I wasn’t in a place where I found myself inspired. I felt like I would learn much more in the real world. I got an internship with a choreographer in China, so I ran away and did that. Then I got a residency in Paris. After three and a half years in France, I applied to a school here in New York, but wasn’t accepted. Now I’m stuck.
I’ve never been particularly attracted to theatre, no. My mother took me to see The Artist Is Present by Marina Abramović when I was twelve. It provided me with a gateway, an understanding of how I could approach my work and make my body fit into a context which interests me. I knew that I wanted to see my work at a museum, where it would be approached as a sculpture. I don’t like sitting at a theatre, I like sitting at the Louvre.
Human form excites me, I like to see how far you can push it before it becomes unrecognizable. It’s the most effective way to translate what I do. There is this human presence without necessarily transforming into human beings. You can look at these abstract shapes and feel a human presence, you feel a soul through it. I think you feel it easier through sculptures than more flat media.
I hate that question. Would I say that I’m spiritual, well, sure. But I feel like “spiritual” insinuates, or questions, whether things are real. There is something real and tangible to my performance. It doesn’t necessarily feel metaphysical or metaphorical, it’s something that comes and goes, and disappears when you’re not focused.
If there is any divination that I believe in, it resides in the physical realm that we all exist in. We can’t always access it. At the end of a six and a half-hour long performance, I am completely hypnotized, released through my own sensorial experience and the physicality of my performance. I’m sure a lot of people would call that spirit. I am sure a lot of people would call that God. But, for me, this is something embedded and innate physically in all of us.
It doesn’t have to be a dream I’ve had when I’m asleep. It could be a daydream, too. It boils down to images and shapes that come to me when I feel a certain way. I write a lot of ideas down, and once I’m offered a space, I see which one fits the best. Then I figure out what they are during or after the performance. But there’s always a physical entanglement. If I feel heartbroken, then I could make a piece where two people are wrestling on plinths, colliding against each other. They all fulfil a deeper need and you reach a place of hypnosis through them. You feel something outside of yourself. I enjoy having a dialogue with architecture. I try to make the measurements harmonious and leave enough space for the audience to stay either for five minutes or five hours.
When I was saying that, I did not mean so much about me as a person. I was mostly frustrated, especially in France, with people looking at my work through a very specific lens – either of me being black or me being queer. Just because a lot of my work is difficult, they would interpret it as painful, associating my blackness and pain as some convoluted metaphor around slavery. I’m not interested in that.
I want to address human emotion: physical and non-physical sensualities, sensoriality, tension and release. I am articulating through my own body the same way that Caravaggio articulated through his. I am trying, through the body that I inhabit, to create something everyone should be able to look at based on themes that apply to everybody. In my life, I’ve only looked at classical sculptures that looked nothing like me. That’s where I’m coming from with universality, it’s rooted in a wish to be understood.
I love images of video game battles, they were present throughout my childhood. I wanted to make a training exercise where we would fight each other on rotation for seven hours and see what came out of it. Usually, swinging a sword or striking something, is a short burst of energy. So when you extend it over the course of eight, twelve, or twenty-four hours, it quickly becomes something else.
Swords were a potent symbol for me as well. I was thinking about Tibetan reliquary. There are objects in Tibetan Buddhism like the phurba, this small meditation dagger that cuts you from certain addictions, obsessions and ties to the physical realm. I liked this idea.
Accessibility. I wasn’t interested in making something that viewers could only see for forty-five minutes, sort of squeezed in. Then there’s automatically a beginning, a middle, and an end. I never wanted to do that, that’s theatre. So I extended it to allow people to guide their own viewership experience – it evolves over time, but it’s not a narrative. Sure, a nine hour performance will do something to you. But initially it was just about creating something people could experience freely and comfortably.
Training, diet: I eat certain things, I don’t eat other things. For Oysterknife, my twenty-four hour performance, I stopped drinking for six months. For Sebastian, it was no drinking, no cigarettes, no anything for three and a half months. You need your blood to coagulate in a certain way. And I don’t rehearse, so I don’t know whether or not I am able to really do anything.
It just happens. I’m not afraid of a lot of stuff when it comes to work. I’m afraid of a lot of shit in my real life, but when it comes to my art practice, it’s like the only place where I’m not afraid of anything.
I’m not that interested in discomfort as a theme. I see discomfort as a tool. It’s a signpost for the body to know whether or not it should act on something or be somewhere. Typically, wherever discomfort is present, it also doubles as uncharted territory. It tends to be a good barometer for where I should be heading with my practice. But I don’t do discomfort for discomfort’s sake, I’m not a masochist. I like what lies behind it, it’s usually interesting and bizarrely poetic. I try to find ways, little crevasses and places in the body, where something is hidden.
TRUTH has a literary connection. It’s a weird one. I was trying to find a title for this piece. Sometimes this is difficult because a lot of the time, I don’t know what the fuck the piece is about until I perform it. But I do read a lot and could remember this literary passage where the word truth was repeated over and over again. I loved the way it was presented in the book, but I couldn’t remember the title of it. Sometimes it just blends together, as I’m sure you know. So I named it TRUTH because whatever was ringing in the back of my head felt correct. Turns out it was from Orlando by Virginia Woolf.
I just finished my tenth book by Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere. After he passed, I decided to blast through all his bibliography. Then I am reading a book that Laurie Anderson gave me on Bernini. It’s an old book that’s falling apart, so there are pages missing, but I’m getting some good information. It’s got some magic to it.
I grew up playing World of Warcraft. That shows up more often than not in my work. I also spent time in Haiti, where voodoo came into my understanding of what performance can be. I am really obsessed by this one particular school of Japanese sculptors and artists called Mono-ha, partially founded by Lee Ufan, who I’m a gigantic fan of.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Ryuichi Sakamoto, he’s one of my Northern stars. I got the chance to work with him before he passed away. We were in contact and he was going to potentially soundtrack one of my works. In the end, he was too ill to produce it, so he licensed one of his existing works. That’s what we used for the Louvre, a bit of his DNA.
I don’t know about legacy yet, I’m twenty-six. But I do think a lot about longevity, how my work can survive beyond me. I think the sculptures are a big part of making that happen. With my work now, I have the lifestyle of a ballerina and it’s nothing that I can do for the rest of my life. Sculptures, however, I can do for the rest of my life. So I am trying to get closer to that practice.
I have two sculptures in Japan right now, they are in this show at the Yokohama Museum of Art. I’m not there, they are there. People are interacting with them every day. To me, this is really inspiring, because that’s how I was raised. I was looking at the work of artists that I love, having conversations with them before meeting them, if I ever did.
Being a part of that legacy is something that I have always craved, but it’s difficult to get there with performance. People want to put you in parallel with art history, as some weird sideshow. I’m trying to work after Bernini, after Caravaggio, after Serra. I don’t necessarily think that my work fits that side of the line, but I think it’s important to be a part of the global conversation.
Miles Greenberg (b. 1997, Montreal, Canada) is a performance artist and sculptor currently based in New York. Human form is central to his work, scrutinized through durational performances, which explores the physical and emotional limits of the self. Oscillating between motion and still-life, each performance translates into a sculpture or a video, creating an immersive sensory experience. Greenberg has exhibited and performed at global institutions including The Louvre (Paris), The New Museum (New York), and Galleria Continua (Les Moulins).
