Roselee Goldberg In Conversation with Praxis

Art

PERFORMA05, the first performance art biennial, will take place this year from November 3-21, 2005 in New York City. A three week program of performances, exhibitions, film screenings, lectures, and symposia, it has been organized in collaboration with a consortium of international curators and artists to provide audiences with an overview of contemporary performance art. With more than ninety participating artists at over twenty venues, PERFORMA05 will articulate a broad range of ideas and sensibilities across disciplines and media.

The Brooklyn Rail spoke with Roselee Goldberg, the Founding Director and Curator of PERFORMA.

Delia Bajo and Brainard Carey (Rail): How did the PERFORMA05 Biennale begin?

James Siena with Chris Martin

Art

The Brooklyn Rail visited James Siena at his compact Canal Street studio on a rainy October morning. The two-room space felt like some archetypal medieval workshop. Recent paintings were glowing like icons on shelves and on the floor. Framed pieces, books, documents, various tools and paints are carefully organized in shelves and cabinets—along with part of his collection of antique typewriters. A beautiful Alan Saret drawing hangs between the two windows.

Omer Fast Godville

by Daniel Baird

Art

Americans’ relationship to American history has always been personal, ambivalent, nostalgic, and prone to delusional fantasy. When Cotton Mather, infamous for his pivotal role in the Salem witch trials, sat down to write biographies of the early Massachusetts Colony patriarchs, he did not write about the daily struggles of men in a then remote and often embattled settlement, but about how the course of their lives conformed to Biblical types. And when Thomas Jefferson wrote his Notes on the State of Virginia, he was not only replying to the great French natural historian George de Buffon’s claim that the flora and fauna of North America are inferior to those native to Europe because of the New World’s distance in time and place from where Noah’s Ark finally ran aground, but he was also arguing for the singular character of America. America’s conception of itself is about renewal, reinvention, and redemption, and this has been further promoted by the dominance of forms of Protestantism that emphasize a visionary and sometimes ecstatic relationship to Jesus. America is a heretical religious concept, not so much part of secular history, as its shining exception and terminus.

Suzan Frecon with John Yau

by John Yau

Art

One Sunday afternoon last month at Suzan Frecon’s Hell’s Kitchen studio, Rail’s consulting editor John Yau spoke with the painter about her new body of work which will be exhibited at Peter Blum Gallery from November 17 to January 14, 2006.