two high-profile examples, could stand to be reappraised from a performance art context, but they don't seem to me as having been interested in leveraging their bodies of work for highbrow legitimacy in the ways the New Yorker critic is describing A$AP Rocky, Jay-Z and Kanye are.)
posted by ardgedee at 2:16 AM on May 26, 2018 [1 favorite]