Who says performance art can’t entertain? Not him
Ryan McNamara is the latest in an increasingly long line of artists trying to steer the notion of “performance art” into more accessible waters.
With a love of stagy theatricality, costuming and — wait for it — Cirque du Soleil, McNamara’s experiences are a long way from the bodily trials of the form’s founders, who in the 1960s imagined performance as visceral endurance and an antidote to the showy spectacle that the art market, with its emphasis on pricey objects, had become.
For McNamara, that much hasn’t changed, though he sees his role less as direct provocateur than Trojan Horse, bringing the outsiders in. Nowhere is that the case more than at Thursday night’s sparkly Power Ball, the annual fundraising gala for the Power Plant at Harbourfront Centre, where he’ll mount a new performance for an elite group of $500a-head VIPs (he’ll be back next year with another all-new work for the rest of us).
Behind the velvet ropes, McNamara, fresh off a commission for the Guggenheim in New York, has some sneaky subversion in store. We chatted with him in the lead-up to his Toronto debut. Performance art, the way most people think about it, historically, has these associations of being the domain of the outsider: anti-institutional, against the market and the fashion of the day. Where do you put yourself in that? That’s still the history I feel most connected to. But I think what I do came as a reaction to what I thought of as performance, which was endurance and cutting yourself, bleeding, all that, which has now become kind of a cliché.
One thing I feel pretty sure of is that I never want you to look at a still of my work and think, ‘Oh, that’s performance art.’ It’s become kind of a cliché. I’d rather you think it’s a marketing campaign. I don’t want it easily labelled. Still, you’re performing here at a gala
and there’s not really any public access.
Right. Maybe the gallery wouldn’t love me saying this, but people are spending a lot of money to see us. So it’s a little weird. We probably wouldn’t be invited to this party, you know? (laughs) But the set of expectations is interesting. And we definitely acknowledge the gala-ness of the gala. We acknowledge the drunkenness, we acknowledge the wealth. It becomes material for the work. I think that’s where performance has a problem; when it’s too self-serious to acknowledge that there’s someone standing right next to it, eating hors d’oeuvres.
You end up doing a fair number of these kinds of events: Art Basel Miami, other art fairs, here, where the market is at the forefront. That’s an odd place for performance to be. How do you reconcile that?
The irony is not lost on me, believe me; this form that was developed as resistance to the art market, to function outside of it, now you kind of have to do it at galas or art fairs, because hey, you gotta pay people. It’s not like there’s a secondary market for it. So we’ve done art fairs because that’s where they’re going to spend the money. And I’m not going to ask these amazing performers to work for free.
But you mentioned making it material for the work itself. Can you explain a little of what you mean?
Well, at (the Power Ball) the structure is very short interventions. These people are eating, they’re chatting, they’re drinking. Some of the performers are planted inside this cocktail party, and what I love about these environments is the performers literally forcing people to pay attention to them. There’s a level of antagonism, I think. That’s exciting to me. It’s interesting to play with. It’s not like we’re spilling blood on them, like that cliché of antagonism performance can have. But we’ll definitely be getting a little closer than people maybe want us to get.
You hear it all the time and my answer is, when did this become a negative term? The thing about my work is that it’s time-based and most timebased culture is entertainment. I grew up watching movies and TV, and that’s as much a part of my practice as anything else. I don’t really care about those boundaries; I’m interested in Vito Acconci, I’m interested in Beyoncé. Why can’t they live in the same world?
Ryan Trecartin, Cirque du Soleil?
Oh my God, Cirque du Soleil is amay-zing. Who doesn’t love them? I think people assume because something is entertaining it has no content. I hope my work is not just that, but let’s go there. Let’s engage people on all levels.