Performa Diary: A Year of Sexy Revolutionaries

My Performa journey began on November 4. Dick Cheney died that morning, and Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York that night. In between, I was fidgety, nervous, and excited for what the city might become. Still, I managed to sit patiently through some performance art like it was my job. The show I saw that evening was fittingly on-theme: War Songs, Diane Severin Nguyen’s meditation on the role music played in shaping popular understanding of the American War in Vietnam.

Performa is always a gamble. The New York biennial often supports an artist’s first foray into performance. These aren’t usually scrappy, Fluxus-esque happenings; they’re orchestrated, high-budget, and heavily produced. Many commissions become the basis for future works or get picked up by institutions outside New York. Credit to the organization for enabling artists to experiment and take risks.

But risks they are. The artists risk trying something new in public. The viewers risk time and money: tickets start around $65 and climb past $200. And if you want to keep up with the full biennial, you’re basically going out every night for a month—which I did not do. Because runs are short, usually three days, there’s never much time for word of mouth to spread. You’re always left wondering if you chose the right performances. Still, the model seems to work: most of the shows I wanted to see were sold out.

War Songs was by an artist I both knew and didn’t. I’d seen Nguyen’s glowing, semi-abstract close-up photographs in MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” and her video at SculptureCenter about K-pop fans in Poland, which touched on cultural exchanges born from Cold War solidarities. But I’d missed her Whitney Biennial film because of strobes—a perpetual gamble in performance art, since most venues remain remarkably bad at offering warnings. This evening was no exception. I watched half the performance with my head buried in a jacket-hat-sunglasses fortress I’ve learned to assemble on the fly, not without bitterness.

A Jesus-looking emcee set the tone: “This is your Woodstock, and it’s long overdue.” What followed were restaged vignettes from historical concerts in which rock stars made revolution—or at least anti-war dissent—seem cool and sexy. Live renditions of Bob Dylan’s “God on Our Side” and Joan Baez’s “Saigon Bride” blended political sentiment with intimate longing; at one point, a performer described dreaming of a protest where someone held a sign that simply said HOLD ME. A chant kicked off: “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids you kill today?”

It was sad that it felt surprising to see performers with platforms actually using them to address an ongoing atrocity—and making protest cool in the process. The contrast with the present felt stark: Today, “saying something” often amounts to an Instagram post, which is far less moving than a living person saying something or singing in front of you. And it was oddly affecting to hear the familiar formulas of pop music repurposed for protest. “Cringe,” one performer explained, “is what happens when you care about someone in public.”

But the takeaway wasn’t “we need more protest pop.” A surprising mash-up of the anti-war anthem “99 Red Balloons” with Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.” showed how similar melodic structures can be deployed for good, or merely for nepo-baby nationalism.

Not being a Performa completist, I was sad to miss Lina Lapelytė (sold out) and Ayoung Kim (scheduling conflict). But Kim’s piece got enough press—the artist appeared on the covers of both Artforum and Frieze this month (is monoculture back?!)—that I hope you can forgive me.

But I made sure not to miss Aria Dean’s A Color Story. I have always preferred her writing to her art—more a compliment to the former than a knock on the latter—and was eager to see what might happen when the two co-conspire.

In her one-hour play, a poet and a philosopher debate art’s political potential on a bench in Berlin. The encounter is based on a real though unnamed meeting in the interwar 1920s. The bench sits on the former Siegesallee, once lined with unpopular neobaroque marble monuments that earned its commissioner, Kaiser Wilhelm II, the nickname “Denkmalwilly” (Monument Billy). The duo—queer Black American men meeting in person for the first time—discuss statues of Germans like Goethe and Kant, whose likenesses were later removed not as a rejection of nationalism but to clear space for Nazi military parades. Dean reconstructed the sculptures with 3D-modeling software, and projected them onto screens behind the live performers.

As with Nguyen’s work, you feel both the longing for art to have real political valence and the awareness of its limits. The question, both pieces suggest, is of tact and of degree. The Weimar-era meet-cute includes debates over truth versus beauty, and asks whether art can be praised for liberating the soul when people still require literal liberation, whether certain art can be political for merely existing against the odds, and whether artistic ambition inevitably corrupts art’s virtue. They argue. It’s hostile, but also vaguely flirtatious. They decide to meet again.

And as with Ngueyn’s work, the tensions alluded to were deeply felt. But with both, I craved more structure, thinking something an hour long ought to have an arc, beginning-middle-end-style. Call me basic. It’s just that wondering “what’s next?” made eavesdropping on the first date unfolding next to me in Dean’s audience distractingly juicy. (One person, visiting from out of town, promised to move to the city soon. Will they or won’t they?).

On my walk over, I’d been listening to the audiobook of Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures, which is fantastic. Like Dean’s play, it features characters in smart, moving debates about art’s potential. But Taylor’s discussions feel more natural, more like actual conversations. His dialogues don’t just hash out ideas noncommittally but articulately; they push the story and develop the characters.

The last night of Performa was Sylvie Fleury’s Instructions for Twilight, staged in an empty floor of an office building downtown. On entering the wide-open, unfinished 39th floor in FiDi during a striking sunset, I saw old cars sliced in half, lit by neon signs and a glowing projection of an escalator video. Visitors wandered until a model in heels strutted across the concrete, spray-painting a line on the floor, telling us where to stand. Everyone obeyed in unison, filing away in silence. But minutes later, when a woman with a Jessica Rabbit hairstyle hiked up her pencil skirt to suggestively wax a car hood, the crowd crossed the line to get a closer look, swarming her.

At one point, Fleury herself took the mic to tell us that her favorite shoes were her blue rain boots, praising them for their practicality. Meanwhile, her performers teetered in far less sensible footwear, their steps miked as if they were tap dancers as they cat-walked across an Andre-esque metal rectangle. Soon, a Kusama-style field of silver mirrored balls were squashed one by another model using her stiletto spikes. The crowd migrated from left to right, following the lights and action as they changed.

The most memorable vignette featured a woman rubbing jelly across a sports car hood before a man, shirtless beneath an all-white suit, licked it off. And then, near a sparkly rocket sculpture, the grand finale: performers moisturizing. The whole thing flirted with both eros and ick—legs and tongues and sticky substances—yet these shiny, staged, skinny people felt many degrees removed from anything especially bodily. Still, the plotless performance kept me on my toes, even in my sensible shoes. I kept wondering: What on earth is going to happen next?