Miles Greenberg

Miles Greenberg (born October 23, 1997; Montreal, Quebec, Canada) is a Canadian performance artist and sculptor. He is known for staging extremely long durational performance art works, such as Oysterknife, 2020, in which he walked on a conveyor belt for twenty-four consecutive hours without breaks. He lives and works between New York City and Reykjavík.
==Early Life and Career==
Miles Greenberg grew up in Montreal, Quebec . His parents are film producer Phoebe Greenberg and Canadian television personality Michael Williams; he was raised by his mother. His mother is of Jewish Ukrainian descent and his father is African-American.
After completing secondary school in 2015, he attended CÉGEP at Dawson College, but dropped out four weeks in. He then spent a year doing experimental performance and drag in nightclubs in Montreal.
In 2016, he took an internship with choreographer and former director of La La La Human Steps Edouard Lock for a summer workshop in Beijing. He stayed in China for some months as an artist-in-residence at the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing’s Chaoyang district.
At the end of 2016, Greenberg moved to Paris to attend École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq’s LEM programme. In 2019, he was Palais de Tokyo’s youngest and first in-house artist-in-residence for their performance programme, La Manutention, for which he staged a four-part 'deconstructed opera’ titled Alphaville Noir, featuring thirty-five Black performers.
Greenberg came to New York City in 2019 in the goal of applying to Cooper Union. Upon being rejected, he decided to stay. In 2019, he portrayed Yukio Mishima in Jeremy O. Harris’ off-broadway play, Black Exhibition, and was included in Cultured Magazine's "30 under 35.”
Since 2019, Greenberg has been included in international art surveys such as the Athens Biennale, Bangkok Art Biennale, Reykjavík’s Sequences Biennial and Biennial of Contemporary Arts Lisbon. He had a solo exhibition at Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto in 2020.
In 2020, he featured in Marina Abramović’s takeover of SkyArt, for which he created a five hour live televised performance.
In 2021, his 2020 film Late October was awarded as a finalist for the CIRCA and Dazed Magazine's #CIRCAECONOMY prize.
His work has been acquired by Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Brooklyn Museum.
==Work and Style==
Miles Greenberg’s multidisciplinary practice investigates the capacities and limitations of the human body through a poetic and ritualistic lens. His work consists of large-scale, sensorially immersive and often site-specific environments revolving around the physical body in space. His installations, sculptures and performances rely on slowness and the gradual decay of form to heighten the audience’s sensitivities and alter their perceptions of time.
Greenberg’s performances often last a minimum of six hours, up to twenty-four consecutive hours or multiple days, and the audience is encouraged to stay as long as they wish. The works are designed to induce a trance-like state in both audience and performer. Greenberg only casts Black performers in his work, and frequently covers their eyes with opaque white lenses; In blocking out the eyes, the performers become quasi-blind, he hopes that He almost always features his own body in his performances.
Hæmotherapy I (2019)
Hæmotherapy I was a seven hour durational performance in which Greenberg, painted in white in white contact lenses and a sterling silver jockstrap, stood immobile atop a stone, balancing a glass vessel on his head. The floor was covered in a large of beetroots, red meat, rose petals, oil and red spices, arranged in a long strip. The audience roamed freely on either side of the installation. A tubing system fixed to the ceiling pumped water overhead to the centre of the stage, where it would drip down into the vessel, filling it gradually over the seven hours. The piece was performed at Reena Spauling's gallery in New York.
Pneumotherapy II (2020)
In Pneumotherapy II, Greenberg’s skin was painted jet black and he donned an 18k gold jockstrap. For seven hours, he balanced atop a stone which was placed atop a rotating platform concealed by a tall, mirrored column. Between the mirrored structural columns of the gallery, a large square of four thousand stems of lilies, hyacinths and amaranth were arranged like a garden inspired by the one in Andrey Tarkovsky’s Solaris. This piece was performed in Galerie Perrotin’s upper gallery in New York in February 2020, days before the COVID-19 was declared.
OYSTERKNIFE (2020)
In this performance, Greenberg walked on a treadmill for 24 consecutive hours without taking any breaks, including for food, water, or bathroom. This was also his only work to be performed for a remote audience. The piece was performed in an undisclosed location (which was later revealed to be the theatre space inside of Montreal’s Phi Centre, who co-produced the piece) and live-streamed via the Marina Abramović Institute's YouTube channel. Upwards of 5000 viewers tuned in to watch the performance over its daylong duration.
At hour eighteen of the performance, Greenberg lost consciousness for twenty-three minutes. It was Abramović’s decision to not rouse him. He eventually roused himself and completed the walk.
The following summer, Jeffrey Deitch exhibited the work in his Soho gallery space as a video installation.
The performance was soundtracked by cellist Kelsey Lu.
The title comes from a line in Zora Neale Hurston’s How It Feels To Be Colored Me in which she says “No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."
Late October (2020-2021)
Late October is a three part project performance, sculpture and video project. It began as a seven hour performance at Galleria Continua in Boissy-Le-Châtel, France. In it, seven performers lacquered in deep turquoise paint slowly ambulate between a series of rotating columns inside of a large wading pool of milky blue-tinted water. Two by two, they descend into a sandpit and wrestle one another.
This performance was documented as a film and reconfigured as an immersive 3-channel video work.
Segments of the performance were later reenacted in a 3D scanning studio by Greenberg himself and captured with a modified scanner. These modifications made it such that the scans recorded and distorted the movements of its subject, creating unpredictable distortions. The models were then extruded and CNC-milled from high-density urethane, resulting in life-sized, abstract humanoid figures.
These sculptures were installed in a reconstruction of the original water installation, alongside the Late October film and a series of prints, in the artist’s first full-scale solo exhibition at Arsenal Contemporary Art in Toronto.
Admiration Is The Furthest Thing From Understanding (2021)
Admiration Is The Furthest Thing From Understanding is a durational performance that lasted eight consecutive days, eight hours per day, as part of the Bangkok Art Biennale’s 2020/2021 edition. In this piece, Greenberg lay stretched out horizontally across a then steel and glass structure, wearing grey trousers, white contact lenses and long box braids. Five intravenous bags filled with cane sugar syrup were suspended from the ceiling over Greenberg’s body. Over the course of eight hours, his body would become covered with the syrup, reducing his ability to move as it hardened.
Fountain I (2022)
In Fountain I, Greenberg stood atop a white plinth in the centre of a large pool of synthetic blood. A pump and tubing system pumped liquid up his legs and torso, concealed with a silicone prosthetic skin, gave the illusion that he was hemorrhaging profusely from holes in his chest and both hands. During seven hours, the blood poured from his body as a crane-operated camera travelled around his body.
The Shadow of Spring (2022)
In Autumn 2022, Greenberg was commissioned to produce two large-scale sculpture works, consisting of a pair of towering humanoid fountains, as part of a duo exhibition at New York's New Museum. The exhibition, titled The Shadow of Spring, also featured works by Brazilian artist, Vivian Caccuri. 
==Influences and Inspirations==
Greenberg has cited the work of Marina Abramović, Senga Nengudi, Andrei Tarkovsky, Tehching Hsieh, Lee Ufan, Robert Wilson and Bill Viola as early influences.
His work has also been contextualized in reference to artists including Yves Klein, and Precious Okoyomon.
Marina Abramović, whom Greenberg first met in 2014 during her MAI fundraising campaign, has been a longtime friend, mentor and supporter of his work.
He participated in the Watermill Center’s annual summer programme in 2017 and 2018 under the mentorship of Robert Wilson.
==Personal Life==
Greenberg is gay, and was raised Jewish. He has openly discussed having obsessive compulsive disorder, and its impact on his working style.
Category:1997 births
Category:People from Montreal
Category:Canadian people
Category:Canadian performance artists
Category:Sculptors