“Expanded Performance”

You can’t accuse the staff of Stroom Den Haag––an independent center for art and architecture located in The Hague––of lacking in spirit of adventure. The venue’s latest project, titled “Expanded Performance,” in reference to Rosalind Krauss’s seminal 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” steadily encroaches upon Stroom’s work and exhibition space. Artist and architect Adrien Tirtiaux will eventually reduce Stroom Den Haag by 20 percent, as a visual rendering of the Dutch government’s stringent budget cuts affecting cultural institutions, by erecting slanted, skeletal wooden structures that will be filled out bit by bit throughout the course of the exhibition. An artificial hell if ever there was one, The Great Cut (all works 2012) was designed to physically inconvenience staff members and visitors trying to access the toilets, eat off tables, or sit at desks, all of which have been temporarily tilted or impeded.

The other projects in “Expanded Performance,” presented as works-in-progress rather than finished products, also explore the ways in which objects can be performative and reconfigure spatial relations. For Painting Rooms, Leidy Churchman, working with performance artist MPA, had walls and a doorway built especially to frame the large-scale vinyl floor paintings. The corners of these constructed rooms are lined in places with brass rods pitched at an angle toward the luscious painted surfaces, as if engaged in conversation with them. Room edges, passages, and doorways are precisely the kind of liminal architectural spaces Vlatka Horvat’s sculptural interventions inhabit and imperfectly replicate in the twin interventions Drift (Floor) and Drift (Wall), both made of cardboard strips bound with colorful tape and lined up against the walls. Ruth Buchanan likewise puts flimsy materials––a flesh-colored curtain, a green wall painting, and a purple spotlight––to sculptural use, in three discrete installations involving a single audio piece and two yellow Eames chairs placed in different configurations. In each of these works the audience plays a central role, as it is called upon to activate what would otherwise remain a collection of inanimate objects.