Earlier this month, at the opening of his new exhibition Desire Path, Miles Greenberg got to do something he typically doesn’t when debuting new work: simply enjoy it.
The Montreal-born, New York-based artist, who is one of today’s preeminent creatives working in the performance genre, is usually himself on display, whether he’s walking on a treadmill for 24 straight hours like in his 2020 performance Oysterknife or standing on a rotating stone, covered in black paint, skin pierced with real arrows, like in 2023’s Étude Pour Sébastien. A protégé of the pioneering performance artist Marina Abramović, Greenberg specializes in immersive, site-specific projects that test his mental and physical endurance. Only 27, he has presented works at some of the art world’s most impressive institutions, from the Louvre in Paris to the New Museum in New York to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Later this month, Greenberg will debut a new performance in Marrakech as part of the 1-54 Contemporary Art Fair.
On view through February 15 at Manhattan art gallery Salon 94, Desire Path isn’t a performance, but it is an extension of one. The show features five marble sculptures depicting couples holding one another in their arms; each one is a freeze frame of a real moment that occurred during one of four performances of Fountain II, a 2023 durational work by Greenberg in which two performers embraced atop a podium for six hours. During each performance, Greenberg used a 3D scanner to map out the couples’ interlocking forms, which were then machine-carved into marble and ultimately finished by hand. Static manifestations of fleeting moments, the pieces explore the relationship between performance and permanence within Greenberg’s practice.
A few days after the opening of Desire Path, Greenberg spoke with Harper’s Bazaar about delving into sculpture, how he separates his art from his life, and claiming his space within the Western art canon as a marginalized artist working in performance.
Congratulations on your opening! Were you able to take some time after to relax?
You know, performing is a lot easier than talking to that many people. I was so, so, so happy about the opening but the social aspect of it is something that doesn’t always come completely naturally to me—I usually just get to perform and then I get off stage after everybody else is gone and go home and watch Golden Girls.
Installation view of Desire Path, 2024.
Tell me about where the show’s name, Desire Path, comes from.
You see desire paths all over in urban spaces; they’re forged pathways that come into being from many people walking through them and taking a shortcut over and over and over. The grass gets trampled, the vegetation kind of dies, and you might see a rut start to form. It happens naturally because of peoples’ collective intuition. Fountain II was this big romantic gesture of a show that was all about holding one another through the end of the world. I liked the concept of how the magnetism between two bodies or between two people is sort of like the shortest distance between two points. Romance is rooted in a lot of shortcuts, like intuitive interactions between two people. Also, I wanted to make sculptures that felt like they were in line with the history of other famous embracing marble sculptures, like [Auguste Rodin’s] The Kiss and Antonio Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss.
Why did you want to translate Fountain II, which was this finite and alive thing, into something permanent and static?
All of my performance works can very easily be translated into sculpture and vice versa. Actually, I don’t think of them as very different to begin with. I learned how to make a performance by looking at classical sculpture, so there’s a lot of common ground between how I treat the sculptural body and how I treat the human body; it’s pretty much identical. My interest in duration actually came from the permanence of sculpture. I love the idea that all of these objects are here forever—that there’s a certain stability to them. That’s very poetic. And through my performances, I’ve always wanted to give the illusion of that. Everything decays, everything changes, but stone sculptures change on a scale that is so far beyond our lifetimes, whereas a body is going to change over the course of a day, right? Essentially, I’ve just extended Fountain II from a six-and-a-half-hour performance into a piece of work that’s hopefully going to live much longer than I will.
When your body is your medium, are you always considering how you’re treating it, what you’re putting into it, and how you can optimize it? Or are you able to separate your body as a medium from your body as just a human?
It’s funny that you’re asking me that question right now, while I’m literally chugging the most disgusting green sludge. I’m heavily obsessed with anatomy, and I understand it really well. I take upwards of 35 pills a day, and I liken that to how artists clean their brushes. I’m 27 now but when I was 22, I had no personal life. I was very obsessive. But now, I’m in love. I live with a man who I intend to spend my life with, and I have developed the ability to go in and out of having a personal life, which is great. It’s taken a few years to learn how to come home from the studio when you live in the thing that you make stuff with.
Alma Communications From Desire Path, 2024.
From Desire Path, 2024.
In 2023, there was a performance artist who lived in a glass box in the New Museum for months.
Was that Jade [Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo]?
Yes! It was Jade. But it kind of speaks to that; she made her day-to-day life her art with really no separation between her practice and personal time for that performance.
I was over at Marina [Abramovic]’s house yesterday; we played dominoes, that’s her new thing. But she obviously did [the 12-day long performance piece] The House with the Ocean View [in 2002] and that was the founding piece for that kind of thing. With duration, you need to be able to decide very resolutely when the piece is over. It’s interesting to talk about that within the context of this particular show. With Fountain I, which happened from six months to a year prior to Fountain II, when I got off the stage it was the first time I felt like okay, this piece doesn’t feel finished. Even when I was making it, I didn’t really understand what the piece was about. It was about heartbreak. It was about grief. But it was also very abstract to me. After I performed it, something still felt unresolved. That night, I went to visit my grandmother in Ottawa, who was reaching the end of her life. On my drive home, my grandmother passed away and that’s when I felt like the performance had ended. Now that I’ve sort of mutated it into this other state, I’m like, okay, it’s crystalized.
Miles Greenberg: Fountain II. Presented as part ofHermann Nitsch:Selected Paintings, Actions, Relics, andMusical Scores, 1962–2020.
What types of moments are the sculptures capturing? How do they capture the unique performances performed by various artists who were coupled up, yourself, of course, included?
I shouldn’t play favorites with my children, but I love that pink one so much. They all have very different energies; each sculpture is modeled from a different performance [and after different performance couples]. Every day was totally different; one day was a little bit more tragic, another was a little bit sadder, another was more blissful. One day, I was like, “Oh, they’re gonna fuck”— it was very, very charged, you could cut the sexual tension with a knife. But everything was still very sensual and poetic. They all had a different frequency.
You touched on this earlier, but many of your pieces have been inspired by historical figures, like Sebastian, your performance piece presented at the Louvre. Why are you interested in building on those types of histories?
I take a lot of inspiration from narratives and characters that recur in art because it’s an ongoing tradition; I don’t turn my nose up at tradition all of the time. Artists of a certain time period would depict characters from mythology or from the Bible over and over and over again. You have [Alexandros of Antioch’s] Venus de Milo, you have [Sandro] Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Everybody has done Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Everybody has done Apollo. And many, many artists, from Botticelli to [Gian Lorenzo] Bernini to whomever, have interpreted Saint Sebastian, who was always sort of this queer figure in mythology. Contemporary artists have also interpreted him, like [performance artist] Ron Athey and [filmmaker] Derek Jarman. So that felt like a really nice place to start thinking about participating in the tradition of art history, not only as an exercise, but also because people have a tendency to relegate performance art to somewhere to the left of art history and the art market. I don’t really identify exclusively as a performance artist, but I definitely feel as though people don’t tend to think of me and artists like me as the inheritors of the world that Bernini, [Leonardo] Da Vinci, and the rest of the classical Western canon created. And we most certainly are. I’d like to stand firmly at the center of art history, and I think we should all be so bold as to as to claim that inheritance, especially artists of marginalized identities.
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