Miles Greenberg’s art occupies galleries, museums, theatres, biennials and triennials –occupy being a term that most aptly describes these presentations, embodied on an architectural scale, visually arresting and multi-sensorial. These descriptors apply whether the work is in a format of performance bracketed by the length of his body's endurance, immersive video installation or sculpture. Previous works have seen rooms filled with over 4000 stemmed lilies and hyacinths (PNEUMOTHERAPY in New York), and IV bags dripping syrup while suspended from the ceiling alongside choreographed, robot-mounted cameras in a Byzantine palazzo during this year's Venice Biennial presentation of SEBASTIAN.
Inspired early in his career to work in performance thanks to a formative encounter with artist Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, Greenberg has been exploring ways performance can exist and be exhibited ever since. The varied bodies of work he has created, OYSTERKNIFE, SEBASTIAN, TRUTH or Late October, all began as live manifestations, but continued to circulate in other innovative ways. Notably, they do so without compromising the live experience of their origin. In the artist’s first solo museum presentation, TRUTH at Buro Stedelijk, audiences were invited into an immersive projection space while standing in a fifteen centimetre-deep pool of water. For Fountain II at Pace Gallery in New York, a self-sustaining water system was installed which fed upwards into the bodies of the performers, and back down into the pool below them. In this instance, Greenberg’s art was positioned in dialogue with a historic artwork by Hermann Nitsch, whose dripped gestural paintings hung next to Greenberg’s ‘fountain.’ The experience of seeing these artworks alongside one another pointed to a sense of a revitalized avant-garde, from post-war Vienna to modern-day North America.
In RESPAWN at the Art Gallery of Ontario, co-commissioned and co-presented with Luminato Festival Toronto, Greenberg occupies the museum’s largest space. A palatial room, set with mirrored flooring creates a setting akin to otherworldly, polygonal landscapes found in digital realms, like video games. RESPAWN marks two firsts in Greenberg’s practice: his first large-scale performance on home soil, and the first time he has introduced text into his work, through a collaboration with fellow Canadian novelist and playwright Jordan Tannahill. For this performance, Tannahill wrote an original long-form poem inspired by the work of feminist psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva.
Thematically this performance navigates intellectual landscapes common in Greenberg’s work: space between performance and sculpture, representations of Black and queer bodies, as well potential for the body to be reflected as both unique and universal. Bodies - his primary material - can be sculptures, but they are also subjects, carriers of histories that occupy these vessels. This is what the Tannahill and Kristeva text underscores, the potential of the subject to be formed, through language and experience, but also to be reformed. To RESPAWN in fighting video games is to die and come back. In the space of Walker Court on June 5, it will be explored as a mode of transformation, resurrection, of reclaiming origins and reanimating them. We hope you join us in this experience and reflect on the possibilities of these prompts while watching the artist navigate them in real-time, using the performance space as a studio of sorts to which we are invited.
- Bojana Stancic, AGO Program Curator, Performance and Live