Nick Mauss, Frieze Projects, 2014. Courtesy Linda Nylind / Frieze. Photo Linda Nylind.
Art fairs have become hybrid beings, caught between the conflicting demands of commerce and their desire to create a unique visitor experience. Given the rise of the experience economy and the contemporary visitor’s desire for the micro-encounter and the #artselfie this has translated to increasingly elaborate performances taking place on site. This achieved its momentary apex in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s and Klaus Biesenbach’s 14 Rooms performance exhibition at Art Basel in June 2014, which included renowned performance auteur Damien Hirst among others. The theatricality of such affairs has little in common with traditional performance art: as performance pioneer Vito Acconci said about Marina Abramovich, the “constant presence of an audience turned her so-called performance into theater,” labeling her performance The Artist is Present at MoMA as “the worst he’s ever seen”, in an interview with the New York Observer. Performance at an art fair is geared towards an audience, towards theatricality, towards Instagram: how can an artist, then, create a piece for a fair which avoids this compromise and remains an artwork in itself? Artist Nick Mauss’ answer was to cast his performance, “1nversions1”, a recital-cum-ballet for Frieze London.
Despite his young age – he was born in 1980 – London-based Nick Mauss is an artist of some renown. His drawings are held in MoMA and Whitney Museum collections, and he has participated in notable exhibitions. In 2012, he exhibited a reconstruction of Guerlain’s first Institut de Beauté spa in Paris from 1939 at the Whitney Biennal. This translocated room served as a manifestation of another time and space, and was intended to halt visitors in their tracks and encourage them to linger, casting them as actors on a stage. It was this installation-as-stage that attracted the attention of Frieze Projects curator Nicola Lees, and she commissioned Mauss to produce a performance for Frieze London, a living stage for a new ballet. It was a new way of working for Mauss, whose hybrid practice encompasses drawing, sculpture and curating.
“When Nicola Lees proposed to me to consider working with a ballet group, it was completely new – no curator had ever suggested that to me. I’m interested in making exhibitions where people become very aware of space, which is how you would think about ballet.” he says. “I realised that this is absolutely something I want to do.” It is an unusual constellation: while artists have often worked with choreographers – witness Picasso’s collaboration with the Ballets Russes, or Robert Rauschenberg’s collaboration with Merce Cunningham – it is novel that an artist should commission a ballet. “This project for Frieze is more in line with curating an exhibition. It’s about collaborating with the choreographer, with the dancers, and making this piece which is as much my false projections on ballet as a ballet itself,” he says.
Nick Mauss. Photo by David Urbanke
Mauss worked together with a large cast of fellow artists, ranging from musician and artist Kim Gordon, DJ Marco Gomez (False Witness) to Juliana Huxtable, a model, DJ and writer and the Northern Ballet Company. Mauss worked with Lorena Randi, a choreographer on the dramaturgy, and designed the state set, which looked like a ballet studio with barres and mirrors, drawing in the rest of the fair, with the public which constantly enters and leaves the stage scene. Visitors thus become participants, as opposed to remaining in their audience role.
Gordon and Huxtable wrote and performed text (with Gordon wearing a pair of fetching leggings emblazoned with the words ‘Die Collector Scum’, at the VIP preview). “I was trying to imagine what kind of music I would want to hear if I was watching a ballet. I had been reading Kim’s writing and then I saw Juliana giving a reading – the text was an amazing series of anecdotes. Kim’s writing is about walking through the art fair and how awkward and almost debilitating it is,” Mauss says. The Northern Ballet performed a series of pieces, Huxtable, Gordon and the dancers alternating, “responding to the fair environment as a place of constant movement and social dance.”
The elements feel very disparate – after all, what connects Gordon’s discordant guitar, with Huxtable’s reading and elements of classic ballet? “I always thought of this as a piece where each performer would maintain total independence: just give them the framework that I have established and have them do whatever it is that would be interesting for them to do,“ Mauss notes.
Perhaps, then, Mauss’ piece should be viewed through the lens of a “happening” as opposed to a (ballet) performance. Performance artist Alan Kaprow first coined the term in 1957 to mean situations or performances that were to be read as art. They could occur anywhere and at any time, with non-linear narratives and with audience involvement. They inspired Seventies choreographers like Yvonne Rainier to unite dancers, musicians and visual artists on an equal footing to obscure genre boundaries. Improvisation also formed a vital element. “1nversions1”, then, can be seen as a continuation of this tradition, with Mauss incorporating audience, improvised elements and chance occurrences into the performance. As he says “I was observing the dancers at during rehearsals. I saw two ballerinas lying on the floor looking at text messages and I asked them, “Is that something you could do?” They understood what I was interested in wasn’t just the performance, but these casual moments that take place just a few feet away in a different headspace.”
Performance timings, with Gordon and Huxtables recitals interweaving with the ballet routines are reminiscent of the classic elements of improvisation, where improvised elements occur with a pre-determined structure. “There’s a moment when the ballet is doing a warm-up routine, and then they get into costume and are painted, and Juliana arrives to play, and it’s sort of all a bit off track, and then things start to coalesce. I don’t necessarily want what Kim and Juliana are doing to go to together with the dance,” he says. “But each time the dance coincides with the live performance of the spoken text, it’s a different response. It’s really interesting to watch the audience–they’re a bit nervous about what’s going on, and “has it started, has it finished, what am I looking at?”
Frieze 2014 of course featured many performances – both commissioned by Frieze itself, or staged by private galleries. Here performance runs the danger of slippage into theatricality or spectacle, in line with Acconci’s warnings about “performing” to an audience. Mauss is concerned with wider questions of collecting, archiving and presenting performance.
“The commercialisation or spectacularisation of performance is of course present.” He hopes that these concerns will be addressed, and that performance doesn’t just become entertainment. This concern also determined the structure of “1nversions1”, there would be pauses in which little happened. “People would react. On the first day, someone walked in and said “WHERE’S THE DANCE? I WANT TO SEE DANCE NOW! I EXPECTED IT!” Sorry, you can’t say that, look, this is the boredom in your own life and you’re going to have to deal with that,“ Mauss notes drily. Despite “never having thought of putting something like this on stage,” Mauss is thinking of taking project further – just not necessarily in such a commercial context.
Text by Jeni Fulton
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