HAVE YOU KICKED A BUILDING LATELY?
A Panel Discussion About Architecture and Performance
Presented by Performa’s Not For Sale Series

Featuring Vito Acconci, Elizabeth Berger, Beatriz Colomina, and Teddy Cruz, with Respondents Glenn Weiss, Alexander Pincus, and Peter Zuspan
Introduced and Moderated by RoseLee Goldberg

Wednesday, May 26 at 6 pm (Doors open at 5:30 pm)
Rose Auditorium, Cooper Union
41 Cooper Square, New York

Tickets:
FREE. General seating. Please RSVP to reserve a seat.
RSVP to notforsale@performa-arts.org

Performa is proud to continue its Not for Sale series with Have You Kicked a Building Lately?, its first panel involving the architectural community, that will examine the role of biennials and festivals to activate the city and foster cultural activism as a form of radical urbanism.  In preparation for Performa 11, this panel will begin a series of conversations with artists, architects, writers, curators, urban planners and museum professionals, to understand how live interventions in the architectural environment increase the pleasure of the city, its streets, facades and skyline, and deepen a sense of connection to place for all its inhabitants.

Taking its title from a 1989 collection of essays by the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic and writer Ada Louise Huxtable, Have You Kicked a Building Lately? encourages the following questions: How do artists and architects manipulate, activate and disturb urban space? Is it possible for architecture and the urban environment to be integral actors in a live event’s unfolding rather than just providing the stage?  How does live performance occupy a space and create a destination where people want to go and return to again and again?  How can architects and artists work together and create a space for theatrical possibility?

Panelists will include Designer Vito Acconci, President of the Downtown Alliance Elizabeth Berger, Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University Beatriz Colomina, and Architect and Professor at the University of California, San Diego Teddy Cruz. With respondents Glenn Weiss, Manager of Public Art and Design of the Times Square Alliance, and Alexander Pincus and Peter Zuspan, Architects and Founding Principals of Bureau V.

The panel will be introduced and moderated by Performa Director RoseLee Goldberg, who wrote the first history of performance, Performance Art from Futurism to the Present, in 1979, and went on to found Performa in 2004 specifically to make this extraordinary history known. After launching the first biennial in 2005, she predicted, “All signs are that we are in the midst of a strong reemergence of performance, and that the coming years are only likely to bring more.” Now, six years after Performa was founded, and over thirty years since Goldberg’s first book was published, museums and cultural institutions are indeed finally taking notice, and the results are very exciting.