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Performance Art Enters the Museum

NEW YORK—Midway through a Sunday night performance in the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium, Casey Spooner signaled his band Fischerspooner to a sudden halt. “I’m going to die!” he screamed to the young, fashion-conscious crowd, apparently displeased with their level of enthusiasm. “I’m a showbiz disaster. This is your last chance to show your love!” The crowd cheered, trying to oblige their fated star, and the noise appeared to be sufficient. Spooner who takes the role of a rampaging showman on stage — equal parts Boy George and Roman gladiator — motioned to his team, and the group’s raucous club music started again.

Later, Spooner explained his tantrum. “Sorry guys, they’re filming these shows,” he told the audience. “The film is what matters.” He noted that the performance would be included in a movie the group was making about a fictional pop star. Everything had to be perfect. As his meltdowns mounted, though, the crowd realized these show-stopping diatribes had been carefully choreographed — designed in part to provide time for performers to rest over the course of the three-hour show and change into new, Rococo costumes (designed by artist K8 Hardy).

The presence of Fischerspooner in MoMA’s hallowed halls encapsulates how far performance art has come from its roots in ephemeral art designed to shock audiences and resist canonization. MoMA invited the group to stage its gesamtkunstwerk as part of its “Performance” series and to mark the start of Performa 09, the performance art biennial that runs through Nov. 22 in New York. Today, performance art is big business. Spooner seemed keenly aware of the transformations. “This movie is going to be in a museum,” he giddily mentioned near the show’s end, before neatly summarizing the historical difficulty in bringing performances into museums: “If you don’t photograph it, it didn’t happen.”