The performance artist Nikhil Chopra at the Met Stephanie Berger
At first glance, Nikhil Chopras itinerary at the Metropolitan Museum of Art may seem like an endurance test: nine consecutive days of drawing, singing, eating, changing costumes and sleeping in a marathon piece of performance art.
“It definitely feels like a long trek,” says the Indian-born artist, whose odyssey begins on the Mets front steps on 12 September and ends on the 20th in a courtyard in the Robert Lehman wing. “But theres also a lot of thrill in that, so its not all torture–its a lot of pleasure as well.”
As he has in previous performances from Manchester to Venice to Mumbai, the artist plans to adopt a series of personae as he moves from gallery to gallery, changing costumes, applying makeup and shaving.
Nikhil Chopra in Coal on Cotton (2013), commissioned by the Manchester International Festival and the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester Sabine Pfisterer/Courtesy of the artist and Chatterjee & Lal
“Somewhere I will look like an abstract painting, and somewhere I will like a shaman, and somewhere I might look even like a Chinese lantern with all of those tassels that hang out of my costume,” Chopra says. At one point, he adds, he will don a red spandex bodysuit that evokes the body masks worn by Asmat tribespeople in the museums displays of Oceanian art.
(The artist's performances start at a time when the Met's embrace of contemporary art is front and center: today the museum ushered in its first-ever such installation on its historic exterior, featuring sculptures by Wangechi Mutu for niches in its Fifth Avenue facade.)
To draw onlookers into the atmosphere, Chopra will periodically sing, while a sound artist with whom the artist has long worked will play music. Yet the artist sees his central task as creating a large-scale drawing that alludes to landscape painting and that plays off the performances title: Lands, Waters, and Skies.
“By calling it Lands, Waters, and Skies, I feel like Im politicising that and not just making a pretty picture,” says Chopra, who has a 2019-20 residency at the Met. “Im asking the question, whose sky, whose land and whose water? Especially in the 21st century, these questions become very important.” Through his performance piece, the artist plans to contemplate how the Met tells its stories as well as explore notions of displacement and migration.
On his first day at the museum, Chopra will mount the museum's steps and assemble his gear in the Great Hall before heading to his first destination, a spot in front of the Egyptian Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing. There, a cotton canvas that he will use for the drawing will serve as a makeshift dwelling, he says.
Asked whether he will interact with museumgoers during his stop there, a popular place at the Met, Chopra says the museum will station staff members to act as liaisons between onlookers and the performance. “I want to be kind of like an object that you would see in a vitrine,” he explains. “I have to in a way separate myself from the audience.”
His second location, on the performances third day, will be the Modern and contempoRead More – Source
