Events: between artistic practice and curatorial practice

Abstract

Merce Cunningham’s contributions with innovative artists of all disciplines have redefined the way of experiencing the visual and performing arts, proposing a number of deviations from other performance practices and even developing novel devices for presenting his own material.

I propose to investigate the format called Event whose emergence is connected to a peculiar way of presenting their work outside the traditional performance space. I will work with Oscar Steimberg’s proposals on genre and style to reflect on the status of this format, putting the Beacon Eventsseries and the Park Avenue Armory Event in parallel. The first proposal was made by Cunningham and the second by Robert Swinston, a factor that would allow us to consider two possibilities in relation to the same format: its particularities as an artistic practice and the implications of analysing it as a curatorial practice. From the confrontation of these cases, I will explore the possible crossovers between the curatorial aspects of an artistic practice (in the case of Cunningham’s creations) and the artistic aspects of a curatorial practice (in relation to the use of this format by the Merce Cunningham Trust).