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New York Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Clifford Owens: Performance Art at the Edge of Transgression
A taut curiosity ran through the crowd on opening night of Clifford Owens's show at David Kordansky. Probably because Owens is known as a boundary-pushing performer, happy to break the fourth wall. In one notorious piece, during his exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2011, he groped and kissed people in the audience. That controversial work followed a 'score' by Kara Walker, one of 26 Black artists that Owens asked to contribute written or graphical instructions for a performance series he called 'Anthology.' Walker's score began, 'French kiss an audience member.' He stopped before the next part: 'Force them against a wall and demand sex.' Walker has said she intended the score only as a provocative hypothetical. But Owens took it there. Three pieces were scheduled for the opening night of the Kordansky show, a 20-year survey of performances and performance documents curated by Jay Gorney and cheekily titled 'I'm New Here.' Each, in its way, involved the viewers — forced them either to respond, or decide not to. But Owens, 54, older and perhaps wiser, has found ways to transgress other than violating people's personal space. The night's first performance dealt in mild scatological humor as the artist dipped a finger into a jar of peanut butter and made a come-hither gesture with his dirty digit. (No one took the bait.) In the third, Owens, accompanied by a drummer, recited the lyrics of Bill Callahan's song 'I'm New Here,' pacing through the gallery and yelling in lucky people's faces. Self-conscious, toothless, a bit sappy. This is what transgressive performance art looks like now. Owens's show feels nostalgic for a kind of edginess and shock that's no longer possible, or desirable. For one thing, over the past 15 years, consent has become more important than an artist's free expression. For another, it's hard to be radical when your audience expects it. On the wall is a pair of photographs of Owens in a cloud of white dust (performing an 'Anthology' score by Nsenga Knight); he has a mohawk and is wearing black leather as if to say: I am a transgressive artist. One who has looked into the abyss of true violation but ultimately stepped back. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Daily Mail
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Artist who had multiple orgasms in public museum reveals the 'exhausting' effect it had on her
An artist who had multiple orgasms in public gallery revealed the 'terrible' effect it had on her in the following years. Marina Abramović, from Serbia, is a performance artist who spent over five decades pushing the limits of art through controversial performances, including switching places with a prostitute in the red light district in Amsterdam in the 70s. Among her controversial stunts is a performance in the 2005 series, Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, in which she masturbated for eight hours straight. The series, which comprised of several performances, took place across a number of days at the museum and was dedicated to the artist's late friend, Susan Sontag. But the performance that stood out was the second, in which she recreated another famous performance piece from 1972 by Vito Acconici, and masturbated underneath a stage for several hours. Reflecting on the controversial performance several years on, Abramovic told fashion designer Bella Freud it had been an 'exhausting' experience. Speaking on the Fashion Neurosis podcast, the artist said: 'I had to do this for seven hours, I think I had more than five orgasms. It was really difficult because the next day I had do another performance. I was exhausted.' Marina took inspiration from another artist named Vito Acconci, who developed a performance called 'Seedbed' where he hid underneath a ramp at the Sonnabend Gallery in NYC and masturbated while speakers played him talking about his fantasies of people walking above him. She said she wanted to recreate 'Seedbed' from the perspective of 'female energy', which prompted her to add the performance into the Seven Easy Pieces series. Her conversation with Bella Freud follows comments Abramovic made to New York Magazine in which she said she'd 'never concentrated so hard in my life'. 'The problem for me, with this piece, was the absence of public gaze: only the sound. But I heard that people had a great time; it was like a big party up there! I ended with nine orgasms,' she said. 'It was terrible for the next piece - I was so exhausted!' The Seven Easy Pieces series isn't the only work of Abramovic's to have made waves in the art industry - after her 1970s stunt shocked the world. However the 79-year-old is most famous for her 'Rhythm 0' piece, a now notorious six-hour performance which tested her will - and the self control of audience members. Carried out in 1974, Abramović lay prone on a table surrounded by 72 objects which included matches, saws, nails and a gun loaded with a single bullet. As audience members interacted with her, they were invited to use the objects in any way they desired. She'd been stripped of her clothes and had her skin slashed with blades, one person even held a loaded gun to her head and put her finger on the trigger. She later said she was 'ready to die' if that was the consequence of that performance. In the 1970s Marina swapped places with a prostitute in the red light district in Amsterdam for six hours for a performance called Role Exchange. She said: 'I asked her to go to the gallery at be me and I sit in the window and become her. 'It was pretty scary stuff to do, but this was in 1975, I did it for six hours, it was so fascinating. 'It was my first time in Amsterdam and my first time to do a performance there. 'This was logical for me to do because in that time my education was always that being a prostitute was the lowest thing to be and my mother would just die when found out I done this work, so all the reason to do it.' On her website, she spoke about the exchange, saying: 'She give me only the instruction that I should never go below her price because I will ruin her business. 'So I had the two customers; one asked about her, and the second one didn't want to pay the price. 'She said to me that I would starve if I will be prostitute because I don't have any talent for that role.' One of her most celebrated artistic performance, known as The Artist Is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2010. The exhibition featured Marina's performance piece, where she sat at a table in the atrium gallery and invited visitors to sit opposite her for silent contemplation. The performance lasted for 736 hours, and over 1,500 people sat opposite her during the show. She said: 'Anything I do before I start I have enormous fear, I have cramps in my stomach, I got the bathroom, I just sit there, but if I don't have fear I will panic that I don't have fear. 'Fear is incredible, it is an indication that I am here 100 percent, but the moment that I am in front of the audience it disappears. 'Then I just there with them, I have to be with my mind and my body and the public, they feel the fear, they feel the insecurity, they feel everything so you really have to be present for them.
