Spontaneous and unrehearsed performance art with live animals and humans is what Laura Lima’s expansive body of work culls from. “I construct images with living beings,” says the Performa 15 commissioned artist. But Laura Lima firmly rejects the term ‘perfomance artist.’
“I am not doing performance,” the Brazilian artist tells a group gathered for her artist talk about her Performa installation and first show in New York. “It’s more like living sculpture, but I don’t like that either.” Performance art or not, Lima’s week-long installation featuring festooned live chickens in a giant, agro-crag style coop that culminates with an interspecies costume party, is quite the show.
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The commission, titled Gala Chickens and Ball, on view at 350 Broadway until Sunday November 22, is an explorable work in progress leading to Saturday’s party, and is a combination of two of Lima’s earlier works. Gala Chickens (2004, 2011) was one of Lima’s many projects involving live animals as performers, taking chickens and attaching a plumage of colorful feathers from her home country’s Carnival festivities to their already feathery bodies. In the past, projects found that the chickens started to react to their coop-mates new ornamentations, some hens cozying up with other hens, the new fancy feathers making them resemble the attractive flair of a rooster.
Here, the embellished foul roam around a jagged coop made from angular wood and chicken wire that is still in the process of being constructed for the culminating party, which bring in elements from Lima’s previous work, Ball (2003-04), which recreated a 17th century painting of a colorful courtly gathering. The party is open to the public and officially starting Saturday, November 21 at 8 PM, but will be open all day to observe as the structure is finished and decorated, the chickens’ fancy attire is finished, catering brought in, live music prepared (a woman with a saw has been practicing in the space all week), and all the party elements are finalized. From there, no one knows what will happen, not even the artist.
“I don’t rehearse,” explains Lima, “I see the image for the first time like the public [does].” The installation, with the fancy chickens acting as both players and instigators in an interspecies co-mingling, gives way for a million unpredictable outcomes that might take place when a bunch of people party with birds in the structural coop. But this uncertainty is what Lima strives for in her work, making the process and interaction the meat of the project, while the visuals (and performers) are the accessories.
“One piece may be decoration of another,” Lima says of the many shifting, unpredictable elements in the show. Being able to interact in all phases in the commission, from the installation to the main event to the breakdown happening on Sunday, we can see how although Lima’s project is perforative, it’s not a performance. The birds, the humans, the structure: it’s as if all theses details are just ornamental decorations, heightening but not defining the overall experience. Lima’s Gala Chickens and Ball is not performance art, it’s just life, with a couple fancy feathers glued on.
Gala Chickens and Ball will be on display everyday at 350 Broadway, New York, NY 1:00 PM – 7:00 PM until Sunday November 22. The party will be on Saturday November 21, 8:00 PM – 12:00 AM.
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