Off the Wall

Between 21 May 2 and October, the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art will feature the exhibition ‘Off the Wall’, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and curated by Chrissie Iles, co-curator of the 2004 and 2006 editions of the renowned Whitney Biennial of American Art.

In twentieth century art innumerable artists have intersected genres and forms of expression, thereby reinventing the modes of artistic production. The artwork is no longer a mere painting or drawing to be hung on a wall, or a sculpture to be shown on a pedestal. The visual arts joined cinema, photography, sound experimentation and the arts of movement in new, ceaselessly redefined languages. From the famous, early twentieth century Ballets Russes to contemporary choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton or Deborah Hay, those intersections have brought about an extremely rich history. The arts of space (the visual arts in the strict sense) intersect with the arts of time (the entire range of the performing arts plus those that involve the moving image).

‘Off the Wall’ brings together more than one hundred works representing performative actions ranging from 1948 to the present. Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the exhibition is a new version of the show presented there in 2010, now enlarged with new pieces, some of which form part of the Serralves Collection. The show features works by renowned artists such as Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Jenny Holzer, Joan Jonas, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Longo, Robert Mapplethorpe, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Tony Oursler, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman and Andy Warhol, among others.

‘Off the Wall’ focuses on actions using the body in live performance, in front of the camera, or in relation to a photographic or printed surface, or drawing. Each action displaces the site of the artwork from an object to the body, acting in relation to, or directly onto, the physical space of the gallery. The wall and floor become the stage for these actions: walking on the wall, slamming doors, slapping hands against the wall, gathering sawdust up from the studio floor, walking on a painting, striding and crawling around a small cylindrical space, writing or drawing on the wall and floor, or performing a striptease behind the transparent plane of Duchamp's Large Glass.

The exhibition also includes a number of works that reveal the underlying theatricality of the performative action and the ways in which artists stage the self in images that question conventions of identity, gender, and the body. As curator Chrissie Iles notes, ‘The performative gestures that have been brought together in this exhibition demonstrate what can be described as the end game of modernism, in their various rupturings of the autonomous space of painting and its primary location – the vertical plane of the gallery wall. Their Oedipal parent was Jackson Pollock, whose drip paintings of the 1950s, made by moving around a canvas placed horizontally on the studio floor, prompted Harold Rosenberg to observe at the time that “at a certain moment, the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act … what was to go onto the canvas was not a picture, but an event.”’


Curator: Chrissie Iles