Seven Portraits on a Correalist Rocker, 2009

Performance on replica Friedrich Kiesler furniture, ultramarine boating canvas, rope, eye-hooks

As part of his commission to design Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery, Friedrich Kiesler created an object, the Correalist Rocker, that had seven different positions and combinations as a pedestal and chair. He made a second form, the Correalist Instrument, which counted eighteen uses.

Seven Portraits on a Correalist Rocker turns Kiesler's rocker into a storyteller's seat. Over the course of a fifteen-minute performance, I rotate an MDF replica into seven positions and deliver imagined portraits of Peggy, loosely told from the perspectives of contemporaries like Maya Deren and Marcel Duchamp. Actual portraits by Man Ray, Virgil Thomson and Max Ernst are also described at length.

Inverting the standard role of the dealer as a representative of creative practitioners, the performance ambivalently meditates on this art-world figure by rendering seven portraits of Peggy herself.