Roselee Goldberg
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RoseLee Goldberg is an art historian, author, critic and curator. She pioneered the study of performance art with her seminal book, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. First published in 1979 and now in its third edition (2001), Goldberg’s book is now the key text for teaching performance in universities throughout the world[citation needed] and has been translated into over seven languages, including Chinese, Croatian, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Born in Durban, South Africa, Goldberg studied Political Science and Fine Arts at Wits University, Johannesburg, and Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. As director of the Royal College of Art Gallery, London, Goldberg set important precedents for exhibiting modern and contemporary performance and organized exhibitions, performance series, and symposia on a broad range of multi-disciplinary artists including Marina Abramovic, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Brian Eno, the Kipper Kids, Piero Manzoni, Anthony McCall, and Christo and Jeanne Claude.
Goldberg's curatorial commitment to new media and contemporary visual arts continued during her tenure as curator at The Kitchen, New York. Her innovative programming, including the creation of an exhibition space, a video viewing room, and performance series, helped established The Kitchen as one of the foremost multi-media institutions worldwide. While at The Kitchen, Goldberg presented works by Laurie Anderson, Phillip Glass, Peter Gordon, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson and curated the first solo exhibitions of Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, David Salle, and Cindy Sherman, among others.
Goldberg has curated several performance series including “Six Evenings of Performance,” as part of the exclaimed High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Couleurs Superposees: Acte VII, a performance by Daniel Buren, (in association with Works & Process), at the Guggenheim, New York.
In 2001 as part of her visionary goal to create significant new theater and performance for the 21st Century, Goldberg commissioned and produced Logic of the Birds, a multi-media performance by Shirin Neshat in collaboration with composer and singer Sussan Deyhim. Developed in residency at Mass MOCA, Logic of the Birds was presented in workshop at the Kitchen in 2001, and premiered at the 2002 Lincoln Center Festival, and toured to the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, and Artangel, London.
In 2004, Goldberg founded PERFORMA, a new non-profit multi-disciplinary arts organization for the research, development, and presentation of 21st Century visual art performance. As PERFORMA director, she launched New York’s first performance biennial, PERFORMA 05, to tremendous critical and popular success. PERFORMA 05 offered an exciting three-week program of live performances, exhibitions, installations, film screenings, and symposia by more than ninety international artists at leading cultural venues throughout the city. Over 25,000 people attended and both Roberta Smith of The New York Times and Time Out New York selected PERFORMA 05 as one of the best events of 2005.
In 2007, PERFORMA07, the second edition of the PERFORMA biennial of new visual art performance took place, and was greeted with even more critical and popular acclaim than the first. PERFORMA 07 featured an extraordinary array of over one hundred performances by artists from around the world. Events took place at more than seventy venues across the city, allowing viewers to see the city of New York in utterly different ways, to discover new ideas, and to witness surprising reconstructions of older ones. From the remake of the original "Happening," Allan Kaprow's 18 Happening in 6 Parts, in a former boathouse in Queens, to a modern day Baptist Revival in the West Village; a revamping of The Rite of Spring on Broadway; a Long March--backwards--along Park Avenue; a punk rock musical featuring a fire-sparking animatronic dinosaur in the East Village; children giving haircuts to adults in Chinatown; hula-hoopers performing on the rooftops of the Lower East Side, and much more, PERFORMA 07 was hailed as a delirious and thought-provoking new biennial for New York City.
"PERFORMA07, the second installment of the new biennial, brought a staggering range of live events to venues large and small throughout New York City." Art in America, March 2008
"Presenting art as a visceral experience to be absorbed with all five senses and carried away through memory and inspiration, PERFORMA07 focused on the act of making rather than the act of consuming....It demanded focus and commitment from both the artist and the audience, and this condition led to just rewards. In the process PERFORMA07 has encouraged performance's expanded presence in New York....In a city that is generally conservative about performance, New York's warm and wide welcome of PERFORMA07 attested to a large population in search of creative fulfillment." Katie Sonnenborn, Frieze, March 2008
"When RoseLee Goldberg came up with the idea of a new New York biennial exclusively dedicated to live events, whether performance, dance, happenings, confrontations, operas or plays, by contemporary artists, young, old or middle aged, nobody thought it would fly. But it did fly and now it¹s high up in the sky as one of the major contemporary art events to look forward to." Francesco Bonami, Domus, January 2008
"A celebration of transience, a paean to you-had-to-be-there, a deep and exhilarating bow to we-have-only-now." Holland Cotter, The New York Times, November 7, 2007
Goldberg has taught at New York University since 1987 and has lectured at Columbia University, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Kyoto University of Art and Design, the Mori Museum, Tokyo, the Tate Modern, London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Yale University, among other institutions. She is a frequent contributor to Artforum, and her publications include Performance Since 1960 (1998), Laurie Anderson (2000) and Shirin Neshat (2002). Goldberg has two forthcoming books in 2007: PERFORMA, the first in a series of publications to accompany the PERFORMA biennials and Performance Now: New Art, New Dance, New Media published by Thames and Hudson. She was recently named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and Communication.
[edit] Publications
[edit] Bibliography
- Hughley, Marty (2000). "A Tribute to the Eye of Laurie Anderson." The Oregonian. June 18.
- Rockwell, John (2004). "Preserve Performance Art?" New York Times. April 30.
- Smith, Roberta (2005). "Performance Art Gets Its Biennial." New York Times. November 2.
