Abramovic, Rainer, Gala Theater & Performance Art Politics: A Public Forum

17 December 2011, 1 – 4 pm

Moderated by Dino Dinco, Jennifer Doyle and Matias Viegner

On performance art, ethics and criticality in the wake of Marina Abramovic’s 2011 MOCA gala performance and Yvonne Rainer’s critical letter of said performance.

Please join us for a moderated open forum instigated by the outpouring of reactions and criticality surrounding, although not limited to, Abramovic’s recent performance as part of MOCA’s fundraising gala. Using Abramovic’s Los Angeles performance as one example, we hope that this forum will expand the depth and scope of performance art practice in the face of art / money / power, will investigate modes of working and programming that are seen as successful and not, and will serve to examine more deeply the role and function of performance art in museums and art spaces.

We encourage those who participated in the performance at MOCA to attend this open forum and share their experience and their thoughts, as well as those who were guests at the dinner, those who worked as food servers during the dinner, those who were selected to perform but decided against it, performance art bloggers, MOCA staff, Debbie Harry, the cosigners of Yvonne Rainer’s letter, etc. All are welcome.

An abundance of thought and reaction to this event (as an event, but also as a mode and model of production) has been documented on blogs and on facebook, at numerous dinners and privately over drinks. We look forward to coming together in the same room to further the investment and interest in some of these very important issues surrounding contemporary performance art practice.

We’ll be broadcasting this panel live on Ustream at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/dino-dinco

LACE is equidistant from the Hollywood / Highland and Hollywood / Vine stations of the MTA Red Line
Suggested $3 admission and open to the public.

Moderators:

Dino Dinco, multi-disciplinary artist and curator and Performance Art Curator in Residence, LACE

Jennifer Doyle, UC Riverside Professor, author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2006) and Hold It Against Me: Difficulty, Emotion and Contemporary Art (forthcoming, 2012).

Matias Viegener, Professor of Literature and Critical Theory, CalArts and co-founder of the participatory art collective, Fallen Fruit

* Please note: We will be taking up a monetary collection for a couple of performers who were part of the gala performance and who will be traveling from San Francisco to participate in this discussion. These two artists were some of the first to write extensively about their experience, helping to ignite the broad and often spicy discussions documented online.

Please extend some true Los Angeles art community hospitality to our out-of-town artist guests in helping to make their presence possible.

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Photo of EJ Hill by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for MOCAModerated by Dino Dinco, Jennifer Doyle and Matias Viegner