PERFORMANCE (career ender) — by Claude Wampler

It's going to be performed at The Kitchen in New York City from November 16 to 18 of this year.

Gia Kourlas's September 10 New York Times story introduced me to Claude Wampler, the work's creator.

Up top is her "Stable (Stupidity Project Part 10)," seen at P.S. 122 in 2003.

The article follows.

'Maybe Some Spontaneity Can Happen'

Visual artists who create performance works are nothing new, but Claude Wampler, a tiny woman with austere artistic intent, is a wonder. Ms. Wampler, who has a history of manipulating the line between audience and performer, presents her newest production, “PERFORMANCE (career ender)” at the Kitchen Nov. 16 to 18. As usual it is full of secrets. The culmination of several years of experiments, the production, as she recently explained, will “merge a kind of visual-arts experience into a performance context, or vice versa.”

Much of Ms. Wampler’s performance work is about the perception of power and how swiftly it can change hands. For “Bucket,” presented at Performance Space 122 in 1999, she hired attractive people to walk out in a huff during the show to test the real audience’s commitment. For “Stable (Stupidity Project Part 10),” seen at P.S. 122 in 2003, Ms. Wampler seated the audience before a ring of Rottweilers wearing western outfits as a topless cowgirl gyrated next to the sound booth.

As the minutes ticked by, the dogs — huge, gentle and ridiculous — stared at us. We stared back. (Who was more stupid?) As the audience reached the breaking point of fatigue and frustration, a screen was revealed onstage: Ms. Wampler had been secretly videotaping the crowd, turning the audience into performers.

“I’m trying to remind the audience of their part in a performance, so that there’s a moment of instability, and then maybe some spontaneity can happen,” she said in a recent telephone interview. “But I’m not taking advantage of the audience or using it as my material. It’s morally for them. When I’m watching dance or theater pieces, I’m praying that someone will do that for me.”

It seemed odd that Ms. Wampler — a brave, independent and transgressive force in both the performance and the art worlds — was excluded from last year’s Performa, a biennial of visual art performance in New York. But for her, the very word “performance,” purposely crossed out in her work’s title, is both used up and a little vague. “This could be my last work, and I don’t even mean in the theater, but forever,” she said. “That’s the way I have to think about it. I’m suspending my own disbelief and saying, ‘If I had to make a final piece, what would it be?’ That’s the career-ender.”

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Tell you what: if there's an individual with a better knack for titles than Ms. Wampler I've yet to encounter her.