{"id":31503,"date":"2018-12-20T14:47:17","date_gmt":"2018-12-20T14:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artzealous.com\/?p=31503"},"modified":"2018-12-20T14:47:17","modified_gmt":"2018-12-20T14:47:17","slug":"ask-the-collector-with-holly-hager-collecting-101-performance-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/ask-the-collector-with-holly-hager-collecting-101-performance-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Ask the Collector with Holly Hager Collecting 101-Performance Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art Baseling is more than just art eye candy, making new friends, and \u00fcber-cool parties. \u2019Tis the season for performance art, and that\u2019s my favorite part of art fairs. Although the traditional objects shown in Miami are often beautifully made, most are less than gut-punching, but there\u2019s always a banquet of performance art to fill that gap.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Before I experienced it for myself, performance art seemed like the most intimidating of the visual arts to me. When I imagined it, I conjured up a pretentious hybrid of Beatnik poetry and self-referential silence that would be hopelessly incomprehensible to the art novice I was then, but\u00a0<\/span>my assumptions were all wrong. Performance is often the most accessible of all visual art because it\u2019s the most experiential, and experience is what we\u2019re all after, right? <\/span><\/p>\n

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Performance art is as diverse as art itself. It can make you wildly uncomfortable or double over with laughter. If the genre has made you want to swipe, gag, and keep moving\u2014give it another go. <\/span><\/p>\n

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I did at my first Miami Art Week in 2011, and it turned me into a performance art lover. It\u2019s the only work I remember from that year. Unfortunately, I was too shell-shocked when it was over to snap a photo of the artist\u2019s name\u2014so I don\u2019t know what it was called or who made it, but I\u2019ll never forget how that work made me feel. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Only about 20 people were allowed into the booth for each performance of it. The artist wasn\u2019t present. Instead, her assistant lined us up on one wall across from four wooden booths with transparent, plexiglass fronts. The artist\u2019s assistant then picked eight people (including me), matched each of us up with a stranger, told us that no one could hear what we said in the booth, and asked us to step in. Once we did, I was acutely aware of being in such close proximity with a college-aged young man\u2014less than a body width between us. He was way more uncomfortable than I was.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The artist\u2019s voice came over a speaker in our booth, asking us to talk and interact. Our discomfort was heightened by the fact that our body language was on display for the rest of the viewers through the clear front of the booth. Laughing nervously, we pressed on.<\/span><\/p>\n

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During what seemed like an eternity, the artist moved from intimate (\u201cDescribe your first kiss\u201d) to actual (\u201cKiss your partner like a long lost lover\u201d). That last command quickly displaced the distress of being on display with the moral dilemma of whether to follow her orders, regardless of my committed relationship at home. Part of me whispered, \u201cIt\u2019s ok\u2014it\u2019s just art.\u201d The other part of me knew my husband wouldn\u2019t think it was ok at all. Worse, my partner in the booth had just confessed that he\u2019d never kissed anyone…because he hadn\u2019t come out yet. It made me sick to think of his first kiss being with a woman, instead of the man he really longed for.<\/span><\/p>\n

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We were both good sports. We wanted to do what the artist asked. But, of course, that\u2019s what the piece was about\u2014whether we would violate societal norms just because we were told to. <\/span><\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t know what went on in the other booths. The experience might have been wildly liberating. If you never dreamed of hooking up with a stranger in broad daylight for others\u2019 viewing pleasure, it would be an exercise in bravery. That\u2019s what made the work brilliant. It was a revelation of each participant\u2019s humanity. <\/span><\/p>\n

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But mere societal norms weren\u2019t at issue in our booth, right and wrong were. Neither one of us wanted to violate what was right for the other person. We both went in for the kiss, but ended up in an awkward hug that morphed into a heartfelt connection of mutual gratitude and respect.<\/span><\/p>\n

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That artist taught me more about myself than I\u2019ve ever learned from any other work of art. I\u2019m eternally grateful to her.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Miami Art Week 2018 brought me similar moments of transcendence.<\/span><\/p>\n

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My \u201cprescription\u201d from Monica Seggos\u2019 <\/span>The Broken Heart Repair Shop<\/span><\/i> at <\/span>Satellite Art Show,<\/span><\/a> a fair that always includes a rich offering of performance art. (Full disclosure, <\/span>Curatious<\/span><\/a> was proud to sponsor Satellite this year.)<\/span><\/p>\n

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Monica Seggos performed in the context of her immersive <\/span>The Broken Heart Repair Shop<\/span><\/i> installation. Riffing on Richard Prince\u2019s kitsch paintings of nurse-themed pulp fiction, the work is meant to trigger the viewer\u2019s own painful and healing memories. Trigger it did. A minute into a personal session with Nurse Monica had me mentally far from the fair and deep into heartbreaks that I thought were long buried. Although I\u2019m currently anything but brokenhearted, the performance was divinely poignant.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Most performance artists offer photography or video of their performances to collectors as a tangible (and monetizable) memorial of it. Seggos, instead, offers an object reminiscent to me of the ephemera from Joseph Beuys\u2019 works. She gifts her participatory viewers with a <\/span>memento mori <\/span><\/i>for the brokenheartedness she repairs. It comes in the ingenious form of a \u201cprescription\u201d written on the back of a vintage medical prescription. <\/span><\/p>\n

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One of many performances held within <\/span>Original Mouth Salacious South<\/span><\/i>, an installation by Kale Roberts and Kevin McFierson of <\/span>Tailgate Projects<\/span><\/a>. Photo courtesy of Satellite Art Show.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The biggest gut punch I got during this years\u2019 fairs was delivered by Kale Roberts, the driving force behind Tailgate Projects. Tailgate hijacks southern rituals of fandom, sports, and truck culture to create a platform for inclusive visibility. Roberts also uses the age-old artistic tradition of evoking vulnerability through nakedness in order to approach bodily taboos of all kinds. As he introduced an especially pan-sexual work, he read the room and prefaced the performance with the recognition that some viewers might be uncomfortable. Then, he asked us to harness any momentary discomfort to experience a taste of the anxiety that many fringe communities live with all the time.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Although I\u2019m radically inclusive myself, I\u2019m still white, straight, and privileged. So I channeled the fear of the other that was, indeed, hanging in the air at that instant…and it leveled me.<\/span><\/p>\n

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As it so often does, this year\u2019s performance art gave me instant and life-changing experiential knowledge. Go get yourself some of your own as soon as you can!<\/span><\/p>\n

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top image \/\/ Monica Seggos<\/span><\/a> performing as Nurse Monica with a participating viewer in her 2018 performance of<\/span> The Broken Heart Repair Shop<\/span><\/i>. Photo courtesy of <\/span>David Durie<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Holly<\/span>\u00a0Hager<\/span>\u00a0is an art collector and the founder of\u00a0Curatious<\/a>. Previously an author and a professor, she now dedicates herself full-time to help artists make a living from their art by making the joys of art more accessible to everyone.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Art Baseling is more than just art eye candy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":31507,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,23,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31503"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}