If It’s Got Naked People, RuPaul Is In

A Piece of Work

MoMA, WNYC Studios

Education, Visual Arts, Self-improvement, Arts, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2017

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A dozen dancers rolling around in their underwear, rubbing raw chickens and fish on each other. No, it’s not some weird ‘60s porn, it’s a performance -- Abbi talks with the feminist artist behind the piece, Carolee Schneemann. Performance art like this can be a bit funny, a bit confusing, and definitely weird. Who better to get to the bottom of it than RuPaul? He and Abbi also watch a performance by Yoko Ono, where she sat alone on stage and invited members of the audience to cut her clothes off... Also featuring: Thomas Lax View the artwork from this episode at wnyc.org/performance --- About the podcast: From WNYC Studios and MoMA, A Piece of Work is everything you want to know about modern and contemporary art but were afraid to ask. Hosted by "Broad City"’s Abbi Jacobson, this 10-episode series explores everything from Pop art to performance in lively conversations with curators, artists, and Abbi’s friends, including Hannibal Buress, Tavi Gevinson, RuPaul, and Questlove. Produced by WNYC Studios. www.wnycstudios.org

Transcript

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0:00.0	Name one performance artist.
0:03.0	Maybe you're thinking of Marina Abramovich,
0:06.0	the artist who sat at Moma eight hours a day for almost three months,
0:11.0	totally still, and anyone could sit in the chair facing her and gaze into her eyes.
0:16.0	Good.
0:18.0	It was really good.
0:19.0	First one.
0:20.0	Now, name another one.
0:24.0	Kanye West does not count.
0:26.0	Sorry.
0:27.0	And neither does your eighth grade talent show performance
0:30.0	as much as you'd like to pretend that performing that song from the music man was an ironic
0:34.6	commentary on consumerism.
0:36.8	And kudos, very advanced eighth grade experience. A lot of people think of performance art as kind of a joke.
0:47.0	I'm not a fan of performance art personally, so.
0:51.0	It's not even so much that I'm appalled by it, just curious.
0:57.0	I'm Abby Jacobson and this is a piece of work and today I'm trying to wrap my head around performance art. And to get beyond that feeling of what the heck is going on here.
1:08.0	So I thought who better to talk to than a person who's made his entire life into a piece of performance art
1:18.3	Ru Paul?
1:19.2	Kids write to me and say well what am I going to do with my life my My parents don't understand me. I write back and I say,
1:23.8	listen, find out what it is you have that makes you unique and special and cultivate that and then
1:28.8	bring that to the party. RuPaul is unapologetically himself.
	...

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