The Contemporary Art Forum presents timely and innovative programs (lectures, conversations, and performances) that address pressing issues in contemporary art, and are developed out of discussions with MoMA curators. Participants include artists and designers, critics, curators, and scholars, among others.
This conference explored current experimental theater and performance art practices with special consideration of the audience and spectator. Participants included Andrea Fraser, artist; RoseLee Goldberg, curator and Director of Performa; Hannah Hurtzig, theater director; Shannon Jackson, Chair and Professor, Department of Performance Studies and Theater, University of California, Berkeley, David Levine, artist; Charlie Todd, Director of Improv Everywhere; and Bill Wasik, Senior Editor of Harper's Magazine and the inventor of the flash mob. The program was organized by Pablo Helguera, Director of Adult and Academic Programs, Department of Education, MoMA.
I attended Audience experiments with my former Master's thesis advisor, Glenn Wharton; who is the head Time-based Media Conservator at MoMA. Not knowing what to expect, we were both amazed by the participatory nature of the "lecture," as all of the panelists treated the evening as a performance of a lecture, as opposed to a lecture itself. Very meta. Of course there were degrees of seriousness to this performance, ranging from Roselee Goldberg (who acted like a "normal" panelist) to Andrea Fraser adopting several different guises; (one of which got naked and told MoMA to "kiss her ass") to David Levine who consciously did not prepare at all. Levine's segment was focused on the dynamics of knowledge transmission, and how that traditional lecture dynamic reveals what audiences expect and how they behave within that context. All of the performances lead to the idea that audiences and institutions should question accepted traditions of audience-lecturer paradigms, and be more open and experimental.
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