ExtravaDanza!

If you love throwing money at vaguely worded, half-baked Internet "performance art projects" as much as you love Who's the Boss, do we have a Kickstarter for you! Meet Louis Crisitello Jr. and Hugo Ball, the creators of the $2,100 fund-raising campaign for something called "Danza Did It."

We'll let them explain:

Also, it will be a documentary podcast thing that has a liminal relationship to Tony Danza:

It is our ambition to conduct a series of revealing interviews with celebrities, politicians, artists, and everyday Americans who have been at the center of a media storm and have had their names plastered in headlines throughout the world. As avid fans of documentary film, we are originating the term “Documentary Podcasting.” We are observing the exploitation of wanted and unwanted celebrity.

Finally, visitors to our website will have opportunities to submit original content and compete in prize-winning contests.

So wait, is Danza Did It itself an example of the exploitation of wanted or unwanted celebrity? What kind of Danza-Jörmungandr are we looking at here? We might never know ... unless you cough up the other $1,864 in the next 12 days.

If you are reticent about parting with hard-earned money, Mr. Crisitello is offers up a transparent plan detailing how your contributions will support Danza Does It:

A portion of our funds will first go to pay for and fulfill our Kickstarter rewards. In addition, we need to purchase some quality audio equipment for our podcast as well as ancillary software and hardware. Lastly, we need to purchase select art supplies to bring some of our eccentric Tony Danza related ideas to fruition. Though we plan on finding followers via word of mouth, a small portion of funding will go towards our marketing efforts. Any additional or excess donations will be put to use for the planning and implementation of our Tony Danza-themed "ExtravaDanza Convention" that we hope to make a reality.

So what will some of these Kickstarter rewards look like? Well, for only $250, you can get a promise for tickets to a convention "when and if it happens," as well as a Photoshopped picture of you hanging out with the Danza. But that's not all!

We swear to God, if this turns out to a fund-raiser for Tony Danza's mayoral bid, we will consider pledging at least 10 dollars. We just hope Danza didn't do it first!

Mary Notari (Photo via YouTube)

Yesterday, The New York Post discovered something odd about one of Bloomberg's press secretaries, Mary DeBlase. Mainly, that she didn't exist.

Instead, the young woman who came to try to talk to protesters on Sunday night during OWS' 24-hour drum circle outside the mayor's mansion was an impostor. And we know who she is.

"The occupiers are treating the mayor like a medieval warlord,” she said. “You have put the mayor of New York under siege in his own home.” Ms. "DeBlase" was quoted by several outlets on Sunday evening.

Our first thought was that Ms. DeBlase was an angry anti-OWS protester who lived in the area and wanted twenty minutes of rest. But through some research on Facebook (and a couple of mutual friends), we were shocked to find that Mary DeBlase was actually Mary Notari, a 2007 Oberlin graduate with a degree in Performance and Politics. Both her Facebook and her Twitter account belie an interest in helping the OWS movement. On Sunday night she had retweeted: "If you are in or near NYC, Occupy Bloomberg's House w/Drum Circle needs you 5th Ave & 79th St Spending the night & resuming noise in am."

On the 17th (Occupy Wall Street's 'Day of Action') she tweeted, "Reports that the opening bell has been delayed! #n17 # winning." (This later turned out to be false.)

So what could Ms. Notari's motivations for pretending to be one of Mayor Bloomberg's flack? We attempted to reach out to the young activist over email and Facebook, but had no response. A mutual friend responded to our query with "I have no idea...that's really weird."

Update: This video shows Ms. Notari's full speech, and goes a long way towards explaining the "public performance" part of her argument.

Ms. Notari: "You have brought a drum to a gunfight."
Protester/press: "Did you just call this a gunfight?"
Ms. Notari: No.
Unfortunately, Ms. Notari's stunt has led to her losing her job at a market research consulting firm, where she was an independent contractor. From RoseMarieBerger.com:

"They said my performance had put the company in an uncomfortable position,” said Mary Notari, who learned of her firing from a phone call Monday afternoon. “The mayor has said ‘No right is absolute’—including, apparently, the right to poke fun at him for using violent force against his own people and for bending the law to do so.”

“I have no idea what’s going on,” Anthony Haden-Guest said with a frown, leaning against a wall in the back. “This doesn’t look like the usual art crowd.”

The garage door at the front of the gallery started to open and a row of people leaning against it spilled some of their drinks in surprise. Mr. Powhida was being driven down W. 25th Street in a dark green Mercedes convertible. He sat in the back with his arms around two beautiful blond women. He was drinking from a bottle of champagne. The car parked in the gallery in front of a wall that said POWHIDA. He posed in front of his name and drank straight from the bottle. He was wearing a suit with a purple shirt underneath it and sunglasses.

“Well I’m bored as fuck,” he said and entered further into the gallery, taking a seat on one of the roped off couches. He was joined by a few friends, one of them the owner of Roberta’s in Bushwick (his girlfriend was one of the blonde women). A few people gathered around the couches. Many remained disinterested. He walked up to the oil painting. It featured a man in a black suit and a purple dress shirt with sunglasses releasing a white dove from his hands. A blonde woman with her breasts nearly exposed was clutching his leg. It was called Powhida (Portrait of a Genius).

“I think it’s great,” he announced and took a seat again. He began drinking heavily and smoking cigarettes. They were Marlboro Reds. The joke was becoming stale. The Observer wanted something to happen.

“Can I have some champagne?” The Observer asked Mr. Powhida.

“I don’t see why not. Would you like champagne or a Budweiser?”

“Champagne.”

“No! Give him a Budweiser!” The beautiful blonde woman said venomously.

“How about a Budweiser?” said Mr. Powhida. “We’re running low on champagne.”

He reached into a mini fridge and gave The Observer a bottle of Budweiser. Once more, very little happened. After a while, Mr. Powhida called out for an assistant and ordered him to remove the oil painting from the wall and to turn it around. The assistant did so. After a couple of minutes, a few handlers carefully re-hung the painting properly. Again, The Observer was bored. Performances like this only work if there is some follow through. No one was being provoked. Mr. Powhida was simply pretending—half-heartedly—to be an asshole. When the artist’s back was turned, The Observer entered the roped off area. He lit a cigarette off of one of the beautiful blonde women’s and smoked.

“Get the fuck out of here!” Mr. Powhida said. “Who the fuck are you? What are you doing in here?

“Excuse me, sir,” Eric Gleason, one of the gallery’s directors, told The Observer sternly, “You can’t smoke in here.”

“I gave you a beer! What the fuck are you doing in here?”

Mr. Powhida ripped the cigarette from The Observer’s mouth.

“You should put it out on the painting,” The Observer suggested. He stomped it out on the ground.

Later at the after party, one of the beautiful blonde women was running the guest list. She looked bored.

mmiller@observer.com

The Grand Openings group.

On Aug. 25, 1969, eight people waded into the pond in the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden and tore off their clothes. A photograph of the event, published on the cover of the Daily News the next day, shows a short Asian woman in a striped dress—the outré Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama—slinking away from the performance, which she had masterminded and titled Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MoMA.

“The museum archives have some great photographs of the security guards looking bewildered about what to do with this activity,” said MoMA archivist Michelle Elligott, sitting on the floor of the museum’s atrium last Thursday afternoon. In front of her were museum staff and artists sitting on benches and a bowl filled with mushrooms. Weather balloons were floating high in the air above them. Another performance, of sorts, was taking place.

This time, the event was authorized by the museum, and staged by a crew of five increasingly prominent, multitasking art world denizens who have operated under the name Grand Openings since forming for a one-night event in 2005 at the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village, during that year’s edition of the Performa performance-art biennial. Since then, the collective has set up shop in various international museums.

Last Wednesday Grand Openings assembled in MoMA’s atrium, which they will occupy through Monday, staging a bewildering array of events and performances there and throughout the museum, for an exhibition—The Observer uses that term hesitantly—called “Grand Openings Return of the Blogs.” (The second part of the title derives from the fact that the group’s members are writing regular diary entries on the events and posting them in the atrium.)

The group has organized discussion panels and a tour of the sculpture garden, hosted a rollicking singles night (more on that below), made copies of Niele Toroni paintings, and invited their parents to present lectures. (Britt Marie Sundblad, the mother of Grand Openings member, art dealer and artist Emily Sundblad, spoke about the history of linens she has collected.) And there is far more to come: an operatic wedding, a re-enactment of Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 zombie film Near Dark, and a concert by the black-metal band Liturgy.

But back to those mushrooms.

Just before Ms. Elligott spoke, another one of Grand Openings’ members, the elegantly tousled curator and onetime dealer Jay Sanders, explained to the small crowd in the atrium that the group had declared it “Mushroom Thursday” and invited MoMA curators to discuss the history of experimentation within the museum. “Many of our ideas are underpinned by psychedelia,” Mr. Sanders, who is co-curating the 2012 Whitney Biennial, said earnestly.

“How interested are you in the psychedelic experience and experimental practices?” another Grand Openings member, Jutta Koether, a tall, rail-thin German painter, asked the panelists. Her question led to the surreal scene of MoMA assistant director Kathy Halbreich segueing from a discussion of the drug use of the late German painter Sigmar Polke to a frank admission: “Personally, I have not had an experience with peyote, LSD, or mescaline, in part because I think I was scared, honestly.”

Ms. Halbreich may have shied away from psychotropic exploration, but her museum has shown some daring in its recent curatorial pursuits. Forty-one years after ejecting Ms. Kusama and her fellow orgiasts from its sculpture garden, MoMA hosted a much-discussed retrospective for performance artist Marina Abramovic, organized by its first new media and performance art curator, Klaus Biesenbach, who is now director of MoMA’s Long Island City outpost P.S.1.

MoMA’s project with Grand Openings—which comprises the artist Ei Arakawa and musician Stefan Tcherepnin, along with Ms. Sundblad, Mr. Sanders and Ms. Koether—marks another step in the museum’s embrace of hard-to-categorize art.

Curatorially, “Grand Openings Return of the Blogs” is the work of Sabine Breitwieser, founding director of Vienna’s Generali Foundation, whom MoMA hired last year to fill the curatorial position Mr. Biesenbach vacated upon his promotion. It’s her second curatorial project since starting at the museum in the fall, and it came together swiftly—over the past few months—after plans for the Mexico City-based conceptual artist Francis Alÿs to use the atrium for an installation in conjunction with his current retrospective were dropped.

“That’s sometimes just how it works,” Ms. Breitwieser cheerfully told The Observer of the sudden change of plans. She was sitting in an office that overlooks the museum’s sculpture garden. It was the day after “Mushroom Thursday,” and Ms. Breitwieser, 49, sounded ebullient as she recalled her initial discussions with Grand Openings. (“We couldn’t say no to MoMA,” Ms. Koether told The Observer. “But we had to scramble.”)

“Art has the reputation of being erratic, abstract, inaccessible and problematic,” Ms. Breitwieser said, adding that, with Grand Openings, she was hoping to present “a very down-to-earth model of an artist in the museum,” apart from much performance art, which has been “so much about excitement and spectacle and entertainment.”

“Sometimes,” Ms. Breitwieser said, smiling, “I miss more thoughtful, more provocative, more critical engagement.” Those characteristics take on surprising forms in today’s art world.

MoMA visitors expecting the shock and drama of Ms. Abramovic’s retrospective are likely to leave disappointed. Rather than sitting in the atrium for weeks like Marina Abramovic, Ms. Breitwieser emphasized, “Grand Openings said, ‘Let’s do it for 13 days.’ It’s a very human scale.” When not staging their periodic events—a schedule is available via MoMA’s website—Grand Openings’ members spend much of their time working in the atrium. “They have an office, some benches and their laptops,” she said. “This is how artists work today.”

Throughout the past week, The Observer watched Grand Openings discuss hallucinogens with curators, work on their laptops and project YouTube videos onto an atrium wall, and heard many visitors asking if this was all, in fact, art. “Maybe that doesn’t matter in the long run,” Ms. Breitwieser said.

A few hours after speaking with Ms. Breitwieser, The Observer participated in Singles Night.
Most of Grand Openings’ events are inspired by MoMA’s history and activities, and this was no exception: “You know MoMA’s education program?” Mr. Arakawa, 33, said. “We made it sexier.”

In the atrium, Mr. Arakawa emceed. Pacing the room wearing a bright-blue T-shirt, shorts, sandals and a headset microphone, he looked like a slightly unhinged motivational speaker.
His audience was a few dozen self-declared singles, including Grand Openings members, all of them sitting on large sheets of paper—divided between Manhattan and Brooklyn residents. Mr. Arakawa asked them to pair off, and pick up long wood planks that Ms. Koether had made. He then instructed the plank-bearing couples to form a circle.

A dance track exploded out of nearby speakers. “Move! Move! Move!” Mr. Arakawa shouted gleefully, waving his hands, and sending the singles running in a circle with their planks. “Single! Single! Single!” He asked us to spin with the planks, put them upside down, and lastly to “Snake!” Applause burst out from around the atrium.

A dance contest with the planks followed, during which The Observer knocked down his partner, Linda Downes, who gracefully recovered, earning cheers from the hundreds in the crowd. Ms. Downes said she’d come to MoMA to see another exhibition and had been cajoled into joining the performance by Mr. Arakawa. “This was more than I bargained for,” she admitted, not sounding disappointed.

When Singles’ Night wound down, The Observer asked Ms. Koether how it felt coming to MoMA every day. “I am ecstatic,” she said, noting that she’s been making daily visits to the painting department. “I’m trying to really inhale it, since this is only for a short moment.”

Only hours earlier, Ms. Breitwieser noted that MoMA has largely been letting Grand Openings record its own performances. “There have been some really nice moments and they’re gone now,” she said. “We don’t have anything.”

arusseth@observer.com

Barclays Center rendering (2011), SHoP Architects.

“We understand more than anyone else on the job site,” Gregg Pasquarelli told a second-floor conference room one recent Thursday evening inside the New School’s Arnhold Hall.

His audience peered at him through a remarkable selection of eyewear—surely the most impressive array of cantilevers, arches and trusswork west of the East River.  “We truly do,” he reiterated. “We know more than the developer, we know more the contractor, we know more than the inspector, we know more than the guy installing something. We know a lot about all the stuff. It’s the integrator and the communicator role that’s the most important thing: We don’t build buildings, we make instruction sets for buildings.”

At a time when even flat-box furniture is morphed by amateurs into “Ikeahacks,”  has our civilization forgotten how to properly follow instructions—and defer to instruction-makers?

A principal of SHoP Architects, the burgeoning firm at work on Barclays Center and the South Street Seaport redevelopment, Mr. Pasquarelli was the keynote speaker at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Teachers Seminar 2011. The theme of this year’s three-day conference was “Performative Practices,” which begs a bit of clarification. Borrowed from linguistics, by way of sociology, ethnography and much else besides, “performance” is perhaps better known as one of those terms of academic art whose very amorphousness—to the uncharitable, meaninglessness—is the intellectual and political point. And in a way, the advent of architecture-as-performance did free thinking from the entrenched, and perhaps as meaningless, rivalry between the formalist and functionalist. Is the “performer” in question the architect, the inhabitant, or the building itself? Yes.

Like many coinages of the 1960s, performativity is an ideal that seems just as free-associational nowadays—but that’s been astutely monetized, or should be. In Mr. Pasquarelli’s telling, architects must assert their parochial interests as “the last great generalist profession.”

“It’s about grabbing those territories back that have systematically been given away by our profession over the past 30 years,” he said at the conference. “For us, that is the core of performance-based design. Think about what the buildings do, how they work, how they’re put together. What are the politics behind it? What’s the finance behind it? What’s the technology behind it? How’s it going to engage a city?”

Mr. Pasquarelli’s favorite slide was a quasi-Venn diagram, without the productive overlaps: architects deal with clients and general contractors as would-be advisories, while outsourcing details—facades, fabrication, zoning, finance—to an orbit of specialist consultants. SHoP’s solution has been rear-guard vertical integration, morphing over 15 years from a five-person design firm to a boutique conglomerate with hands in planning, construction, software, and even real estate itself. (Developers are apparently apt to listen to architects that take equity stakes in their condo projects.)

Above all, SHoP is concerned with materials.

“I’m not talking about sitting down with your mechanical engineer, early in a project,” Mr. Pasquarelli said. “I mean actually, like, actually talking to the tinknocker who’s bending metal when you’re building a building and finding out how big are the sheets are that can fit on a truck, and what the turning radiuses are, what are the eight ways they can be clipped together.”

SHoP Construction is managing the fabrication of the Barclays Center’s rust-steel skin, cut from digital files, weathered in an Indianapolis warehouse, and tagged by barcode; SHoP Applications has unleashed an iPhone app so that “everyone from Bruce Ratner to the guy turning the screwdriver” can track the status of each of thousands of unique panels.

A drumbeat of opportunity—or countdown of crisis—animated much of the ACSA seminar.

“We are out ahead of the construction industry by about three or four years,” Mr. Pasquiarelli told the room. “But if we don’t grab those territories really fast, they’re going to grab them first and we’re going to get even more relegated to the sidelines.” SHoP, he insisted, was to remain “firmly rooted in the academic,” despite the branded subsidiaries, commitment to large-scale building, and general interest in making money. This wasn’t just playing to the bookish crowd.  Performance theory in the 20th century exploded architecture into the realm of the phenomenological, the discursive, the dramaturgical. Performative practices in the 21st seems to be about architects realigning themselves with the ancient and decidedly un-theatrical realities of engineering—while maintaining the self-dramatizing ideas (and language) of “capital-A Architecture.”

This language, of an exceptional tradition losing its “territory,” betrayed real professional pride tempered by severe vocational anxiety. Might architects really be at risk of irrelevance?

In a mildly controversial article this April, Slate critic Witold Rybczynski took to task the sort of dense, insular architecture speak—“assemblage,” “tectonic,” “spatiality”—favored by, say, participants at ACSA conferences. (Sample presentations at the New School event: “The Architectural Detail in Inter/Trans-disciplinary Practice,” “Historical Problematics of the Collaborative Divide.”)

Nineteenth-century architects, claimed Mr. Rybczynski, invented all manner of filigreed terminology to elevate themselves from mere builders. With their universalist and functionalist commitments—and unquestioned prestige—modernists swept away the linguistic ornament with jargon-free simplicity. After the collapse of modernism, “paper architects” moored in universities reinvented their practical discipline as high theory based on “arcane historical tracts and the writings of French literary critics in hermeneutics, poetics, and semiology.”

This account makes sense genealogically—to use a term as popular and despised as “performative”—but misses the special, incongruous charm of architectural overstatement over the last quarter century. The latest monograph from the leading light in post-colonial Queer Marxist semiology tends to suffer the tediousness of the inconsequential—however “radical” the argument, it’s not as if the author’s at risk of becoming secretary of the treasury. Meanwhile, Peter Eisenman spent the 1980s conceptualizing deconstructivist architecture with Jacques Derrida and the naughties building a stadium for the Arizona Cardinals.

In SHoP’s hometown, capital-A Architecture would seem to be more ascendant than ever. Surely this is the first time in history that the most significant New York buildings are being named—or branded, anyway—after their architects: see Nouvel Chelsea (100 11 Avenue) or New York by Gehry (8 Spruce Street). Puritans might blanch about the condofication (or in the case of the Gehry tower, high-end rentalization) of serious architecture, but the residential pretensions of the hyper-rich seem to be privileging design in a way eight decades of corporate benevolence maintained only fitfully, and temporarily. (Chrysler and Lever Brothers have long cleared out of their gleaming headquarters; unlike makers of soap and sedans, the financial-services industry hardly seems interested in the chimerical goodwill of an eponymous landmark.)

Look beneath the starchitect marquees, however, and Gregg Pasquarelli’s unease about architects’ ghettoization as merely “the people who make the pictures of buildings” seems more prescient. Linking the wild menagerie of high-profile, high-status Manhattan towers are a small number of faceless megafirms, tasked with translating the visionaries into concrete and steel. (SHoP was added to Atlantic Yards to do something similar, if converse: add a modicum of vision to Kansas City McStadium specialists Ellerbe Becket.) What does it mean for advancing—or arresting—the “performance” or “practice” of making buildings that Mr. Nouvel’s sleek 40 Mercer shares its architect of record, SLCE, with Robert A.M. Stern’s classicist behemoth 15 Central Park West and dozens of condo projects totaling some seven million square feet a year? Or that the ubiquitous structural-engineering outfit Cantor Seinuk is behind Mr. Gehry’s metallic waveforms at 8 Spruce, Herzog & de Meuron’s glass-wall cubism at 56 Leonard Street, and that most banal specter of un-architecture, 1 World Trade Center?

Developers value architects like never before— the “value-add” of name brand design is more tangible in the Condo Age—but this may have the ironic effect of further reducing architecture to just another consultant specialty. Skyline connoisseurs rejoiced when Rem Koolhaas, the architecture-speak icon who wrote Delirious New York, received his first Manhattan commission in 2007, for a whimsical, inverted-ziggurat on 22nd Street. By 2009, scandal-plagued developer Slazer Enterprises had quietly cancelled Mr. Koolhaas’s tower but was still touting his interior-design work on neighboring 1 Madison Park, the hubristic obelisk since foreclosed and still unfinished. Here was, literally, the architect as window dressing.

Of course, architects—even starchitects—eventually die (Mr. Nouvel is 65, Mr. Gehry is 82); will architecture live? The second day of the ACSA seminar turned, naturally enough, to pedagogy. Cornell architecture professor Kevin Pratt described his collaborations with computer scientists and engineers.

“In my mind it has to go to some basic fundamentals,” he said. “Like how does a computer work? How do you program it? What the heck is it doing? What are the basics of thermodynamics? It would be really hard for us to talk to each other if one of us didn’t know what an integral is.”

Mr. Pratt bemoaned his department’s recent abolishment of its calculus requirement. Parts of the crowd stirred with skepticism.

“Mathematics is important. It just is,” he insisted. “We need a common language…. For some reason, the language in architecture is the language of badly translated French continental philosophy, which I think is unfortunate.”

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Ferver is to play Ms. Kunis’ hard-partying ballerina role in his new play, SWAN!!! His company, QWAN, has re-appropriated Black Swan (a film directed by a straight man and starring, largely, women) for the stage as a gay fantasia on balletic themes. And Mr. Ferver is a performance artist as committed as any ballerina to mastering his art. (His company previously mounted a similar production based on the British lesbian-seduction drama Notes on a Scandal, titled NOTES!!!) SWAN!!! begins its run March 10 at P.S. 122.

A recent SWAN!!! rehearsal at Abrons Art Center on the Lower East Side began with the male cast members demonstrating to the company’s one woman, Jenn Harris, who plays the Natalie Portman role, the “fouetté,” a spin Ms. Portman executes in front of her mirror. Randy Harrison, who plays the Barbara Hershey role and was a star of the Showtime series Queer as Folk, demonstrated a single perfect spin.

“No, in a pirouette you just go around once. You fouetté! Put some fouetté into it,” said Mr. Ferver, spinning his body like a dervish’s. It was agreed that Ms. Harris would spin her finger to indicate the fouetté.

“Remember how I said the bun thing could be a unifying thing?” asked Matthew Wilkas, who plays the Winona Ryder role. Mr. Ferver placed his hands on Mr. Wilkas’ developed pectorals and nodded. “But what about leg warmers?” Mr. Wilkas asked.

“You can do whatever you want!” said Mr. Ferver.

Ms. Harris, a veteran actress who starred in Silence!, another company’s 2005 musical version of Silence of the Lambs, suggested half-shirts akin to the sleeves-only shrugs Ms. Portman wears on film. The performers could wear another shirt underneath.

“I’m not going to wear anything!” shouted Mr. Ferver.

Props were discussed: fake hair buns from the makeup store Ricky’s and fake blood. A pair of ballet shoes was found on the floor of the rehearsal space; the group debated taking them, but decided it wouldn’t be fair to whoever owned them. Ms. Harris would wear silver shoes she already owned; Mr. Ferver would wear black socks.

Mr. Ferver is familiar to many for his work as a regular on the Comedy Central series Strangers with Candy, Amy Sedaris’ early-2000s cult hit. He played a bullied, effeminate teen, a role different only in comic escalation from his real upbringing in Prairie du Sac, Wis., which he described as “Boys Don’t Cry, without the funny parts.”

“Work!” was an expression Mr. Ferver used frequently during rehearsal as an expression of delight. (Other conversational tropes included “Everything!” indicating perfection, and repetition to the point of delirium, as in an scene when Mr. Harrison forced Ms. Harris to eat a cupcake: “Disgusting, disgusting, disgusting, disgusting, disgusting.”)

Mr. Ferver is well known for his more seriously intended performance art. In 2010 at P.S. 122, Mr. Ferver put on Rumble Ghost, an interpretation of the film Poltergeist in which the actor plays both the film’s mother (tormented by ghosts) and himself (same).

His work can divide audiences, and individual critics, against themselves. Claudia La Rocco, writing in The New York Times, said of Mr. Ferver’s 2009 New Museum show A Movie Star Needs a Movie that “Mr. Ferver was born too late” for the personality-driven 1980s performance scene, and added, “Self-love is a grand thing. It can also be limiting, sad, and gross.” Johanna Burton responded in Artforum that Mr. Ferver’s work exists beyond “a proper place and time, since these are categories that camp easily outruns.”

But A Movie Star Needs a Movie’s camp value was bound up in a genuine and painful emotion, the need for recognition. What personal significance there is in the new production—Mr. Ferver said he’d seen Black Swan 12 times, and cried each time—is shrouded behind more amiable, casual humor, with a slightly less tortured spirit. The actors largely remain seated, read stage directions aloud and do not plan to wear tutus.

“When you’re talking about a movie with your friends,” said Mr. Ferver, “you don’t dress up like Mila Kunis.”

As for what constitutes camp, Mr. Ferver pointed to Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp.’” “I don’t think we’ve gotten past that essay,” he said. “It conveys the summation.” He added that SWAN!!! offers a particular form of catharsis: “Like a really good laugh with your lover in bed.” Melodrama takes many forms.

The show is a diversion in Mr. Ferver’s busy schedule. He is preparing a collaboration with the sculptor Marc Swanson in Houston and reading Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra for a future piece. He recently lost his SAG health insurance, for failing to book sufficient gigs, after years of onscreen work that included a stint as the pageboy-wearing “Little Lad” in Starburst ads.

“That didn’t feel like a choice to me,” he said. “I felt very driven to make this work come out of me, and I know that sounds hyperbolic, and dramatic, and antique.”

At rehearsal, Ms. Harris noted Mr. Ferver’s black leather high tops were detaching from their soles. “I know, I’ve been really busy,” he said.

SWAN!!!, despite its smaller scale, is not lacking in Mr. Ferver’s old habit of self-love. As his character performed oral sex on Ms. Harris’ during rehearsal, he instructed her to moan “Jack Ferver!” But ideas come from the entire group. Ms. Harris, for instance, has interpolated Ms. Portman’s Oscar speech into the show. And in rehearsal, ideas fouettéd freely. Mr. Ferver said, “Do something manly!” In response, Mr. Wilkas, imitating the dancer and real-life Natalie Portman beau Benjamin Millipied, made his arm movements choppy in an imitation of a toy soldier.

“I swear I have a performance piece in me,” Ms. Harris said, “where I’ll play his ex-girlfriend”—i.e., the ballerina Isabella Boylston, whom Mr. Millipied was reported to have dumped unceremoniously to take up with Ms. Portman—“who lives on the Lower East Side. She’s probably right around here.”

“Just do one called Ex-Girlfriends,” Mr. Ferver said. “It can go from Jennifer Aniston—to that girl.”

“I’m very choreographic,” Mr. Ferver said later. At some moments, Mr. Ferver more resembles Black Swan’s choreographer character, played by Vincent Cassel, than Mila Kunis’ bad-girl private dancer. (Though it must be said that his sly eyebrow-preens and murmured haaays are more Kunis than Ms. Kunis herself.) He is striving, if not for control, then for a sort of collective perfection. The members of QWAN company are all longtime friends, and their rapport is
obvious. Collaborators on Mr. Ferver’s more personal projects are chosen “by intuition. I never audition anyone. I meet people, and I fall in love.”

At one point in the show, Ms. Harris must kiss Christian Coulson, the British actor who plays Mr. Cassel’s role.

“You guys don’t have to make out if you don’t want,”  said Mr. Wilkas. 

“Everything!” said Ms. Harris.

“I didn’t chew gum when we made out Sunday night,” Mr. Ferver told Ms. Harris. “But my breath is always kinda good. That’s what the boys say.”

Everyone in the room popped a piece of gum, though only two were to kiss, and discussed their ages. “I’m 28. Don’t IMDb me,” said Mr. Ferver, who is in his early 30s. Mr. Coulson’s resistance broke down; the kiss was a hit in the room.

At the end of rehearsal, Mr. Ferver was troubled about an obscure reference to Black Swan. “Does that line make sense?” he asked The Observer. We said that it would make sense to anyone who had seen the movie.

Mr. Ferver looked unimpressed. “If they haven’t seen the movie, then fuck them, frankly.”

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

"Why don't you take your shirt off?" Ms. Nakadate said. "You know you're the prettiest girl, right? Let's see your panties."

The exchange was projected on a screen in a gallery at P.S.1. It was staged. Ms. Nakadate filmed it for a video, Good Morning Sunshine, that is part of her first museum retrospective, titled "Laurel Nakadate: Only the Lonely." The girl undressing was an actress who auditioned for the part in an open casting call, and she was very young. Ms. Nakadate's voice sounded manipulative, menacing even.

Right on cue, when Ms. Nakadate said, "Let's see your panties," a mother walked into the room pushing her child in a stroller. She looked at me--horrified--then around the room, then smiled awkwardly at one of the walls, unsure what else to do. The smile transformed quickly into a deep frown, and she rushed out of the gallery as fast as if she had mistakenly walked onto the set of a snuff film.

Striking, with straight black hair and a mischievous smile, Ms. Nakadate looks younger than her 35 years. She calls her work a "hybrid of fact and fiction." Her themes are voyeurism and exploitation. She attacks convention. We expect the voice coaxing the young girl out of her clothing to belong to a man with a criminal record. (Or perhaps, as one museum guest put it in the coat-check line at P.S.1, "It's like, uh, about feminine identity.") 

Ms. Nakadate's latest work, A Catalogue of Tears, on view in the main room of the exhibition, is a series of 365 photographic prints of the artist crying or pretending to, each one taken on a different day in 2010. The documentation is less about moments in the artist's life than the interruption of that life to continue the performance. A Catalogue of Tears is the culmination of a career spent mining this theme. Ms. Nakadate's two feature-length films star non-actors. She films in the homes and bedrooms of the people onscreen. Her videos focus on her interactions with strangers, mostly older men she meets through chance encounters (in the elevator of her apartment building, in the parking lot at Home Depot). She will give her subjects a scenario--pretend it's my birthday and eat this cake with me--and film what happens. A kind of twisted documentary emerges: real people--actor, artist and audience alike--responding to highly contrived situations. She pushes and distorts the idea to the extent that both real and fictive are indistinguishable. Often it is difficult to tell when reality stops and fiction sets in. In other words, are the tears real or fake?

"The way I work isn't that strange," Ms. Nakadate told me. "I'll take this body and I'll take this idea and I'll put it out into the world and see what happens and how chance takes over." 

Her most recent film, The Wolf Knife, shot over 10 days in Florida for a budget that was "about two months' rent in New York City," is about two adolescent girls, best friends, on an ill-fated road trip. We stood watching it in a room with the lights off, while two people helping with the installation drilled seats into the ground and adjusted the volume levels. Ms. Nakadate appears onscreen only briefly, but she fills the story with self-reference.

"We're going to see a guy who used to teach you in third grade?" one girl says to the other. "How do you know he's a nice guy?" The camera is uncomfortably close. As with much of Ms. Nakadate's work, we feel as if we are intruding on a scene we were never meant to witness.

"He might ask me to live with him, which would be really great," the other girl responds.

"It would be really creepy, he's, like, 50."

In conversations about Ms. Nakadate's work, the word "creepy" often comes up, as does the question, "How does she know the stranger's not gonna kill her?" Ms. Nakadate says having faith in strangers is about "gut instinct." She trusts the men in her videos. Later in The Wolf Knife, a mother of one of the girls says to the two, "You're not gonna want to hear this, girls, but there's a rapist in the area." Her delivery is almost cheerful, as if she were asking them what they want to eat for lunch.

As we watched, the scene shifted to the girls on a beach in Hollywood, Fla., at night. "The only actors I cast in advance were these two girls," Ms. Nakadate said. "All the supporting cast and all the locations were found as we went along." In the distance, over the ocean, lightning flashes from a rain cloud. "That lightning? It was chance. We went to a beach and we waited for something beautiful to happen. The fiction is that these two girls didn't know each other until three days before the shoot. The fact is that that lightning is real." In another twist of fact and fiction, the two girls are now close friends.

I was distracted while writing this. I was looking at Facebook. I claimed this was research. The site was Ms. Nakadate's impetus for A Catalogue of Tears.

"It started when I was looking around online," she said. "There's a lot of different Web sites like Facebook and MySpace and blogs where people fake happiness all the time. You ever notice when you're on Facebook, all your friends are happy? Really? Is that true? All of my friends are happy?"

As I procrastinated, I heard of an acquaintance's death through my news feed, suddenly and by chance. It was the first time this had happened. I thought, "How has this not happened before?" All of the smiling faces posted memorial messages on his wall, things like "rip" followed by sad-face emoticons. And then I thought, "Laurel has a point." There are so many ways to gloss over sadness.

"You can go out into the world and anything can happen," Ms. Nakadate said. "The performance is prescribed by my living, and my living is affected by my performance."

Where, then, does the performance begin and end? In one of Ms. Nakadate's most unsettling videos, Exorcism in January, a scraggly-looking man (he has been a recurring character in her work over the past decade) says, "I think my chemical imbalance in my brain changed. I'm feeling pretty down." Off camera, Ms. Nakadate says, "What do we do?" He responds, "I don't know. I think an exorcism might help." The words sound forced, but the man looks genuinely sad. Too sad to shave or comb his hair, too imbalanced to clean his apartment or put sheets on his bed. Still, both performers are aware of the setup.

"The people in the videos always want to perform," she said. "Somebody that wants to perform, you know, you don't have to convince them. I've never really had to convince someone to do anything."

The man in the video lies on his bed without sheets, and Ms. Nakadate shouts, "Go away bad spirits! Shake them out! Shake out the evil spirits!" The man is writhing, moaning and repeating Ms. Nakadate's commands like incantations. Suddenly, the pretend exorcism does not look so pretend. Of course sadness, like happiness, can be feigned. The line between crying and faking it is itself nearly fictional.

                  mmiller@observer.com

Now, TV Guide has the scoop that the phone-throwing, Denis Johnson-reading and cross-dressing James Franco will be going back for another soap-tastic General Hospital appearance.

He'll simply drop by the set for a few days in Febraury, and then jet back to New Haven to resume his studies. He's getting a Ph.D., that smartypants.

Also, the filming will take place on the days before and after the Oscars, which Franco is hosting. Hosting!

"When we realized James would be in L.A. for the Oscars and all the other awards shows, we asked if he'd consider coming back and doing a little something for us," General Hospital executive producer Jill Farren Phelps told TV Guide. "He was happy to do it and requested that we use the appearance to plug his next story. He's also expressed an interest in directing at GH. He's been really, really good to us. Whatever James wants, we'd love to make it happen!"

Well what if Franco wanted to play a character named Franco? Oh, right. That's what he's actually doing.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234