Alexander Gray Associates inaugurated their new gallery space with an ambitious exhibition examining the art of public participation. What’s Left: Art Made by a Public is a cross section of art since the advent of conceptualism, showcasing performance art projects that are activated only through viewer engagement. Affected by the political and cultural turmoil since the 1960s, Allison Knowles, Karen Finley, Lorraine O’Grady and Paul Ramírez Jonas conceived spaces where public intervention simultaneously critiques the social order and contends with the traditions of the art institution. More perplexing is the exhibition’s investigation of how such performances can exist as both documentation and an archive, and by extension the possibility of these events to exist as objects in a gallery. What story will these objects tell of the performer and of the audience who participated?
The exhibition’s opening reception featured a reperformance by Alison Knowles of #2 Proposition (Make a Salad) from 1962. This iconic Fluxus performance elevates the banal activity of making and serving a salad to high art form. It has been reperformed continuously for nearly four decades with recent incarnations at the Tate Modern and the Wexner Center for Contemporary Art. The performance began – as it always has - with a Mozart duo for violin and cello immediately followed by Knowles and three assistants chopping away at lettuce, tomatoes, and carrots, amongst other items. According to the artist, the Mozart remains the same but the salad ingredients are different in each reperformance. At first the audience seemed unaware of the connection between the finely attired musicians and the aged Knowles who was adorned with an old cooking apron. Little to no attention was given to the salad preparation until the gallery was filled with the scent of fresh cut onions and peppers. The ingredients were combined in two large plastic vats, seasoned and distributed. As the audience furiously ate away at their salads (possibly the only thing that most of them have ate all day . . . some of them were so skinny . . . it is a sin) individuals became a collective we. We were there to watch Knowles, we were there to eat the salad she prepared, we were there to participate as have others in a performance whose potential for reincarnation are limitless. The strangeness of making a salad being viewed as art quickly gave way to a sense of tradition and continuity perpetuated by the reperformance.
The three other performances in the exhibition were not represented by their original incarnations as performances rather by documentation and artifacts. Despite the limiting qualities of these materials, they testify to the potential that participatory performances have in stimulating audiences from passive to active. Lorraine O’Grady is represented by Art Is . . ., which answered the challenge from an acquaintance that “avant-garde art doesn't have anything to do with black people." So in September of 1983 during Harlem's African-American Day Parade the artist took avant-garde performance directly to a largest congregation of blacks in New York City. The bohemian artist was not so such much invading the party then she was a wedding crasher swept up in the merriment of celebration. O’Grady, and a group of 15 women artists dressed in white, hopped on and off a slow moving float and framing people in the crowd with a 9 x 15 ft. antique-styled gold frame. Anyone “framed” by the frame was declared a work of art. The photo documentation of the performance shows the playfulness of both performer and audience as they smile and laugh at the prospect of being considered a work of art. Much akin to Duchamp's readymades, the artist is not only a creator of art but a creator of taste, dictating what constitutes art. The field of art is opened beyond the confines of the institution, and is especially poignant as it is a black female artist who dictates the framing. The performance was not advertised to the art community at large, despite having received a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts. Thus, O’Grady was able to create a performance outside the boundaries of the art establishment that was not critical of a community, rather acted to celebrate and engage a community that has long been alienated by the avant-garde. This engagement is done by populist means, not through the jargon of post-modernist practices.
Karen Finely’s work takes a darker turn in her 1991 project Momento Mori. Originally presented at the Kitchen and LA MoCA, the public was invited to tie multi-colored ribbons to an aged wrought-iron gate in memory of someone who had died of AIDS. Finley’s work has noticeable aged as the thousands of ribbons that cover the gate have faded. As well, the names and prayers written on the ribbons are barely visible. These traces are stark reminders of those who were impacted by the AIDS crisis. The work is an emotional footprint even in its dilapidated state, acting in one regard as a memorial to the dead while also serving as an archive of individuals who became communities bonded together by a deadly disease.
Paul Ramírez Jonas' Talisman I (2008–2009) is the most recent project in the exhibition. The original performance is represented by a triptych containing the objects from his public art work in the 28th São Paulo Biennale. Deriving his performance from the Biennale’s theme of “in living contact,” Jonas had hundreds of Sao Paulo residents exchange their house keys for those of the Biennale’s main building. He required each participant to sign a contract that detailed in several different language the rules and regulations of access to the exhibition space. The keys are symbolic of the bonds that can open and close out a society to the artistic process much like O’Grady’s golden frame. The contract, which each participant was free to enter into, is premised on the artist’s longstanding interest in exploring the interactive bonds between art work and the public, where one must give in order to receive. This is the moral which unites all the works represented in this small, yet powerful exhibition: for giving their time, their interest, their participation, in turn audiences were given the opportunity to be part of a community of participants whose gestures are part of a fleeting moment. While documentation and subsequent reperformances attempt to capture the atmosphere of what originally took place, the experiences are unique to those who made them possible.
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