Losing its edge

Last November the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles held its annual fund-raising gala. Previously the event had used the tried-and-tested formula of wheeling in celebrity hosts such as Lady Gaga to try to persuade the great and good of Los Angeles to part with cash to fund the museum’s programme. This time, however, the museum changed tack, and appointed the performance artist Marina Abramovic as its creative director. When the guests, who included Kirsten Dunst, Pamela Anderson and Will Ferrell, turned up, they were asked to don white lab coats. They were then led to their tables, many of which featured a live human head poking up through the middle, revolving like a Lazy Susan. Other tables had as their centrepieces naked performers lying underneath skeletons.

Before the main course Abramovic read a manifesto proclaiming that each guest wasn’t ‘just here as a guest of another gala’ but was in fact ‘an experimenter in a strange lab’. The ageing singer Debbie Harry was then carried on stage by a number of shirtless male performers where she belted out the Blondie hit ‘Heart of Glass’. Finally, two life-size nude statues of Abramovic and Harry were wheeled on to the stage. Harry attacked her statue with a machete and removed its heart, which turned out to be made of red velvet cake. The guests applauded. Dessert had arrived.

Abramovic’s gala generated some controversy. The dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer wrote a much-publicised letter, co-signed by several art-world figures, that denounced the event as ‘a grotesque spectacle’ which exploited those who signed up as performers. But the museum’s director, Jeffrey Deitch, seemed unperturbed by Rainer’s protests, and, given that the gala raised $2.5 million for his institution, that’s understandable. What’s more interesting is what the episode tells us about the status of performance art, once the outrider of the 20th-century avant-garde.