Performance Now

On Friday, February 7, the Middlebury College Museum of Art will open the exhibition Performance Now, a selection of works by artists who practice a variety of art making procedures featuring videos, objects, films, and installations that document ephemeral occurrences. RoseLee Goldberg, art historian and curator of the exhibit, showed in her groundbreaking book Performance Art: From Futurism To the Present (1979) that performance is central to the history of 20th century art. In 2005 she launched Performa 05, the first biennial of visual art performance, and predicted that performance would become “the medium of the 21st century.” Performance Now deftly demonstrates that this medium’s time has come.

Performance Now features a preponderance of new performance works created since the year 2000, a period that has witnessed an exponential growth in the field. Bringing together 22 of the most significant practitioners today, the exhibit surveys critical and experimental currents in performance internationally, featuring key Performa commissions, and works by Marina Abramovic, Jérôme Bel, Spartacus Chetwynd, William Kentridge, and Clifford Owens, among others.

Together the works in the exhibition are an indication of the extent to which visual artists use performance as part of their creative process; how that process produces objects, installations, video, or photography; and how these mediums have been enlivened by the demands of recording performance in innovative ways. Exploring live performance, artists capture its ephemerality and transform it into new work that contains the power and content of the original.