PERFORMANCE DESIGN | What’s the Haps?

BERLIN, NEW YORK CITY & PRINCETON, NJ  |  Three musings.  One nagging question: “But is it Performance Design?”

BUT IS IT PERFORMANCE DESIGN? | A ghost train from Bulgaria, composed of sound and lights, speeds through Berlin’s city center

It was not just any metro train. It was an actual train that had disappeared from Bulgaria some years ago under mysterious circumstances. Now this train has been making appearances at different places and different times. Eyewitnesses spotted this ghost train speeding by Berlin’s Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance (LEAP), an interdisciplinary project for electronic, digital media arts and performance that aims to initiate the dialogue between art, science and technology in Germany.

BUT IS IT PERFORMANCE DESIGN? | Tino Sehgal’s “This situation” dreamily implicates the art experience, and quite likely elite academia itself

Tino Sehgal explicitly refuses to call his piece “This situation” a performance. He disavows it, in fact. He prefers to call this “constructed situation” as something in-between. Ordinarily on view continuously during a museum or gallery’s open hours over a period of six weeks or more, Sehgal’s work will be presented in a university setting in November. His work stems from a direct engagement with the present. Will the new berth at Princeton University generate a new critical context?

BUT IS IT PERFORMANCE DESIGN? | Lesbian herstory emerges at Brooklyn Museum

Ulrike Müller, an Austrian-born artist in New York City, had a great idea for a mash-up. What if she gave found descriptions of T-shirt images stored in an archive of lesbian history to 100 artists? Her invitation: Make art.