The ballet headlining the North and South American art world’s fall gathering at Art Basel Miami is about the mundane. It’s about the viral, the bizarre and distractions they cause. There might be a Taylor Swift moment. It’s a ballet about the internet.
ME3m 4 Miami: A Story Ballet about the Internet was conceived in an small New York performance space and grew to fit a theatre in Miami Beach, the city where Art Basel takes place. Its creator Ryan McNamara stretched the ballet from its original 13 dancers to 28. Corners of the house will be occupied by artists wearing print spandex, focused on their act as others around them perform independently.
But that’s just half the ballet. The audience makes the other half.
In its New York iteration, critics were befuddled if immersed in the ballet’s forced audience participation. People movers gently picked up audience members in custom made chairs, a hybrid of dollies and seats, gently tilting back and wheeling them to other focal points in the diffuse performance. A critic for the New York Times called the show a “like a strip club without stripping.”
“At the conceptual level what he’s saying is, ‘How do you read your screen?’” says RoseLee Goldberg, director of Performa, the performance art biennial that commissioned the McNamara’s piece. “You’re on your computer. I’m on mine. We’re seeing totally different things” – despite sitting side by side.
There’s no central narrative. There’s no single thread. You know that pop song but you can’t place it. You don’t get to know your neighbours and your attention is demanded everywhere. That, says McNamara, is the point.
“When I think about these technological advances, you’re kind of awestruck by them,” says the artist. “The kind of information superhighway, those terms that were this utopic (sic) idea of what was going to happen.
“Over time, [it] just kind of became junk mail, and I don’t know, like ads, and you know from Spotify asking you upgrade to paid members,” he said. “It sort of became so mundane so quickly and that’s sort of amazing.”
The piece appears to fit right in at Art Basel. Nearby is an exhibition of André 3000 from Outkast’s 47 custom jumpsuits. One reads “thinking deeply about shallow sh#t.” The words mimic pop artist Andy Warhol’s famous self-assessment of being, “deeply superficial.”
Among the more than 200 galleries attending Art Basel is Lady Gaga, The Death of Marat, a video portrait by theatre director Robert Wilson of the star, playing off the famous portrait by Jacques-Louis David of a French revolutionary.
Born in Phoenix, Arizona but based in Brooklyn, McNamara’s performance art is well known in the New York art world. When first staged, ME3M won a Malcolm McLaren award, a prize named after the Sex Pistols manager and provocateur.
But despite many performance pieces, McNamara is a virgin to large theatre spaces. He was minted as a visual artist, and staged performances in galleries and museums. Like a lot of McNamara’s work, ME3M is marked by pop songs you recognize but don’t know wherefrom, and the vague feeling that you are familiar with pieces of the performance.
“It’s like I’m cheating,” said McNamara. “You reference this one pop culture moment, like a song or even like a genre of music, and everyone has had an experience.”
At the moment, one of McNamara’s favorite such low-boil viral successes is Too Many Cooks, a 10-minute vamp on the opening credits of 90s television. The video continually introduces new characters as it runs through family sitcom, cop drama and science fiction series, gradually introduces a serial killer.
“Anyone that grew up watching TV in the 90s would have known [the characters], and then it goes to the most surreal place,” McNamara said. “It’s sort of like this shared cultural knowledge that we have.”
It’s videos like this, shared more than 3.8m times, but not shared enough to be ubiquitous, that can quickly mesh an audience, McNamara said.
“It’s this layered thinking about, how do we move through different material when you’re online?” said Goldberg. “The surprise is actually the sheer fun of the piece itself.”
