Culturebot is thrilled and honored that Meiyin and Mark at Under The Radar have graciously invited us to collaborate on and organize two discussions on contemporary performance during the festival. We will be engaging with some of the ideas that have garnered the most attention and discussion on CBOT lately: our article on Visual Art Performance vs. Contemporary Performance and the issue of Citizen Criticism and the Arts.

Full details below (updates to come as panelists are finalized and bios come in). Hope you will join us!

Can’t be there? Conversations will be livestreamed at http://www.livestream.com/newplay

Under The Radar presents
CULTUREBOT CONVERSATIONS ON CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE

Performance and Context: The Black Box and The White Cube
Sunday, January 8 at 1PM
LuEsther Lounge
@ The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street

In today’s cultural landscape, contemporary artists are continuously blurring the lines between theater, dance, installation, performance art, visual art and live art. The work’s context comes from who curates it, where it happens, who writes about it and who is its intended audience. Performance is perceived and evaluated differently when presented in a gallery or museum as opposed to a theater. Why is that? What does it mean? And how can we move beyond the Black Box vs. the White Cube and devise new frameworks for genre-defying performance?

Participants:
Philip Bither (Senior Curator of Performing Arts, Walker Art Center)
RoseLee Goldberg (Founding Director and Curator, Performa)
Liz Magic Laser (Artist)
David Levine (Artist)

RECOMMENDED READING:
Claire Bishop, “Unhappy Days In The Art World” (Brooklyn Rail)
Andrew Horwitz, “Visual Art Performance vs. Contemporary Performance” (Culturebot)

Everyone’s A Critic! Exploring the Changing Landscape of Arts Writing
Sunday, January 15 at 1PM
LuEsther Lounge
@ The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street

As the mainstream media continues to cut its arts coverage, an increasingly diverse field of citizen journalists has filled in the gap. Some decry this as a disaster, proclaiming the death of criticism. Others characterize this as a long-overdue democratization of critical conversation. The truth is probably somewhere in between. What is the role of the arts writer in today’s society – either “professional” or “amateur”, what is the difference between a reviewer, a critic and a crank, and what does the future hold?

Participants:
Randy Gener (U.S. editor of CriticalStages.org)
George Hunka (Superfluities Redux)
Margo Jefferson (critic, author, professor)
Tom Sellar (Theater magazine (Yale) & Village Voice)

RECOMMENDED READING:
Michael Kaiser, “The Death of Criticism” (Huffington Post)
George Hunka, “Criticism dies, again” (Superfluities Redux)
Jeremy Barker, “Why Aren’t Audiences Stupid?” (Culturebot)
Andrew Horwitz, “Why Aren’t Audiences Stupid?(Andy Version)” (Culturebot)

PARTICIPANT BIOS:

Philip Bither has been Walker Art Center’s Senior Curator of Performing Arts since April 1997, overseeing one of the country’s leading contemporary performing arts programs. He has overseen significant expansion of the Performing Arts program, including the building of the McGuire Theater, an acclaimed new theatrical space within the Walker expansion (2005), the raising of the program’s first commissioning/programming endowment, the commissioning of more than 100 new works in dance, music and performance, and the annual presentation/residency support of dozens of contemporary performing arts creators, established and emerging. Prior to this, he served as Director of Programming/Artistic Director for the Flynn Center, later becoming Associate Director/Music Curator at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). He received the Fan Taylor Distinguished Service Award in 2009. He sits on numerous federal, state, local, and national foundation arts panels and he speaks and writes about the contemporary performing arts nationally.

Randy Gener is the Nathan Award-winning editor, writer, critic and artist in New York City.  He began as a theater critic and staff contributor at The Village Voice from 1991 to 2001, as well as an entertainment writer for The Daily News and The Star Ledger.  A dramaturg at Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, Gener is the U.S. editor of Critical Stages(criticalstages.org), an international journal; the Broadway editor of the New York Theatre Wire (nytheatre-wire.org), which he co-founded in 1996; and a contributing writer of American Theatre magazine. As a curator, producer and consultant of international festivals, Gener creatively collaborates with U.S. and European arts organizations, foreign institutes, consulate offices and NGOs to build, design and create artistic programs, strategic alliances, international tours in Europe, conferences and seminars, foreign-media partnerships and editorial content. Gener most recently served for four years as the curatorial adviser and co-creator of “From the Edge,” USITT’s USA National Exposition at the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. A 2003 New York Times critic fellow, Gener contributes critical essays and scholarly articles to books and anthologies, most recently in ”Cambridge Guide to the American Theater” (Cambridge University Press), ”The World of Theater” (International Theatre Institutes in Paris and Bangladesh), and “About the Phenomenon of Theater” (Namayesh in Tehran, Iran).  For his editorial work and critical essays for American Theatre, Gener has received, among other awards, grants and honors, the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, the Deadline Club Award for Best Arts Reporting from the New York chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists; and the NLGJA Journalist of the Year. Last year, Gener was among five artists from around the world conferred by His Excellency President Benigno S. Aquino III with the Presidential Award as “Pamana ng Pilipino (Legacy of the Filipino Nation).” Gener’s website is theaterofOneWorld.org.

RoseLee Goldberg, Founding Director and Curator of Performa, is an art historian, critic, and curator whose book Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, first published in 1979, pioneered the study of performance art. Former Director of the Royal College of Art Gallery in London and Curator at The Kitchen in New York, she is also the author of Performance: Live Art Since 1960 (1998) and Laurie Anderson (2000), and is a frequent contributor to Artforum and other publications. Recent awards and grants include two awards from the International Association of Art Critics (2011), the Agnes Gund Curatorial Award from Independent Curators International (2010), Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Warhol Foundation (2008), and Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Government (2006). In 2004, she founded Performa, a non-profit arts organization committed to the research, development, and presentation of performance by visual artists from around the world, and launched New York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05 (2005), followed by Performa 07 (2007), and Performa 09 (2009). In 2011, Performa presented its fourth biennial, Performa 11 (November 1–21, 2011). Since 1987, Goldberg has taught at New York University.

George Hunka launched the first version of his blog Superfluities Redux, under the title Superfluities, on 1 October 2003. An Albee Foundation fellow, he has written several plays and essays, as well as reviews, theory and feature stories about theatre for the New York Times, the Guardian (UK), Yale University’s Theater, Contemporary Theatre Review, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art and other publications. His first book, Word Made Flesh: Philosophy, Eros and Contemporary Tragic Drama, was published by EyeCorner Press in March 2011.

Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic and the author of On Michael Jackson (Vintage). She was a staff writer for The New York Times for 12 years, and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Bookforum, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Grand Street, The Nation, and MS. She has been anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death (Norton); Best African American Essays, 2010, (Ballantine/One World); Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness (Counterpoint) and The Mrs. Dalloway Reader (Harcourt) and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Columbia). She also wrote and performed a solo theater piece, Sixty Minutes in Negroland at The Cherry Lane and The Culture Project. Currently, she teaches writing at Columbia University and Eugene Lang College.

New York-based artist Liz Magic Laser (b. 1981, New York City) is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Columbia University’s MFA program. Laser has been a resident at the LMCC Workspace Program, the Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited internationally including The Pace Gallery, New York (2011); Casey Kaplan, New York (2011); Derek Eller Gallery, New York (2010); MoMA PS 1, New York (2010); the Prague Biennale 4, Czech Republic (2009); Galeria Horach Moya, Mallorca, Spain (2011) and the Ljubljana Biennale, Slovenia (2011). Her recent public performance project, Flight (2011), took place in Times Square with support from Franklin Furnace and the Times Square Alliance. In November 2011, Laser presented the Performa Commission, I Feel Your Pain at the School of Visual Art Silas Theatre, a former cinema in New York City. Recent articles discussing her work have appeared in publications including, Modern Painters, Frieze, ArtReview, Artforum.com, Art In America and The New York Times.

David Levine‘s work encompasses performance, theater, photography, installation, and video. Dividing his time between NYC and Berlin, where he is Director of the Studio Program at the European College of Liberal Arts, Levine has presented performance projects and other work at such international art spaces and surveys as MoMA, Documenta XII, Mass MoCA, Town House Gallery/Cairo, HAU2/Berlin, PS122/NYC, the Luminato Festival and the Watermill Center, and has directed at Atlantic Theater Company, the Vineyard Theater/NYC, and Primary Stages/NYC. David’s work has been featured in Mousse, The New York Times, Artforum, Theater, Art in America, Bomb, Cabinet, Theater Heute, Art Review, Die Zeit, TDR, The Village Voice, Time Out, and the Believer, and his own writing has appeared in Cabinet, Theater, and Triple Canopy. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Kulturstiftung Des Bundes, and Etants Donnés/French Fund for Performance. He is currently working with composer Joe Diebes, poet Christian Hawkey, and the Watermill Center/NYTW on an opera about Milli Vanilli. David will be presenting Anger at the Movies, a performance seminar, as part of PS122′s COIL Festival starting on Jan 10.

Tom Sellar is Editor of Theater magazine, a journal of criticism, plays and reportage published by Yale School of Drama (www.theatermagazine.org). His criticism and reporting appear regularly in national publications including the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and American Theatre, and he has been a frequent contributor to the Village Voice since 2000. Sellar received his doctorate in 2003 from Yale University, where he is currently Associate Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism.

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All right, so today I’m violating one of my editorial rules and writing about performing arts criticism. I try to avoid this because I think it’s ridiculously navel-gazing for people to write about what they do, particularly when the field itself is so ridiculously impoverished (as I’ll explain in a moment). Surely all us critics could be writing about better things than what we do. But critic and playwright George Hunka recently wrote something that irritated me just that much that I had to respond.

The quick backstory is that the Times‘ Jason Zinoman recently wrote a nice post (well worth reading) on ArtsBeat about the value of writing bad reviews. Parabasis followed up, and you should glance that over, too, and it was that which led me to Hunka. I’ve never met Hunka, but he seems nice enough, and though I don’t agree with everything he writes, he’s undeniable smart, insightful, and passionate about theater. However, quoting himself from the comments on Zinoman’s article, he wrote this:

“It’s not so much a matter of whether a critic who gives a bad review to a show has a vendetta or seems to engage in abuse. It is, however, a matter of whether or not the reviewer has the thoughtfulness or the knowledgability to render such a review valid. Especially with plays that seek to extend the form, the critic should be able to differentiate between a bad play and those which do not yield their pleasures as easily as others.” The contentious and rude review often enough calls attention to itself and the reviewer, not the play and the artist, which does a disservice to reader and artist alike. It also might serve as a cover for ignorance. The same can be said for rude and contentious political arguments, for that matter, whether from Noam Chomsky or Ann Coulter. True, sometimes readers find these reviews fun — but that’s only to cater to the lowest common denominator. Perhaps in a world of 140-character Tweets and Facebook status updates, this is to be expected, but the serious reader should want more than this, the serious critic or reviewer should want to write it, and the serious arts editor should want to publish it. That such criticism and reviews can be provocatively and entertainingly written is proven by the writings of critics from George Bernard Shaw to Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein, and many many others.

Ok. Insofar as the first part makes an argument (the middle is just a bunch of suppositions, and the end a list of critics who conveniently no longer write), it’s complete bollocks. With all due respect. And furthermore–and this is why it really irritated me–it actually argues against good criticism. Read the quote within the quote again. Now let me paraphrase. This is nothing more than a verbose version of the complaint I’ve gotten from everyone I ever wrote a bad review of who thought to argue with me: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Needless to say, the artists I give good reviews to, particularly those I notice coming up in their careers, at least occasionally think I’m a rather insightful critic. One can, apparently, be both at once, if my own experience is to be believed. But for those on the receiving end, who I’m concerned with now, I’m not properly educated (as Hunka provides for) to pass judgment on their oh-so-visionary work, the brilliance of which I failed to note due to my benighted ignorance. This particularly occurs when I write about dance, because I studied theater and comparative literature, not dance (as has been pointed out to me more than once). My standard response to this sort of drivel, in short, is: “Exactly how educated in the form do you expect your audiences to be to enjoy or experience the work?”

In the case of dance, for instance, while I don’t have formal training as a dancer nor an academic background in it, I do talk with choreographers about the form regularly, I read about it as much possible, and in the past year, by my rough count, I’ve seen between 50 and 60 distinct pieces of choreography. If all of that actually left me still unqualified to offer a personal impression of whether or not a given piece is interesting or demonstrates some form of accomplishment, who in God’s name is your target audience? And furthermore, if dance is actually only something that can be understood through personal participation and/or academic work in the field, I have to tell you, the art form has bigger problems than a couple bad reviews.

All of this applies equally well to theater, which, as it happens, I did study. But for Hunka, that may still leave me unqualified to critique work that seeks “to extend the form.” Fundamentally I don’t dispute that there’s a big difference between Art Theater, experimental work, devising, etc., and your standard Broadway or mainstream fare, but as a yardstick for policing the police, as it were, this is stupid. If “extending the form” is the definition of success, than I’d say the work actually has to do so in practice, by actually influencing and inspiring work in the future. Short of being a seer, only time will tell. And furthermore, there are always multiple traditions of work at any point in time. There are plenty of works in the past that did “expand the form” that I’d still argue are not good, not a good influence, and better forgotten or consigned to the pages of a theater history textbook. Influence alone is not a sign of quality; breaking new ground is not always a sign you’ve done something well, or important.

And finally, I want to make one last point. In the world of books or music–which have much healthier critical fields than performing arts–critics are not seen as arbiters of taste or quality who can speak with god-like authority. True, plenty of writers complain that certain critics, like Michiko Kakutani, have too much influence on the buying public, but fundamentally, book criticism isn’t a matter of passing judgment, it’s a form of intellectual discourse and engagement. The essay, as a form, is dead in American publishing. Aside from literary magazines, the only mainstream publication that features them that I can think of is Harper‘s. Otherwise, we’re left with book reviews in which to discuss and engage with ideas in substantive form shorter than an actual published book.

The performing arts, on the other hand, seems to yearn for the sort of recognition a god-like critic can supposedly confer (solace or consolation, perhaps, for a sad lack of other sorts of rewards in the field, such as money or meaningful support). Whereas writers of books (novels or non-fiction) see themselves as equals of their critics (possibly even superior) and think nothing of writing essays and reviews themselves, performing artists seem to prefer a separation between the two fields, and refuse to engage. For them, writing about the form is usually the aforementioned matter of conferring value, not part of a broader discourse about the art. That’s sad, because it actual retards meaningful discussion. It’s not that artists don’t have opinions, mind you; two drinks and even the cheeriest booster of the idea of community will let loose with a fusillade of complaints and criticisms of his or her fellow artists, faulting ideas, aesthetic, execution, whatever. But all too rarely do artists themselves choose to even voice them, even mildly, in a public forum, let alone overcome their own sense of victimization enough to take part in a broader discussion as an interested party, rather than just to rebut this or that thing someone else said that they didn’t like.

So my advice is first, don’t listen to George Hunka (in this circumstance, at least); second, treat yourself with the dignity and respect to air your own arguments and thicken up your skin enough to be able to deal with the fact not everyone will agree with you (like Hunka does); and third, stop trying to convince yourself that a critic’s acceptance or rejection is the end-all, be-all, and accept that criticism and reviews are, at best, part of a broader discourse about arts and society. In short, read this from Zinoman and take it to heart; your work is worthy of being talked about as part of something bigger than itself, and you should help by being part of that conversation:

Of course, fairness is important in criticism. Critics are human and a negative review can go off the rails and veer into cruelty and personal attacks. The temptations of the witty put-down are real, and when it comes to the Fringe, seeing five shows in a day can also play a role. We should take our responsibility seriously. But I would rather live in a theater culture where discussions about plays can get as contentious (and occasionally rude) as those about politics. Theater may be known as the fabulous invalid, but artists and critics who go into this low-paying, highly competitive field are tougher than you think.

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