JONATHAN MONK
Five Ballerinas in Manhattan
Chinatown, East Village, Greenwich Village, Times Square, SoHo, Central Park, Wall Street

Sunday, May 27, 2-4pm: CHINATOWN beginning at Walker and Centre Streets
Monday, May 28, 2-4pm: EAST VILLAGE beginning near 8th Street and 3rd Avenue
Tuesday, May 29, 2-4pm: GREENWICH VILLAGE beginning near West Houston Street and Avenue of the Americas
Wednesday, May 30, 11am-12pm and 9-10pm: TIMES SQUARE beginning near 42nd Street and 7th Avenue
Thursday, May 31, 1-4pm: SOHO beginning at 420 West Broadway
Friday, June 1, 2-3pm: CENTRAL PARK beginning near Rockefeller Center
Saturday, June 2, 12-2pm: WALL STREET beginning near Greenwich and Fulton Street

Click Here to download the brochure that will be distributed by the dancers

Click Here to see Photos of the Event

Jonathan Monk will restage Daniel Buren’s key performance work, Seven Ballets in Manhattan, on its 32nd anniversary. Re-titling the work, Five Ballerinas in Manhattan, five performers, dressed in dance rehearsal clothes, will attempt to perform Buren’s choreography at the identical locations on the same days and times of the original performances. In 1975, the dancers carried placards featuring the striped work of Buren; for this rendition, Monk will have the dancers distribute an adaptation of Buren’s brochure featuring illustrations of the choreography for each site.

This enigmatic work in its original presentation prompted questions regarding the status of art in the public realm and how such confrontations are defined in its initial presentation. For example, audiences in SoHo, then the center of the commercial gallery scene in New York, accepted the work as art, but audiences on Wall Street interpreted the parade of placards as a potential unidentifiable threat. By re-phrasing and re-presenting works from the Modernist Canon of the 1960s and 1970s, Monk aims to test their continued strength and validity, in part through demystifying the process. Part homage, part parody, the work suggests alternative outcomes, differing audience responses and new-routes for the cultural producer and artist of today.

This is conceptual artist Jonathan Monk’s first non-gallery based work in New York. Born in Britain in 1969, and now based in Berlin, Monk works in a wide range of media including installations, photography, film, sculpture and performance. His tongue-in-cheek methods often recall procedural approaches typical of 1960’s Conceptualism, but without sharing their utopian ideals and notions of artistic genius. Monk, like Daniel Buren, is a key practitioner in the “art into life” debate.

Curators Mark Beasley and David Platzker ask Jonathan Monk:

1. To what extent is your project subject to a "built environment"?
 
Due to the direct development of the city as an ever changing environment, my piece is subject to this movement and I understand that this development cannot be contained. The work is only altered by external forces.
 
2. Is your project at all a reaction to work that has come before it? (i.e.: historical interventions in public places)
 
It is a direct reaction to the ‘Seven Ballets for Manhattan’ piece by Daniel Buren.
 
3. In terms of audience do you see your work as either 1:1 or 1 to infinite? Or, possibly both?
 
The audience for my piece is infinite within the context of a New York City street, although whether the audience understands what they are seeing whilst it is being seen is another matter. It will no doubt only be understood as an artwork by very few.
 
4. Is there an attempt to compete with the city or as a competing spectacle within a city? 
 
I am quite sure it is impossible for the piece to compete with the city. The work will be so unspectacular it will perhaps disappear.
 
5. Similarly, how does the city frame your project?
 
The city becomes a stage set for an almost invisible intervention.
 
6. What's specific about this project in this place - NYC?
 
The specific context of NYC functions only within the framework provided by Daniel Buren.  It would also be possible for the piece to be made somewhere else. This would change the meaning slightly and it would become another piece.