Intentions – Actions – Outcomes

Intentions – Actions – Outcomes mines the legacies of Fluxus and Conceptual art in the 1960s and 70s until today, as diverse artists question the nature of production, commodification, and reception; blur distinctions between disciplines of visual art, music, and dance; and use everyday objects and irreverent humor in sly and suggestive ways.

Artists include Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Janine Antoni, Lynda Benglis, Chris Burden, David Byrne, Philip Corner, Merce Cunningham, Ayana Evans, Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, Charles Goldman, Piero Manzoni, Dave McKenzie, Robert Morris, Yoko Ono, Clifford Owens, Pope.L, Joe Sola, Stephen Vitiello, and Erwin Wurm, among others. Their works take the form of advertisements, diagrams, postcards, posters, scores, drawings, sculptures, and documentary photographs of private and public events. 

Often the artist performs an act of endurance, testing the limits of their physical and mental capacities. These can be dramatic or subtle, as when Marina Abramović created Freeing the Voice in 1975 by screaming continuously for three hours until her voice was gone; or Janine Antoni using her eyelashes and Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara to make Butterfly Kisses in 2019, a drawing that is the result of thousands of accumulated winks against the paper.  

Sometimes, the art offers the promise of an encounter, as in Dave McKenzie’s I’ll Be There, a 2007 multiple produced for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Public Offerings series. The artist distributed two hundred day planners, stamped with the time and location of where he’d be on a given date—on a train, at a museum, etc. He arrived at each rendezvous with the understanding that any one of his fellow citizens might be there to meet him but not knowing what would happen if they did.   

Philip Corner’s installation Metal Meditations, 1972-77, includes calligraphic scores, which must be interpreted in order to “play” several suspended instruments and objects. As an artist/composer/musician, Corner is known for his cultivation of activities that result from chance-based operations and improvisation. Visitors to this exhibition will have the opportunity to activate his sculpture with some instruction and supervision.  

Film screenings and planned and impromptu performances will be presented along with the objects on view. Extended wall labels will put works in historical context and address aspects of audacity and irreverence.    

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Ronald Feldman (1938 – 2023), whose gallery in New York City championed numerous performative and political artists including Eleanor Antin, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Leon Golub, and Hannah Wilke.

IMAGE: Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992, performance with Loving Care hair dye, Natural Black. Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1993. © Janine Antoni; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.