Miles Greenberg performs in Venice.Francesco Allegretto/Courtesy of the artist, Museum Berggruen and Neue Nationalgalerie
Miles Greenberg would rather you did not call him a performance artist. Fearing that performance might be placed beneath painting or sculpture, he prefers to think of himself simply as an artist who uses his body as his medium.
And use it he does: He plans to battle an unseen opponent to the point of exhaustion for a Canadian debut at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, which will launch the Luminato festival Wednesday. At the Venice Biennale this year, he spent seven and a half hours with five arrows piercing his flesh in a reference to Saint Sebastian, the early Christian martyr so beloved of Renaissance painters.
“It wasn’t as bad as it looks,” Greenberg said, showing off a faint scar on his back in a video call from New York. “More expensive arrows this time: Spend your money on the needles,” he added, referring to last year’s study for the work enacted over five hours at the Louvre in Paris.
Greenberg, 26, also spent eight hours a day for eight days lying immobile (and apparently blinded) on a table in a Bangkok museum in the 2021 work Admiration Is the Furthest Thing from Understanding, and he stood on a plinth in a New York studio for seven hours dripping fake blood for Fountain I from 2022. His trainer is a physical therapist who used to work for the Cirque du Soleil.
For 2022's Fountain I, Greenberg stood on a plinth in a New York studio for seven hours, dripping fake blood.Maria Baranova/Courtesy the artist
A Canadian now living in New York, Greenberg is a child of privilege – but likes to describe himself as a high-school dropout. His mother, Phoebe Greenberg, is a former actor, one of the heirs to the Minto development fortune and the philanthropist who established Montreal’s Phi Foundation for contemporary art. Her teenage son left Dawson College, Montreal’s English-language CEGEP, after a few weeks.
Greenberg will make his Canadian debut at the AGO as part of the Luminato Festival.Eva Roefs/Supplied
He was already, in those early years, sneaking into Montreal nightclubs to enact performances. Since leaving Canada soon after, he has been in training for the career he chose at the age of 12: In 2010, he saw Marina Abramovic, probably the most famous performance artist in the world, staring silently into visitors’ faces for eight hours a day at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for her retrospective The Artist is Present. Today, she is his teacher and mentor.
“We met here in New York by chance at one of her events and she took me on in subsequent years and we developed a close friendship. She’s my sounding board.”
Abramovic’s work often questions the relationship between the audience and the artist: In her most notorious performance, Rhythm 0 of 1974, the artist surrounded herself with 72 objects related to pleasure and pain, from a feather and lipstick to a knife and gun with one bullet, and invited people to use them on her. The audience showed itself increasingly capable of violence as it divided into those who sought to protect the artist and those who wanted to test the limits of her concept and actually use the weapons.
Greenberg’s work revives the acts of extreme physical endurance that characterized performance art in the 1970s but he argues that doing something hard on stage is very different than doing it as a civilian. “The work is never about pain,” he said. “Pleasure and pain, and idleness and exhaustion, and ecstasy and agony are all entry points into a part of the psyche that contains a lot of secrets. Our body is full of things that we never solicit through our daily, quotidian social lives. There is a lot more there that is accessible through processes and through rigour.”
His self-directed apprenticeship in performance began as an assistant to Quebec choreographer Édouard Lock on a tour to Beijing and included several years in Paris studying at the renowned clown school École Jacques Lecoq, where his mother had previously studied. It also featured a month in Haiti studying voodoo and observing practitioners going into trance states.
“People would transform and then they would come back. You don’t stay transformed. You access a point: There’s a secret, turn the key. You learn what it is, but you can’t take it backwards. There’s a lot that happens to you as a practitioner in that moment. But then there’s a lot that happens to the audience who’s watching you: It’s sort of like watching someone go into space. You are like an astronaut, touching the frontier.”
He compares it to what he achieves in performance: “I come back and I come to and I forget, but when I’m in that moment, I know that it’s as close to my idea of God as I can ever get.”
For Sebastian at the Biennale, he had himself smeared with black pigment, pierced with five arrows and exposed to a steady drip of cane sugar syrup, as part of a continuing investigation of the Black body. (Greenberg identifies as Black; his mother raised him on her own but his father is the former MuchMusic VJ Michael Williams.)
The sugar cane is a reference to enslaved labour and Greenberg was also partly inspired by the so-called blackamoors, statues of Black youths that hold up tables and even walls in Venetian palaces. In addition to performing, he makes his own sculptures using 3-D printing and Sebastian included a single 3-D-printed blackamoor, which he had managed to create by sneaking a low-level version of the software on his phone into a Venetian museum.
He had first wondered about the anonymity of these Black figures in childhood, visiting the Venice Biennale with his mother and touring a city filled with paintings and sculptures of identifiable white religious and civic figures. As a way of closing the circle on those trips, he asked his mother to take the arrows out at the end of his performance.
“It was a huge moment for us; she has been taking me to the Biennale since I was in utero,” he said.
Still, Greenberg has worked hard to establish a career outside of her influence, both in leaving Canada and in rejecting theatre (her original profession albeit in a highly experimental mode).
“I grew up on a tour bus, but theatre was never a medium I felt attracted to,” he said, adding that he finds the structure of a play and the formality of the audience’s experience confining and self-conscious.
Establishing himself in New York five years ago to work with Abramovic, he began to build a portfolio of daring performances that have been shown around the world, but the AGO event will mark his first Canadian appearance. Both escaping expectations and perceiving a lack of interest, he used to feel there was little reason to be in Canada, but since he was offered the AGO show and long-listed for the 2024 Sobey Art Award, he’s rethinking.
“I’m starting to feel a little bit homesick,” he said. “I’m definitely coming back some day.”
His only previous Canadian show was one of his sculptures, a facet of his work related to his performances. He is interested in the body in motion and how sculpture persists through time: Using 3-D printing but forcing the software to record repetition and movement, rather than discard or correct for it, he creates human figures whose digitized versions of the models’ original movements make them look like they are collapsing or disintegrating.
“I’m more interested in sculptures when they are falling apart,” he said. “I look at the Sphynx, and as far as I am aware it never had a nose. The Venus de Milo never had arms. Eventually she will lose her head, her boobs, her torso.”
Art may promise immortality but it’s always a struggle, and one of which Greenberg is only too aware.
“I have a ballerina’s lifespan in performance,” he said. “I will be making sculpture and video for the rest of my life.
“I’m looking for longevity, for posterity. I am trying to make something that is in the canon, not outside of it, staking a claim for performance not as a sideshow but as central to the conversation.”
Miles Greenberg’s performance RESPAWN will take place at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto on June 5 from noon to 9 p.m.