- Michael Portnoy
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For the Dream Theater drummer, see Mike Portnoy.
Michael Portnoy from SAKANAMA's "I KNOW WHO I AM!", 2005
Michael Portnoy is an American multimedia artist, choreographer, musician and actor. He calls himself a "Director of Behavior".
Contents
Performance artist
Portnoy was born in Washington, D.C. and studied comparative literature and creative writing at Vassar College and theater at the National Theater Institute. After moving to New York City, he formed several short lived experimental theater groups and then began concentrating on solo performance. His early performance works, such as Gymnastics and Schizophrenia, and 5teen3sy: Kicking Games of Lip, were antic and unpredictable, and characterized by dense language play, song and movement fragments and rapid transformations of character. In the mid '90s, Portnoy started to perform in venues associated with the new "Alternative Comedy" scene. His wild, raw theatrical performances, which occasionally interrupted and challenged other comedians on stage, prompted Time Out NY to describe him as "the bad boy of comedy",[1] and The New York Post to dub him "the next Andy Kaufman".[2] Simultaneously, Portnoy started working as a dancer for New York choreographer Koosil-Ja Hwang, and as an actor in commercials, music videos and short films. He also sang and performed his own operatic, electro-progressive-rock music as XAR, and in the theatrical-conceptual band The Liquid Tapedeck.
Soy Bomb
For Bob Dylan's performance of "Love Sick" at the 1998 Grammy Awards, Portnoy was hired by the Grammys to stand in the background with other dancers and bob his head to the music to "give Bob a good vibe." Instead, halfway through the performance, Portnoy ripped off his shirt, ran up next to Dylan, and started dancing and contorting spastically with the words "Soy Bomb" written boldly in black across his chest. [3]
When questioned by reporters, Portnoy said, "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" according to Entertainment Weekly [4] and that "he meant Soy Bomb as a 'spontaneous explosion of the self' to re-invigorate the current music scene.[5] He has also said that the phrase is a combination of Spanish and English, meaning "the bomb of 'I am'" The Grammy Awards chose not to press charges against Portnoy for the act, but did decline to pay Portnoy's $200 fee for the dancing gig.
The event was soon parodied on comedy television shows. It was the subject of skits on Saturday Night Live, where he was portrayed by Will Ferrell, and on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. In 2004, the band Strawman featured the track "Soy Bomb" on their album American Idle in reference to the incident. One year later, the band Eels featured the track "Whatever Happened to Soy Bomb" on the double-disc album Blinking Lights and Other Revelations.
Portnoy: 1999-present
Michael Portnoy's TALUS abstract gambling table, 2007Portnoy expanded his practice to include choreography, video, installation, sculpture and participatory works. Portnoy's long-standing investigation of social exchange, and the rules of communication and play, has been conducted through a series of 'abstract gambling' tables and related sculptures, and conversation games drawing on 17th Century universal languages. He has called his breed of absurdist, dictatorial interaction with participants 'Relational Stalinism' - "the fashionable promise that an artwork might offer a democratic magic, transforming inter-relational codes into something nicer, is abandoned in favour of a clarification of the artist's imperious role as producer and performer..." [6]
He has presented work in museums, art galleries, theaters and music halls internationally, including: The 2nd Moscow Biennial, The Taipei Biennial, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Performa Biennial 07 & 09, Art Unlimited Basel, Centre Pompidou, SculptureCenter, The Kitchen, Kunsthalle Basel, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Gallery, IBID PROJECTS, Deitch Gallery, White Box, ACE Gallery, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Roulette, Kling & Bang (Reykjavík), Foksal Gallery Foundation (Warsaw), Kaaitheater (Brussels), Migros Museum (Zurich), Le Comfort Moderne (Poitiers, France) and The National Review of Live Art (Glasgow).[7]
References
- ^ True, Cynthia. "Alterna Be thy Name", Time Out New York, June 5–12, 1996, pp.43-44.
- ^ PAGE SIX, New York Post, Dec 15, 1999
- ^ http://expectingrain.com/dok/who/p/portnoymichael.html NY Times reprint
- ^ Brunner, Rob. "Bombs Away," Entertainment Weekly, March 13, 1998, p. 14
- ^ Derek Yip. "MICHAEL PORTNOY aka SOY BOMB , Upstart Pissing on the Contemporary Mix", Performing Arts Journal (PAJ), NO. 61 (January 1999), pp. 36-44
- ^ Tirdad Zolghadr. "Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture: 10 Curators, 100 Contemporary Artists, 10 Sources", Phaidon Press, 2010, pp. 192-193.
- ^ http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/conversations/2009-08-28/600-words-with-michael-portnoy/ Art in America
External links
Categories:- Artists from New York
- Living people
- People from Washington, D.C.
- American performance artists
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