Momentary Arrest: Collecting Interdisciplinary Artworks

How can a work of dance be collected by a museum? How, why, and to what ends can a museum collection support interdisciplinary artworks that stem from performances? What opportunities and limitations do such works present to the artist and institution? In this essay, Visual Arts Curator Pavel Pyś considers the Walker’s acquisitions of works by Maria Hassabi, Jason Moran, Joan Jonas, Meredith Monk, and Carolee Schneemann that have each presented unique questions, challenging and opening new ways for the Walker to approach collecting.

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The presumption of permanence is a foolish one to harbor. Yet the desire for perpetuity underscores so many of our institutions, especially museums and their collections. Protocols of preservation seek to ensure an artwork’s integrity and safety through stasis: fixing an artwork as if an insect trapped in amber. Philosopher Theodor W. Adorno remarked that “museums are the family sepulchres of works of art,”¹ a sentiment shared among many thinkers for whom the museum is synonymous with finitude and death. Yet, how might we imagine the collection other than a crypt, a realm of the dead? How have artists posited on the artwork as changeable rather than fixed?

Let’s do away entirely with the pretense of permanence: the possibility of decay threatens all artworks. It’s only a matter of time, as material properties prescribe the inevitable speed of degradation. Many 20^th-century artists—whether those associated with Fluxus, Conceptualism or Minimalism—sought ways to decouple the idea from its physical carrier. Rather than the object, the certificate gained heightened status, standing in for “the artwork itself, while referring to it, serving as its deed, legal statement, and fiscal invoice.”² Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s certificates for candy piles, light strings, and paper stacks are unparalleled in their subversive probing at the limits of objecthood. While defining ideal parameters (such as size, shape, and weight), they resist prescribing decisive instructions. As such, the works are never truly the same but are, rather, to borrow from Miwon Kwon, “in a passing state of continual becoming,”³ between being taken by the audience and replenished by the museum. Inherently migratory and provisional, they do not exist but instead materialize or instantiate as sculptures in exhibition spaces. Gonzalez-Torres’s certificates also destabilize assumptions around authorship and originality by passing on display decisions to the owner or exhibiting institution. Over the course of its life, a single work by Gonzalez-Torres will assume different forms, each depending on context and curatorial decisions, forging a relationship between the artwork, artist, and owner/exhibitor. Gonzalez-Torres’s commitment to change and renewal are helpful values when considering artworks whose primary expression is not made manifest in objects, but rather in liveness. How, why, and to what ends can a museum collection support acquisitions—such as dances or performances—that do not take the form of unchanging objects? What opportunities and limitations do such acquisitions present to the artist and institution?

Reflecting on the commixture of visual art with choreographic and theatrical practices, curator Hendrik Folkerts defines liveness as “a situation of display that places different regimes of visibility, temporality, spectatorship and narrativity in concurrent relation to each other.”⁴ In the last decade, there has been a surge of interest among museums in blurring these various regimes, especially by presenting dance and choreography within their gallery spaces and exhibition programs.⁵ The Walker’s Interdisciplinary Initiative has focused on similar concerns, guiding the collaborative work of the Visual Arts and Performing Arts departments over the last four years and generating eight new commissions, while also heightening scholarly research into our own interdisciplinary history, collection, and informing several new acquisitions.

A commitment to the interdisciplinary has always permeated the Walker’s programmatic approach, as well as collecting strategies, evidenced by existing holdings of works by Trisha Brown, Ralph Lemon, Meredith Monk, Tino Sehgal, and Nam June Paik, as well as the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection. Yet, more recent acquisitions (especially of works by Maria Hassabi and Jason Moran) have commanded heightened attention, given the relatively undefined terrain of interdisciplinary acquisitions and their related protocols.⁶ Each work has posed unique problems to be negotiated between the artist, curator, registrar, and conservator; all the while raising crucial questions regarding the artwork’s ontology and the role the museum plays in offering it a permanent home.

Marking the first of the eight new Interdisciplinary Initiative commissions, choreographer Maria Hassabi was invited to present her work alongside the Walker retrospective Merce Cunningham: Common Time (2017). Presented as a solo within the exhibition and as a durational quartet in the public space of the museum’s Cargill Lounge, Hassabi’s live installation, STAGING (2017), in the artist’s words, “unfolds as a progression of austere choreographies, composed of stillness and decelerated movements in space.”’⁷ After many internal curatorial discussions, which at first focused on the material components (such as the artist-designed light sculptures marking the entrances to Common Time), conversations with Hassabi centered on placing STAGING: solo (2017) within the Walker’s collection. Over the course of eighteen months, the artist engaged in conversation with the curatorial and registration staff to shape the nature of the acquisition, which came with a variety of physical assets.⁸ Negotiating the archival and registrarial challenges posed by museum collecting practices, Hassabi ultimately conceived of the acquisition as three discreet versions of a single work: 

1. STAGING: solo (2017)

2. STAGING: solo – archival (2018)

3. STAGING: 5min (2018)

The foremost and preferred version is the live dance. However, from the start, Hassabi insisted that any acquisition must protect the live work as a form of embodied knowledge, meaning it could only be taught via “body-to-body transmission,”⁹ passed on from the artist to one of her performers. This caveat posed the first hurdle for the Walker: how to sustain a work that refuses objecthood and is instead bound to the artist and their lifetime? How can our Registration and Visual Art departments—with little Performing Arts expertise—ensure the integrity of future presentations of the work? The system devised by Hassabi was partly inspired by MoMA’s acquisition of Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions (1960–1961) in 2015,¹⁰ in which the dances persist thanks to a group of Forti’s designated “qualified teachers,” who are enlisted to teach new performers. Similarly, Hassabi conceived of “licensed teachers” (LTs), comprised of a group of her regular performers.¹¹

To present STAGING: solo, the Walker must contract a “dance professional” (DP), who will audition and shortlist local dancers and teach the work on the basis of teaching videos and a score. However, prior to public showing, the Walker must hire Hassabi or an LT to oversee the work’s final rehearsals. To ensure the dancer’s well-being, Hassabi’s documents extensively stipulate labor conditions, specifying the dancers’ and DPs preferred training background, types of appropriate training spaces, rehearsal and performance durations, fees (to be measured against industry benchmarks), and a preference for diversity underscoring all parameters. To ensure that her pool of LTs grows, Hassabi committed to train successively younger dancers and provide their contact details to the Walker’s registrars. In doing so, Hassabi builds a network of body-to-body transmission that extends from herself to the LTs, and possibly beyond her lifetime, as LTs train successive groups of LTs. However, should the living memory of performing STAGING: solo (2017) be extinguished (i.e. beyond Hassabi’s lifetime and with no LTs surviving), the live dance will cease to exist. As such, STAGING: solo occupies a dual position: on the one hand, it carries the possibility of renewal; on the other, it spells out its own death. Knowingly, the Walker accessioned an artwork that might expire, a notion completely antithetical to the logic of preservation, a key tenet underscoring collecting practices. While the Walker collection holds many instructional works that do not physically exist while not on view (among others by Sol LeWitt, Kara Walker, Richard Tuttle, and Lawrence Weiner), few determine their own obsolescence.¹²

 Reflecting on the revival of interest in performance among museums, critic Robert C. Morgan perceives a parallel institutional pursuit in the field of “archivism,”¹³ whereby collecting institutions seek to preserve performances through a heightened commitment to archival materials, such as notes, sketches, fliers, posters, clippings, relics, etc. The metaphor of a “constellation” is invoked frequently: MoMA Curatorial Assistant Nancy Lim cited a “constellation of materials”¹⁴ inherent to the acquisition of Forti’s Dance Constructions; while, discussing the work of VALIE EXPORT, curator Jürgen Thaler problematized the “archival constellation” as an “interplay of two different types of materials, a new work … of an almost infinite variety of opportunities.”¹⁵

Hassabi was highly deliberate in conceiving of her own “archival constellation,” at once setting out a clear path for the use of her materials and ensuring that no future curator selects these willy-nilly. STAGING: solo – archival (2018) suggests the space and traces of a live performance: taped markers (a “Spike Mark” and “Pink Line”) are spatial cues for the missing performer, while an outfit on a mannequin suggests the vacated body. The accompanying moving image material shows STAGING at the Walker in 2017: we see the light sculpture, the quartet, and solo, all set to a spare Erik Satie–esque score by Marina Rosenfeld. The footage captures the dances both with and without audiences: the camera steadily pans past the quartet alone in Cargill Lounge, while in the galleries we see visitors simply ignoring the solo or, perplexed, asking gallery guards for more information.

Scholar Philip Auslander differentiated “documentary” from “theatrical” forms of documenting performances,¹⁶ the first merelly giving evidence and ensuring longevity beyond the performance itself, while the second includes works that are specifically performed for the camera lens. Auslander generalizes that most performance art documentation purports “to make the artist’s work available to a larger audience, not to capture the performance as an ‘interactional accomplishment’ … [it] participates in the fine art tradition of the reproduction of works rather than the ethnographic tradition of capturing events.”¹⁷ The footage in STAGING: solo – archival achieves both: at once it offers an excerpt of the performance (giving a sense of speed, spatial parameters, interplay between dancers), as well as its context (drawing attention to audience behavior and setting within a gallery and public space). Hassabi’s third iteration—STAGING: 5min (2018)—is described by the artist as a “sculptural entity” and consists of three elements: the taped Pink Line and Spike Mark, as well as a stack of identical sheets of paper, each showing an excerpt from the written script for STAGING: solo, an invitation for the viewer to stand in the dancer’s space, and, while reading the text, begin dancing the piece. Borrowing from Gonzalez-Torres, the stack has a prescribed height and must be replenished by the exhibiting institution. STAGING: 5min is at once a discrete sculptural work, as well as a place of anticipation and rest. Immediately prior to a dancer’s arrival, the stack is removed, and then following their departure, the stack is replaced.

In 2017, the Walker acquired three drawings by Jason Moran, whose exhibition the museum would present the following year. Each work on paper (part of a series titled Run), conjures the image of a piano keyboard, registered by Moran’s charcoal dust–covered fingers, while he plays the instrument. Bearing impressions of the artist’s touch, they bring to mind other drawings from the Walker’s collection that carry the traces of performative actions: Yves Klein’s Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo Cane Shroud) (1961) and Trisha Brown’s It’s a Draw – For Robert Rauschenberg (2008). Citing his conversations with Joan Jonas, Moran described the drawings as “residue” and “remnants of a performance,”¹⁸ urging the question: What remains once a performance is finished? How do objects bear witness and attest to liveness?

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  Jason Moran, STAGED: Slugs’ Saloon (2018). Photo: Galen Fletcher for Walker Art Center.
  
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  Jason Moran and Charles Lloyd performs at the opening of Jason Moran, 2018. Photo: Nate Ryan for Walker Art Center.
  
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  Charles Lloyd performs at the opening of Jason Moran, 2018. Photo: Nate Ryan for Walker Art Center.
  
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  Charles Lloyd and Jason Moran perform on Moran’s recreation of the Slugs’ stage at the opening of his solo exhibition, April 26, 2018. Photo: Nate Ryan for Walker Art Center.

Commissioned especially for Moran’s exhibition, STAGED: Slugs’ Saloon (2018) is one in a series of sculptures that replicate the interiors of seminal New York City jazz venues. Like a time capsule rescued from Manhattan’s East Village, the work consists of an instrument-laden stage flanked by mirrors, a backdrop that faithfully replicates the original by artist Bob Thompson, a sawdust-covered area for the audience, and a Wurlitzer Americana II jukebox, programmed to whistling tunes and samplings of the audience from the Village Vanguard, in Greenwich Village. Slugs’ bridges disparate registers: it is at once a sculpture and a prop, an object for contemplation, while also a space for performance. Slugs’ operates with a logic similar to conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers’s notion of décor, a term given to a series of immersive interior spaces that often presented no artworks as such, but objects selected by Broodthaers. Similarly, Slugs’ is not comprised of artworks made by Moran but readymade instruments set within a bespoke “period room,” a term frequently invoked to describe the décors, which often alluded to historical spaces. Broodthaers’s choice of the word was not accidental, but played upon its French meaning as both a theater and film set, suggesting a space where an action or story might take place. Moran’s choice of “STAGED” as the series’ title similarly conceives of the club replicas as mise en scènes or staging devices for live performances by musicians. While “passive,” Slugs’ is a sculptural installation permeated by the sounds of the jukebox, and while “activated” it becomes a functional stage, with each instrument turning into a musician’s prop. Upon its premiere at the Walker in 2018, the history of Slugs’ was resurrected in the present during its “inauguration” by Moran and saxophonist Charles Lloyd, who had performed regularly at the original Slugs’ Saloon.

Accessioning any work into the Walker’s collection is accompanied by the morbid question of its future following the artist’s life. In the case of Slugs’, the key question centered on whom should the Walker permit to perform on the stage in the future? Moran opted for a loose and open framework: while alive, he reserves the right to approve performers, but once he passes the choice will be the Walker’s, with the stipulation that each musician must “prove a bloodline or affinity with Slugs.”¹⁹ “The stage is a portal,” Moran has said of the series²¹, each is an entry point into a moment of Black American jazz history whose memory is made alive in the present.

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  Carolee Schneemann, Noise Bodies, 1965.
  Collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2019.
  
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  Carolee Schneemann, Noise Bodies, 1965.
  Collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2019.
  
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  Carolee Schneemann, Noise Bodies, 1965.
  Collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2019.
  
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  Carolee Schneemann, Noise Bodies, 1965.
  Collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2019.Walker Art Center Collection, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2019
  

The destiny of an object used in a performance is often not clear until years later. So was the case with a mangled bicycle rim, rusted tins, teapot lids, and many other cast-off pieces of detritus that languished in Carolee Schneemann’s storage until 2015, when they resurfaced on occasion of Charlotte Moorman’s exhibition at the Block Museum of Art.²² These various pieces were once material for costumes and props in the movement/sound duet Noise Bodies (1965), first performed on August 28, 1965 by Schneemann and James Tenney at Festival of the Avant-Garde ’65, an annual experimental music and performance festival organized by Moorman. Noise Bodies began offstage with the performers dressing in the costumes, followed by a dance in which each “played” the other’s body with metal rods salvaged from a car engine. The performance reached a finale with Tenney shaking the bicycle rim to create a cacophony of found sounds. While Moran’s STAGED: Slugs’ Saloon continues to be performed, the objects that constitute Noise Bodies has now gained a different status due to its vintage. Though until recently covered in mouse excrement in storage²³, the work’s elements are now preserved and no longer activated, cushioned safely in archival vitrines when on view. Much like Tony Conrad’s musical instruments or Nam June Paik’s TV Cello (1971), once performed by Moorman, the elements that constitute Noise Bodies no longer have a functional purpose—they are now artifacts—and their once performative function is communicated by Peter Moore’s photographs, as well as a sound collage recorded by Schneemann.²⁴ Questions of “authenticity” abound: Noise Bodies generates a dialogue between the original (or “authentic”?) props and contextual documentation, but what to make of works that are rooted in performance, yet devoid of their residue? How have artists sought to transpose liveness into other media, how have they moved from the ephemeral to the concrete?

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  Joan Jonas, Funnel, 1974/2019. Photo: Charlie Villyard
  Walker Art Center Collection, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2019.
  
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  Joan Jonas, Funnel, Walker Art Center Auditorium, October 4, 1974. Photo courtesy Walker Art Center Archives.
  
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  View of the exhibition Less Than One, 2016; Meredith Monk, 16 Millimeter Earrings, 1966/1998 Photo: Gene Pittman, Walker Art Center Collection, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2010.
  
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  View of Meredith Monk’s works in Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones, 1998. Photo: Walker Art Center Archives.
  

In 1974, as part of the public program accompanying the Walker exhibition Projected Images—and following iterations in New York, Amherst, Cologne, Rome, and Houston—Joan Jonas presented Funnel, in which she performed within a space demarcated by suspended paper walls, receding from the front of the stage to the back. Scattered on stage were a number of paper cones and two TV screens showing a live feed of Jonas singing, drawing, and enacting gestures, aided by props including a white rabbit, spinning discs, and a leather belt. In 2019, on occasion of the Walker exhibition The Body Electric, Jonas revisited the performance, but as an installation, which was acquired the same year.

Unlike Schneemann’s Noise Bodies, whose configuration can be decided by the curator, the positioning of Funnel is highly specific. While the viewer is invited to walk around the sides of the installation, an invisible fourth wall prohibits walking into its space. Conceived to be viewed frontally, like a diorama in a natural history museum, Funnel is similar to Meredith Monk’s 16 Millimeter Earrings, an installation that also stems from a performance,²⁵ configured first in a gallery on occasion of the 1998 Walker exhibition Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones, and then subsequently acquired in 2010.

Through a combination of objects, sound, and moving image documentation, both works occupy their own demarcated stage-like space that suggests movement. Monk and Jonas were both strongly influenced by Surrealism, and it is not accidental that their installations recall spaces of momentary arrest, like a chessboard mid-game or Alberto Giacometti’s 1932 tabletop sculptures. Though organized alongside similar spatial coordinates, each artist has employed differing vocabularies to characterize their works. Monk spoke of 16 Millimeter Earrings as a “shrine” gathering “relics.”²⁶ while Jonas perceives Funnel as a “stage set … a sculptural situation,”²⁷ emphasizing its ephemeral and contingent nature. The mode of display chosen by Jonas and Monk confers a different status upon each installation’s elements, when compared with Schneemann’s Noise Bodies. The authenticity and originality of the costumes and props that make up Noise Bodies is heightened by their presentation: they lie in museum vitrines rather than an artist-design setting; they are presented as proof of a historical event. While 16 Millimeter Earrings includes some objects that were original to the performance (a wig and Slinky), all others were sourced or fabricated. Similarly, in the case of Funnel—aside from a wooden spinning object and a metal butterfly—everything can be reproduced according to specifications provided upon acquisition. This is not surprising for Jonas, whose work “does not necessarily remain fixed in its first exhibited or staged iteration, whether video, performance, or installation”²⁸: each of the objects within Funnel has existed in works either immediately prior to or subsequent. As such, they are part of a lexicon of Jonas’s familiar forms, constituting her own visual language. The installation’s spatial position and fourth wall make no claim for truth: they are, in Monk’s words, “intensified compressions of performances,”²⁹ layered spaces of “visual rhyming.”³⁰

It becomes increasingly clear that interdisciplinary acquisitions are not necessarily wedded to a live form nor a set of singular and irreplaceable parts. Just as Joan Jonas reuses and recontextualizes elements within her body of work, similarly Ralph Lemon frequently employs the term “refraction” to describe the way in which a work might subsequently be isolated, studied, and reconsidered anew, both materially and temporally. Liveness splinters into medial manifestations—whether as “installations,” “drawings,” or “archival presentations”—while still carrying the possibility of future liveness, transcending the boundaries set by the stable and accessioned object.

Interdisciplinary acquisitions unravel assumptions related to medium-specificity, display, preservation, documentation, and interpretation (and by extension changing art history and the “canon”), in effect stretching and breaking open institutional boundaries and conventions. Performance curator Catherine Wood describes such collecting as a “viral energy,”³¹ forcing the institution to consider existing holdings through a performative lens, urging us to think anew about what, how, and why we collect.

Yet are these programmatic and collecting engagements with liveness temporary? Do they engender a visual arts imperialist foray into forms of expression that are historically not only ephemeral, but often anti-institutional and transgressive? Does collecting interdisciplinary artworks necessarily tame, entrap, or reduce the possibilities of a work? Conversely, I believe such acquisitions to catalyze new questions and opportunities for both the artist and the institution. Rooted in trust (and, to an extent, intimacy), these acquisitions bring to light received notions of how a collecting institution operates, not only in their relationship to material but also time. The typical acquisition narrative is still similar to the chain of events decried by Daniel Buren as the “ossifying customs of art”³¹: an artwork is made in the studio, exhibited, accessioned into the Walker’s collection, and, subsequently, shown unchanged in the future. Interdisciplinary acquisitions might refer to an originating moment in time (such as a gesture, dance, performance, place) yet require materializing on occasion of an exhibition, much like Gonzalez-Torres’s paper stacks or candy piles. Or a work might be refracted, in a vein similar to Ralph Lemon’s Scaffold Room (2014), acquired by the Walker in 2015. In 2024, the Walker will present Scaffold Room anew, and as we progress in dialogue with Lemon, we realize that the acquisition is not tied to a set material form but will change in its future presentation, bringing to the fore a question about ownership: can an artist change their work once it has been acquired? Together with Lemon, we will negotiate that path. Ultimately, how else will museums and the possibilities of collecting grow, if we don’t partner with artists to imagine new ways forward?

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NOTES

1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” Prisms,London: Neville Spearman, 1967, 173-186
2. See Susan Hapgood and Cornelia Lauf, In Deed: Certificates of Authenticity in Art, exhibition booklet, The Drawing Center, 2012, 2.
3. Miwon Kwon, “The Becoming of a Work of Art: FGT and a Possibility of Renewal. A Chance to Share, a Fragile Truce,” Felix Gonzalez-Torres (New York and Göttingen: Steidl, 2006),Julie Ault, ed., 288.
4. Hendrik Folkerts, “Continuing From Liveness,” MOUSSE, September 2016, 135.
5. Claire Bishop, “The Perils and Possibilities of Dance in the Museum: Tate, MoMA, and Whitney,” Dance Research Journal,vol. 46, no. 3 (December 2014), 62–76. The efforts of research initiatives led by the Tate should also be acknowledged, especially Collecting the Performative (2012–2014) and Performance at Tate: Collecting, Archiving and Sharing Performance and the Performative(2014–2016).
6. For more information see Live Forever: Collecting Live Art (Cologne: Walther König, 2015), Teresa Calonje (ed.).
7. Maria Hassabi quoted in the Acquisition Overview document provided to the Walker upon acquisition of STAGING: solo (2017).
8. Most of which are not for public view, including the instructional materials, installation instructions, casting instructions, teaching instructions, a script, schematic drawings, teaching videos, material samples, digital templates, and moving image documentation.
9. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment(London: Routledge, 2011), 104.
10. For a comprehensive overview, see Megan Gwen Metcalf, “In the New Body: Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions (1960–61) and their Acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)” (PDF), PhD Thesis, Department of Art History, University of California, 2018.
11. These include Hassabi herself, as well as dancers Hristoula Harakas, Oisín Monaghan, Paige Martin, Jessie Gold, and Mickey Mahar.
12. The closest example might be Danh Vo’s Tombstone for Phùng Vo (2010), named after the artist’s father and whose grave the sculpture will mark in Copenhagen’s Vestre Kirkegård. Upon Phùng Vo’s death, the Walker will be, in return, bequested three artifacts of personal significance to Vo—a Dupont lighter, an American military class ring, and a Rolex watch—to be henceforth shown in an artist-designed vitrine.
13. Author’s own word, see Robert C. Morgan, “Thoughts on Re-Performance, Experience, and Archivism,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 32, no. 2 (September 2010), 12.
14. Including teaching videos to sketches, historical photos, notebooks, and recorded interviews. See Nancy Lim, “MoMA Collects: Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions,” Inside/Out, MoMA blog, January 27, 2016.
15. Jürgen Thaler, “Archival Constellations: Valie Export,” VALIE EXPORT (Bregenz, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2012), Yilmaz Dziewior, ed., 37.
16. Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 28, no. 3 (September 2006), 1.
17. Emphasis author’s own. Ibid, 6.
18. Jason Moran quoted in Jason Moran (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2018), Adrienne Edwards, ed., 21.
19. Walker Art Center Collections object file for STAGED: Slugs’ Saloon (2018).
20. Ibid., Edwards, 106.
21. A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant Garde, 1960s–1980s (Evanston: The Block Museum of Art, 2016).
22. Describing the unearthing of these elements, Schneemann said, “I had to dig up all the noise-making elements. I found them, they were all covered in mouse poop but they are okay.”
23. As no audio or moving image documentation survived of the original performances, the artist recorded a short composition in 2015 using one of the original metal rods to strike parts of the costume.
24. Originally presented in 1966 at New York’s Judson Memorial Church, a key venue for downtown experimental dance. Described by Monk as an emotional and sexual awakening of a young woman, the multimedia performance merged film projections and sound recordings within a carefully conceived sculptural environment.
25. In 1999, a year after Art Performs Life, Meredith Monk opened the exhibition Shrines at Frederike Taylor / TZ’Art, New York. For more on Monk’s use of the term, see interview with Siri Engberg, Walker Art Center Archives.
26. “Watch: Joan Joans in Conversation with Pavel Pyś,” Walker Reader, April 29, 2019.
27. Julienne Lorz and Andrea Lissoni, “Distance, Framing, and Layering: Joan Jonas’s Artistic Process,” Joan Jonas (Munich: Hirmer, 2018), 10.
28. Interview with Siri Engberg, Walker Art Center Archives.
29. Deborah Jowitt, “Meredith Monk in Conversation with Deborah Jowitt,” in Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, Bill T. Jones (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1998), Philippe Vergne, Siri Engberg, and Kellie Jones, eds., 74, republished on Walker Reader, May 18, 2016.
30. Catherine Wood quoted in “Tate Tanks,” Artforum, October 2012.
31. Daniel Buren, “The Function of the Studio,” October, Vol. 10 (Autumn, 1979), 51.

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