Michael Portnoy
{{Short description|American artist (born 1971)}}
{{For|the Dream Theater drummer|Mike Portnoy}}
{{Infobox artist
| name = Michael Portnoy
| image = 1 Michael Portnoy portrait.jpg
| caption = Michael Portnoy (2016)
| birth_date = {{birth date and age|1971|08|02}}
| birth_place = Washington, D.C., U.S.
| field = performance art, film, sculpture, dance, theater
| training = Vassar College
| website = {{URL|strangergames.com/}}
}}
Michael Portnoy (born August 2, 1971) is an American visual artist, filmmaker, choreographer and performance artist.
He has been described in Art in America as "one of the most interesting performance artists anywhere",Currie, Nick, "600 Words with Michael Portnoy", Art in America, August 2009 and by Artforum as a "great Absurdist".Krasinski, Jennifer, "Absolutely Fabulist", Artforum, May 2017
Background and early work
Portnoy was born in Washington, D.C., and studied comparative literature and creative writing at Vassar College and theater at the National Theater Institute at The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. After moving to New York City, he formed several short-lived experimental theater groups before concentrating on solo performance. In the mid 1990s, Portnoy performed in venues such as Surf Reality and Luna Lounge's weekly show "Eating It".True, Cynthia. "Alterna Be thy Name", Time Out New York, June 5–12, 1996, pp. 43–44.PAGE SIX, New York Post, December 15, 1999 At the same time, Portnoy started working as a dancer for the New York choreographer Koosil-Ja Hwang.
Soy bomb incident
For Bob Dylan's performance of "Love Sick" at the 1998 Grammy Awards, Portnoy was hired by Dylan's production company as a background dancer. Halfway through the performance, Portnoy ripped off his shirt, ran next to Dylan, revealing the words "Soy Bomb" written across his chest. The Grammys did not press charges against Portnoy for the act, but he was not paid the for the gig.
When questioned by reporters, Portnoy later stated: "Soy... represents dense nutritional life. Bomb is, obviously, an explosive destructive force. So, soy bomb is what I think art should be: dense, transformational, explosive life".Brunner, Rob. "Bombs Away", Entertainment Weekly, March 13, 1998, p. 14Derek Yip. "MICHAEL PORTNOY aka SOY BOMB, Upstart Pissing on the Contemporary Mix", Performing Arts Journal, No. 61 (January 1999), pp. 36-44
The event was parodied on Saturday Night Live, where he was portrayed by Will Ferrell, and on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. In 2005, the band Eels included the track "Whatever Happened to Soy Bomb" on the double-disc album Blinking Lights and Other Revelations. In 2016, the TV show Broad City parodied Soy Bomb with a performance artist character played by musician Har Mar Superstar.
Later career
=Relational Stalinism=
Central to many of Portnoy's projects is his tongue-in-cheek concept of 'Relational Stalinism', a form of relational aesthetics that works against "the fashionable promise that an artwork might offer a democratic magic, transforming inter-relational codes into something nicer…"Tirdad Zolghadr. Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture: 10 Curators, 100 Contemporary Artists, 10 Sources, Phaidon Press, 2010, pp. 192-193. This breed of absurdist, dictatorial interaction with participants has been described as "a clarification of the artist's imperious role as producer and performer".
= Experimental comedy =
Portnoy’s work is also framed by what he calls experimental comedy, or "the injection of the sublime, the blatantly inscrutable, the abstract, the primal, the choreographic, the theoretical, the improbable, the generative, the post-rhythmic, the turbo-stupid, etc., into the frame of stand-up".After Berkeley: Objectif Exhibitions, 2010–2011, Sternberg Press, 2012 This has been manifested in the operatic stand-up routine of The K Sound (2006), Taipei Women’s Experimental Comedy Club (2010), and Script Opposition in Late-Model Carrot Jokes (2011), a project that investigated the "carrot joke", a term used in cognitive linguistics to describe a poem-like joke with a high degree of ambiguity, blunt omissions of information and logical faults and inconsistencies.
References
{{Reflist}}
External links
- [https://www.dropbox.com/s/75rj49m2uryhwdl/Theater%20Magazine%20-%20Complicating%20Comedy%2C%20Engineering%20Behavior.pdf?dl=0 Complicating Comedy, Engineering Behavior - A Conversation with Michael Portnoy, Theater, Yale University, 2023]
- [https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/whnju58g6045uhecle9gb/Garage-Vice-Proressive-Touch-new-grab.pdf?rlkey=3ki70ri3jlg2c298g8lat0j2y&dl=0 Michael Portnoy Wants to Know: Can You Fuck to An Irregular Beat?, Garage Magazine - VICE, January 12, 2020]
- [https://news.artnet.com/art-world/michael-portnoy-interview-994718 Ex-Comedian Michael Portnoy on How Performance Art Can Exorcise Your Alt-Right Demons, artnet news, June 2017]
- [http://www.strangergames.com/Press_files/27%20Gnosis%20_%20Blog%20_%20Frieze%20Publishing.pdf Review in Frieze magazine of Portnoy's 27 Gnosis performance]
- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBZfdHegY3Q Video excerpt from 27 Gnosis performance at Documenta, 2012]
- [http://www.strangergames.com/ Strangergames: The official website of Michael Portnoy ]
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20110716152519/http://www.strangergames.com/metropolis_m.pdf Interview in Metropolis M]
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Portnoy, Michael}}
Category:Artists from New York City
Category:Vassar College alumni
Category:Artists from Washington, D.C.