LONDON — Soup cooked with vegetables grown in Fukushima. Choreographic services to hire by the hour. A reflexologist helping to contemplate the notion of vacationing. Slow-motion floats. Action-sculptures animated by the public.
Yes, it’s all art or whatever you want to call it, part of Frieze Live, a new program at the must-see, must-do annual art world circus that is the Frieze Art Fair here, running Oct. 15-18.
The Live program arrives at a moment when performance art and dance seem to have made permanent inroads into contemporary art museums and the broader culture. Since 2012, the Tate Modern has had a permanent space dedicated to performance, installations and experimental film. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pompidou Center in Paris and a number of other prestigious museums regularly bring choreographers and performance artists into their galleries.
The biennial Performa festival in New York, relatively modest in 2007, its first year, has grown bigger and more ambitious with each new edition. (The influence works both ways; performance was the theme of this year’s Biennale de la Danse in Lyon, France.)
But, as the introduction of the Frieze Live program suggests, works that have traditionally been at the furthest edge of the avant-garde, discipline-blurring and hard to define, have entered not only institutions and festivals, but also the marketplace. The introduction of the Frieze Live program suggests that live art — a phrase that can encompass performance art, installation work and ephemeral experimental work— is now uncontroversially part of a larger commercial field.
“It’s really not unusual for collectors or institutions to buy this kind of work; performances, ephemeral or temporary work, installations,” said Matthew Slotover, who founded the Frieze Art Fair with Amanda Sharp in 2003. “We noticed that a lot of commercial galleries are doing this kind of work in a very ambitious way, and we wanted to give them the opportunity to represent these artists at the fair.”
Nicola Lees, the curator of Frieze Live, said the program was developed after discussions about how the fair could support these more experimental practices. “We have always had some interesting live performances and people like Tino Sehgal at the fair,” Ms. Lees said by telephone. “But it’s often hard to know how to integrate this kind of work into a conventional fair setup. So we decided to create a formal program and really work with the artists early on, so that we can set it all up.”
Frieze Live features six galleries and their chosen artists, selected from about 140 entries. A selection committee made up of seven members from international galleries and headed by Ms. Lees worked through the proposals and made studio visits. Finally, the committee pared the choices down to six propositions from galleries.
“We had at least 20 that were excellent,” Mr. Slotover said. “It was tough.”
Two of the projects are recreations of older works, which Ms. Lees said was an opportunity to bring important artists in the live-art field to the attention of a younger public. The Galerie Jocelyn Wolff from Paris is bringing two action-sculptures — which must be animated by the public through a series of instructions — made by the German artist Franz Erhard Walther in 1968 and 1975.
A pioneer of relational aesthetics, or forms of participatory art, Mr. Walther’s sewn-canvas sculptures were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970.
The second historical production is from another Paris gallery, the gb agency, which is offering a restaging of the American artist Robert Breer’s “Floats,” a slow-motion progression of motorized sculptures originally created for the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan.
“Robert Breer taught most of his life at Cooper Union, collaborated with Stockhausen, and was an important influence on a younger generation of artists,” Ms. Lees said, referring to the college in New York and the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. “The fair has over 50,000 people in the four or five days it’s open, so it’s a great opportunity for this work to be seen.”
Whether anyone will buy these pieces, including the four that are being created for the fair, is an intriguing question. Adam Linder, the Australian-born, Berlin-based choreographer who danced with the Royal Ballet before switching to the contemporary dance companies of Michael Clark and Meg Stuart, and who is represented by the Silberkuppe Gallery in Berlin, said that his work, “Some Proximity,” is not for sale, but can be rented by the hour.
“It’s a real-time way of valuing the specificity of choreography, a subjective real-time practice,” Mr. Linder said by telephone.
What this means is that Mr. Linder, along with the dancer Justin Kennedy, will respond in dance form to an art writer, Jonathan P. Watts, moving through the fair and making critical notes that are brought back to the dancers.
“Once these short criticisms are written, Justin and I will work through several choreographic modalities that translate the text,” Mr. Linder said. “The notion is not only a real-time positing of an economy for the subjective labor, it’s also the idea that the choreography is at work and is transforming something.”
Dominic Eichler and Michel Ziegler, who run the Silberkuppe Gallery, said they had represented Mr. Linder for three years and had sold his work. “What we both like about the new live section of Frieze is that the booths are integrated into the fair,” Mr. Eichler said.
Asked who might hire “Some Proximity” and why, Mr. Linder said that art institutions “might be interested in questions of real-time embodiment of the economic labor of choreography today.” He added that a private collector might also be interested in conceptual work.
“Someone might throw a dinner party and might like to have that happening,” he said. “What’s interesting for me is that it’s not just about moving out of the theater and into the exhibition space. It’s about choreography asserting its temporality.”
The other Live projects are very different. Tamara Henderson’s work, presented by the Rodeo gallery in Istanbul, “is based on the idea of resorts and vacationing,” Ms. Lees said. In addition to a slide presentation and an audio element, Ms. Lees said Ms. Henderson would be showing furniture she has made from pulped travel brochures.
United Brothers, from the Green Tea Gallery in Iwaki, Japan, are offering soup at lunchtime, made by the artists’ mother from vegetables grown after the radiation disaster in Fukushima. The United Brothers website offers a photograph of a scarily green liquid, with the tagline: “Does this soup taste ambivalent?”
And then there is that must-have part of any art-going experience: the gift shop, set up by Shanzhai Biennial, two artists who have turned their fascination with fake brand-name luxury items into a possibly commercial, or possibly cryptic, art-world venture.
“The shop will be in the entrance hall to the fair, and all the items will be Frieze-themed,” Ms. Lees said. “There will be a range from inexpensive items to couture outfits, and the sales assistants will be in a performing role. I’m sure some people will think it really is a Frieze shop.”
(Insofar as objects can be bought, it really is a Frieze shop.)
The Live program offerings are not the only performance or ephemeral pieces to be seen at the fair. Frieze Projects, a program of artist commissions that is also run by Ms. Lees, this year has a strong focus on the intersection with other disciplines, notably dance.
A collaboration between the artist Nick Mauss and Northern Ballet; offsite “symposiums” held by the choreographer and performer Isabel Lewis in a raw space above the Selfridges department store; and Jérôme Bel’s “Disabled Theater” are all on the program.
They are not, however, for sale.
“This fashion for performance, for ‘live’ in a museum or gallery, is surely because it is entirely another experience, and a fulfilling one, for people who are not used to looking at things for a long duration,” said Mr. Bel, who might best be described as a conceptual choreographer, but whose medium is a theatrical one.
“Performance has entered the market, now dance is there too,” he added. “We’ve always been protected from commercialism in the dance world by not having any material value. We need to think carefully whether we want to participate in this, or resist it.”