Met Action
Best Praxis and Co. (Tal Beery, Eugenia Manwelyan, Panagiotis Alexiou), Met Action (April 26, 2015). Performance art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
Trace the ideological roots of western empire and remodel the story of culture and democracy. A day of exploring, movement, sketching, & playful occupation at the Met Museum.
A group of 12 artists and scientists assembled for an eight-hour performance in the Roman Sculpture Court, delving into the democratic origin myth through discussion, movement, sketching, and play. The action emerged from the question: "What would we do at the Met if we were free to do anything?" The resulting performance was part intellectual query, part political action, part dance; part performance, part workshop, part occupation.
Act I involved a conversation led by Panagiotis Alexiou, linking America's ideological heritage to a distant country and empire. Act II featured sketching exercises to integrate ideas about democracy, civilization, story, and history with personal narratives and experiences. Act III offered a dynamic game to achieve an embodied understanding of the exhibition, examining physicality and interpersonal connections within the museum space.
The Met Action represents a proposal for the museum of the 21st century. Museums can be spaces of deep learning and freedom. This action was a hopeful disruption, an announcement that artists and museum-goers alike demand and benefit from the freedom to talk, create, and move. Freedom to appropriate and occupy, to be independent, free thinking, questioning, concerned iconoclastic idol worshippers.
