Twenty years ago, the curator and art historian RoseLee Goldberg began to think about what it might mean to “frame” a work of performance art. She had moved from London in 1975 to a loft on Mercer Street, just across from Joan Jonas’s studio and up the street from Donald Judd and Nam June Paik’s — all artists who blended art into their surroundings. So when Goldberg organized the first edition of her biennial dedicated to performance art, Performa, in 2005, she made the city itself its stage.
Goldberg, who is 79, has since scouted hundreds of sites with artists to choose what she calls “the perfect frame” for their work. Among the earliest was the Noho McDonald’s, where artist Christian Holstad installed a vintage jukebox that played Will Oldham, and the Slipper Room burlesque bar, where artist Francis Alÿs had a dancer tease her clothes back on. The venues took even more experimental turns as the years went on. In 2013, guests derobed at the Russian and Turkish baths to watch Rashid Johnson’s steamy rendition of Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman, which the artist just revivedagain for the latest edition of Performa in November. Then, in 2015, the artist Robin Rhode chose Times Square on a Saturday night as the site for his interpretation of a slow-motion, atonal Arnold Schönberg opera. Instead of a moonlit forest, he used “the vertical architecture of New York itself” as the set, he has said. “Times Square, with its simultaneity of movement, light, and sound, resonated profoundly with Schoenberg’s fractured tonality and heightened emotional register.”
