This Is Not a Drill
On Holly wood sets or at the Whitney
Biennial, artist and choreographer
Madeline Hollander stages performances
with an urgent undercurrent.
When the curators behind the 2019 Whitney
Biennial selected Madeline Hollander as
one of the participating artists, her mind turned to the
museum’s home since 2015, a hulking gray structure
on the western edge of lower Manhattan. “Every time
I’m at the building, I find myself looking into the
Hudson,” she says. “The river is the biggest moving body
I could imagine working with.” Unorthodox performers
are a recurring feature in Hollander’s work. Last year,
she choreographed the colorful A.I.-programmed office
chairs rolling around Chelsea’s Gagosian Gallery in
Urs Fischer’s Play and pitted dancers against air-
conditioning units in a piece called New Max, about
ever-rising temperatures.
Climate change is similarly the underlying inspiration
for—or threat behind—Ouroboros: Gs, Hollander’s
two-day outdoor performance that caps off the Biennial
in late September. (The title refers to a circular symbol,
often a snake, consuming itself.) The protagonist in
Hollander’s unlikely ballet is the museum’s multimillion-
dollar flood-mitigation wall; her cast is the art-handling
and operations staff tasked with erecting the giant
aluminum “Lincoln Log pieces” (as Hollander calls them)
that make up the emergency barrier. (Measuring 16.5
feet at its tallest by 500 feet long, the structure was added
to the design plan for the new
museum after Hurricane Sandy
dumped more than six million
gallons of water into the
construction site in 2012.) During
Ouroboros: Gs, a four-part
section of the wall snakes around
the sidewalk: As one group of
performers dismantles the tail,
another group reinstalls those panels at the head,
creating a kind of autophagy in motion. “The fact that
Madeline is doing the work in the place where we
would be impacted—she’s really making it visible,” says
Biennial cocurator Jane Panetta, referring to the
often-abstract nature of environmental issues. This is
not a drill—not exactly; when the exhibition
MUSICAL CHAIRS
HOLLANDER’S
WORKS, SUCH AS RED
SHOES (TOP) AND
HER CHOREOGRAPHY
IN URS FISCHER’S
PLAY (ABOVE), OFTEN
MEDITATE ON HOW
HUMAN BEHAVIOR
INTERSECTS WITH
TECHNOLOGY.
DANCE>142
DANCE
VLIFE
140 OCTOBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
TOP: MADELINE HOLLANDER. PERFORMANCE VIEW OF
RED SHOES, 2018;
BOTTOM: © URS FISCHER. PHOTO BY CHAD MOORE. COURTESY OF GAGOSIAN.
